Microplastics are pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size. They make up part of the estimated tens of millions of tons of plastic that gets washed into the ocean every year. That could be hurting fish that eat plastic, and humans, when we eat fish. But help may be on the way. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Georgia’s health commissioner was named Friday to lead the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal government’s top public health agency.
Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald is an OB-GYN and has been head of the Georgia Department of Public Health since 2011. She succeeds Dr. Tom Frieden, who resigned as CDC director in January at the end of the Obama administration.
Fitzgerald was appointed by Dr. Tom Price, who was a congressman from Georgia before he was named head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by President Donald Trump.
“Having known Dr. Fitzgerald for many years, I know that she has a deep appreciation and understanding of medicine, public health, policy and leadership — all qualities that will prove vital as she leads the CDC in its work to protect America’s health 24/7,” Price said in a statement.
Fitzgerald, 70, has had strong ties to the Republican Party. She was a GOP candidate for Congress twice in the 1990s. She was also a health care policy adviser to Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, and the late Sen. Paul Coverdell.
Fitzgerald is respected in the public health community, and her choice drew praise from Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
“From her work as a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist to her recent service as the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, Dr. Fitzgerald is more than prepared to face the health challenges of our time, including climate change, Zika, Ebola, and our growing burden of chronic disease,” Benjamin said in a statement.
The CDC investigates disease outbreaks, researches the cause and frequency of health problems and promotes prevention efforts. It is the only federal agency headquartered outside of Washington, D.C. It has nearly 12,000 employees and 10,000 contractors worldwide.
Her first day at CDC was Friday. A CDC spokeswoman said Fitzgerald would not be available for interviews.
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The state of Minnesota is battling the biggest outbreak of measles since 1990, and state health officials are hoping it is tapering off. Seventy-eight people caught the disease, mostly Somali-Americans, and nearly a third were hospitalized.
The Somali-American community in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is tight-knit. At one time, they had the highest rates of vaccinations against measles than any other group in the state until they heard this:
“Autism is caused by vaccines administered (to those) under 3 years of life.”
Anti-vaccination groups believe that vaccines expose children to health risks and can cause harm, and they convinced Somali-Americans in Minneapolis that the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), caused autism. So while they continued getting their children vaccinated for everything else, the rates for this particular vaccine dropped dramatically.
Patsy Stinchfield is a nurse in Minnesota. She blames the state’s measles outbreak on anti-vaccination groups.
“I would say almost exclusively the whole responsibility lands on the anti-vaccine movement,” she said, “and the reason is misinformation and myths spread about a link between MMR and autism, of which there is none, and science has proven that not to be true,” she added. She spoke to VOA via Skype.
Since March, Stinchfield has been at the forefront of Minnesota’s measles outbreak. She says the Somali-Americans came together fast to hold community meetings where doctors could talk about the safety and effectiveness of the measles vaccine.
Since then, they have been getting to clinics to get their children vaccinated.
“Since the outbreak, the message has gotten out that measles, mumps, rubella vaccine is safe,” Stinchfield said. “It’s effective, and typically in a week in Hennepin County, which is the Minneapolis county, there would be 500 MMRs given, and for three weeks in a row, there were 3,000 MMRs given for three weeks in a row, so that is a tremendous response.”
Stinchfield said measles took the Somali-Americas by surprise.
“They did not think that measles would be in the United States,” she said, “and so the level of fear was greater for autism. This has now shifted, because the level of fear and the level of fear for measles is great because these families know measles. They’ve had loved ones die of measles in Somalia.”
Measles was wiped out in the U.S. 17 years ago, but outbreaks still happen when someone carries the virus back from a country where measles still circulates.
Fortunately, no one who caught measles in Minnesota had any serious complications, and state officials are hoping to declare the outbreak over by the end of July.
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Measles was officially wiped out in the United States 17 years ago. But outbreaks still happen when someone carries the virus back from a country where measles exists. The state of Minnesota is battling the biggest outbreak of measles since 1990, and state health officials are hoping it is now tapering off. Seventy-eight people caught the disease and nearly a third were hospitalized. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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After a mild winter, the northeastern United States is in for a banner year when it comes to ticks. That would be little more than a nuisance if it were not for the fact that the tiny bloodsuckers carry some potentially deadly diseases. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Not every police officer patrols on two legs. Some have four legs, and fur. Faith Lapidus reports on some new recruits and some veterans leaving police work behind.
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At least three people worldwide are infected with totally untreatable “superbug” strains of gonorrhea, which they are likely to be spreading to others through sex, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday.
Giving details of studies showing a “very serious situation” with regard to highly drug-resistant forms of the sexually transmitted disease (STD), WHO experts said it was “only a matter of time” before last-resort gonorrhea antibiotics would be of no use.
“Gonorrhea is a very smart bug,” said Teodora Wi, a human reproduction specialist at the Geneva-based U.N. health agency. “Every time you introduce a new type of antibiotic to treat it, this bug develops resistance to it.”
78 million infected a year
The WHO estimates 78 million people a year get gonorrhea, an STD that can infect the genitals, rectum and throat.
The infection, which in many cases has no symptoms on its own, can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility, as well as increasing the risk of getting HIV.
Wi, who gave details in a telephone briefing of two studies on gonorrhea published in the journal PLOS Medicine, said one had documented three specific cases, one each in Japan, France and Spain, of patients with strains of gonorrhea against which no known antibiotic is effective.
“These are cases that can infect others. It can be transmitted,” she told reporters. “And these cases may just be the tip of the iceberg, since systems to diagnose and report untreatable infections are lacking in lower-income countries where gonorrhea is actually more common.”
Drug resistance
The WHO’s program for monitoring trends in drug-resistant gonorrhea found in a study that from 2009 to 2014 there was widespread resistance to the first-line medicine ciprofloxacin, increasing resistance to another antibiotic drugs called azithromycin, and the emergence of resistance to last-resort treatments known as extended-spectrum cephalosporins (ESCs).
In most countries, it said, ESCs are now the only single antibiotics that remain effective for treating gonorrhea. Yet resistance to them has been reported in 50 countries.
Manica Balasegaram, director of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, said the situation was grim and there was a “pressing need” for new medicines.
Few new drugs coming
The pipeline, however, is very thin, with only three potential new gonorrhea drugs in development and no guarantee any will prove effective in final-stage trials, he said.
“We urgently need to seize the opportunities we have with existing drugs and candidates in the pipeline,” he told reporters. “Any new treatment developed should be accessible to everyone who needs it, while ensuring it is used appropriately, so that drug resistance is slowed as much as possible.”
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Scientists have found an extra charming new subatomic particle that they hope will help further explain a key force that binds matter together.
Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced Thursday the fleeting discovery of a long theorized but never-before-seen type of baryon.
Baryons are subatomic particles made up of quarks. Protons and neutrons are the most common baryons. Quarks are even smaller particles that come in six types, two common types that are light and four heavier types.
The high-speed collisions at the world’s biggest atom smasher created for a fraction of a second a baryon particle called Xi cc, said Oxford physicist Guy Wilkinson, who is part of the experiment.
The particle has two heavy quarks – both of a type that are called “charm”- and a light one. In the natural world, baryons have at most one heavy quark.
It may have been brief, but in particle physics it lived for “an appreciably long time,” he said.
The two heavy quarks are in a dance that’s just like the interaction of a star system with two suns and the third lighter quark circles the dancing pair, Wilkinson said.
“People have looked for it for a long time,” Wilkinson said. He said this opens up a whole new “family” of baryons for physicists to find and study.
“It gives us a very unique and interesting laboratory to give us an interesting new angle on the behavior of the strong interaction (between particles), which is one of the key forces in nature,” Wilkinson said.
Chris Quigg, a theoretical physicist at the Fermilab near Chicago, who wasn’t part of the discovery team, praised the discovery and said “it gives us a lot to think about.”
The team has submitted a paper to the journal Physical Review Letters.
The Large Hadron Collider, located in a 27-kilometer (16.8-mile) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN.
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Canada is attacking its expanding opioid crisis with an unusual measure: It’s giving addicts a safe place to shoot up.
The government has allowed seven “safe injection sites” to open and a score of others are being considered across the country.
The storefront sites give addicts clean syringes, medical supervision and freedom from arrest. They don’t get help in kicking their problem unless they ask for it, but the program dramatically reduces the chance of a fatal overdose or the transmission of blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis or HIV.
The effort, inspired by some in Europe, is being closely watched in the U.S., where officials are struggling to cope with a surge in overdose deaths from opioid use. Several cities say they are considering similar measures despite fears that they may encourage drug use.
First center in Vancouver
Dozens of people a day have been coming to three new centers in Montreal, where users are given a small kit to safely inject drugs they bring with them and then an opportunity to relax for a half hour on couches listening to music, according to a 30-year-old addict who would only give his first name, Francois. The center operators denied access to the media once the center opened.
“They give you everything you need,” Francois said as he left a center in the gentrifying downtown neighborhood around Sainte-Catherine Street after injecting heroin. “Everyone is pretty relaxed.”
A single injection site opened in 2003, run by a Vancouver nonprofit organization under authorization by Health Canada. It received 214,898 visits by 8,040 individuals last year, with nurses intervening in 1,781 overdoses. It said it’s never had an overdose death.
Another center also has opened in that West Coast city, and in recent weeks, two more have opened in British Columbia and three in Montreal. Another is scheduled to open in Montreal soon and three in Toronto. More than a dozen other potential sites are being considered across Canada federal officials say.
More overdoses prompt more centers
Health Minister Jane Philpott said the government felt compelled to add sites because of the escalating number of overdose deaths, which topped 2,400 last year.
“They are absolutely known to save lives and reduce infections,” Philpott said. “We have a very significant public health issue in our country.”
She acknowledged they are not a complete answer to the drug problem: “This is only one in a very broad range of tools. A comprehensive approach is necessary.”
Seattle to open centers
U.S. drug overdose deaths have tripled in 15 years, reaching at least 52,000 in 2015, making it the leading cause of death for people under 50. Seattle and King County in Washington are moving forward with plans for safe injection centers and a city task force in Philadelphia has proposed some, though such measures have faced opposition.
John Walters, who directed the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George W. Bush, said safe-injection sites merely prolong addiction and eventually lead to deaths.
He noted that overdose deaths have risen sharply in British Columbia despite the presence of the first safe-injection site in North America. The province had 136 deaths in April, a 97 percent increase over the same month a year earlier. There were 967 overdose deaths in British Columbia in 2016, up from 517 in 2015. And there have been 640 this year through May.
“Government-sanctioned injection sites are now said by advocates to prevent overdose deaths. That clearly has not happened in British Columbia,” Walters said.
Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, isn’t convinced they work either but said he understands their appeal.
“The opioid crisis is so horrible that you are desperate and willing to try anything,” he said. “There’s a part of me that says, ‘Sure, give it a shot.”’
Neighbors not pleased
Gilles Beauregard, executive director of a Montreal safe injection site opening in September, argued that the service will help neighborhoods.
“At street level, we’re going to see a decrease in the number of needles lying around, and less people shooting up in parks and alleys and public toilets,” he said.
Not everybody living nearby agrees. Angry residents met Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre and other officials when they inaugurated the Sainte-Catherine Ease facility in late June. Chantal Beauregard, who lives in the area, said it has attracted junkies at all hours and needles now litter the ground.
“It’s been one week and we’re already fed up,” she said.
A new safe injection facility scheduled to open a mile east in Montreal in September is also drawing criticism
“Having a supervised injection site in a school zone doesn’t make sense,” says Christelle Perrine, who has two children in a school about 200 yards (meters) from the facility.
A tall, broad-shouldered and extensively tattooed man who gave his name only as Benjamin was among about a dozen drug users who made their way to the Sainte-Catherine East injection site over an hour one midweek day.
“I’ve been waiting for something like this for years. It’s great. You don’t have junkies shooting up everywhere, leaving their needles all over the place,” the 46-year-old said after injecting cocaine. “It’s clean, the staff is great.”
“I understand why people who live around here aren’t happy. I have a heart and I have a brain,” he said. “My life’s ambition wasn’t to do this, but at least with this, we’re safe.”
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Using only baker’s yeast, researchers at Columbia University have designed an inexpensive, on-the-spot test to detect major fungal pathogens. Faith Lapidus has details of the new biosensor, described in the journal Science Advances.
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One of Africa’s driest regions — the Sahel — could turn greener if the planet warms more than 2 degrees Celsius and triggers more frequent heavy rainfall, scientists said on Wednesday.
The Sahel stretches coast to coast from Mauritania and Mali in the west to Sudan and Eritrea in the east, and skirts the southern edge of the Sahara desert. It is home to more than 100 million people.
The region has seen worsening extreme weather — including more frequent droughts — in recent years.
But if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, the resulting global warming — of more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — could change major weather patterns in the Sahel, and in many different parts of the world, scientists say.
Rainfall models vary
Some weather models predict a small increase in rainfall for the Sahel, but there is a risk that the entire weather pattern will change by the end of the century, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) said.
“The sheer size of the possible change is mindboggling — this is one of the very few elements in the Earth system that we might witness tipping soon,” said co-author Anders Levermann from PIK and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of New York’s Columbia University.
If the Sahel becomes much rainier, it will mean more water for agriculture, industry and domestic use. But in the first few years of the transition, people are likely to experience very erratic weather — extreme droughts followed by destructive floods, the researchers said.
Hard for people to plan
This level of unpredictability makes it very hard for people to plan for coming changes, they said.
“The enormous change that we might see would clearly pose a huge adaptation challenge to the Sahel,” said Levermann.
“More than 100 million people are potentially affected that already now are confronted with a (multitude) of instabilities, including war,” he said.
The region faces a range of conflicts, including some driven by groups such as Boko Haram and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
The researchers studied rainfall patterns in the months of July, August and September when the region receives most of its annual rain.
‘A range of possible outcomes’
“There’s a range of possible outcomes for societies in the Sahel which depend on the climate that eventually (develops) … and whether they are prepared for fluctuations,” lead author Jacob Schewe, from PIK, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Climate change from burning fossil fuels “really has the power to shake things up,” he said.
“It is driving risks for crop yields in many regions and generally increases dangerous weather extremes around the globe,” he added.
The study was published on Wednesday in Earth System Dynamics, a journal of the European Geosciences Union
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A novel class of personalized cancer vaccines, tailored to the tumors of individual patients, kept disease in check in two early-stage clinical trials, pointing to a new way to help the immune system fight back.
Although so-called immunotherapy drugs from the likes of Merck & Co, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Roche are starting to revolutionize cancer care, they still only work for a limited number of patients.
By adding a personalized cancer vaccine, scientists believe it should be possible to improve substantially the effectiveness of such immune-boosting medicines.
Twelve skin cancer patients, out of a total of 19 across both the trials, avoided relapses for two years after receiving different vaccines developed by German and U.S. teams, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Larger studies are next
The small Phase I trials now need to be followed by larger studies, but the impressive early results suggest the new shots work far better than first-generation cancer vaccines that typically targeted a single cancer characteristic.
The new treatments contain between 10 and 20 different mutated proteins, or “neoantigens,” that are specific to an individual’s tumour. These proteins are not found on healthy cells and they look foreign to the immune system, prompting specialist T-cells to step up their attack on cancer cells.
One vaccine was developed at the U.S.-based Dana-Farber Institute and Broad Institute and the other by privately-owned German biotech firm BioNTech, which uses so-called messenger RNA to carry the code for making its therapeutic proteins.
Roche, the world’s largest cancer drugmaker, is already betting on BioNTech’s technology after signing a $310 million deal last September allowing it to test the German vaccine with its immunotherapy drug Tecentriq.
BioNTech’s co-founder and CEO Ugur Sahin told Reuters that combination trials using Roche’s drug were due to start later this year against a number of different cancers.
Rival biotech firm Neon Therapeutics, which was formed to exploit the U.S. research, initiated tests of its personalized neoantigen vaccine in combination with Bristol-Myer’s Opdivo drug last year.
Expensive treatment
New drugs like Opdivo and Tecentriq that enlist the body’s immune system are improving the odds of survival, but their typical price tag of more than $150,000 a year is controversial and adding a personalized vaccine will jack costs up further.
Sahin acknowledged such vaccines would be expensive at first but said costs could be brought down by economies of scale and automation.
“In the mid to long term the cost will fall dramatically … it is an individual treatment but it is a universal process,” he said. “We are at a very early stage at the moment but in the long-run this approach could change everything.”
Potential confirmed
Cornelius Melief of Leiden University Medical Center, who was not involved in either study, said the research confirmed the potential of neoantigen vaccines.
“Controlled, randomized Phase II clinical trials with more participants are now needed to establish the efficacy of these vaccines in patients with any type of cancer that has enough mutations to provide sufficient neoantigen targets for this type of approach,” he said.
Mainz-based BioNTech is one of Europe’s largest private biotech companies, with more than 500 employees and deals with Sanofi and Eli Lilly, as well as Roche. It is majority-owned by twin brothers Andreas and Thomas Struengmann, who sold generic drugmaker Hexal to Novartis in 2005.
Sahin said BioNTech would probably stay private for another two to four years before deciding on an initial public offering.
Stem cell tourism involving patients who travel to developing countries for treatment with unproven and potentially risky therapies should be more tightly regulated, international health experts said Wednesday.
With hundreds of medical centers around the world claiming to be able to repair damaged tissue in conditions such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, tackling unscrupulous advertising of such procedures is crucial, the experts said.
These therapies are advertised directly to patients with the promise of a cure, but there is often little or no evidence to show they will help, or that they will not cause harm, the 15 experts wrote in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Some types of stem cell transplant — mainly using blood and skin stem cells — have been approved by regulators after full clinical trials found they could treat certain types of cancer and grow skin grafts for burns patients.
But many other potential therapies are only in the earliest stages of development and have not been approved by international regulators.
“Stem cell therapies hold a lot of promise, but we need rigorous clinical trials and regulatory processes to determine whether a proposed treatment is safe, effective and better than existing treatments,” said one of the 15, Sarah Chan of Britain’s University of Edinburgh.
The experts called for global action, led by the World Health Organization, to introduce controls on advertising and agree on international standards for the manufacture and testing of cell- and tissue-based therapies.
“The globalization of health markets and the specific tensions surrounding stem cell research and its applications have made this a difficult challenge,” they wrote. “However, the stakes are too high not to take a united stance.”
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The Trump administration will soon begin a review that will question the veracity of the climate change science used by President Barack Obama’s administration as the basis for environmental regulations.
The move by the Environmental Protection Agency to launch public debates between scientists on climate research, known as red-team, blue-team exercises, would be the first major effort by the Republican administration to challenge the long-standing scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.
Advocates who have petitioned the EPA to reverse the scientific finding underlying U.S. regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions see the proposal to scrutinize mainstream climate science as a first step in that direction.
“It’s a way to survey the landscape before reopening the endangerment finding,” said Myron Ebell, head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the groups that filed a petition with the agency to undo the 2009 scientific determination that formed the basis for the Democratic Obama administration’s regulation of greenhouse gases.
In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had authority under the federal Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases from cars if the agency determined they endangered human health.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has spoken several times about the merits of opening the climate change debate up to the public. The website Climatewire on Friday cited a senior administration official, who said Pruitt plans to launch the back-and-forth scientific critiques formally.
Francis Menton, a lawyer who filed an endangerment finding petition in January on behalf of the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, said Pruitt told an event at the Manhattan Institute think tank in New York on Friday that he would launch the debates in the next few months.
Menton said he asked Pruitt whether he had made a decision on reopening the endangerment finding. Pruitt said the agency is weighing its options.
The review “can create a body of scientific work that can be trustworthy and dependable to make regulatory choices and decisions,” said Rob Henneke, of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a third group that filed an endangerment finding petition.
Unlike the other two, it has challenged the legality of the endangerment findng, not the science.
Environmental groups are confident that Pruitt will not be successful if he tries to undo the endangerment finding because they expect the courts will side with the scientific consensus that human beings cause climate change.
Pruitt and the EPA would need to build up a new case that shows carbon dioxide is innocuous and counter the volumes of scientific research that support the finding.
“If he has any grasp of scientific and legal reality, he would realize that it’s a fool’s errand to reverse the endangerment determination,” said David Doniger, climate director for the Natural Resources Defense Counsel.
“This could be a way for him to keep the right-wing fringe groups occupied and also accimplish the goal of further confusing the public debate,” he said.
Ebell, who was also the transition leader of the Trump EPA, had previously been critical of Pruitt’s hesitation to take on the endangerment finding because of the time and staffing it would require.
The Trump administration has not yet appointed second-tier assistant administrators to run different policy divisions of the agency.
“I think [the red-team, blue-team process] is a logical first step, but I don’t think it commits the administrator to anything yet,” Ebell said.
A team of teenage Gambian students are upset and mystified at being denied visas to attend a major global robotics contest in Washington later this month.
This comes days after an Afghan girls team was also turned down by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Neither team was given any reason.
“It’s very disappointing, knowing that we are the only two countries that aren’t going to take part in the competition,” Gambian student Fatoumata Ceesay said.
The two teams will instead enter the competition via Skype. But the video link is no substitute after the youngsters worked for months perfecting their projects and dreamed of the thrill of visiting Washington.
“It would be an experience to see and discover other robots and ask questions and exchange ideas with others. It’s more than 160 countries, so we’d have the chance to mingle,” Ceesay said.
The Gambian and Afghan students are especially puzzled because teams from Iran and Sudan, and a group of Syrian refugees were given visas. All three Muslim-majority countries are on President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Afghanistan and Gambia are not.
Lida Azizi, a 17-year old from Herat, calls the visa rejection “a clear insult for the people of Afghanistan.”
The U.S. embassies in Afghanistan and Gambia and the State Department say they cannot discuss visa requests.
WATCH: Robotics contest for youth promotes innovation
A group called FIRST Global Challenge holds the yearly robotics competition to build interest in science, technology, engineering and math around the world.
The group says the focus of the competition is finding solutions to problems in such fields as water, energy, medicine and food production.
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Hundreds of environmentalists protested in Kraków Tuesday against widespread logging in Europe’s last primeval forest as a conference of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee got underway in the historic city in southern Poland.
The environmentalists demanded that the Polish government stop felling trees in the Białowieża forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site that straddles the border with Belarus. The forest of nearly 142,000 hectares is one of the last and largest remaining parts of an immense primeval forest that stretched across the European Plain 10,000 years ago.
Separated by a police cordon, forest rangers held a counterdemonstration in Kraków. They support the government’s explanation that selective logging will help save the forest, which is north of Brest, the Belarusian capital, and Białystok in Poland.
The forest is home to many rare species of birds and plants as well as hundreds of European bison, the continent’s largest mammals. It contains a number of large, ancient oak trees, survivors of the wars in Eastern Europe during the 20th century and many earlier conflicts; the biggest trees, named after historical figures in many cases, have circumferences of over 600 centimeters (20 feet) and stand over 30 meters (98 feet) tall.
The government said it increased logging to fight an infestation of bark beetles that has affected many spruce trees. Ecologists claim authorities have been felling not only infected trees but also healthy ones. They contend the government’s stand is a pretext to increase timber production for profit.
Scientists and the European Union, which says the increased logging is illegal, have also protested the logging. In late April, the European Commission gave Polish authorities a “final warning” to address its concerns over the forest or face being summoned by the EU’s top court.
The UNESCO committee, meeting in Poland through July 11 in its 41st annual session, is expected to decide Wednesday whether to send a mission of experts to the Białowieża Primeval Forest to reassess the situation.
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Lawyers from around Africa gathered in Cameroon this week to call for tougher legislation against counterfeit medicine.
Sixty tons of counterfeit medicine was burned after being seized by customs officials in Cameroon, who say the stockpile had an estimated value of $80,000.
Customs official Marcel Kamgaing said the imitation medicine was being used to treat everything from diabetes and hypertension to cancer and erectile dysfunction. He said the forged drugs were destined for sale at shops and roadside pharmacies.
He says illicit drugs are very dangerous to the health of consumers and may even kill due to poor packaging and preservation. He says importers should be informed that Cameroon’s customs laws give them the authority to destroy all fake drugs.
Counterfeit drugs conference
The burning was scheduled to coincide with an international conference this week in Yaounde on the problem of phony drugs in Africa.
Jackson Ngnie Kamga, president of the Cameroon Bar Association, says the current penalties are not enough of a deterrent. He said traffickers should face jail time.
He says because of its deadly consequences, it is high time for Cameroon to join African states to start considering the transportation and commercialization of bogus drugs as a major crime, not a simple offense punishable by fines and seizure of the illicit goods. He says the number of people who die because of such drugs makes them consider it another form of homicide, which the international community should help Africa tackle.
The World Health Organization says falsified medical products may contain no active ingredient, the wrong active ingredient or the wrong amount of the correct active ingredient. The WHO says about 100,000 deaths-a-year in Africa are linked to counterfeit drugs.
Asian source
Issouf Baadhio, an attorney from Burkina Faso, represented the International Association of Lawyers as its vice president. He said the counterfeit drugs are primarily manufactured in Asia, especially in China, and so African countries need to focus on stopping importation.
He says besides the fact that this trade is illegal, importing fake drugs has disastrous economic consequences and as such civil society organizations and professional groups like the International Association of Lawyers should join states and make sure that markets are protected and custom controls are set up at entrances to all states to detect and stop the sale of all dangerous drugs.
Identifying counterfeit medicines can be difficult. The WHO urges officials and consumers to look for signs like misspelled words on the packaging and to check that the manufacture and expiration dates inside and outside packaging match.
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The U.N. children’s fund warns tens of thousands of malnourished children are at great risk in Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan, which are on the brink of famine.
UNICEF reports an estimated 4.7 million children in the three cholera-stricken countries are malnourished. Of these, UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac tells VOA, more than one million are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
“Let me remind you that a child who is suffering from severe acute malnutrition are nine times more likely to die of disease than a well-nourished child,” he said. “So, having cholera and diarrhea in countries where so many children are so fragile because of malnutrition among other things because of such a bad access to safe water is extremely worrying.”
Sudan outbreak
UNICEF says it also is extremely worried about an outbreak of acute watery diarrhea in Sudan, where the Federal Ministry of Health reports more than 20,000 cases of the disease, including over 400 deaths.
Boulierac says the disease has spread to 14 of 18 states and children account for more than 20 percent of the affected population.
“The situation in White Nile State, which is in central Sudan, is deeply worrying, since it is the most affected with 7,200 reported cases and since it has almost 100,000 refugees living in camps,” he said.
UNICEF says it needs access, security and more money to contain cholera and acute watery diarrhea in all four countries. It says aid operations must be scaled up. Malnourished children must receive special life-saving medication, therapeutic feeding and have access to safe drinking water.
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Dairy farmers want U.S. regulators to banish the term “soy milk,” but documents show even government agencies haven’t always agreed on what to call such drinks.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture “fervently” wanted to use the term “soy milk” in educational materials for the public, according to emails recently released in response to a lawsuit. That irked the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that oversees the rule defining milk as coming from healthy cows.
It’s “not a trivial decision,” the FDA warned in one of the 2011 emails about the USDA’s desire to use the term.
The sour history over who gets to use “milk” reaches back to at least 1997, when a soy foods group petitioned the FDA to recognize the term “soymilk.” A couple of years later, the group pointed out that the FDA itself had used the term. Even now, the National Milk Producers Federation says it’s working to build support for legislation directing the FDA to enforce the federal standard. The dairy group says both “soy milk” and “soymilk” are inappropriate ways to describe non-dairy drinks made from soybeans, and that the one-word version is just an attempt to get around the definition.
There are plenty of other food names at issue. A European Union court recently ruled that a company named TofuTown can’t describe its products as “cheese.” U.S. rice producers have railed against “pretenders ” like diced cauliflower and said they may take the issue to the FDA.
But the FDA hasn’t even always been able to get other agencies to go along, as illustrated in the emails obtained by the Good Food Institute, which advocates alternatives to industrial animal agriculture. The GFI sued the FDA for public records relating to soy milk.
The email exchange started when a nutrition adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services alerted the FDA that the USDA planned to use “soy milk” in educational materials about dietary guidelines.
“USDA staff are preparing consumer publications and fervently want to use the term ‘soy milk’ because beverages are widely marketed this way,” the adviser wrote.
The FDA bristled and provided the federal definition of milk as a “lacteal secretion” from cows. Therefore, the FDA declared that referring to soy, almond and rice drinks as “milk” would be incorrect. It suggested the other agency say “beverage” or “fortified beverage.”
When that didn’t put the matter to rest, the FDA warned that the USDA’s use of the term could undermine the FDA’s regulatory authority.
That apparently didn’t stop the USDA, either.
“They are adamant about using the term in consumer publications,” the nutrition adviser wrote. The USDA had indicated that it would use “soy beverage” in official policy documents, but it wanted to use “plain language” in materials for the public.
Despite the federal regulation, others may also consider “soy milk” an acceptable term. The Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn’t limit milk’s definition to cows, saying it is “a fluid secreted by the mammary glands of females for the nourishment of their young.”
It also allows for a “food product produced from seeds or fruit that resembles and is used similarly to cow’s milk.”
Asked how the spat was resolved, the USDA provided materials from 2011 that use both terms by referring to “soymilk (soy beverage).” The agency also uses the term elsewhere, including on its “Choose My Plate” website, which currently says “calcium-fortified soymilk (soy beverage)” is part of the dairy group.
The National Milk Producers Federation says the USDA’s usage of the term shows even other government agencies are confused about how to describe soy beverages in the absence of consistent enforcement by the FDA.
The FDA declined to comment.
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A robot wheels across a rocky, windswept landscape that looks like the surface of some distant planet from a science fiction film. But it is not in outer space, it’s on the slopes of Europe’s most active volcano.
Mount Etna, in Sicily, is a test bed for the approximately three-foot high, four-wheeled machine ahead of a future mission to the moon. It is being conducted by the German Aerospace Center, the agency which runs Germany’s space program.
The program has enlisted experts from Germany, Britain, the United States and Italy to research ROBEX (Robotic Exploration of Extreme Environments) with the aim of improving robotic equipment that will be used in space.
“This is aimed at simulating a future, hypothetical landing mission on the moon or Mars and they use a lot of robots which are there to transport and install different instruments”, said Boris Behncke, a volcanologist from the National Vulcanology Institute in Catania, near Mount Etna.
Scientists also hope to use the robots to explore the depths of Mount Etna and relay back useful technical data on seismic movement. The techniques learnt on Etna would then be deployed in lunar missions or in the exploration of Mars.
An initial robotic testing phase has nearly been completed on the Piano del Lago area of the volcano, a desolate stretch of terrain buffeted by strong winds.
Next, a network of equipment including rover robots and drones will be mounted to monitor seismic activity that closely simulates that which would be used on the moon.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX accomplished another space first when its reusable Dragon cargo ship capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after its second successful mission to the International Space Station.
The commercial spacecraft completed its first mission in September 2014. Its second journey to the ISS began on June 3 when it was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The ship took about 2,700 kilograms of supplies to the ISS and brought back about 2,000 kilograms of scientific samples as well as unneeded equipment.
“Good splashdown of Dragon confirmed – completing first re-flight of a commercial spacecraft to and from the @Space_Station,” the company tweeted early Monday.
Astronaut Jack Fischer tweeted a photo of the capsule’s fiery reentry, saying, “beautiful expanse of stars – but the ‘long’ orange one is SpaceX-11 reentering! Congrats team for a successful splashdown & great mission!”
SpaceX crews were waiting off Long Beach, Calif., to retrieve the capsule and unload its cargo.
The successful splashdown marks a new milestone for the company that hopes to dramatically drive down the cost of space operations through its reusable rockets and capsules.
In a minor setback Sunday, the company was forced to delay the launch of another satellite, but was to try again later Monday.
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Recent progress in forecasting the intensity of hurricanes —
which has lagged behind storm track forecasting — could be undermined by proposed cuts in federal funding for tropical weather research, says the retiring chief of a team of U.S. hurricane specialists.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program in 2009 with a $13 million budget. Funding has shrunk to less than half that, and President Donald Trump’s proposed budget includes further cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service.
“It’s hanging on really by a thread in terms of funding,” said James Franklin, who oversees the National Hurricane Center team that releases tropical storm forecasts and warnings.
During his time at NOAA, Franklin was on research teams that made breakthroughs in tropical storm forecasting and in the understanding of the winds circling a hurricane’s eye. His research with dropsondes — sensor-filled tubes that send weather data as they fall through hurricanes — helped improve forecasts of storm tracks and led NOAA to buy a “hurricane hunter” jet that’s still used today. He also helped develop new GPS dropsondes that showed how eyewall winds vary.
Before his June 30 retirement, ending a 35-year NOAA career that included 83 flights breaching hurricane eyewalls, Franklin discussed forecasting with The Associated Press:
Uneven forecast improvements
Hurricane track forecasts have steadily improved partly because the weather elements that direct a storm’s path are easy to see, Franklin said. For example, a high-pressure area over the Atlantic known as the Bermuda High, which can nudge storms toward land instead of over open waters, is hundreds of miles (kilometers) across.
However, forecasting intensity has been more difficult because it depends on the interactions between the ocean and thunderstorms at the core of a tropical storm, and those interactions happen in an area just tens of miles (kilometers) wide and are difficult to observe even with advanced dropsondes, drones and satellites, Franklin said.
“We’ve always been able to see many or most of the steering factors or steering features in the atmosphere, and we get better at it all the time,” he said.
“But when it comes to intensity, what’s going to make a tropical depression strengthen into a hurricane — now you’re talking about all kinds of things going on in the atmosphere on very small scales. You’re talking about the interface between the ocean and the atmosphere. How much heat is going to get extracted from that ocean? That’s a big driver for intensification.”
Despite forecasts, use caution
Improved forecasts, however, can be a double-edged sword, Franklin said. Despite a variety of warnings and advisories highlighting specific storm hazards, such as storm surge flooding, some people still expect hurricanes to stick to a predicted track, even though forecasts include a range of potential outcomes.
“I find this surprising because there’s still so many bad forecasts out there — ours included — yet we see it over and over: people don’t have a good grasp on just what the forecast uncertainties still are,” he said.
Potential storm advisories
The hurricane center issued its first advisories for potential tropical cyclones in June, alerting the U.S. Gulf Coast and Venezuela’s Caribbean coast to strong winds and heavy rains a full day before tropical storms Bret and Cindy were officially named. Franklin said those advisories reflect both forecasting improvements and the hurricane center’s emphasis on potential risks for communities in a storm’s path.
“As the models got better and as the data got more plentiful, the models became much more capable of forecasting formations of storms,” he said. “If you’re going to do advisories on potential tropical cyclones, you really need to have a good handle on which ones are going to develop and which ones aren’t, so it was that science advance that allowed us to do that. I don’t think we could have done potential tropical cyclone [advisories] 10 years ago.”
Seven-day forecasts?
The hurricane center only issued two-day forecasts when Franklin began working for NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division in 1982. Five-day forecasts were introduced in 2003. The hurricane center has practiced creating seven-day forecasts for several years, but Franklin said they still aren’t accurate enough for public use, and he’s skeptical that they’d be useful to coastal communities.
“I’m not in a hurry to do a public seven-day forecast. There’s not a lot you can do seven days in advance,” he said. “The emergency management community is not telling us that this is important for them.”
3-D printing has given artists and engineers a way to create some of their most daring visions. But it is giving Argentine inventor Gino Tubaro a chance to change lives by building customized prosthetic limbs. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Sudanese doctors and aid workers are urging the government to declare a state of emergency over a cholera outbreak and delay the start of the school year, which began Sunday.
The disease, which is passed through contaminated water, has surfaced in five states, including the capital, Khartoum. The U.S. Embassy said last month that fatalities had been confirmed, and Egypt has begun screening passengers from Sudan at Cairo’s international airport.
Some 22,000 cases of acute watery diarrhea have led to at least 700 fatalities since May 20, said Hossam al-Amin al-Badawi, of the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors, adding that it is most likely cholera, but the government refuses to test for it.
Doctors say cholera, a bacterial infection linked to contaminated food or water, has surfaced in the states of Khartoum, Al-Jazeera, Sennar, White Nile and North Kordofan, and are urging the government to seek international aid.
The fast-developing, highly contagious infection can spread in areas without clean drinking water or with poor sanitation. If left untreated, it can cause death from dehydration.
Sudan’s official news agency SUNA meanwhile announced the opening of the school year, saying that authorities had the outbreak of “acute watery diarrhea” under control.
Activists and the opposition say President Omar al-Bashir’s government refuses to acknowledge the cholera outbreak because it would reveal failures in the country’s crumbling health system, where corruption is rife.
Neighboring South Sudan is grappling with the “the longest, most widespread and most deadly cholera outbreak” since the it won independence in 2011, according to the U.N. Since the outbreak began a year ago, over 11,000 cases have been reported, including at least 190 deaths, according to the World Health Organization and South Sudan’s government.