Poaching and wildlife trafficking have left some of Africa’s most iconic species endangered. The loss of the animals has cost African countries critical tourism revenue. But what if those national parks could get a second chance? The nonprofit African Parks has been trying to give just that. Lameck Masina reports for VOA from Liwonde National Park in southern Malawi which just welcomed some new inhabitants – four cheetahs relocated there by African Parks from South Africa.
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Poaching and wildlife trafficking have endangered some of Africa’s most iconic species and the loss of the animals has cost African countries critical tourism revenue.

But at least one national park is getting a second chance. Liwonde National Park in southern Malawi has just welcomed some new inhabitants – four cheetahs relocated there from South Africa courtesy of the nonprofit African Parks group.

Park rangers lured the first cheetah out into its new home with a fresh carcass. It’s the first cheetah Malawi has had in the wild in two decades. 

The cheetah is the fastest land animal in the world, but even that couldn’t protect the species in Malawi. Poachers killed off the cheetahs’ prey and ultimately the cheetahs themselves. 

“They were last seen in Malawi about 20 years ago,” said Craig Reid of the Liwonde National Park. “Specifically in Liwonde area, they have been absent for over a 100 years. So, as part of the rehabilitation of the park, we feel it is very important to bring back the cheetah to Malawi and Liwonde specifically.”

A total of four cheetahs – two males and two females – were airlifted to Liwonde from South Africa in May.

Before being released into the park, the cheetahs spent their first three weeks in an enclosure to allow them to become acclimated to their new surroundings. 

Liwonde National Park has a population of 12,000 large mammals. These include bush buck, water buffalo and antelope.

The cheetah is the first large predator to be reintroduced to the park. 

“We have a very healthy animal base and now that the protection measures are in place as we have got a very good law enforcement in the park,” Reid said. “The numbers of animals are increasing very rapidly and, as a result to that, there are more than enough animals to provide for some carnivorous animals such as the cheetah”. 

Officials are holding meetings with communities surrounding the park. 

“Those people are likely to face danger,” said David Nongoma of African Parks. “And our message to the community is to say that…they refrain from entering the park and stop doing what they used to be doing because these animals are definitely very dangerous. They can kill a human being.”

Park officials say they also plan to reintroduce leopards and lions to restore the park’s lost glory.
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Someday, your immune system may be pressed into service to fight heart disease.  Researchers have discovered that a simple sugar can stimulate immune system “clean up” cells to reduce disease-causing plaque in arteries.  

Marcophages are the garbage men of the body.  These immune system cells mop up cellular toxins and debris that are produced through cells’ normal functioning.

But scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis wondered, what if macrophages could be pressed into service to eliminate or degrade the accumulation of plaque as well? The fatty substance collects inside blood vessels and is a leading cause of heart disease and stroke.

Cardiology researcher Babak Razani has pondered that possibility. “If you, you could imagine this, that you could somehow manipulate it to rev it up, to stimulate its function, then you could make a macrophage into a super-macrophage, one that’s really stimulated to degrade.”

In a two-part study published in the journal Nature Communications, Razani and colleagues described how they manipulated and activated a genetic molecule called TFEB that goes into the nucleus of macrophages, supercharging their housekeeping skills inside cells.

Researchers then showed that a simple sugar, called trehalose, stimulated macrophages in the same way.  In experiments with mice prone to atherosclerotic plaques, injection of the sugar molecule decreased plaque size by 30 percent.  

“So that’s what we found here,” Razani reports, “that this simple, natural compound, that is very safe, could be very atherogenic as therapy for cardiovascular disease.”

In their unaltered state, macrophages try to fix damaged arteries by cleaning up cellular waste, including misshapen proteins, excess fat and dysfunction cellular structures called organelles.

But Razani says they eventually become overwhelmed by the task in people with atherosclerotic plaques, contributing to the debris problem that leads to inflammation and more disease.

Razani said supercharging macrophages with trehalose, so they resist damage and are able to continue their housekeeping function, offers a potential treatment for plaques, in addition to cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Because it’s a natural substance found in yeast, mushrooms and crustaceans, Razani said trehalose is completely safe.

Investigations found the sugar is broken down and doesn’t work when swallowed. Trehalose reduced the size of arterial plaques only when injected into mice. Other sugars did not have any effect.

So the challenge for researchers now is to find a way to turn trehalose into a form that is effective in humans to fight heart disease and possibly other health conditions like fatty liver disease and diabetes.
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Kenya has become the latest African country to introduce HIV self-testing kits in a bid to get more people to know their status and seek treatment. The government estimates that there are as many as half a million people in Kenya who are HIV-positive but don’t know it. Lenny Ruvaga reports for VOA from Nairobi.
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The understanding of human origins was turned on its head on Wednesday with the announcement of the discovery of fossils unearthed on a Moroccan hillside that are about 100,000 years older than any other known remains of our species, Homo sapiens.

Scientists determined that skulls, limb bones and teeth representing at least five individuals were about 300,000 years old, a blockbuster discovery in the field of anthropology.

The antiquity of the fossils was startling – a “big wow,” as one of the researchers called it. But their discovery in North Africa, not East or even sub-Saharan Africa, also defied expectations. And the skulls, with faces and teeth matching people today but with archaic and elongated braincases, showed our brain needed more time to evolve its current form.

“This material represents the very root of our species,” said paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who helped lead the research published in the journal Nature.

Before the discovery at the site called Jebel Irhoud, located between Marrakech and Morocco’s Atlantic coast, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils were known from an Ethiopian site called Omo Kibish, dated to 195,000 years ago.

“The message we would like to convey is that our species is much older than we thought and that it did not emerge in an Adamic way in a small ‘Garden of Eden’ somewhere in East Africa. It is a pan-African process and more complex scenario than what has been envisioned so far,” Hublin said.

The Moroccan fossils, found in what was a cave setting, represented three adults, one adolescent and one child roughly age 8, thought to have lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

These were found alongside bones of animals including gazelles and zebras that they hunted, stone tools perhaps used as spearheads and knives, and evidence of extensive fire use.

An analysis of stone flints heated up in the ancient fires let the scientists calculate the age of the adjacent human fossils, Max Planck Institute archaeologist Shannon McPherron said.

There is broad agreement among scientists that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. These findings suggest a complex evolutionary history probably involving the entire continent, with Homo sapiens by 300,000 years ago dispersed all over Africa.

Morocco was an unexpected place for such old fossils considering the location of other early human remains. Based on the shape and age of the Moroccan fossils, the researchers concluded that a mysterious, previously discovered 260,000-year-old partial cranium from Florisbad, South Africa also represented Homo sapiens.

The Jebel Irhoud people had large braincases that lacked the globular shape of those today. Max Planck Institute paleoanthropologist Philipp Gunz said the findings indicate the shape of the face was established early in the history of Homo sapiens, but brain shape, and perhaps brain function, evolved later.

But given their modern-looking face and teeth, Hublin said, these people may have blended in today if they simply wore a hat.

Homo sapiens is now the only human species, but 300,000 years ago it would have shared the planet with several now-extinct cousins in Eurasia – Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east – and others in Africa.

Hublin did not hazard a guess as to how long ago the very first members of our species appeared, but said it could not have been more than 650,000 years ago, when the evolutionary lineage that led to Homo sapiens split from the one that led to the Neanderthals.
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Nearly 16,000 young children die every day around the world, says researcher Sue Grady, citing U.N. figures. The Michigan State University medical geographer says newborns account for about half of the deaths.

A U.N. study of neonatal mortality around the world found that Africa has the highest rate, at 28 deaths for every 1,000 live births. In a study pertaining to 14 sub-Saharan African countries, Grady and her student investigators found that neonatal mortality was significantly associated with, among other factors, home births, where babies are delivered without the supervision of a trained professional.

Grady said many of the newborns succumbed immediately after birth to asphyxiation or an inability to take their first breath. Other common causes of death were infection and diarrhea from unclean water.

Grady said newborn deaths in East and West Africa could be dramatically reduced if babies were delivered in medical facilities with trained personnel standing by.

“Focusing on real hygienic conditions as the baby is being delivered, really cleaning the umbilical cord well [and] being very, very careful as far as the water the baby receives after birth” are critical, she added.

Targeting resources

The study conducted by Grady and colleagues is aimed at informing the United Nations in its global efforts to reduce infant mortality by targeting resources where they are most needed.  

Since 1990, when the U.N. Millennium Development Goals were adopted, infant mortality has decreased 53 percent, from nearly 12 million deaths a year to about 6 million.

Those goals have been replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals, a universal call to action to reduce scourges of poverty.

In Africa, Grady said, many women can not afford or access medical care or prefer to deliver their babies at home, surrounded by family and community. Newborn mortality also increases with the age of the mother, she noted.

And a disturbing trend also was found: More female babies were dying than male infants. Grady’s study, which looked at more than 344,000 births in East and West Africa, did not identify the possible causes for that, but “we do know there is some bias, so we would want to better understand why female infants were less likely to survive.”

The findings were published in the journal Geospatial Health.
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A new report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council has called for the urgent retooling of what it calls an outdated mental health care system. The report contends the current system is injurious to mental well-being and violates the human rights of patients.

Dainius Puras is the author of the report and special investigator on the right to physical and mental health. His work found that mental health was grossly neglected within systems around the world and where they exist, “they do so in isolation, segregated from regular health care despite the intimate relationship between physical and mental health.”

He said there is a harmful overreliance on biological factors in the treatment of mental illness to the exclusion of psychological, environmental and social influences.

“Today, there is unequivocal evidence that the…excessive use of psychotropic medicines is a failure,” he said. “Yet, around the world, biomedical interventions dominate mental health investment and services.”

He said people with mild and moderate forms of depression too often are encouraged to use psychotropic medications “despite clear evidence that they should not.”

Worldwide problem

The World Health Organization reports nearly one in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Currently, it estimates around 450 million people suffer from such conditions. It notes depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide, affecting more than 300 million people.

Despite the enormity of the problem, Puras said things have barely changed regarding the treatment of mentally ill people. He said governments worldwide continued to favor institutional care, a system he called outdated and open to human rights abuses.

He told VOA that the warehousing of people with mental disabilities in large institutions should stop and be replaced by community-based health care systems.

“The West investment is to invest in institutional care and I am very openly advocating to stop investing in institutional care. It is against human rights and it is the most expensive way of caring for people because it is 24-hour service.”

While community-based services may not be cheap, Puras said they respect the dignity of people with psychosocial, intellectual or other forms of mental disabilities. Unlike institutions, he said community systems do not “breed human rights violations, hopelessness and social exclusion.”

Outdated concepts

He said the entire mental health field has to be liberated from outdated and scientifically unsound concepts that undermine the human rights of people with mental disabilities.

For example, he said people who are diagnosed as having mental health conditions may be considered dangerous “and that is why they are often deprived of their liberty.”

He said another outdated, and seriously misused belief is that people who are diagnosed with a mental condition need some form of medical intervention.

“If they do not agree,” he said, “quite often force is used to provide treatment,” which research now shows “is not necessarily effective.”

Parus is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and professor at Vilnius University in Lithuania. He is particularly incensed at the thought that eight million children globally are living in institutional care, even though some of them have one or both parents.

“But, for some reason the State decides that they are better parents. So, instead of empowering parents, we enclose children into institutional care. This is a very bad investment,” he said.

Parus recommends that children without parental care be placed in a family setting instead. He said treating the mentally ill within communities breaks down dangerous and erroneous myths and lessens discrimination against them.

“If you have never seen and do not know a person with a psycho-social disability, your mind will be occupied by all these stigmatizing myths, that they are dangerous, they are hopeless and so on,” he said. “So, this integration of children and adults into society is very helpful. It brings about tolerance.”

“The biggest problems I see are not on the side of persons with disabilities, but on the side of so-called normal society, which is very seriously biased by all these outdated concepts,” he added.
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India is likely to experience deadly heat waves more frequently in the years ahead, even though there only has been a slight increase in human-driven warming over the past few decades, according to a study released Wednesday.

“It’s getting hotter, and of course more heat waves are going to kill more people,” said climatologist Omid Mazdiyasni of the University of California, Irvine, who led an international team of scientists analyzing a half-century of data collected by the Indian Meteorological Department.

After tracking temperature, heat waves and heat-related mortality, Mazdiyasni said, “We knew there was going to be an impact, but we didn’t expect it to be this big.” The findings are especially sobering considering the average temperature in India rose about one-half of one degree Celsius over 49 years.

The unveiling of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, follows President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels during this century.

The scientists said that, even despite the relatively slight rise in mean temperatures in India between 1960 and 2009, the probability of India experiencing a massive heat-related mortality event – defined by more than 100 deaths – has shot up by 146 percent. Roughly speaking, that means dying in a heat wave in India is now about two and one-half times as likely as it was in the mid-20th century.

Country mostly unprepared

Most of India has experienced a 25 percent rise in the number of heat-wave days during that period. The study’s authors said the vast majority of the country’s cities and states are not prepared to handle such heat crises, even if they understand the devastation they can wreak.

In 2010, 1,200 people died from heat-related causes in the western city of Ahmedabad, prompting city officials to introduce seven-day weather forecasts and warnings, extra water supplies and cool-air shelters in the summer.

 

After more than 2,500 people were killed by heat in ravaged areas of India in 2015, nine other cities rolled out a plan to educate children about heat risk, stock hospitals with ice packs and extra water, and train medical workers to identify heat stress, dehydration and heat stroke.

 

But those nine cities have only about 11 million people, not even 1 percent of the country’s population.

The same methodology can be applied in any region to get a sense of how vulnerable a country or population might be, the authors said. Recent events underscore years of warnings by scientists that climate change will make future heat waves more intense, more frequent and longer lasting.
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The United Nations Ocean Conference opens next week in New York and is to call for action to help protect marine life from the threats of global warming, over-fishing and pollution. But in some cases, climate change is already affecting some of the ocean’s iconic species. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Cancer patients are being urged to speak up about their experiences with side-effects from chemotherapy. This, following a new study that shows reporting symptoms can improve their chances of survival. Faith Lapidus reports.
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A study gives reassuring news for breast cancer survivors who want to have children. Those who later became pregnant were no more likely to have their cancer come back than those who did not have a baby.

It’s a big issue — the average age of moms has been rising in the United States, and more women are being diagnosed with breast cancer in their childbearing years. About 11 percent of new breast cancer cases in the U.S. are in women under 45.

The study, done in Europe, is the largest so far on women whose cancers were fueled by hormones, which rise in pregnancy and, theoretically, might spur a recurrence.

“Having a family is one of the most important achievements in a person’s life,” said study leader Dr. Matteo Lambertini of the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels, Belgium. These results show that “pregnancy after breast cancer can be considered safe.”

The research involved more than 1,200 breast cancer survivors. More than half had tumors whose growth was fueled by estrogen. After treatment, 333 became pregnant, about two and a half years after their cancer diagnosis, on average. Researchers compared them to 874 other survivors, matched for tumor type and other things, who did not.

More than 12 years after conception, recurrence rates were similar in both groups. Abortion had no impact on the rates either.

There was information on breast-feeding for 64 of the moms, with 25 reporting doing so successfully, suggesting it’s possible for some women even after breast surgery.

The results show “fairly convincingly” that women don’t have to worry, said Dr. Richard Schilsky, chief medical officer for the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The group featured the study at its annual conference that ended Tuesday in Chicago.

A big study under way in the U.S. and other countries is taking this research one step further, testing whether it’s safe for breast cancer survivors who want to get pregnant to temporarily suspend taking the hormone-blocking drugs like tamoxifen usually recommended for five years after initial treatment.

If they wait until all five years are past, they might be too old to have a baby, said Dr. Ann Partridge, who specializes in treating young women with breast cancer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She is helping enroll patients in the study, called POSITIVE.

Participants must have used the hormone blockers for at least 18 months before stopping, and can suspend treatment for up to two years to enable pregnancy, delivery and breast-feeding.

Sarah Murray of Bridgeport, Connecticut, is the first U.S. woman in the study to have had a baby. She was 29 and planning her wedding when her breast cancer was found in 2013.

“We had just set the date when I got diagnosed, the same week. So obviously, children was on our minds,” she said.

Worries about triggering a recurrence if she got pregnant “did weigh on me quite a bit,” she said, but “I didn’t want the fear to have power over a decision that would bring so much joy.”

Her son, Owen, was born in December.
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Drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol is linked to changes in brain structure and an increased risk of worsening brain function, scientists said Tuesday.

In a 30-year study that looked at the brains of 550 middle-aged heavy drinkers, moderate drinkers and teetotalers, the researchers found people who drank more alcohol had a greater risk of hippocampal atrophy — a form of brain damage that affects memory and spatial navigation.

People who drank more than 30 units a week on average had the highest risk, but even those who drank moderately — between 14 and 21 units a week — were far more likely than abstainers to have hippocampal atrophy, the scientists said.

“And we found no support for a protective effect of light consumption on brain structure,” they added.

The research team — from the University of Oxford and University College London — said their results supported a recent lowering of drinking limit guidelines in Britain, but posed questions about limits recommended in the United States.

U.S. guidelines suggest that up to 24.5 units of alcohol a week is safe for men, but the study found increased risk of brain structure changes at just 14 to 21 units a week.

A unit is defined as 10 milliliters (ml) of pure alcohol. There are roughly two in a large beer, nine in a bottle of wine and one in a 25 ml spirit shot.

Harder to justify

Killian Welch, a Royal Edinburgh Hospital neuropsychiatrist who was not directly involved in the study, said the results, published in the BMJ British Medical Journal, underlined “the argument that drinking habits many regard as normal have adverse consequences for health.”

“We all use rationalizations to justify persistence with behaviors not in our long-term interest. With [these results], justification of ‘moderate’ drinking on the grounds of brain health becomes a little harder,” he said.

The study analyzed data on weekly alcohol intake and cognitive performance measured repeatedly over 30 years between 1985 and 2015 for 550 healthy men and women with an average age of 43 at the start of the study. Brain function tests were carried out at regular intervals, and at the end of the study participants were given an MRI brain scan.

After adjusting for several important potential confounders such as gender, education, social class, physical and social activity, smoking, stroke risk and medical history, the scientists found that higher alcohol consumption was associated with increased risk of brain function decline.

Drinking more was also linked to poorer “white matter integrity” — a factor they described as critical when it comes to cognitive functioning.

The researchers noted that with an observational study like this, no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect.

They added, however, that the findings could have important public health implications for a large sector of the population.
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The World Health Organization published a new classification of antibiotics Tuesday that aims to fight drug resistance, with penicillin-type drugs recommended as the first line of defense and others for use only when absolutely necessary.

The new “essential medicines list” includes 39 antibiotics for 21 common syndromes, categorized into three groups: “Access,” “Watch” and “Reserve.”

Drugs on the “Access” list have lower resistance potential and include the widely used amoxicillin.

The “Watch” list includes ciprofloxacin, which is commonly prescribed for cystitis and strep throat but “not that effective,” Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director-general for health systems and innovation, told reporters.

Its use should be “dramatically reduced,” the WHO said.

“We think that the political will is there, but this needs to be followed by strong policies,” Kieny said.

The “Reserve” category antibiotics such as colistin should be seen as a last resort. That prompts questions about how producers of such antibiotics could make money, said Suzanne Hill, WHO’s director of essential medicines and health products.

‘Keep it in reserve’

“What we need to do is stop paying for antibiotics based on how many times they are prescribed, to discourage use. We don’t want colistin used very frequently. In fact, we don’t want it used at all,” Hill said. “What we need to do as a global community is work out how we pay the company not to market colistin and not to promote it and to keep it in reserve.”

The WHO classification takes into account the use of antibiotics for animal health use, and was developed together with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health.

Other changes to the list included the addition of two oral cancer treatments, a new pill for hepatitis C that combines two medicines, a more effective treatment for HIV, and new pediatric formulations of medicines for tuberculosis.

But the WHO also said Roche’s well-known flu drug oseltamivir, marketed as Tamiflu, may be removed from the list unless new information supports its use in seasonal and pandemic influenza outbreaks.

“There is an updated data set compared to when the committee evaluated this product last, and what that suggests is that the size of the effect of oseltamivir in the context of pandemic influenza is less than previously thought,” Hill said.

But oseltamivir was the only listed antiviral, and was still useful for pregnant women and patients with complications, so the drug should be restricted to the most critical patients, she added.
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A large team of international researchers has found 30 percent of HIV positive individuals in nearly a dozen countries delay starting life-saving drugs.

A study spearheaded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at the prevalence of HIV in Haiti, Vietnam, Nigeria, Namibia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

Investigators reviewed more than 694,000 treatment records from 2004 to 2015, from nearly 800 clinical facilities, focusing on patients age 15 and older.

HIV expert Andrew Auld, Malawi Country Director at the CDC, is lead author of the study.  He said in eight of the countries, the percentage of people receiving early treatment increased, in Haiti, Mozambique and Namibia by 40 percent or more during the time period.

But Auld said treatment is still not reaching a significant portion of HIV positive people.

“So some of the key things that still need to be done in these countries to further reduce the prevalence of advanced disease and HIV treatment initiation are to scale up testing strategies and facilitate HIV diagnosis at earlier disease stages, and also treatment policies that mean that patients once they are diagnosed are eligible to start HIV treatment the same day,” he said.

HIV infects and destroys the immune system’s CD-4 T-cells, so the body gradually loses its ability to fight off infections, eventually with lethal consequences in untreated individuals.

Ambitious target

UNAIDS has set a 90-90-90 target in dealing with the HIV epidemic.

By 2020, it’s hoped that 90 percent of all people with HIV will know their status, 90 percent will receive antiretroviral therapy and 90 percent of those receiving treatment will have viral suppression.

Not only does immediate antiretroviral treatment mean avoiding life-threatening complications, Auld said it reduces the risk of transmission.  

Another study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2016, found treatment reduces the risk of spreading HIV to a sexual partner by up to 96 percent.  The risk of vertical transmission, from pregnant women to their newborn babies, is also reduced if the mother is treated with antiretroviral drugs.

Despite advances in treatment and care of people infected with the AIDS virus, the NEJM article noted that there were more than two million HIV infections reported worldwide in 2014.

Auld said the main reason people wait until they are very sick to go for treatment is they are unaware that quick action increases their chances of survival.

Men with more advanced cases, according to Auld, point to work demands that keep them from seeking treatment earlier in the course of the disease.  For women, childcare and family obligations are often cited.  Among infected children, Auld said the problem is access to testing and treatment.

“HIV diagnosis is not a death sentence,” he stressed.  “Excellent HIV treatment is available and people can live long, healthy, productive lives if they adhere to the HIV treatment.  And it will increase demand for both testing and treatment services.”

The study by Auld and colleagues is published in the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly. 
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The tiny nation of Lesotho is one of the few countries in the world, including the United States, and one of just two in Africa, without mandated paid leave for new mothers. International watchdogs and activists say maternity leave is often poorly enforced, especially since so many African women work in the informal sector.

When Makhopotsohad Letsie had her youngest child, she took a three-month break from her job as a riveter to care for her baby boy.

 

Her employer, a large factory in Lesotho’s capital, paid her during that time. She got a grand total of just more than $23.

 

It was not enough to meet her needs, she says, but she had no choice.

That amount was not even a quarter of her monthly salary. But she was grateful, she says, because she lives in one of the few countries that does not mandate maternity benefits.

Parliament Member and All Basotho Congress spokesman Moeketsi Majoro says paid leave is not a kindness, it is a necessity. He says his party wants to implement a three-month maternity leave policy.

 

“We want everybody to participate, and participate fully in the economy and without the insecurity or the difficult choices of having to raise the future of Lesotho and having to go to work for a minimum wage,” said Majoro. “It is, in fact, an empowerment process that we need to put in place, as a policy.”

 

The International Labor Organization recommends maternity leave of at least 18 weeks. But in a survey, the organization found no African government offers that to all mothers, South Africa leads with its law mandating 17 weeks.

 

Other African nations are trying to expand their policies. Rwanda last year expanded benefits to 12 weeks. Nigeria’s government recently expanded leave for civil servants to six paid months, but the private sector is only required to give three months.

 

In Kenya, employers have strongly objected to a recent proposal to offer at least six months leave, the last three unpaid and voluntary. They say they can not afford such a plan.

The ILO estimates a universal maternity cash benefit would cost low- and lower-middle income countries less than 0.5 percent of their economy. But the organization acknowledges, cash-strapped countries, like Lesotho, struggle in the face of more urgent needs.

 

Professor Anita Bosch, who researches gender and workplace issues at the University of Stellenbosch Business School, says societies cannot afford to deny newborns the bonding and formative experiences that will set them up for life.

 

But she says few women in Africa benefit from maternity leave, because these laws only apply to the formal sector. The ILO estimates worldwide less than a third of women hold formal employment.

“In the informal sector, people are so desperate for work, remember our unemployment levels are at extreme levels. People are just desperate to have a job and to hang on to a job. And so for that, they will do whatever, and that makes them highly exploitable,” said Bosch.

 

In most African nations, the law puts the burden on employers to pay maternity benefits. For mothers without jobs, there is often little help from the state.

Letsie says that worries her. Her 18-year-old daughter just married and like a quarter of Lesotho’s population can not find a job. Letsie is the breadwinner for her extended family and says she desperately needs help. She wonders what they will do when her first grandchild comes along?

 

 
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Most Americans believe the United States should take “aggressive action” to fight climate change, but few see it as a priority issue when compared with the economy or security, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

The June 2-4 opinion poll suggests American voters may not penalize President Donald Trump too harshly for walking away from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, even if they would have preferred he keep the country in the deal.

The poll found 68 percent of Americans want the United States to lead global efforts to slow climate change, and 72 percent agree “that given the amount of greenhouse gases that it produces, the United States should take aggressive action to slow global warming.”

Even so, Americans rank the environment near the bottom of their list of priorities for the country. Only about 4 percent of Americans believe that the “environment” is a bigger issue than health care, the economy, terrorism, immigration, education, crime and morality, Reuters/Ipsos polling shows.

“I just kind of feel helpless about it,” Dana Anderson, 54, of Mesa, Arizona, said about climate change. “If something happens to the environment, it is what it is, right?”

Anderson, who has multiple sclerosis, said that whatever Trump says about health care will matter to her much more than his thoughts on global temperatures.

The poll was conducted after Trump announced on Thursday that the United States would abandon the landmark agreement with 195 countries to slash carbon emissions and curb global warming.

The Republican president, who had previously called climate change a “hoax” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, said he thought the pact would harm the U.S. economy without providing a tangible benefit.

The decision drew anger and condemnation from world leaders and business chiefs, many of them worried a U.S. exit would put the planet at risk and leave the United States behind in a global shift away from fossil fuels.

The poll found the U.S. public split along party lines over the move to withdraw from the global climate pact, with most Republicans supporting it and most Democrats opposing it.

Overall, 38 percent agreed with Trump’s decision, 49 percent disagreed and 13 percent were undecided.

The poll also showed 50 percent of Americans believe global temperatures will rise faster as a result of the U.S. withdrawal from the climate deal, and 64 percent think U.S. relations with other countries will suffer.

The public was split over the decision’s economic impact, too, with 41 percent saying it will strengthen the economy and 44 percent saying it will not.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,398 Americans, including 459 Republicans and 635 Democrats. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points for the entire group and 5 percentage points for the Republicans and Democrats.
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A massive and deep circular pit on Mars has NASA officials stumped.

The image of the hole on the Martian surface was taken by the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) as it scanned the planet’s south pole region.

The hole, which is surrounded by a “Swiss cheese terrain” of frozen carbon dioxide, is likely hundreds of meters across and quite deep.

The image also captures a glimmer of light coming from the bottom of the hole, likely a reflection of the Sun off the ice.

According to Science Alert, there are several possible ways the hole formed, including a meteorite impact, collapsing lava tubes, floods or some kind of volcanic activity.

The “Swiss cheese terrain” is believed to be caused by the sublimation, going directly from solid to gas, of the frozen carbon dioxide.

The image was snapped with the MRO’s “High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment,” which allows NASA to see objects on the Martian surface that are larger than one meter from between 200 and 400 kilometers above the Red Planet.

MRO has been circling Mars since 2006 and has captured many interesting images, including dust devils and moving sand dunes.
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To celebrate the June 5 World Environment Day, diplomats from more than a dozen foreign embassies and international organizations Monday joined the U.S. State Department to plant underwater seagrass in the Potomac River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay.

 

Diplomats told VOA their participation in “green diplomacy” is to help raise awareness of the challenges of clean water here and at home.

 

Underwater grasses growing in shallow waters of the Chesapeake Bay add oxygen to the water, provide wildlife with food and habitat, absorb nutrient pollution, trap sediment and reduce erosion, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

 

Representatives from China, Costa Rica, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Iraq, Malta, Pakistan, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the European Union and the World Bank, have been growing seagrasses in their chanceries or ambassadors’ residences since January 2017.

 

After six months of grow-out, diplomats gathered at the Mason Neck State Park in Lorton, VA to plant their grasses to bolster grass populations and help restore the Chesapeake Bay.

 

Nursing the grasses is a challenge.

 

“My gosh, it is very difficult,” Anggarini Sesotyoningtyas from Embassy of Indonesia’s Economic Affairs office told VOA.

 

“It’s not just like regular plant ‘cause I think it really needs a careful maintenance and care,” said Sesotyoningtyas, adding that the first few days were making sure grass-growing kits were set up correctly, then checking constantly that the seeds were growing. 

 

By working with the CBF’s “Grasses for the Masses” program, diplomats are demonstrating the commitment to environmental protection.  

 

“Underwater grasses are great to protect the natural ecosystem. They offer a lot of benefits for the water. One of the neat things about grasses is they provide shade for some of the river critters or the bay critters. They also provide oxygen to the water, bring in more oxygen, they help trap pollution,“ said Rebecca LePrell, Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Virginia executive director.

Addressing the challenge of clean water is part of the State Department’s green diplomacy initiative.  

“It’s certainly something that many other countries, most other countries, struggle with as well. And so it’s something that we share in common and can work around a simple product that can be taken to other countries to use. Just simple six months of growing grasses makes a huge benefit to waterways,“ the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions director Cliff Seagroves told VOA.

 

Some diplomats say the U.S. decision to leave the Paris agreement will affect their partnerships. Instead of country-to-country relationships, they will instead focus on cooperation with local governments and communities. 

 

“My job here at the embassy is environmental cooperation with the United States.That might take a different form going forward. We might focus more on state local actors, on the business community who have been very loud in their opposition to the pulling out with the Paris agreement and want to continue to fight climate change,” said Anton Hufnagl from the Germany Embassy.

 

By helping restore seagrass in the Chesapeake Bay, the State Department said it aims to raise awareness of the challenge of clean water, both in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and around the world.  

 

It also is an opportunity for the U.S. to work with the foreign diplomatic community to address an environmental challenge that people face globally.
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Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg submitted a statement to the United Nations on Monday that over 1,000 U.S. governors, mayors, businesses, universities and others will continue to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement abandoned by President Donald Trump last week.

Bloomberg, who is the U.N. Secretary-General’s special envoy for Cities and Climate Change, submitted the “We Are Still In” declaration to U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa.

He also launched a process to work with local governments and non-state entities to formally quantify the combined – and overlapping – emissions reduction pledges, which will be known as “America’s Pledge,” and submit the report to the United Nations.

“Today, on behalf of an unprecedented collection of U.S. cities, states, businesses and other organizations, I am communicating to the United Nations and the global community that American society remains committed to achieving the emission reductions we pledged to make in Paris in 2015,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

Signatories to the new initiative include 13 Democratic and Republican governors, 19 state attorneys general, over 200 mayors, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and small businesses.

Trump on Thursday pulled the United States from the landmark 2015 agreement designed to fight climate change, fulfilling a major campaign pledge despite entreaties from U.S. allies and corporate leaders.

Although the formal process to withdraw from the Paris agreement takes four years, Trump said the United States will not honor the pledge the Obama administration submitted, known as the nationally determined contribution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2025.

To fill the void, “America’s Pledge” will be submitted to the UNFCCC as a “Societal NDC.”

“The UNFCCC welcomes the determination and commitment from such a wealth and array of cities, states, businesses and other groups in the United States to fast forward climate action and emissions reductions in support of the Paris Climate Change Agreement,” said Espinosa.

The coalition will align a number of different efforts to how U.S. support for the Paris agreement, including a commitment of over 260 corporations including Kellogg, Pepsi Co. and Walmart to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in line with the latest science.

Thirteen governors have also pledged to continue to honor the Paris pledges.

“It will be up to the American people to step forward-and in Virginia we are doing just that,” said Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.
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The remote South Pacific island of Henderson hit the headlines recently not for its pristine natural beauty, but for the 38 million tons of accumulated plastic and other debris that ocean currents had landed on its shores.

The uninhabited island is a UNESCO heritage site and one of the world’s biggest marine reserves. It is also a victim of the pollution that is slowly killing our oceans.

 

“Conserving our oceans and using them sustainably is preserving life itself,” declared U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres at the opening Monday of a week-long Ocean Conference at the United Nations.

 

That is not an understatement. The ocean provides nearly half of the oxygen produced on Earth and its marine bounty feeds billions.

 

Some 4,000 leaders from the worlds of politics, science, academia, business and civil society have gathered for the conference, which kicked off on World Environment Day.

They hope to draw attention to the effects of pollution, plastics, climate change, over-fishing and other factors that are affecting all marine life, with potentially disastrous consequences.

WATCH: Pollution, plastics damaging the earth’s oceans

Plastics: A Top Offender

“Marine plastic debris is a slow motion catastrophe waiting to happen,” warned Indonesia’s Maritime minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan.

 

Plastics and microplastics  plastic particles under 5mm in diameter  are among the biggest threats to the ocean and marine life. A World Economic Forum study warns that by 2050 the oceans could contain more plastics than fish.

The ocean is overflowing with manmade items, including water bottles, plastic shopping bags, cigarette butts, and larger items from fishing nets to sunken vessels. It all presents a danger to marine life through entanglement, ingestion or leakage of harmful chemicals.

“The ultimate way to keep marine debris from becoming a threat is by preventing it from entering the ocean in the first place,” said Nancy Wallace, Director of the Marine Debris Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for the United States. “Changing behaviors is a particularly important aspect of prevention,” she added.

That includes getting the public to cut back or eliminate its use of plastic shopping bags, cutlery and bottled beverages.

 

In the Pacific, where the ocean covers 90 percent of the region and land is only two percent, leaders are striving for cleaner seas by 2025.

 

Kosi Latu of the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Program said his group did a recent study that examined 215 species of marine life. They found 136 types had ingested plastic, and in fish, the figure was 97 percent.

 

“That gives you a sense of how big this problem is,” Latu said. He noted that in the Pacific the rate is about 30 percent higher than the global average of about 67 percent.

“The challenge is implementing, enforcing policies; it is enforcing legislation,” Latu said.

He said his region is also looking at innovative policies, not just banning plastics. “But looking at policies that will put the onus on those who produce the plastics, so making sure there is some way they contribute to the solution.”

Call to Action

This week, conference attendees will discuss a range of other problems confronting the oceans. On Friday, they will formally adopt a Call to Action. So far, they have more than 700 voluntary commitments to improve the health of the ocean, and they are growing.

 

The commitments include agreeing to implement long-term strategies to reduce the use of plastics and microplastics, as well as to develop and implement mitigation measures to help the ocean recover from other harmful impacts, such as climate change.
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A smartphone app lets citizen scientists help professional scientists track changes in the natural world as urbanization, habitat loss, invasive species and climate change shake up ecosystems worldwide.

More than 100,000 users on all seven continents are snapping pictures of plants and animals they find and uploading the images using an app called iNaturalist. Those geotagged photos are giving researchers an unprecedented amount of information about what lives where, and how that’s changing with humanity’s expanding footprint.

On a spring afternoon in Arlington, Virginia’s Barcroft Park, a half-dozen eager onlookers huddle around a plywood board on the forest floor, waiting for the big reveal. Spray-painted on the board are the words, “wildlife study.”

 

As one volunteer lifts the plywood board, Arlington natural resources manager Alonso Abugattas spots a pair of snakes coiled underneath.

“Northern brown, northern brown,” he calls.

 

Another volunteer leans in with smartphone clicking. He uploads the photos to iNaturalist, where crowdsourcing soon confirms Abugattas’ identification.

WATCH: App lets citizen scientists help professional scientists

That observation, tagged by date, time and location, is now part of a growing database of nearly 5 million species finds all over the world.

 

“Everyone knows that if you want to protect something, you’ve got to know what you have,” Abugattas said.

 

Visitors to the iNaturalist website can search an annotated Google map for what lives in their neighborhood. Or search for where others have found a particular species.

 

As he works to protect Arlington County’s natural spaces, Abugattas will be looking for how iNaturalist data gathered on this day-long photo safari compare with earlier surveys.

 

“Are some things that we had then no longer here? Are some things that we never knew we had now popping back up?” he asks. “That will give us a gauge of how good or how poorly we’re doing as far as being stewards.”

Data + excitement

The app came about as a collaboration between biologist and software developer Ken-ichi Ueda and environmental scientist Scott Loarie.

 

Loarie was studying methods to gather more data for wildlife conservation, while Ueda “was looking for a way to connect people to nature and find ways to use technology to get people excited about the outdoors,” Loarie said.

 

“That’s one of the great things about citizen science. It achieves both those goals,” he said.

And it comes at an important time.

“Species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate,” he said. “We’ve only begun to understand exactly how those ecosystems contribute to our food system, or human health, all these things that we depend on.”

There’s a popular analogy in the field: it’s like pulling rivets off the wing of an airplane while it’s in flight.  

 

“We don’t know exactly which rivet is going to cause the wing to fall off, but it’s probably not a good idea to go around popping rivets off the plane,” Loarie said.

Butterflies, snails and mushrooms

So far, iNaturalist data has been a part of studies on monarch butterflies, bats that may carry Ebola, and more.

 

An iNaturalist user snapped a picture of a rare snail on an island off the coast of Vietnam.

 

“It’s never been collected. It’s never been photographed. It’s only been drawn. And it was drawn on one of Captain Cook’s voyages,” when the 18th-century explorer sailed around the world, Loarie said.

Back in Arlington, the group logged more than 450 species, including some rare plants and the biggest puffball mushroom anyone had seen, as big as a mid-sized dog.

 

“If you just open up your eyes to the natural world, you’d be amazed at what’s out there,” Abugattas said.
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India’s heaviest, newly-developed rocket hurtled into space Monday evening carrying a communication satellite of more than three tons from Sriharikota in eastern India. It marks another milestone in the country’s ambitious space program and brings India a step closer to sending astronauts into space.

 

“Today is a historic day.…we have been able to successfully put the satellite into the orbit,” a smiling A.S. Kiran Kumar, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization said after the launch.

 

Space scientists count many benefits of the 640 ton Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mk III rocket which can carry a four ton payload into higher orbit. It will reduce India’s dependency on foreign space agencies to put its heavier satellites in space leading to huge savings, it can over time make it possible to send manned missions and enhance deep space exploration capabilities.

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that the “mission takes India closer to the next generation launch vehicle and satellite capability. The nation is proud!”

 

Although India has been dreaming big in space – mulling a manned mission to space and interplanetary missions to Venus and Jupiter, its lack of heavy lift technology remained a hurdle in giving concrete shape to those plans.

 

“To be very honest there was a major limitation of thinking slightly big in space,” says Ajay Lele at the Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. “Without a heavy launcher you cannot have ambitious programs. Even though India had gone to Moon and Mars, India had carried a very small amount of a payload. Now future missions to all those planets can help India to do major scientific research.”

 

The technology has not come easy — India’s space agency has spent about 15 years to develop the heavy lift rocket.

 

The new rocket will also help the country enhance the commercial potential of its space program – putting satellites into space is a lucrative $ 300 billion business that India has begun exploiting. It was limited to putting smaller satellites in space so far, but can now consider heavier launches.

 

In the last three years India’s space program has come into international limelight with a series of landmark programs: In 2014, it sent the world’s cheapest mission to Mars, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi points out cost less than the Hollywood movie “Gravity”. Earlier this year it achieved a record by putting 104 small satellites in a single launch simultaneously into space.
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More than a billion people around the world rely on food from the ocean as their primary source of protein. But as the planet’s oceans become more polluted, they are changing and all kinds of marine life are being impacted. VOA U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer reports that this week ((June 5-9)) more than 4,000 government, scientific, business and civil society leaders will meet in New York to mobilize for action to stop the decline of our oceans.
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If you’re being treated for cancer, speak up about any side effects. A study that had patients use home computers to report symptoms like nausea and fatigue surprisingly improved survival – by almost half a year, longer than many new cancer drugs do.

 

The online tool was intended as a quick and easy way for people to regularly report complications rather than trying to call their doctors or waiting until the next appointment. Researchers had hoped to improve quality of life but got a bonus in longer survival.      

 

“I was floored by the results,” said the study leader, Dr. Ethan Basch. “We are proactively catching things early” with online reporting.

 

Patients were able to stick with treatment longer because their side effects were quickly addressed, he said.

 

People shouldn’t assume that symptoms are an unavoidable part of cancer care, said Dr. Richard Schilsky, chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

 

“You want to be able to reach your provider as early and easily as possible,” because a sign like shortness of breath may mean treatment isn’t working and needs to be changed, he said.

 

The study was featured at the cancer group’s annual meeting in Chicago on Sunday and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

 

Earlier studies suggest that doctors miss about half of patients’ symptoms.

 

Catching problems sooner

Much of this happens between visits when patients are out of sight and out of mind,” said Basch, a researcher at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

 

Sometimes patients just put up with a problem until their next exam.

 

“The spouse will say, `My husband was laid up in bed, exhausted or in pain,’ and I’ll say `Why didn’t you call me?’” Basch said.

 

The study tested whether the online tool could catch problems sooner. It involved 766 people being treated for various types of advanced cancers at Sloan Kettering. Some were given usual care and the rest, the online symptom tool.

 

Patients were as old as 91, and 22 percent has less than a high school education, but using a computer proved easy. “The older patients really grabbed onto it very quickly,” Basch said.

 

The online group was asked to report symptoms at least once a week – sooner if they had a problem – and given a list of common ones such as appetite loss, constipation, cough, diarrhea, shortness of breath, fatigue, hot flashes, nausea or pain.

 

Doctors saw these reports at office visits, and nurses got email alerts when patients reported severe or worsening problems.

 

“Almost 80 percent of the time, the nurses responded immediately,” calling in medicines for nausea, pain or other problems, Basch said.

 

Six months later, health-related quality of life had improved for more of those in the online group and they made fewer trips to an emergency room. They also were able to stay on chemotherapy longer – eight months versus six, on average.

 

Median survival in the online group was 31 months versus 26 months for the others.

 

A larger study will now test the online reporting system nationwide.

 

A colon cancer patient, 53-year-old James Sylvester of New York, is using a version of the one tested in the study to report any problems to his doctors at Sloan Kettering. He hasn’t had many side effects, but a rash led to referral to a dermatologist to see if it was related to his cancer medicine.

 

“The main benefit is they go holistically all over your body” with the list, asking about things that folks may not realize could be due to cancer, such as a rash or trouble with balance, he said.

 

“Some of the things you might not tell your doctor, or you might forget,” Sylvester said. The tool ensures the doctor has that information ahead of time, “so when you have that face time, it’s more focused.”
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