Girls’ school attendance in East Africa almost doubles when students of both sexes are taught about sex, relationships and money, a charity said on Monday, highlighting how the attitudes of boys influence the educational success of girls.

Asante Africa Foundation said girls’ attendance increased by 80 percent in Kenyan and Tanzanian schools where its project taught about 9,000 adolescent girls, 3,000 mothers and 500 boys about problems like teenage pregnancy and domestic violence.

“If we want to ensure that the next generation of women are given the chance to receive a quality education then we must train our boys to be champions for girls’ equality,” Erna Grasz, founder of the U.S.-based charity, said in a statement.

Boys start listening

Two-thirds of the countries with the greater gender gap between boys and girls in school are in sub-Saharan Africa, largely due to culture and poverty.

Poor girls in rural East Africa often drop out of school when their periods start, as their families regard this as a sign that they are old enough to be married off, or have sex to pay for basic needs.

After taking part in the program, boys started listening to girls more and helped them come up with income-generating ideas, like making jewelry and rearing chickens, the charity said.

Change in attitudes

“The boys of today are the husbands and fathers of tomorrow,” the report said, highlighting the need to change boys’ attitudes towards traditions like female genital mutilation to end such practices.

Mothers were brought in to talk about puberty and finances, while students had frank discussions with slightly older girls about taboos like backstreet abortions, Asante Africa said.

At current rates, the world is set to miss a target for all children to go to secondary school by 2030 by more than half a century, according to the U.N. educational body UNESCO.

 
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A new study suggests a link between breast-feeding and a lowered risk of heart disease in older women.

The research by Chinese investigators found that women who breast-fed may have lowered their risk of heart disease or stroke by an average of 10 percent when they became older.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Peking University and the University of Oxford analyzed data on 289,573 women whose  average age was 51.  

They found that those who breast-fed had a 9 percent lower risk of heart disease and an 8 percent decreased risk of stroke, compared with women who had never nursed. The benefit was even greater for women who breast-fed their babies for two years or more. Their heart disease risk was 18 percent lower and the risk of stroke 17 percent less.

Each additional month of breast-feeding was associated with a 4 percent and 3 percent lower risk of heart disease and stroke, respectively, researchers said.

The findings of the study, the first to look at the long-term health benefits of breast-feeding for women, were published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Hormone’s possible role

Cardiologist Nieca Goldberg, who was not involved in the study, said the cardiovascular benefits could have been related to the release of oxytocin during breast-feeding.

“Oxytocin is a hormone that helps the flexibility of our blood vessels,” she said. “And flexible blood vessels are resistant to the buildup of plaque or cholesterol in the walls of the arteries.”

Breast-feeding provides a number of benefits, such as conferring a mother’s immune protection to her infant and protecting a newborn from life-threatening infections in countries with poor water quality.  

There are short-term benefits for mothers, too. Studies indicate that breast-feeding appears to reset the woman’s metabolism after pregnancy, so she loses baby weight faster, while lowering her cholesterol, blood pressure and glucose levels.

Goldberg, medical director at the Joan H. Tisch Center for Women’s Health in New York, said it was possible that women in the study who breast-fed, and saw heart healthy benefits, might have also led healthier lifestyles compared with other women.

Other strategies

“For those women who don’t choose to breast-feed, there are other things they can do to prevent heart disease,” said Goldberg. “And that’s certainly by exercising, something as simple as taking a walk and eating a healthy diet, rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat proteins.”

Goldberg cautioned that the Chinese study was observational, relying on information provided by the mothers many years after they had given birth, so the findings do not prove a cause-and-effect relationship. She said what’s needed is a head-to-head comparison of women who breast-feed with a control group of those who don’t, to see whether there are long-term heart-healthy benefits.
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A blood bank in the Pacific Northwest has developed a kit for transfusions in remote places that it says “takes the banking out of blood banking.”

A blood transfusion can often be the difference between life and death. Hospitals have stored blood on hand for people gravely injured in car accidents, and new mothers suffering from potentially fatal postpartum hemorrhaging. In areas far from hospitals and blood banks – like battlefields – medics have trained to do a procedure sometimes called a buddy transfusion. They rapidly collect and transfuse blood on scene after making a match between donor and patient.

Now the technique is bleeding over into the civilian world where it could save tens of thousands of lives every year.

Linda Barnes, chief operating officer at Bloodworks Northwest in Seattle, says the military was the model for what is, essentially, a walking blood bank. “Blood banking of stored blood certainly is not going away anytime soon. But in low resource settings, having banked blood available — and the logistics and the refrigeration required — simply isn’t feasible in the near term.”

Barnes has done a lot of international consulting about strengthening blood systems in places such as Ivory Coast, Kenya, Ukraine and the Caribbean islands. One thing from those trips that nagged her was how many patients in the developing world die each year for lack of blood, especially women giving birth. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 100,000 new mothers perish from profuse bleeding after childbirth each year.

Barnes and a colleague challenged themselves to build a simple, self-contained blood transfusion kit in a shoebox. The off-the-shelf components they assembled didn’t quite fit into a shoebox, so the Bloodpak expanded to backpack size.

It contains everything caregivers at remote rural clinics need to collect and transfuse blood: from alcohol wipes and bandages to blood typing and disease testing test kits to sterile catheters and needles. There are enough supplies to collect blood from six donors.

No refrigeration is needed for any of this because the blood goes directly from the donor to the recipient. The Bloodpak comes with step-by-step guidance on an app clinic workers can install on their smartphones. That app could also be used to send a mass text to registered villagers to come to their clinic to give blood in an emergency — in theory.

Putting it into practice

Recently, Bloodworks Northwest demonstrated its prototype to a Seattle company called Remote Medical International. The fast-growing company supplies medical personnel and support for isolated work places. Clinical Operations Director Loreen Lock foresees a variety of applications for the BloodPak, in oil and gas exploration for example, or mining, construction and by military contractors.

One thing she brought up was informed consent and the advance legwork that might be needed to deploy this in a civilian setting. “Part of the discussion evolved into how to do that in the developing world where there are social concerns, religious concerns. What does the local medicine man, if you will, think of the whole concept? Are they willing to sign off on it or not?”

Although it is not their primary market, Lock says there is undoubtedly great need in sub-Saharan Africa for a portable blood transfusion kit to address postpartum hemorrhaging.

Bloodworks Northwest just learned it is in line for a roughly $500,000 grant from the British foreign aid department. That will launch the next phase of product development: feasibility and acceptability testing at four rural clinics in western Kenya, beginning early next year.

Barnes estimated the Bloodpak would cost around $300 once in mass production. The company has identified clinics and partners for further field testing in Nepal and Uganda. After the validation phase, she said Bloodworks Northwest would likely partner with a medical supply chain company to commercialize the portable transfusion kit.

 
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Celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking says humans should return to the Moon by 2020 and Mars by 2025 in order to unite humanity in the shared purpose of spreading out beyond Earth.

“Spreading out into space will completely change the future of humanity,” the Cambridge professor said at the Starmus Festival in Trondheim, Norway. “I hope it would unite competitive nations in a single goal, to face the common challenge for us all.”

He added that reaching to the Moon, Mars and beyond would also get younger people interested in science such as astrophysics and cosmology.

Hawking said leaving Earth is essential as the planet faces climate change and stresses on natural resources.

“We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth,” he said. “If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before.”

Hawking said making the first moves into space would “elevate humanity” because it would have to involve many countries.

“Whenever we make a great new leap, such as the Moon landings, we bring people and nations together, usher in new discoveries, and new technologies,” he continued. “To leave Earth demands a concerted global approach, everyone should join in. We need to rekindle the excitement of the early days of space travel in the sixties.”

So far, the European Space Agency has announced a plan to create a “Moon Village” after the International Space Station is decommissioned in 2024. China is also reportedly interested in sending an astronaut to the Moon.

The U.S. space agency, NASA, is instead focusing on manned missions to Mars, something it hopes to do by the 2030s.
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To judge by their popularity in online videos, cats rule the pet kingdom. In fact, there are more pet cats in the United States than dogs, in part because most cat households are home to multiple cats. Some new DNA evidence suggests that long before they began showing up on our daily Facebook feed, cats were part of our lives. VOA’s Kevin Enochs explains.
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The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports the planet Earth is experiencing another exceptionally warm year with record-breaking temperatures occurring in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States.

At least 60 people have been killed in the devastating forest fires in central Portugal. The World Meteorological Organization says one of the factors contributing to these run-away wildfires are very high temperatures that have exceeded 40 degrees Celsius.

Extremely high temperatures also have been recorded in Spain and in France, which issued an Amber alert, the second highest alert level on Tuesday.  WMO reports near record heat is also being reported in California and in the Nevada deserts.

Meteorologists report North Africa and the Middle East are experiencing extremely hot weather with temperatures topping 50 degrees Celsius.  But WMO spokeswoman Claire Nullis says the hottest place on Earth appears to be the town of Turbat in southwestern Pakistan, which reported a temperature of 54 degrees Celsius in May.

“It seems like this is a new temperature record for Asia.  If it is verified, it will equal a record … which was set in Kuwait last July. So, we will now set up an investigation committee to see if that indeed is a new temperature record for the region,” Nullis said.

WMO Senior Scientist Omar Baddour says the world heat record of 56 degrees Celsius was recorded in Death Valley in the United States in 1913.  

“It is very difficult to break a world record because it is not easy to have all the conditions in terms of pressure, invasion of air together at one place.  So, the concern now is we are close to cross that record.  We are now 54.  We are not that far.”  

The WMO says it expects global heat waves will likely trigger more deadly wildfires.  If necessary precautions are not taken, it warns many people will die from the heat, as happened in 2003, when heat waves across Europe killed 70,000 people.

Scientists predict climate change will cause heat waves to become more intense, more frequent and longer.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) reports the cholera outbreak in Yemen has spread to practically every part of the war-torn country.  Suspected cases of cholera and acute watery diarrhea now top 170,000, with 1,170 deaths.

WHO reports cholera has spread to 20 of Yemen’s 22 governorates in just two months. Spokesman Tarik Jasarevic says aid agencies are scaling up their operation and refining their response.  

He says it is not possible to cover the country at all times, so WHO and the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF)  workers are going to so-called hotspots – the most affected areas – to treat cholera victims who are most at risk.

He calls the situation a very challenging one.

“If you look at the numbers, we are talking close to 2,000 suspected cases a day.  Cholera is endemic in Yemen.  It is currently the largest cholera outbreak that we have in the world,” Jasarevic said.

Cholera can be easily treated by replacing lost fluids right away.  But patients can die within hours if the disease is left untreated. Jasarevic says cholera is being transmitted through contaminated water so it is critical to provide people with a clean water supply.

“It is difficult in a situation where a country has a health system that is collapsing.  There is simply no money in the budget and health facilities are not having money to run their daily operations.  There is also the issue of waste collection that obviously affects the quality of water and access to clean water,” he said.

Jasarevic says the WHO and UNICEF are providing water purification tablets and are chlorinating water in an effort to keep contaminated water sources at a minimum.  He says both agencies also are providing money to health workers as an incentive to have them treat cholera patients.  He notes health workers have not received a salary in six months.
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Scientists said on Monday they had pinpointed a particular type of immune system cell that could predict more precisely if cancer patients are likely to respond to modern immunotherapy medicines.

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature Immunology, suggests doctors and drug developers will need to get smarter in zeroing in on those people who stand to benefit from the expensive new drugs, which are revolutionizing cancer care.

Drugs such as Merck’s Keytruda, Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Opdivo, Roche’s Tecentriq and AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi can boost the immune system’s ability to fight tumors, but they only work for some patients.

The current widely used benchmark when giving cancer immunotherapy is a protein called PDL-1. However, many experts view PDL-1 as a “blunt instrument”, since it does not match precisely to drug response, leading to the consideration of other measures, such as the level of mutation in tumors.

The latest research adds a further twist by highlighting therole of so-called tissue-resident memory T-cells.

Researchers from the University of Southampton and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology found that lung cancer patients with lots of this cell type in their tumors were 34 percent less likely to die than others.

“Having made the first baby steps with PDL-1 testing, we need to be smarter by using new tests,” said Christian Ottensmeier, a Cancer Research UK scientist who worked on the study.

“PDL-1 testing is a little bit like saying ‘you’ve got a Ferrari because it is red.’ Many Ferraris are red and many tumors that are PDL-1 positive will respond to immunotherapy, but on its own that is not sufficient.”

Ottensmeier and colleagues now plan further clinical trials to see how well their biological predictor can pick out patients who will benefit from taking Opdivo.

Industry analysts expect the new generation of cancer immunotherapy drugs to generate tens of billions of dollars in annual sales by early next decade, with lung cancer the biggest single market.
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Artificial intelligence is turning out to be a useful tool for doctors who are increasingly using complex algorithms to help them diagnose disease, and even create new drugs. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A mass bleaching of coral reefs worldwide is finally easing after three years, U.S. scientists announced Monday.

About three-quarters of the world’s delicate coral reefs were damaged or killed by hot water in what scientists say was the largest coral catastrophe.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a global bleaching event in May 2014. It was worse than previous global bleaching events in 1998 and 2010.

The forecast damage doesn’t look widespread in the Indian Ocean, so the event loses its global scope. Bleaching will still be bad in the Caribbean and Pacific, but it’ll be less severe than recent years, said NOAA coral reef watch coordinator C. Mark Eakin.

Places like Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, northwest Hawaii, Guam and parts of the Caribbean have been hit with back-to-back-to-back destruction, Eakin said.

University of Victoria, British Columbia, coral reef scientist Julia Baum plans to travel to Christmas Island in the Pacific where the coral reefs have looked like ghost towns in recent years.

“This is really good news,” Baum said. “We’ve been totally focused on coming out of the carnage of the 2015-2016 El Nino.”

While conditions are improving, it’s too early to celebrate, said Eakin, adding that the world may be at a new normal where reefs are barely able to survive during good conditions.

Eakin said coral have difficulty surviving water already getting warmer by man-made climate change. Extra heating of the water from a natural El Nino nudges coral conditions over the edge.

About one billion people use coral reefs for fisheries or tourism. Scientists have said that coral reefs are one of the first and most prominent indicators of global warming.

“I don’t see how they can take one more hit at this point,” Baum said. “They need a reprieve.”
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Long before cats became the darlings of Facebook and YouTube, they spread through the ancient human world.

A DNA study reached back thousands of years to track that conquest and found evidence of two major dispersals from the Middle East, in which people evidently took cats with them. Genetic signatures the felines had on those journeys are still seen in most modern-day breeds.

Researchers analyzed DNA from 209 ancient cats as old as 9,000 years from Europe, Africa and Asia, including some ancient Egyptian cat mummies.

“They are direct witnesses of the situation in the past,” said Eva-Maria Geigl of the Jacques Monod Institute in Paris. She and colleagues also looked at 28 modern feral cats from Bulgaria and east Africa.

It’s the latest glimpse into the complicated story of domesticated cats. They are descendants of wild ancestors that learned to live with people and became relatively tame – though some cat owners would say that nowadays, they don’t always seem enthusiastic about our company.

The domestication process may have begun around 10,000 years ago when people settled in the Fertile Crescent, the arch-shaped region that includes the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and land around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They stored grain, which drew rodents, which in turn attracted wild cats. Animal remains in trash heaps might have attracted them too. Over time, these wild felines adapted to this man-made environment and got used to hanging around people.

Previous study had found a cat buried alongside a human some 9,500 years ago in Cyprus, an island without any native population of felines. That indicates the cat was brought by boat and it had some special relationship to that person, researchers say.

Cats were clearly tame by about 3,500 years ago in Egypt, where paintings often placed them beneath chairs. That shows by that time, “the cat makes its way to the household,” said Geigl.

But the overall domestication process has been hard for scientists to track, in part because fossils skeletons don’t reveal whether a cat was wild or domesticated.

It’s easier to distinguish dogs, our first domesticated animal, from their wolf ancestors. Dogs evolved from wolves that had begun to associate with people even before farming began, perhaps drawn by the food the humans left behind.

The new study tracked the spread of specific cat DNA markers over long distances through time, a sign that people had taken cats with them. Results were released Monday by the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The study “strengthens and refines previous work,” said Carlos Driscoll of the Wildlife Institute of India. The extensive sampling of cat DNA going back so far in time is unprecedented, he said.

Researchers also looked for a genetic variant that produces the blotchy coat pattern typical of modern-day domestic cats, rather than the tiger-like stripes seen in their wild cousins.  It showed up more often in samples from after the year 1300 than earlier ones, which fits with other evidence that the tabby cat markings became common by the 1700s and that people started breeding cats for their appearance in the 1800s. 

That’s late in the domestication of cats, in contrast to horses, which were bred for their appearance early on, Geigl said. 

Most of the study focused on the ancient dispersals of cats. In the DNA samples analyzed, one genetic signature found first in the Asian portion of Turkey – and perhaps once carried by some Fertile Crescent cats – showed up more than 6,000 years ago in Bulgaria.

That indicates cats had been taken there by boat with the first farmers colonizing Europe, Geigl said. It also appeared more than 5,000 years ago in Romania, as well as around 3,000 years ago in Greece.

A second genetic signature, first seen in Egypt, had reached Europe between the first and fifth centuries, as shown by a sample from Bulgaria. It was found in a seventh-century sample from a Viking trading port in northern Europe, and an eighth-century sample from Iran.

The dispersal of the cats across the Mediterranean was probably encouraged by their usefulness in controlling rodents and other pests on ships, the researchers said.
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Killer heat is getting worse, a new study shows.

Deadly heat waves like the one now broiling the American West are bigger killers than previously thought and they are going to grow more frequent, according to a new comprehensive study of fatal heat conditions. Still, those stretches may be less lethal in the future, as people become accustomed to them.

A team of researchers examined 1,949 deadly heat waves from around the world since 1980 to look for trends, define when heat is so severe it kills and forecast the future. They found that nearly one in three people now experience 20 days a year when the heat reaches deadly levels. But the study predicts that up to three in four people worldwide will endure that kind of heat by the end of the century, if global warming continues unabated.

“The United States is going to be an oven,” said Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii, lead author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The study comes as much of the U.S. swelters through extended triple-digit heat. Temperatures hit records of 106, 105 and 103 in Santa Rosa, Livermore and San Jose, California on Sunday, as a heat wave was forecast to continue through midweek. In late May, temperatures in Turbat, Pakistan, climbed to about 128 degrees (53.5 degrees Celsius); if confirmed, that could be among the five hottest temperatures reliably measured on Earth, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of Weather Underground.

Last year 22 countries or territories set or tied records for their hottest temperatures on record, said Masters, who wasn’t part of the study. So far this year, seven have done so.

“This is already bad. We already know it,” Mora said.  “The empirical data suggest it’s getting much worse.”

Mora and colleagues created an interactive global map with past heat waves and computer simulations to determine how much more frequent they will become under different carbon dioxide pollution scenarios. The map shows that under the current pollution projections, the entire eastern United States will have a significant number of killer heat days. Even higher numbers are predicted for the Southeast U.S., much of Central and South America, central Africa, India, Pakistan, much of Asia and Australia.

Mora and outside climate scientists said the study and map underestimate past heat waves in many poorer hot areas where record-keeping is weak. It’s more accurate when it comes to richer areas like the United States and Europe.

If pollution continues as it has, Mora said, by the end of the century the southern United States will have entire summers of what he called lethal heat conditions.

A hotter world doesn’t necessarily mean more deaths in all locales, Mora said. That’s because he found over time the same blistering conditions _ heat and humidity _ killed fewer people than in the past, mostly because of air conditioning and governments doing a better job keeping people from dying in the heat. So while heat kills and temperatures are rising, people are adapting, though mostly in countries that can afford it. And those that can’t afford it are likely to get worse heat in the future.

“This work confirms the alarming projections of increasing hot days over coming decades – hot enough to threaten lives on a very large scale,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a University of Washington environmental health professor who wasn’t part of the study.

Mora documented more than 100,000 deaths since 1980, but said there are likely far more because of areas that didn’t have good data. Not all of them were caused by man-made climate change.

Just one heat wave – in Europe in 2003 – killed more than 70,000 people.
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The UN Children’s Fund warns three-quarters of a million children in Eastern Ukraine are at risk of water-borne diseases as fighting threatens to cut off their safe water supply.

The United Nations estimates around 10,000 people have been killed and more than 23,500 injured since fighting in Eastern Ukraine erupted between the government and Russian-backed separatists more than three years ago.

The U.N. children’s fund warns an upsurge in fighting in the rebel-held territory is putting more lives at risk.  The agency reports the recent escalation of hostilities has damaged vital water infrastructure, leaving 400,000 people, including more than 100,000 children without drinking water for four days this week.

Water pipes repaired

Damage to these water pipes has been repaired.  But, UNICEF says other infrastructure that provides water for three million people in eastern Ukraine is in the line of fire. UNICEF spokesman, Christophe Boulierac warns many families, including some 750,000 children will be cut off from safe drinking water if these structures are hit.

“Why we are worried is because the children who are cut off from clean drinking water can quickly contract water-borne disease, such as diarrhea,” said Bouliererec.  “Girls and boys having to fetch water from alternative sources or who are forced to leave their homes due to disruptions to safe water supplies face dangers from ongoing fighting and other forms of abuses.”  

Other problems

UNICEF reports nearly four million people in Eastern Ukraine need humanitarian assistance.  The agency says children are among those suffering the most from more than three years of conflict.  

The aid agency says tens of thousands of children face dangers from landmines and unexploded ordnance.  It says many children show signs of severe psychological distress.

 
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It’s a challenge many Muslims in America are facing this year. Ramadan falls in the summer, and the fast can last between 16 and 20 hours day. Those long hours drove Dr. Imran Posner, a psychiatrist in Philadelphia, to create a food supplement that helps curb hunger during Ramadan. Anne Budianto reports from Philadelphia.
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Algae blooms are a part of California summers, but something in the water is different this year, and it’s making the local wildlife sick. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The University of Manitoba has terminated its project to study climate change in the Hudson Bay area because of hazardous ice conditions caused by a change in the climate.

The canceled part of the $17 million, four-year study involved the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen, which was scheduled to sail through the area making scientific measurements and observations.

But the southward flow of Arctic sea ice, caused by climate change, led to unusually severe ice conditions along the northern coast of Newfoundland, where the Amundsen is involved in marine safety operations. That meant the ship could not depart for Hudson Bay, a huge ocean basin in northeastern Canada, in time to meet the research objectives.

Forty scientists from five Canadian universities planned to study the impact of climate change on Arctic marine and coastal ecosystems.

However, the reminder of the study will continue, and scientists say results so far indicate that climate change already affects environments and communities, not only in the north but also in the south of Canada.
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Scientists from several U.S. and Chinese universities say new findings about microbes and their interaction with other species show that Darwin’s theory of evolution needs an update.

Their contention is based on discoveries that all plants and animals, including humans, evolved in interaction with a huge number of microscopic species — bacteria, viruses and fungi — not only in harmful but also in beneficial ways.

In a paper published by the scientific journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, scientists from the University of Colorado, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and several other universities say Darwin’s tree of life fails to recognize that many forms of life are linked physically and evolved together in so-called symbiomes.

The authors propose creating a working group that would use advanced computational methods to create a multidimensional evolutionary tree describing our complex interaction with microbes.

For centuries, mythologies around the world used the so-called tree of life as a metaphor for diversity stemming from a single source.

In 1859, Charles Darwin used the same concept to explain his theory of evolution, depicting it as a two-dimensional tree with individual species evolving independently of other branches.

Scientists say an updated view on symbiomes could have a profound effect not only on biology but also on many areas of science, including technology and even on society.
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In the never-ending battle against cancer, scientists are incessantly refining their tools and developing new methods. Some of the most important advances have been made in treating breast cancer, with the five-year survivability rate now at 90 percent VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Scientists have identified three mutations that, if they occurred at the same time in nature, could turn a strain of bird flu now circulating in China into a potential pandemic virus that could spread among people.

The flu strain, known as H7N9, now mostly infects birds but it has infected at least 779 people in outbreaks in and around China, mainly related to poultry markets.

The World Health Organization said earlier this year that all bird flu viruses need constant monitoring, warning that their constantly changing nature makes them “a persistent and significant threat to public health.”

At the moment, the H7N9 virus does not have the capability to spread sustainably from person to person. But scientists are worried it could at any time mutate into a form that does.

To assess this risk, researchers led by James Paulson of the Scripps Research Institute in California looked at mutations that could potentially take place in the genome of the H7N9 virus.

They focused on the H7 hemagglutanin, a protein on the flu virus surface that allows it to latch onto host cells.

The team’s findings, published in the journal PLoS Pathogens on Thursday, showed that in laboratory tests, mutations in three amino acids made the virus more able to bind to human cells — suggesting these changes are key to making the virus more dangerous to people.

Scientists not directly involved in this study said its findings were important, but should not cause immediate alarm.

“This study will help us to monitor the risk posed by bird flu in a more informed way, and increasing our knowledge of which changes in bird flu viruses could be potentially dangerous will be very useful in surveillance,” said Fiona Culley, an expert in respiratory immunology at Imperial College London.

She noted that while “some of the individual mutations have been seen naturally, … these combinations of mutations have not,” and added: “The chances of all three occurring together is relatively low.”

Wendy Barclay, a virologist and flu specialist also at Imperial, said the study’s findings were important in showing why H7N9 bird flu should be kept under intense surveillance.

“These studies keep H7N9 virus high on the list of viruses we should be concerned about,” she said. “The more people infected, the higher the chance that the lethal combination of mutations could occur.”
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Like many online video games, the one developed by scientists at the University of Exeter challenges players to quickly find hidden objects, but with a twist. They’re not looking for gold or swords or magical mirrors in an imaginary universe, but for birds in real photos. And everyone who plays “Where is that Nightjar” is contributing to a study of animal vision.

Nightjars are ground-nesting birds, whose mottled feathers help them disappear into the fallen leaves and twigs where they lay their eggs. They are hunted by a variety of predators and rely on their camouflage for their survival.

Some predators, such as mongooses, are color-blind and cannot see reds and greens. They are called dichromats. Others, like baboons and humans, are trichromats, and can see a wider range of colors. Researchers wanted to know how color vision affected an animal’s ability to find camouflaged prey.

“A huge number of mammals are dichromats,” ecologist Jolyon Troscianko explains. “But it does not take a huge evolutionary leap to develop this third color channel. So it is surprising that this has not happened more often in nature, suggesting there could be some advantage to being a dichromat.”

The game uses actual photos of nightjars, manipulated so the images appear as they would through the eyes of a dichromat predator, and also as we would see them. People could choose to play as a trichromat or a dichromat, and they had just 30 seconds to try to find each camouflaged bird.

After 30,000 volunteers played the game, the researchers got some surprising results, published in Behavioural Ecology.

Scientists assumed that dichromats, which are better at differentiating between light and shadow, would be better at finding camouflaged prey. But the trichromat competitors found the birds and their eggs faster, at first. Troscianko says as the game progressed, the dichromats improved faster, and were performing equally well by the end of the game.

“That shows that there is a huge element of learning, which has previously been largely ignored in the importance of camouflage. But if a predator in the wild is learning to try to find one type of prey, one type of camouflage faster than another, that could actually change the whole dynamics of an ecosystem where there is now a disadvantage to having a camouflage type that is easily learned by predators over time.”

The Exeter Sensory Ecology Group has also developed games to study camouflage in other animals, like crabs and moths.
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Teen vaping, which has been skyrocketing, fell dramatically last year in the United States.

A government survey released Thursday suggests the number of high school and middle school students using electronic cigarettes fell to 2.2 million last year, from 3 million the year before.

Health officials have worried about the booming popularity of vaping products among kids and the potential impact on adult smoking rates in the future.

“It certainly is a public health win,” said Brian King, an expert on smoking and health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s the first decline CDC has reported in teen vaping since the agency began tracking it in 2011. The findings echo a recent University of Michigan survey, which also detected a decline in 2016.

It’s unclear why teen vaping fell last year, and it’s too soon to know if the numbers will continue to drop.

One possibility may be a growing push to ban sale of e-cigarettes to minors, including a federal regulation that took effect in August. Another may be the influence of ad campaigns by the government and other organizations to discourage kids from smoking, the CDC said.

E-cigarettes may also be losing their novelty among teens, said Matthew Farrelly, a tobacco control researcher at RTI International.

Studies suggest many kids who vape use the products less often than kids who smoke cigarettes — a sign that vaping seems to be more social and experimental, some experts said.

“These products were new and novel and now we’re starting to see that change,” said Robin Koval, president of Truth Initiative, a public health education organization that runs anti-tobacco ads.

E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that provide users with aerosol puffs that can contain nicotine. Research has found kids like to vape flavorings like strawberry and bubble gum, though often in nicotine-free versions.

They’re generally considered a less dangerous alternative to regular cigarettes. But health officials have warned nicotine in e-cigarettes is harmful to developing brains.

The CDC study is based on a questionnaire filled out annually by about 20,000 students in grades 6 through 12. It focused on “current users” — kids who said they had used a tobacco product within the 30 days before they answered the survey.

It found an overall decline in use of vaping devices, traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products. Based on the survey responses, the CDC estimates that the number of middle and high school students using tobacco products fell to 3.9 million last year, from 4.7 million the year before.

Adolescent cigarette smoking has been falling for many years, but the decline in e-cigarette and hookah use was more remarkable.

In 2011, 1.5 percent of high school students said they’d recently vaped. That jumped to 16 percent in 2015, and it’s become more common than cigarette smoking. But it dropped to about 11 percent last year, the CDC said.

For middle school students, about 5 percent said they’d recently vaped in 2015. That fell to about 4 percent last year, the study found.
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Among the people socializing in a tavern in Alexandra township in Johannesburg is Karabo Sathekge, who asked that VOA not give her real name. She is a slight, attractive 19-year-old in a veil of an orange dress, defying the winter chill.

Sathekge often meets one of her partners here. He is more than twice her age.

Sathekge explains that sex with older men is sometimes “rough,” and always without a condom.

South Africa has almost 7 million people living with HIV and manages the globe’s largest antiretroviral program, keeping about 4 million people alive with the drugs. At the South African National AIDS Conference in Johannesburg this week, specialists voiced their concern about the spiking rates of infections among young women, a trend reflected throughout the continent.

“What does it tell you about the lack of knowledge about HIV, 20, 30 years into the HIV epidemic?” said Mark Heywood, the director of the Section 27 social justice movement. “We have seen, shockingly, a decline in knowledge of HIV amongst young people. It is like we have taken our foot off the accelerator, in certain respects.”

Heywood says more than 200 young women, ages 15 to 24, are infected with HIV each day in South Africa.

In 2015, that demographic accounted for the largest segment of new HIV infections in South Africa and a disproportionate number of new cases in the region. Adolescent and young women made up a quarter of the new cases in sub-Saharan Africa, according to UNAIDS most recent global report.

UNAIDS says adolescent and young women in Africa are at “particularly high risk” for a variety of reasons, such as poverty, lack of education and violence.

Like Sathekge, many poor young women in South Africa have “transactional” sexual relationships with older men who have jobs and money. The men buy them food, clothes and gifts.

Health care workers in South Africa say transactional sex is a key driver of the new infections among young women in the country.

Heywood is at the forefront of protests to demand the government make a new weapon against HIV infection available to young women. That weapon is a combination of antiretroviral drugs called “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” or Prep. Taken correctly, the pill can prevent people from getting HIV.

Heywood says the state could afford to give the drugs to young women for free.

“If you have literally tens of billions of rand being stolen every year out of different government departments, that is money that could be generating programs that reduce the vulnerability of young women,” he said. “But there has to be a [political] will.”

South Africa’s health minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, says he plans to provide Prep to young women in about two to three years, after educating them about the pill. It must be taken at about the same time every day, and ideally is used with condoms.

However, Heywood says Motsoaledi’s “innovative” policies to prevent new HIV infections are likely to stall, as Motsoaledi has been politically isolated after publicly opposing President Jacob Zuma over Zuma’s alleged corruption.
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Photosynthetic bacteria and light may offer hope to heart disease patients, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Stanford University say that after injecting the bacteria into the hearts of rats with cardiac disease and using light to start photosynthesis, they were able to increase the flow of oxygen, improving heart function.

“The beauty of it is that it’s a recycling system,” said Joseph Woo, senior author of the study. “You deliver the bacteria, they take up carbon dioxide, and with energy from the light, they form oxygen.”

The findings could help many who have a condition called cardiac ischemia, which restricts blood flow and the delivery of oxygen to the heart muscles.

“We thought there is an interesting relationship in nature,” Woo said. “In nature, humans exhale carbon dioxide and plants convert it back to oxygen. During a heart attack, the muscle is still trying to pump. There’s carbon dioxide but no oxygen. We wondered if there were any way to use plant cells and put them next to heart cells to produce oxygen from the carbon dioxide.”

At first, the researchers tried to use spinach and kale cells, but the chloroplasts, the structures where photosynthesis occurs, were not stable enough to live outside the plant.

“So we kept looking around,” Woo said, saying the next option was photosynthetic bacteria called cyanobacteria because it is “more rugged” and could survive with heart cells in a petri dish.

After that, Woo and his team injected cyanobacteria into the beating hearts of anesthetized rats, comparing the oxygen levels among rats with their hearts exposed to light and rats that did not have light shined on their hearts.

“The group that received the bacteria plus light had more oxygen and the heart worked better,” Woo said, adding that the bacteria “dissipated” in about 24 hours. Improved cardiac function lasted at least four weeks, he said.

“This is still very preliminary,” Woo said.

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
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