Doctors encourage their patients to eat a healthful diet, and often give them tips on how to do that. But a pediatrician in Spotsylvania, Virginia, is doing even more. Dr. Nimali Fernando is showing her young patients and their parents how to eat healthy by offering them a variety of cooking classes, from baby food for parents to cooking with preschoolers and older kids. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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When we’re buying groceries by weight, being a few grams off may not be a big deal. But we do expect the store scales to be calibrated to show the exact measure. The situation becomes more complicated when we want to know the exact measure of something weighing a hundred tons or more. VOA’s George Putic visited a lab that calibrates large-force instruments.
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Ethiopia’s highlands traditionally have a built-in protection for the people who live there. The elevation and the cool temperatures have meant that malaria, the deadly mosquito-borne illness, cannot be transmitted.
But climate change may be putting an end to that safeguard. A new study led by a researcher at the University of Maine found that since 1981, the elevation needed to protect people from malaria has risen by 100 meters.
For the first time, people living in Ethiopia’s highlands could be vulnerable to the disease.
“What’s happening is the conditions, at least in terms of temperature, that are suitable for malaria are slowly creeping up at higher elevations,” said Bradfield Lyon at Maine’s Climate Change Institute and School of Earth and Climate Sciences. “The same thing would be true in other highland locations throughout the tropics.”
“It’s sort of eroding this natural buffer,” he said.
The two most common types of parasites that cause malaria in the region require consistent temperatures above 18 degrees Celsius and 15 degrees Celsius respectively.
Lyon’s study found that temperatures in the Horn of Africa are rising by an average of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade due to climate change. He said this may not sound like a major change, but that over the course of the years studied (1981 to 2014), more than 6 million people who once lived areas protected from malaria may have lost that protection.
Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, at 2,300 meters above sea level, still sits well above the threshold for malaria. Lyon said the communities potentially at risk are at elevations between 1,200 and 1,700 meters.
Still, he emphasized that this is simply a meteorological study. He has not seen evidence that people in the described areas actually contracted malaria. But the research is pointing out that it is possible.
“It does not mean that these people, therefore, are going to get malaria. It just says that it is slowly enhancing the risk if we leave all other factors alone,” Lyon said. “I mean the hope is through interventions and so forth that we can, in fact, eradicate malaria in this and other regions of the tropics.”
In 2015, about 212 million people worldwide fell ill with malaria and about 429,000 died, according to the World Health Organization. About nine-tenths of the cases and deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa.
Worldwide, about 214 million people fall ill with malaria each year and 438,000 people die as a result, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most vulnerable are children living in sub-Saharan Africa.
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More than 75 people, mostly young children, have gotten measles in the U.S. state of Minnesota. Nearly all were unvaccinated.
Measles is one of the most highly contagious diseases that exists. All it takes is a sneeze or a cough to spread the virus in tiny droplets through the air.
One person can infect up to 18 others. Each one of those people infects another dozen or so people, and it spreads from there.
Ninety percent of those exposed will get the virus, unless they have been vaccinated or have already had measles.
The measles virus can linger on doorknobs, tables, any surface for up to two hours. Touch it and you’re exposed.
‘Not a trivial disease’
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, says, “Measles is not a trivial disease. If you have a measles outbreak, a proportion of people are going to have serious complications.”
The complications can be as serious as permanent brain damage. It can leave a child blind or deaf. Measles also kills.
Dr. Peter Hotez is a professor at Baylor College of Medicine. He’s also the director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.
Hotez told VOA, “In the pre-vaccine era, we had about 500 kids die of measles every year in the U.S. and 50,000 hospitalizations.”
And that’s not all. Dr. Flavia Bustreo at the World Health Organization says measles can have lingering consequences.
“Measles can lead to pneumonia, and a reduction in immune function for some time after the infection, so the child becomes weaker and more susceptible to other infections,” Bustreo said.
The U.S. was declared measles free in 2000. Last year the World Health Organization declared the Americas measles free. This came after a 22-year campaign to eradicate this disease in both North and South America. The achievement was considered a historic milestone.
International hub
So, why, you could ask, have more than 75 people, mostly children, gotten measles in the Midwestern state of Minnesota?
All cases of measles in the Americas are imported. In Minnesota, the outbreak started among the Somali-American community and spread because this group had low vaccination rates for measles.
Minneapolis is an international hub where people arrive from countries around the world. As of now, no one knows the identity of the first patient with measles, whether it was someone visiting from abroad or if an unvaccinated American brought the disease home after traveling overseas.
Like most pediatricians in the U.S., Dr. Hope Scott counts herself lucky to have never seen a case of measles. “The kids who get measles are really, really sick. It’s a pretty big deal to get measles,” she says.
The first signs of measles are a runny nose, cough and a fever followed by a blotchy rash that starts on the face and then spreads all over the body. Once the rash appears, the fever spikes.
An infected person can spread the virus to others about four days before the rash appears and for about four more days afterward.
Hospitalizations
About a third of the children who have acquired measles in Minnesota have been hospitalized. There is no treatment that can get rid of a measles infection, but doctors can treat the symptoms.
Patsy Stinchfield, a nurse practitioner who’s overseeing care at Children’s Minnesota, where these children have been treated, says they are exhausted and dehydrated when they arrive. But, she told VOA, that so far none of the children has suffered any complications.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has asked doctors to work with parents who are reluctant to get their children vaccinated.
Reston Town Center Pediatrics in Virginia allows parents to set up a delayed vaccine schedule for their children, to a point.
Scott says the practice will work with the parents until the child is about 2 years old. Then, if the child is not vaccinated and the parents don’t have a plan to do so, Scott said the office sends them a letter saying their children can no longer be treated at the practice.
Measles is not just a childhood disease. Adults can get it, too, and adults are also at risk for complications.
The best protection is to get two doses of the measles vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends children get the first dose after their first birthday and the second when they are 4 to 6 years old. The two doses together provide 97 percent protection against measles.
Stinchfield said Children’s Minnesota has a walk-in clinic for measles vaccinations. She said before the outbreak, about 500 children would get vaccinated against the virus in a week. Since the outbreak, 3,000 people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds get vaccinated each week.
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More than 75 people, mostly young children, have gotten measles in the U.S. state of Minnesota. Nearly all were unvaccinated. The same is true in every other country worldwide. That’s why pediatricians and public health doctors want every child to get vaccinated against this virus. VOA’s Carol Pearson takes a look at measles to find out why.
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We know that forests are carbon sinks. That means they absorb a lot of planet-warming carbon dioxide. But researchers are trying to find out just how good they are at storing carbon, and if there is a limit to how much they can absorb. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Chief lieutenants in the Koch brothers’ political network lashed out at the Senate Republican health care bill on Saturday, becoming a powerful outside critic as GOP leaders try to rally support for their plan among rank-and-file Republicans.
“This Senate bill needs to get better,” said Tim Phillips, who leads Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s political arm. “It has to get better.”
Phillips called the Senate’s plans for Medicaid “a slight nip and tuck” over President Barack Obama’s health care law, a modest change he described as “immoral.”
The comments came on the first day of a three-day private donor retreat at a luxury resort in the Rocky Mountains. Invitations were extended only to donors who promise to give at least $100,000 each year to the various groups backed by the Koch brothers’ Freedom Partners — a network of education, policy and political entities that aim to promote small government.
No outside group has been move aggressive over the yearslong push to repeal Obama’s health care law than that of the Kochs, who vowed on Saturday to spend another 10 years fighting to change the health care system if necessary. The Koch network has often displayed a willingness to take on Republicans — including President Donald Trump — when their policies aren’t deemed conservative enough.
Big-budget push
Network spokesman James Davis said the organization would continue to push for changes to the Senate health care bill over the coming week.
“At the end of the day, this bill is not going to fix health care,” Davis declared.
The network’s wishes are backed by a massive political budget that will be used to take on Republican lawmakers, if necessary, Phillips said.
He described the organization’s budget for policy and politics heading into the 2018 midterm elections as between $300 million and $400 million. “We believe we’re headed to the high end of that range,” he said.
On Friday, Nevada Republican Dean Heller became the fifth GOP senator to declare his opposition to the Senate health care proposal. Echoing the other four, Heller said he opposed the measure “in this form” but did not rule out backing a version that was changed to his liking.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has said he’s willing to alter the measure to attract support, and promised plenty of backroom bargaining as he tries pushing a final package through his chamber next week.
Republican leaders have scant margin for error. Facing unanimous Democratic opposition, McConnell can afford to lose just two of the 52 GOP senators and still prevail.
At least two of the current opponents, Utah Senator Mike Lee and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, were among 18 elected officials scheduled to attend the Koch donor conference.
The Senate measure resembles legislation the House approved last month that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said would mean 23 million additional uninsured people within a decade and that recent polling shows is viewed favorably by only around 1 in 4 Americans.
Meeting with Pence
Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his chief lieutenants met privately with Vice President Mike Pence for nearly an hour Friday. Pence, a longtime Koch ally, was in Colorado Springs to address a gathering of religious conservatives.
Phillips said it was “a cordial discussion” about policy.
Also Saturday, retired football star Deion Sanders announced plans to partner with the Kochs to help fight poverty in Dallas.
The unlikely partnership aims to raise $21 million over the next three years to fund anti-poverty programs in the city where Sanders once played football. The outspoken athlete also defended Koch, who is often demonized by Democrats, as someone simply “trying to make the world a better place.”
“I’m happy where I am and who I’m with because we share a lot of the same values and goals,” Sanders said when asked if he’d be willing to partner with organizations on the left.
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A cholera outbreak in war-ravaged Yemen could infect more than 300,000 people by the end of August, up from nearly 180,000 cases today, the United Nations said Friday. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports on the dire situation resulting from the 27-month-long conflict, which pits Houthi rebels against government forces backed by a Saudi-led coalition.
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A deadly heat wave that has claimed at least six lives in parts of the American Southwest continues.
While temperatures cooled off Friday in Los Angeles, residents are bracing for a long, hot summer.
Planes were grounded for a time in Phoenix earlier this week, as temperatures in parts of the U.S. Southwest soared to 45 degrees Celsius and higher, from Tucson, Arizona, to Palm Springs, California.
Cooling stations, community centers
People have tried their best to stay cool, using community cooling stations in parks and community centers throughout the region.
An air-conditioned senior center in the Los Angeles suburb of Canoga Park offered companionship and relief from the heat.
Four women relaxed over a game of dominoes, while in another part of the center, a dozen women kept active in a tap-dancing class.
They are fine indoors, center director Karin Haseltine said, but she warned too much activity outside on hot days could be hazardous for both seniors and young children.
Haseltine said many seniors also worry about the cost of air-conditioning.
“They can’t turn it on because the bill is so expensive,” she said.
Inside the center, where it is cool, seniors were staying active, taking tap dancing classes and doing yoga.
Deaths blamed on heat
Scattered fires have burned throughout the West, and several deaths in Nevada, Arizona and California have been blamed on intense heat.
Animals are in danger, too.
Zoo workers have been hosing down the elephants at the Phoenix Zoo. Authorities also warn parents and pet owners not to leave animals or children in cars, where temperatures can quickly soar to deadly levels.
At an air-conditioned center in Los Angeles, senior volunteer Rosalie said people are making the best of being indoors.
“The don’t have to worry about being uncomfortable, getting ill,” she said, and can have lunch and activities with friends.
Others are doing what they can to stay cool outdoors, from lounging in the shade to splashing in public fountains.
Makeshift hydration stations are offering bottled water. Near-record-high temperatures are expected through early next week, and people say they are prepared for more heat this summer.
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A deadly heat wave continues in parts of the American Southwest. In Los Angeles, temperatures cooled off Friday, but residents are bracing for a long, hot summer.VOA’s Mike O’Sullivan reports.
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The Zika virus made headlines last year because it caused microcephaly in many babies whose mothers were pregnant while they had the virus. Microcephaly keeps the brain from developing normally in children but is relatively harmless to adults. That got cancer researchers thinking about the possibility the virus could be used to attack cancer cells in the brain. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Water temperatures in the northwestern Mediterranean are increasing much faster than global averages, threatening the survival of several species, French researchers said.
Weekly water temperature readings by researchers at the Villefranche-sur-Mer oceanography laboratory have shown that Mediterranean surface water temperatures have increased by 0.7 degree between 2007 and 2015.
The researchers, who believe their findings apply to an area that includes Spain, France and Italy, also said in a note summarizing their study that the water’s acidity has increased by nearly 7 percent.
“The acidification and warming up of the water are due to carbon dioxide emissions from human activities,” French CNRS researcher Jean-Pierre Gattuso told Reuters.
He added that about a quarter of mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by the oceans, making the water more acidic.
Gattuso said that plankton tend to migrate north in order to maintain an optimum temperature, but that is not possible in the Mediterranean, which is connected to the Atlantic Ocean only via the narrow Strait of Gibraltar.
“It’s a dead-end here, so species could disappear,” Gattuso said, noting a particular threat to the posidonia oceanica seagrass, known locally as Mediterranean tapeweed, which produces oxygen and forms an important fish habitat.
He said that at the same time, more grouper and barracuda had been seen in the Mediterranean, as it becomes more like a subtropical sea.
Gattuso said the acidification would become a problem in a few decades for marine organisms that have a skeleton or a calcium shell, such as oysters, mollusks, snails and corals.
Mediterranean mussels, popular in restaurants, could disappear in 2100, he said.
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The U.N. Children’s Fund warns cholera cases and deaths in war-torn Yemen continue to mount and could reach 300,000 by the end of August. UNICEF puts the current number of suspected cases at nearly 200,000, including more than 1,200 deaths — with a quarter of those being children.
UNICEF says containing the cholera outbreak in Yemen is extremely difficult. It says the health system is near total collapse, water and sanitation systems are in disrepair and the people who are meant to care for patients, collect the garbage and maintain vital systems have not been paid for six months.
The UNICEF representative in Yemen, Meritxell Relano, says despite the obstacles, aid agencies are making progress in reducing cholera cases and deaths in some parts of the country.
Package of intervention
Speaking from Sana’a, she says UNICEF and partners are meeting with some success in preventing the spread of the disease in places where they have provided families and communities with a package of intervention.
She tells VOA the package includes household water purification.
“A team of people, they go house by house and they check the water sources that the family is using,” Relano said. “They chlorinate the water tanks if they have a water tank … and then they are informed about the ways to avoid cholera by providing good hygiene to the family — hand washing with soap, how to handle the food and how to handle a family that is sick with cholera or with diarrhea.”
Easily treated if caught quickly
Relano says it is important to know how to care for a patient because cholera is sometimes transmitted by the fluids of a sick person. Cholera, which is caused by contaminated food and water, is easily treated if caught quickly; however, it can kill in a matter of hours if left untreated.
The UNICEF representative says cholera cases are going down in 77 of the country’s 333 districts where aid agencies have introduced the life-saving package of integrated measures. This past week, U.N. humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien was quoted as saying Yemen’s cholera outbreak was a “man-made” catastrophe caused by Yemen’s warring sides and their international backers.
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Ron Finley has been called a “guerrilla gardener” and the “gangsta gardener,” an edgier description of a man who once defied local authorities to bring nature to the inner city.
Finley’s efforts to plant edible gardens on public property have earned him court citations, but they also brought a victory two years ago when Los Angeles city officials approved community gardens on public parkways, the narrow strips of land between the street and sidewalk.
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Many mornings, Finley can be seen tending the dense vegetation in the sliver of a garden outside his house.
“This is a food forest,” he said, pointing to lemon trees, sunflower plants and tomato vines. “There’s fruit trees, there’s also weeds that are edible in here. And I want to educate people to the fact that there’s food all around you.”
From figs and Swiss chard to edible nasturtiums, Finley grows fruits and vegetables that are rare in the inner city, where he says residents have better access to fast food and liquor stores than to healthful produce.
He spends much of his time doing public speaking and urging people to start community gardens. But many in Los Angeles were already on board with the concept before he became involved.
A few miles from Finley’s garden in South Los Angeles, Tamiko Nakamoto walks through plots of edible plants tended by 22 gardeners.
This community garden is not far from the epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and Nakamoto said the community activist who set it up shortly afterward wanted “a place of peace and an oasis in this city that’s surrounded by turmoil.”
There are “collard greens, sugar cane, bananas, tomato trees (vines), cabbage,” said one gardener, a towering immigrant from the Virgin Islands who uses his Rastafarian name, Makado. He is here most days weeding and watering.
Los Angeles is now dotted with dozens of gardens and small strips of vegetation outside the homes of residents.
Others are being planted. Los Angeles officials are in the process of approving tax breaks for owners of vacant lots if the land is used for community gardens. The City Council gave preliminary approval to the measure this month.
“I want them to do more,” Finley said of city officials. “I want them to advocate for this. I want them to put bulletin boards up. I want them to have workshops showing people how to do this.”
Slowly, patches of greenery and color are appearing amid the concrete, and Finley said these gardens make residents feel “healthy all over, not just your body, your mind-set, everything because looking at this, smelling this affects every sense in your body.”
Just as importantly, he said, these gardens are putting fresh fruits and vegetables on the tables of local families.
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A new study by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says that safe burial practices may have helped prevent the transmission of thousands of cases of Ebola during the epidemic in West Africa between 2013 and 2016.
More than 11,300 people died from Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea before the epidemic was stopped in those countries in 2016.
Ebola is highly contagious and spread by direct contact with blood or other bodily fluids. Symptoms include a sudden fever, aching muscles, diarrhea and vomiting.
Red Cross study
A co-author of the Red Cross Federation study, Amanda McClelland, says the traditional burial practice of washing and touching the dead was a major mode of transmission of Ebola during the outbreak in all three countries.
While isolating patients is key to preventing the spread of the disease, she says early burial is crucial to keeping Ebola in check.
“They can really produce super-spreading events where we get very large chains of transmission well beyond what a live case would cause in the community,” she said. “So, the infectiousness of the bodies increases. The virus is at its peak when a person dies. So, we see a much higher transmission from a body than we do from a live person.”
McClelland says the Red Cross had to change its approach in dealing with communities that adhered to traditional burial practices. Aid workers stopped talking about management of the remains and instead spoke about safe and dignified burials, she said.
Local volunteers
Burial teams made up entirely of local volunteers, gained the trust of the communities, which was critical to success, she said. In all, the teams provided more than 47,000 safe burials, accounting for more than 50 percent of all burials in the three countries during the outbreak.
This action, McClelland said, may have prevented more than 10,000 people from becoming infected with the virus, which is named for the Congolese river near where it was first identified in 1976.
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Farming on empty land in one of America’s biggest cities used to be discouraged. But urban gardeners in Los Angeles spent years pressing local politicians to let them grow food in vacant lots, and now their efforts are bearing fruit. Mike O’Sullivan reports on the people planting food forests in the middle of the city.
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One of the challenges to designing prosthetics, or exoskeletons for the disabled, is that everyone is different. Technology designed to help a person walk or get around doesn’t work very well when it is built to be one-size-fits-all. But scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out a quick, easy way to make each prosthetic different. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park will be stripped of Endangered Species Act safeguards this summer, U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced on Thursday in a move conservation groups vowed to challenge in court.
Dropping federal protection of Yellowstone’s grizzlies, formally proposed in March 2016 under the Obama administration, was based on the agency’s findings that the bears’ numbers have rebounded sufficiently in recent decades.
The estimated tally of grizzlies in the greater Yellowstone region, encompassing parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, has grown to 700 or more today, up from as few as 136 bears in 1975 when they were formally listed as a threatened species through the Lower 48 states.
At that time, the grizzly had been hunted, trapped and poisoned to near extinction. Its current population well exceeds the government’s minimum recovery goal of 500 animals in the region.
Lifting the bears’ protected status will open them to trophy hunting outside the boundaries of Yellowstone park as grizzly oversight is turned over to state wildlife managers in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, as well as to native American tribes in the region.
Hunters and ranchers, who make up a powerful political constituency in Western states, have strongly advocated removing grizzlies from the threatened species list, arguing the bears’ growing numbers pose a threat to humans, livestock and big-game animals such as elk.
Environmentalists have raised concerns that while grizzlies have made a comeback, their recovery could falter without federal safeguards. They point to the fact that a key food source for the bears, whitebark pine nuts, may be on the decline due to climate change.
“The grizzly fight is on. We’ll stop any attempt to delist Yellowstone’s grizzlies,” the Oregon-based Western Environmental Law Center said in a Twitter post.
“We anticipate going to court to challenge this premature, deeply concerning decision,” Bethany Cotton, wildlife program director for the conservation group WildEarth Guardians, said Thursday.
Native American tribes, which revere the grizzly, also have voiced skepticism about ending its threatened classification.
Zinke said the final delisting rule by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be published “in coming days” and go into effect 30 days later.
As proposed last March, the rule will not affect four other smaller federally protected grizzly populations in parts of Montana, Idaho and Washington state. A much larger population in Alaska remains unlisted.
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The United Nations reports about 250 million people, or 5 percent of the global adult population, used drugs in 2015, and of those, about 29.5 million suffered from drug-use disorders, including addiction.
The World Drug Report 2017 launched Thursday by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said that opioids were the most harmful drug type, accounting for 70 percent of drug-linked health problems worldwide.
It said opioids, including heroin, legal painkillers, such as morphine, and synthetic drugs like fentanyl were responsible for many premature drug deaths.
“In many parts of the world, we observe an increasingly complex relationship between the use of heroin and synthetic opioids,” Aldo Lale-Demoz, deputy executive director of UNODC, said.
Lale-Demoz said that poly drug use — the use of two or more psychoactive drugs — a common feature of both recreational and regular drug users, “as well as the cross-over between synthetic and traditional drugs pose increasing public health challenges and produce highly negative health and social consequences.”
Injecting drugs
Of the 12 million people who inject drugs worldwide, the report found that 1-in-8, or 1.6 million people, is living with HIV and more than half or just over 6 million are living with hepatitis C, while around 1.3 million are suffering from both diseases.
Despite the many health problems afflicting drug users, the report noted that only 1-in-6 people seeking help have access to drug treatment programs.
Lale-Demoz observed that many countries preferred to deal with drug problems by throwing users in prison, which he said exposed them to many infectious diseases.
“The standard of care, which is provided to those who are incarcerated should be equivalent to the care received by those outside the prison system, with appropriate continuity of care between prison and the wider community,” he said.
“Most importantly, we know that alternatives to incarceration for drug offenses of a minor nature actually help reduce the spread and burden of infectious diseases in prison and ultimately within the wider community,” Lale-Demoz added.
Luiz Loures, deputy executive director of UNAIDS, agreed with this assessment noting that “criminalization and health do not go together.”
Loures warned that an injecting drug user who is on the police radar would be reluctant to seek treatment for HIV or another illness for fear of being caught. He said this drives the disease underground, which is dangerous.
“It does not help for the person and it does not help for society. There is plenty of evidence that when you criminalize, the impact on health is negative,” he said. “In my view, one of the major problems today is exactly this confusion between criminalization and access to health. I think that is really not helping, in fact that is fueling the drug use epidemic globally.”
Among its other key findings, the report notes amphetamine use accounts for a large share of the disease burden globally. It said the cocaine market has expanded with the largest number of consumers found in North America and Europe.
The report said global opium production had increased by one-third in 2016 mainly due to higher opium poppy yields in Afghanistan.
Thriving business
Chloe Carpentier, chief of the Drug Research Section at UNODC, told VOA that the Taliban was behind this thriving business.
“We estimate that about $150 million were made by them only in terms of taxing the drug business in 2016, and their revenue would be between $150 and $200 million per year and the drug business would account for about half of what they make per year,” Carpentier said.
Authors of the report concluded that “without the proceeds of drug production and trafficking … the reach and impact of the Taliban would probably not be what it is today.”
The report noted that organized crime groups were reaping huge profits from the multi-billion-dollar drug trade, generating between one-fifth and one-third of their revenues from these illicit sales.
One of the aims of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is to significantly reduce such illicit financial flows.
“Drug profits is what drives traffickers and, therefore, identifying the flows related to these profits and the channels where they are invested and laundered can effectively counteract them,” the UNODC’s Lale-Demoz said.
Ultimately, however, he said drug control was less a law and order issue, and more a matter of personal and public health.
“Sending people to jail, punishing people for minor drug offenses has not worked,” he said. “In fact, it is highly detrimental. It only increases the possibility of all sorts of social dislocations — violence, crimes, stigma and also the spread of diseases.”
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The benefits of a Mediterranean diet are widely chronicled, but new research shows extra-virgin olive oil, a key part of the diet, may protect “against cognitive decline.”
Specifically, researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia say extra-virgin olive oil “protects memory and learning ability and reduces the formation of amyloid-beta plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain – classic markers of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Researcher say olive oil reduced inflammation and triggers a process called autophagy, which helps broken down cells to flush intracellular debris and toxins. This includes amyloid plaques and tau tangles, the latter of which is associated with memory loss in Alzheimer’s.
“Brain cells from mice fed diets enriched with extra-virgin olive oil had higher levels of autophagy and reduced levels of amyloid plaques and phosphorylated tau,” said senior investigator Domenico Praticò.
For their study, the researchers looked at mice with three traits of Alzheimer’s: memory impairment, amyloid plaques, and neurofibrillary tangles. The mice were put into two groups, one group got a diet enriched with extra-virgin olive oil, while the other group received a normal diet.
The olive oil was given to the mice when they were only six months old and before any symptoms of Alzheimer’s set in. While there was no difference in the appearance of the mice, at age 9 months and 12 months, the mice in the olive oil group “performed significantly better on tests designed to evaluate working memory, spatial memory, and learning abilities.”
An analysis of the brain tissue of the mice revealed more differences.
“One thing that stood out immediately was synaptic integrity,” Praticò said. The integrity of the connections between neurons, known as synapses, were preserved in animals on the extra-virgin olive oil diet. In addition, compared to mice on a regular diet, brain cells from animals in the olive oil group showed a dramatic increase in nerve-cell autophagy activation, which ultimately was responsible for the reduction in levels of amyloid plaques and phosphorylated tau.”
Next, researchers plan to see what happens to mice who are given olive oil at 12 months, when they are already showing symptoms.
“Usually when a patient sees a doctor for suspected symptoms of dementia, the disease is already present,” Praticò added. “We want to know whether olive oil added at a later time point in the diet can stop or reverse the disease.”
The study was published online June 21 in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.
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Simplice Lenguy told his wife to leave him behind as people fled when fighting broke out in Central African Republic’s capital.
“I said, ‘Take the children. You go to the camp. I am handicapped. I can’t flee like the others. If something happens to me, at least my family will be safe,'” Lenguy, who is disabled from polio, recounted in an interview with The Associated Press. His wife refused and forced him to come with her, even when he lost consciousness because of the pain.
For years Central African Republic has seen widespread violence that has displaced more than 500,000 people.
This week at least 100 people were killed in fighting in the town of Bria. Those with disabilities are a “forgotten people within a forgotten crisis” at high risk during attacks and forced displacement, facing neglect in an ongoing humanitarian crisis, according to Lewis Mudge, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, which released a report this week on their challenges.
The country has faced deadly violence since 2013, when predominantly Muslim Seleka rebels seized power in the capital, Bangui. Mostly Christian anti-Balaka militias fought back, resulting in thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.
It is not known how many of the displaced are people with disabilities, but Human Rights Watch said conditions at camps are not conducive for them. Some have trouble getting food during distributions, while others have challenges using showers and toilets that lack ramps.
The new report said one man with a physical disability was killed in November 2014 while trying to crawl away from attacking Seleka fighters in the town of Bolo. And when anti-Balaka forces attacked the village of Ngbima the same month, they killed 28 civilians, including a 25-year-old woman with a bad foot who could not move quickly. She was burned alive inside her home, said the report.
With half of Central Africa Republic’s population in need of humanitarian assistance, Mudge said people with disabilities do not get the “protection and assistance they desperately need.”
Human Rights Watch called on the U.N. peacekeeping mission and other U.N. agencies to monitor and report abuses against people with disabilities and commit resources to improving humanitarian aid.
In 2015, the U.N. Security Council’s mandate for the peacekeeping mission expressed “serious concern about the dire situation of persons with disabilities in the CAR including abandonment, violence and lack of access to basic services.” However, when the mandate was renewed by the U.N. Security Council in 2016, no language on people with disabilities was included.
The human rights chief for the U.N. peacekeeping mission had “no statement” on why the language wasn’t included. However, Musa Yerro Gassama said the U.N. continues to work on the issue with aid groups.
Central African Republic’s government doesn’t have the capacity to support people with disabilities, Mudge said. And U.N. officials say humanitarian funding for the country is only at 28 percent.
Once Lenguy recovered from his journey to the camp for those displaced in Bangui, he started organizing others with disabilities into a group to demand more aid. They seek support to replace lost canes and tricycles, rebuild homes and provide vocational assistance.
Despite the challenges, the 40-year-old Lenguy said he’s “very optimistic.” He said he wants people with disabilities to have a role in the government and play a role in their country’s future.
“We, people with disabilities, are ready to help the country to develop,” he said.
An estimated 8-12 million Americans have a medical condition called Peripheral Artery Disease or PAD. The condition is caused by plaque buildup in the arteries and can be extremely painful. But some space age technology could provide relief. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports, and Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Researchers at a British University have embarked on a decade-long experiment that will pump a forest full of carbon dioxide to measure how it copes with rising levels of the gas, a key driver of climate change.
The Free Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment (FACE) experiment at the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) will expose a fenced-off section of mature woodland in Norbury Park in Staffordshire, West Midlands, to levels of CO2 that experts predict will be prevalent in 2050.
Scientists aim to measure the forest’s capacity to capture carbon released by fossil fuel burning, and answer questions about their capacity to absorb carbon pollution long-term.
“[Forests] happily take a bit more CO2 because that’s their main nutrient. But we don’t know how much more and whether they can do that indefinitely,” BIFoR co-director Michael Tausz told Reuters.
Carbon dioxide record
The apparatus for the experiment consists of a series of masts built into six 30-meter-wide sections of woodland, reaching up about 25 meters into the forest canopy.
Concentrated CO2 is fed through pipes to the top of the masts where it is pumped into the foliage.
Last year the U.N World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that the global average of carbon dioxide, the main man-made greenhouse gas, reached 400 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere for the first time on record.
“The forest here sees nearly 40 percent more CO2 than it sees normally, because that’s what it will be globally in about 2050; a value of 550 parts per million, compared to 400 parts per million now,” Tausz said.
Deforestation
With deforestation shrinking the carbon storage capacity of the world’s forests, researchers hope that a greater understanding of their role in climate change mitigation could help policymakers make informed decisions.
“We could get a clear idea of whether they can keep helping us into the future by sucking up more CO2,” Tausz said.
The remainder of the Norbury Park woodland is open to the public and will not be affected by the experiment.
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The first total solar eclipse across the continental United States in a century is expected to spark watching parties and traffic jams as it darkens skies from Oregon to South Carolina, authorities said Wednesday.
During the August 21 eclipse, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, blocking the face of the sun and leaving only its outer atmosphere, or corona, visible in the sky.
It will be the first coast-to-coast total eclipse since 1918.
Weather permitting, people can watch as the moon’s 70-mile-wide (113 kilometers) shadow crosses through 14 states from 10:15 a.m. PDT (1715 GMT) around Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to 2:49 p.m. EDT (1849 GMT) in McClellanville, South Carolina.
‘Be prepared’
With 200 million Americans within a day’s drive of the path, national parks and highways officials are bracing for a travel surge.
“Be prepared,” Martin Knopp of the Federal Highway Administration said at a news conference, cautioning drivers against simply showing up. “It’s not the time to pull over and be on the side of the road.”
Travel groups and many scientists will be heading to Oregon’s northwest desert seeking favorable weather for viewing, according to the website eclipsophile.com.
Total solar eclipses occur somewhere on Earth every year or so, but most cast their shadows over oceans or remote land. The last total eclipse over part of the contiguous U.S. was in 1979.
All of North America will experience a partial eclipse, though the difference between a full and partial eclipse is “literally the difference between night and day,” said astronomer Rick Fienberg of the American Astronomical Society.
Temperature drop
He noted that even a 99 percent eclipse will not reveal the sun’s corona. And during a total eclipse, the temperature drops and the horizon is ringed by the colors of sunset.
“The sky gets deep twilight blue and bright stars and planets come out,” Fienberg said. “Animals and birds behave strangely, like it’s the end of the day.”
NASA said it plans to fly high-altitude research balloons and airplanes for solar physics and other experiments. Nearly a dozen U.S. science satellites will observe the sun and Earth.
The U.S. space agency will also broadcast the eclipse live from locations along the path.
Experts caution that the only safe time to look at the sun without special eclipse glasses is during totality when the surface of the sun is completely blocked by the moon.
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