BILLINGS, Mont. — Since passage of the Endangered Species Act 50 years ago, more than 1,700 plants, mammals, fish, insects and other species in the U.S. have been listed as threatened or endangered with extinction. Yet federal government data reveals striking disparities in how much money is allocated to save various biological kingdoms.

Of the roughly $1.2 billion a year spent on endangered and threatened species, about half goes toward recovery of just two types of fish: salmon and steelhead trout along the West Coast. Tens of millions of dollars go to other widely known animals including manatees, right whales, grizzly bears and spotted owls.

But the large sums directed toward a handful of species means others have gone neglected, in some cases for decades, as they teeter on potential extinction.

At the bottom of the spending list is the tiny Virginia fringed mountain snail, which had $100 spent on its behalf in 2020, according to the most recent data available. The underground-dwelling snail has been seen only once in the past 35 years, according to government records, yet it remains a step ahead of more than 200 imperiled plants, animals, fish and other creatures that had nothing spent on their behalf.

With climate change increasing threats to organisms around the planet and adding to the number that qualify for protection under the Endangered Species Act, government officials are struggling in many cases to execute recovery actions required under the law.

Some scientists even argue for spending less on costly efforts that may not work and putting the money toward species with less expensive recovery plans that have languished.

“For a tiny fraction of the budget going to spotted owls, we could save whole species of cacti that are less charismatic but have an order of magnitude smaller budget,” said Leah Gerber, a professor of conservation science at Arizona State University.

An Associated Press analysis of 2020 data found fish got 67% of the spending, the majority for several dozen salmon and steelhead populations in California, Oregon and Washington. Mammals were a distant second with 7% of spending and birds had about 5%. Insects received just 0.5% of the money and plants about 2%. Not included in those percentages is money divided among multiple species.

Species drawing no spending at all included stoneflies threatened by climate change in Montana’s Glacier National Park, the stocky California tiger salamander that has lost ground to development and flowering plants such as the scrub lupine around Orlando, Florida, where native habitat has been converted for theme parks.

Such spending inequities are longstanding and reflect a combination of biological realities and political pressures. Restoring salmon and steelhead populations is expensive because they are widespread and hemmed in by massive hydroelectric dams. They also have a broad political constituency with Native American tribes and commercial fishing interests that want fisheries restored.

Congress over decades has sent massive sums of money to agencies such as the Bonneville Power Administration that operate dams along rivers the fish once traveled up to spawn. The money pays for fish ladders around dams, habitat restoration projects, monitoring by scientists and other needs.

More than half the species protected under the Endangered Species Act are plants, but the entire plant kingdom was almost excluded from the landmark conservation law when it was adopted in 1973, according to the Congressional Record and Faith Campbell, who interviewed people involved in the bill’s passage for a 1988 study published in the Pace Environmental Law Review.

Plants initially were left out when the measure passed the Senate, with opposition led by influential Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. They were added back at the 11th hour following a push by botanists from the Smithsonian Institution and Lee Talbot, a senior scientist at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, according to Campbell.

Botanists at the time proposed more than 2,500 plants as threatened with future extinction. However, most failed to get protections because federal officials failed to act prior to a Congressional deadline.

Today more than 900 trees, ferns, flowers and other flora are protected. Combined, they received about $26 million in 2020.

“In terms of numbers they’re catching up, but as far as money and attention they’re still not getting their share,” said Campbell, a longtime environmental advocate who now works at the Center for Invasive Species Prevention. “The threats are serious, they’re the same as the threats to animals. Yet they don’t have the political clout of, say, a couple dozen of the big animal species that attract favorable attention or get in people’s way.”

Most plants receive less money than recommended under their recovery plans, according to Gerber and others. Researchers say that has direct consequences: species tend to decline when allocated less funding than needed, while they have a higher chance of recovery when receiving enough money.

Gerber has suggested redirecting some money from species getting more than their recovery plans seek — the bull trout, the gopher tortoise and the Northern spotted owl among them — to those receiving little or none. Her ideas have stirred pushback from some conservationists.

Former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Jamie Rappaport Clark said debating how to allocate scarce resources for rescuing endangered species is a distraction.

“The issue is not where the money is spent,” said Clark, now president of Defenders of Wildlife. “The issue is that there isn’t nearly enough of it.”

Gerber said she doesn’t want to let anything go extinct but that a strategic approach is needed with the shortage of resources.

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking,” she added. “We need to take action.”

Wildlife officials say they are trying to do just that with money for endangered species in the climate law signed last year by President Joe Biden.

It included $62.5 million officials said will allow them to hire biologists to craft recovery plans to guide future conservation work, initially for 32 species and for as many as 300 over coming years.

Among them are a colorful fish known as the candy darter that lives in rivers in the southeastern U.S., a flowering shrub from the Virgin Islands called marron bacora, the Panama City crayfish of Florida and the pocket-sized Stephens’ kangaroo rat in southern California.

The extra money is intended to provide some relief after the agency’s environmental review staff fell 20% over the past two decades, even while new species were listed, according to officials. Increased funding is especially important because more than half the agency’s existing recovery plans are more than two decades old, according to Lindsay Rosa, vice president for conservation research at Defenders of Wildlife.

Also in the law was $5.1 million for recovery projects that could benefit hundreds of species from four groups that officials said have historically been underfunded: Hawaii and Pacific island plants, butterflies and moths, freshwater mussels and desert fish in the southwestern U.S.

“Each of these species are part of this larger web of life,” Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said in an interview. “They’re all important.”
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — More than 700,000 immigrants living illegally in California will gain access to free health care starting Monday under one of the state’s most ambitious coverage expansions in a decade.

It’s an effort that will eventually cost the state about $3.1 billion per year and inches California closer to Democrats’ goal of providing universal health care to its roughly 39 million residents.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers agreed in 2022 to provide health care access to all low-income adults regardless of their immigration status through the state’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal.

California is the most populous state to guarantee such coverage, though Oregon began doing so in July.

Newsom called the expansion “a transformative step towards strengthening the health care system for all Californians” when he proposed the changes two years ago.

Newsom made the commitment when the state had the largest budget surplus in its history. But as the program kicks off next week, California faces a record $68 billion budget deficit, raising questions and concerns about the economic ramifications of the expansion.

“Regardless of what your position is on this, it doesn’t make sense for us to be adding to our deficit,” said Republican Sen. Roger Niello, the vice-chair of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee.

Immigration and health care advocates, who spent more than a decade fighting for the changes, have said the expanded coverage will close a gap in health care access and save the state money in the long run. Those who live in the state illegally often delay or avoid care because they aren’t eligible for most coverage, making it more expensive to treat them when they end up in emergency rooms.

“It’s a win-win, because it allows us to provide comprehensive care and we believe this will help keep our communities healthier,” said Dr. Efrain Talamantes, chief operating officer at AltaMed in Los Angeles, the largest federally qualified health center in California.

The update will be California’s largest health care expansion since the 2014 implementation of former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which allowed states to include adults who fall below 138% of the federal poverty level in their Medicaid programs. California’s uninsured rate dropped from about 17% to 7%.

But a large chunk of the population was left out: adults living in the United States without legal permission. They are not eligible for most public benefit programs, even though many have jobs and pay taxes.

Some states have used their tax dollars to cover a portion of health care expenses for some low-income immigrants. California first extended health care benefits to low-income children without legal status in 2015 and later added the benefits for young adults and people over the age of 50.

Now the last remaining group, adults ages 26-49, will be eligible for the state’s Medicaid program.

The state doesn’t know exactly how many people will enroll through the expansion, but state officials said more than 700,000 people will gain full health coverage allowing them to access preventative care and other treatment. That’s larger than the entire Medicaid population of several states.

“We’ve had this asterisk based on immigration status,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a consumer advocacy group. “Just from the numbers point of view, this is a big deal.”

Republicans and other conservative groups worry the new expansion will further strain the overloaded health care system and blasted the cost of the expansion.

State officials estimated the expansion will cost $1.2 billion the first six months and $3.1 billion annually thereafter from the budget. Spending for the Medi-Cal program, which is now about $37 billion annually, is the second-largest expense in the California budget, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Earlier this month, the state Department of Finance sent a letter urging state agencies to cut costs in light of the deficit. It has not given specific directions about the Medicaid expansion, state officials told The Associated Press in December.

California’s expansion of Medicaid will face other challenges. The state is chugging through a review of Medicaid enrollees’ eligibility for the first time in more than three years that was prompted by the end of some federal pandemic policies. Many immigrants who had their coverage protected during the COVID-19 pandemic now find themselves ineligible because they no longer financially qualify.

John Baackes, CEO of L.A. Care Health Plan, the state’s largest Medi-Cal plan with nearly 2.6 million members, said roughly 20,000 members have lost their Medicaid coverage during the review process this past year and are looking to secure new insurance plans. His organization is juggling to help people navigate through both processes.

“People are being bombarded with information,” Baackes said. “I can’t imagine if somebody were having to maneuver through all this, why they wouldn’t be terribly confused.”

“The phones are ringing off the walls,” he said.

Fear and distrust are also barriers for the expansion, said Sarah Dar, policy director for the California Immigrant Policy Center. 

Many immigrants avoid accepting any public programs or benefits out of fear it will eventually prevent them from gaining legal status under the “public charge” rule. The federal law requires those seeking to become permanent residents or gain legal status to prove they will not be a burden to the U.S., or a “public charge.” The rule no longer considers Medicaid as a factor under President Joe Biden’s administration, but the fear remains, she said.

More resources and effort are required to reach this population “because of the history of just being completely excluded and not interfacing with the health care system or with government programs at all for so long,” Dar said. 

California has more work to do to see the state’s uninsured rate hit zero, known as “universal coverage,” Dar said.

For one thing, immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission are still not eligible to purchase insurance from Covered California, the state-run exchange offering steep discounts for people who meet certain income requirements. A bill pending in the state Legislature, supported by the California Immigrant Policy Center, would change that.

“It’s going to be another really big undertaking,” Dar said. “And we know that revenues are down … but it’s our job to make the case that, in times of economic downturn and whatnot, these are the communities that need the support the most.”
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MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president inaugurated a huge “super pharmacy” Friday in a bid to help patients throughout the country who are told they need a specific medicine, but their hospital doesn’t have it.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s solution was to outfit a big warehouse on the outskirts of Mexico City to centralize a supply and send it to hospitals throughout the country.

“The pharmacy is going to be big, big, big, and it is going to have all the medications that are used in the health system,” López Obrador said Friday.

The pharmacy is intended to complement local health facilities. If a patient can’t get needed medications at a local hospital, the patient, the patient’s doctor or the pharmacist would be able to have it delivered from the 40,000-square-meter Mexico City warehouse.

The armed forces, or the government-run pharmaceutical company Birmex, will ship the drugs by land or air “within 24 to 48 hours,” López Obrador pledged.

The question is whether Mexico can overcome its history of being bad at regulating the pharmaceutical industry, bad at buying medicines, bad at storing them, and bad at distributing them. Extreme centralization also hasn’t helped Mexico much in the past in many areas.

The most visible face of this problem are the parents of children with cancer, who frequently stage protests because they say that in recent years chemotherapy and other drugs have been impossible to obtain.

The problems have killed otherwise healthy people. Because Mexico has had problems in obtaining enough morphine, anesthesiologists in Mexico have had to carry around their own vials of the sedative, drawing multiple doses out of a single vial for routine procedures.

That has led to contamination of the vials, triggering outbreaks of injection-induced meningitis in two Mexican states that have killed dozens of people, including some Americans who sought treatment at clinics in the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.

In the United States, where there is no shortage of morphine, doctors are advised to draw a single dose from a vial and throw the remainder out.

López Obrador mounted a major effort to obtain COVID-19 vaccines in 2021, using the armed forces to distribute them and volunteers to administer them. By the end of that year just about anybody in Mexico who wanted a vaccine got one, for free.

But trying to replicate that model of centralized government purchasing and army distribution on a national scale for thousands of medications is not the same, according to Mauricio Rodríguez-Dorantes, a professor at the School of Medicine at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

“This is crazy,” said Rodríguez-Dorantes, noting the government is opening the centralized warehouse without answering how the system will operate, especially for urgently needed medications. He noted that concentrating all the drugs at one site increases risks and could sideline some existing distribution systems.

For decades, there have been scandals involving millions of dollars’ worth of medicines that have expired at warehouses while hospitals couldn’t get them.

The country’s medicine regulatory agency, known by its Spanish acronym as Cofepris, was so riddled with corruption before López Obrador that regulators would hide applications for approval of new medicines for years and demand bribes to approve them.

And with alarming frequency, regulators in Mexico send out alerts about falsified or knock-off medications being sold for treating everything from cancer to heart disease. Boxes, labels, vials and certifications are copied with amazing accuracy, but the bottles often contain little or none of the medication.

The fake medicine trade is so common and so lucrative in Mexico because patients or their relatives are often told by doctors to buy medications at private drug stores when they are unavailable at government hospitals.

The civic group Zero Shortages said there was a 142% increase in the number of alerts about falsified medicines between 2021 and 2022.

But some of the problems are of López Obrador’s own making. Angry at what he claimed were inflated profits made by drug distributors and importers, the president simply cut the private companies out and decided the government should directly buy all medications.

Because the government did not have much infrastructure, contacts or experience in such a massive effort, López Obrador signed an agreement with the World Health Organization to help Mexico in purchasing. But even with that help, Mexico was unable to obtain some specialized medication.

Zero Shortages said the number of prescriptions that went unfilled in Mexico rose from 1.5 million in 2019 to 22 million in 2021; disruptions because of COVID-19 probably played a role.

But even in 2022, about 12.5 million prescriptions went unfilled. 
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The U.S. military’s secretive X-37B robot spaceplane blasted off from Florida on Thursday night on its seventh mission, the first launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket capable of delivering it to a higher orbit than previous missions.

The Falcon Heavy, composed of three rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch pad from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular nighttime liftoff carried live on a SpaceX webcast.

The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays. Three earlier countdowns were aborted due to poor weather and unspecified technical issues, leading ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before proceeding with Thursday’s fight.

It came two weeks after China launched its own robot spaceplane, known as the Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon,” on its third mission to orbit since 2020, adding a new twist to the growing U.S.-Sino rivalry in space.

The Pentagon has disclosed few details about the X-37B mission, which is conducted by the U.S. Space Force under the military’s National Security Space Launch program.

The Boeing-built vehicle, roughly the size of a small bus and resembling a miniature space shuttle, is built to deploy various payloads and conduct technology experiments on long-duration orbital flights. At the end of its mission, the craft descends back through the atmosphere to land on a runway much like an airplane.

It has flown six previous missions since 2010, the first five of them carried to orbit by Atlas V rockets from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and most recently, in May 2020, atop a Falcon 9 booster furnished by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Thursday’s mission marked the first launched aboard SpaceX’s more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket, capable of carrying payloads even heavier than the X-37B farther into space, possibly into geosynchronous orbit, more than 35,000 kilometers above the Earth.

The X-37B, also called the Orbital Test Vehicle, has previously been confined to flights in low-Earth orbit, at altitudes below 2,000 kilometers.

New orbital regimes

The Pentagon has not said how high the spaceplane will fly this time out. But in a statement last month, the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office said mission No. 7 would involve tests of “new orbital regimes, experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies.”

The X-37B also is carrying a NASA experiment to study how plant seeds are affected by prolonged exposure to the harsh environment of radiation in space. The ability to cultivate crops in space has major implications for keeping astronauts nourished during future long-term missions to the moon and Mars.

China’s equally secretive Shenlong was carried to space on December 14 by a Long March 2F rocket, a launch system less powerful than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and believed to be limited to delivering payloads to low-Earth orbit.

Still, Space Force General B. Chance Saltzman told reporters at an industry conference earlier this month he expected China to launch Shenlong around the same time as the X-37B flight in what he suggested was a competitive move.

“It’s no surprise that the Chinese are extremely interested in our spaceplane. We’re extremely interested in theirs,” Saltzman said, according to remarks published in Air & Space Forces Magazine, a U.S. aerospace journal.

“These are two of the most watched objects on orbit while they’re on orbit. It’s probably no coincidence that they’re trying to match us in timing and sequence of this,” he said.

The planned duration of the latest X-37B mission has not been made public, but it will presumably run until June 2026 or later, given the prevailing pattern of successively longer flights.

Its last mission remained in orbit for well over two years before a return landing in November 2022.
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portland, oregon — As native trees in the Pacific Northwest die off due to climate change, the U.S. Forest Service, the city of Portland, Oregon, and citizen groups around Puget Sound are turning to a deceptively simple climate adaptation strategy called “assisted migration.”

As the world’s climate warms, tree growing ranges in the Northern Hemisphere are predicted to move farther north and higher in elevation.

Trees, of course, can’t get up and walk to their new climatic homes. This is where assisted migration is supposed to lend a hand.

The idea is that humans can help trees keep up with climate change by moving them to more favorable ecosystems faster than the trees could migrate on their own.

Yet not everyone agrees on what type of assisted migration the region needs — or that it’s always a good thing.

In the Pacific Northwest, a divide has emerged between groups advocating for assisted migration that would help struggling native trees, and one that could instead see native species replaced on the landscape by trees from the south, including coast redwoods and giant sequoias.

“There is a huge difference between assisted population migration and assisted species migration,” said Michael Case, forest ecologist at the Virginia-based Nature Conservancy.

Case currently runs an assisted population migration experiment at the Conservancy’s Ellsworth Creek Preserve in western Washington.

Assisted population migration involves moving a native species’ seeds, and by extension its genes, within its current growing range.

By contrast, assisted species migration involves moving a species well outside its existing range, such as introducing redwoods and sequoias to Washington.

A third form of assisted migration, called “range expansion,” amounts to moving a species just beyond its current growing range.

Case’s project involves testing whether breeds of native Douglas fir and western hemlock from drier parts of the Pacific Northwest can be used to help western Washington forests adapt to climate change. He says the Nature Conservancy is focusing on population migration because it has fewer ecological risks.

“Whenever you plant something in an area where it is not locally found you increase the risk of failure,” Case said. “You increase the risk of disturbing potential ecosystem functions and processes.”

Population migration is the only form of assisted migration currently practiced nationwide by the Forest Service, according to Dr. David Lytle, the agency’s deputy chief for research and development.

“We are very, very cautious and do not engage in the long-distance movement and establishment of plant material outside and disjunct from the historic range of a species,” Lytle said.

The Forest Service is pursuing assisted population migration because it’s likely to have few if any “negative consequences” to ecosystems, he said.

Douglas Tallamy, professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware, said one potential negative consequence of species migration is the possibility that native caterpillars might not eat the leaves of migrated nonnative tree species. Because caterpillars feed birds and other animals, this could lead to disruptions to the food web.

This could happen if the City of Portland migrates oak species from places to the south, Tallamy noted.

“Oaks are the most important plant for supporting wildlife that we have in North America,” he said, “but when you move them out of range, the things that are adapted to eating them no longer have access to them.”

The City of Portland’s Urban Forestry program is currently experimenting with the assisted migration of 11 tree species, including three oak species to the south: California black oak, canyon live oak and interior live oak.

Asked via email about potential ecological disruptions, Portland’s City Forester & Urban Forestry Manager Jenn Cairo responded: “We use research from universities, state and federal sources, and local and regional field practitioner experience.”

Another advocate for species migration is the Puget Sound-based, citizen-led PropagationNation. The organization has planted trees in several parks in the Seattle area and has the ambitious goal of “bringing a million coast redwoods and giant sequoias to the Northwest,” according to its website.

The PropagationNation website also recommends planting redwoods in areas where native western red cedar, western hemlock, Sitka spruce and big leaf maple already grow.

Western red cedar, western hemlock and big leaf maple have all seen die-offs and growth declines in recent years tied to climate.

Philip Stielstra, PropagationNation’s founder and president, and a retired Boeing employee, declined to comment for this story.

David Milarch, founder of the Michigan-based Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, which has supplied PropagationNation with redwoods and sequoias, says his trees aren’t intended to replace Pacific Northwest native species.

“All we are doing is extending the range [of redwoods and sequoias] north in the hopes that they will still be here in 100 to 200 years and not join the list of trees that are going extinct,” Milarch said.

This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and Columbia Insight, exploring the impact of climate on trees in the Pacific Northwest.
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Kinshasa, Congo — As Congo copes with its biggest outbreak of mpox, scientists warn discrimination against gay and bisexual men on the continent could make it worse.

In November, the World Health Organization reported that mpox, also known as monkeypox, was being spread via sex in Congo for the first time.

That is a significant departure from previous flare-ups, where the virus mainly sickened people in contact with diseased animals.

Mpox has been in parts of central and west Africa for decades, but it was not until 2022 that it was documented to spread via sex; most of the 91,00 people infected in approximately 100 countries that year were gay or bisexual men.

In Africa, unwillingness to report symptoms could drive the outbreak underground, said Dimie Ogoina, an infectious diseases specialist at the Niger Delta University in Nigeria.

“It could be that because homosexuality is prohibited by law in most parts of Africa, many people do not come forward if they think they have been infected with mpox,” Ogoina said.

WHO officials said they identified the first sexually transmitted cases of the more severe type of mpox in Congo last spring, shortly after a resident of Belgium who “identified himself as a man who has sexual relations with other men” arrived in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. The U.N. health agency said five other people who had sexual contact with the man later became infected with mpox.

“We have been underestimating the potential of sexual transmission of mpox in Africa for years,” said Ogoina, who with his colleagues, first reported in 2019 that mpox might be spreading via sex.

Gaps in monitoring make it a challenge to estimate how many mpox cases are linked to sex, he said. Still, most cases of mpox in Nigeria involve people with no known contact with animals, he noted.

In Congo, there have been about 13,350 suspected cases of mpox, including 607 deaths through the end of November with only about 10% of cases confirmed by laboratories. But how many infections were spread through sex isn’t clear. WHO said about 70% of cases are in children under 15.

During a recent trip to Congo to assess the outbreak, WHO officials found there was “no awareness” among health workers that mpox could be spread sexually, resulting in missed cases.

WHO said health authorities had confirmed sexual transmission of mpox “between male partners and simultaneously through heterosexual transmission” in different parts of the country.

Mpox typically causes symptoms including a fever, skin rash, lesions and muscle soreness for up to one month. It is spread via close contact and most people recover without needing medical treatment.

During the 2022 major international outbreak, mass vaccination programs were undertaken in some countries, including Canada, Britain and the U.S., and targeted those at highest risk — gay and bisexual men. But experts say that’s not likely to work in Africa for several reasons, including the stigma against gay communities.

“I don’t think we’ll see the same clamoring for vaccines in Africa that we saw in the West last year,” said Dr. Boghuma Titanji, an assistant professor of medicine in infectious diseases at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

She said that the gay and bisexual men most at risk of mpox might be fearful of coming forward in a broad immunization program. Countries should work on ways to give the shots — if available — in a way that wouldn’t stigmatize them, she said.

Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyemba, general director of Congo’s National Institute of Biomedical Research, said two provinces in Congo had reported clusters of mpox spread through sex, a concerning development.

There’s no licensed vaccine in Congo, and it would be hard to get enough shots for any large-scale program, Muyemba said. The country is trying to get a Japanese mpox vaccine, but regulatory issues are complicating the situation, he said.

Globally, only one vaccine has been authorized against mpox, made by Denmark’s Bavarian Nordic. Supplies are very limited and even if they were available, they would have to be approved by the African countries using them or by WHO. To date, the vaccine has only been available in Congo through research.

Without greater efforts to stop the outbreaks in Africa, Ogoina predicted that mpox would continue to infect new populations, warning that the disease could also spark outbreaks in other countries, similar to the global emergency WHO declared last year.
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An out-of-this-world Christmas greeting from the past. Plus, the Sun reminds humans who’s boss, and a look back at this year in the cosmos. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Socorro, Colombia — In northeast Colombia, police guard warehouses stacked high with confiscated timber with a noble new destiny: transformation into homes for bees beleaguered by pesticides and climate change.

The illegally harvested wood is used in the Santander department’s “Timber Returns Home” initiative, building hives since 2021 to house the little pollinators so critical to human survival.

So far, the project has seen about 200 cubic meters of wood transformed into 1,000 beehives, with another 10,000 planned for the next phase, according to the Santander environmental authority.

Previously, confiscated timber was turned into sawdust, donated to municipalities for projects … and sometimes just left to rot.

Now it is being repurposed to help address the “extremely serious problem” of possible bee extinction, said biologist German Perilla, director of the Honey Bee Impact Foundation.

About three-quarters of crops producing fruits or seeds for human consumption depend on pollination, but the U.N. has warned that 40% of invertebrate pollinators — particularly bees and butterflies — risk global extinction.

“The main threat is that we will run out of trees and there will be no flowers, because without flowers there are no bees, without bees there are no humans, and we will run out of food,” said beekeeper Maria Acevedo, one of the beneficiaries of the project.

In 2023 alone, she told AFP, she lost more than half of her hives. She blames pesticides used in nearby production of crops such as coffee.

Multiple threats

According to official data, some 3,000 hives, each able to house around 50,000 bees, die off in Colombia each year. Laboratory tests found traces of the insecticide fipronil in most of the dead insects.

Colombia has issued a ban on fipronil — already banned in Europe and restricted in the United States and China — starting February 2024.

According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, higher temperatures, droughts, floods and other extreme events caused by climate change reduces nectar-bearing flowers that bees feed on, and studies have also linked bee infertility to heat stress.

The Santander environmental authority seizes some 1,000 cubic meters of illegally felled timber in anti-trafficking operations in Santander every year.

The country lost 123,517 hectares of trees in 2022, mainly in the Amazon — the world’s largest rainforest.

Nearly half of all timber traded in Colombia is of illegal origin, according to the environment ministry. 
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Yuma, Arizona — As the world pivots from planet-warming fossil fuels to renewable energy, a new pollution problem is rearing its head: What to do with old or worn-out solar panels? 

Thousands of photovoltaic slabs are being installed across the United States every day, particularly in the sunny west and south of the country, as states like California race to toward greener energy production. 

But with an expected lifespan of around 30 years, the first wave of solar installations is now coming to the end of its usefulness, sparking a rush to recycle things that might otherwise end up in the landfill. 

“What is about to happen is a tsunami of solar panels coming back into the supply chain,” said Adam Saghei, chief executive of Arizona-based We Recycle Solar. 

“One of the challenges with any industry is, there hasn’t been that much planning for a circular economy,” he said. “(Solar) is a sustainable form of energy; there needs to be a plan for the retirement of those assets.” 

Saghei’s plan involves, among other things, reusing panels. 

Up to 5% of panels either have a minor production defect or get damaged during transport or installation. 

These still-working panels can be refurbished and diverted to other markets, often abroad, Saghei said. 

But for the panels that no longer function, either because they’re decrepit, or because they were damaged beyond use during installation, or smashed by hailstones, there’s treasure to be found. 

“We’re doing what’s called urban mining,” Saghei said, referring to a process that took his engineers three years to perfect. 

That mining recovers silver, copper, aluminum, glass and silicone, all commodities that have a value on the open market. 

While the uses for the metals might be obvious, what to do with silicone and glass is less so, but nonetheless intriguing. 

“You can use it for sand traps on golf courses, you can refine it for sandblast mix, you can also use it for the stones or the glass mix that you get for outdoor fireplaces,” Saghei said. 

With the capacity to process up to 7,500 panels every day at the plant in Yuma, a surprisingly small amount goes to waste. 

“Depending on the make and model of the panels … we’re able to get up to 99 percent recovery rate,” he said. 

Logistics challenges

For Meng Tao, who specializes in sustainable energy infrastructure at Arizona State University, developing an efficient lifecycle for solar panels is a pressing issue. 

With the United States among the countries committed to weaning itself off of fossil fuels, solar panel installation looks set to increase and peak two decades from now. 

“Once it matures, then the annual installation and the decommissioning will be about the same,” he told AFP.  

“But for the next 20 years … at least for the next 10 years … we’ll just have more installations than retirements,” he said. 

The problem with recycling, he said, is not just that the value of recovered materials from panels can be relatively low, but also the logistics. 

With panels distributed to thousands of sometimes far-flung rooftops, it can cost a lot of money just to get them to a recycling center. 

And unlike some jurisdictions, the United States imposes the cost of removal and recycling on the end user, making it more attractive for households just to dump their old units at the local landfill. 

“There has to be some policy support” to plug the gap between what consumers will pay and the total lifecycle cost of the panels, Tao said. 

Growing market

For Saghei, as for any business leader, profitability is important. 

“You don’t see too many getting into the business because recycling has a cost. It’s not free. It’s labor intensive. It’s energy intensive,” he said. 

But he does see a way forward. 

Recovering materials from old solar panels that can be put back into new solar panels is — he is convinced — a winning proposition. 

“These are markets that are growing,” he said. 

“Right through this process we are able, once the industry scales to even larger figures, to put those raw commodities back into the supply chain,” he said. “What’s exciting is we’re at the forefront.” 
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The COVID-19 pandemic affected students around the world, disrupting their studies and weakening their social skills. But the pandemic did generate some positive outcomes, say college counselors and international students who are back to in-person learning in the United States. VOA’s Laurel Bowman explores. Camera: Adam Greenbaum and Saqib Ul Islam.
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WASHINGTON — Arnong Mungoei has farmed rice in Thailand’s Khon Kaen province for half a century.  

Working land some 500 kilometers northeast of Bangkok never made her rich, but it provided a dependable livelihood.  

But since February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, global geopolitical tensions and weather conditions elsewhere have upended the rice markets and by 2023, worldwide rice prices had exploded.  

Yet Arnong said she made less than she has in years. 

“The mills [that buy rice] don’t increase the price. What can I do? I bring rice there to sell. Whatever they offer us, we have to sell it. We won’t take the rice back because we had to pay for the truck,” said Arnong, 68.

In 2023, the prices of wheat and grains such as oats and corn declined 20% to 30% as stocks were replenished, according to an annual report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

But according to the FAO report, rice prices remained high throughout the year due to a persistent La Niña in March, followed by an El Niño anomaly in June and India imposing restrictions on non-basmati rice in July due after a late monsoon raised fears of a production shortfall.

India’s export control removed 9 million metric tons of grain from the international market and ignited global prices. India is responsible for 40% of global rice supplies after overtaking Thailand as the world’s largest rice exporter in 2011.

The countries most reliant on India’s rice include the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam in Southeast Asia, and Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal in West Africa.

“Rice is tough, because there are just not a lot of other suppliers,” Joseph Glauber, a senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, told Bloomberg in November, adding that India’s export-control policy leaves “a big hole to fill.”

 

The World Bank predicted, “Rice prices will remain high into 2024, assuming India maintains its export restrictions. The outlook assumes a moderate-to-strong El Niño.”

The bank’s commodity report published on Oct. 30 said rice prices had reached their highest point in the third quarter of 2023 since the 2007-2008 food crises due to the Hamas-Israel conflict and El Niño.

While India’s controls benefit its own consumers, for the billions elsewhere in Asia and in Africa who depend on a stable rice supply, continued high prices could increase food insecurity. 

In Nigeria, the cost of rice increased 61% from September through November. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast the nation would import 2.1 million metric tons of rice in 2024. 

In the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. imposed a price cap Sept. 5 after the cost of rice hit a 14-year high in September. Marcos, who blamed the soaring prices on “smugglers, hoarders and price manipulators,” removed the cap Oct. 13 as concerns over tight supply eased.

Alfie Pulumbarit, national coordinator at MASIPAG, a Philippine-based network of farmers, scientists and nongovernmental organizations working on farmer empowerment, told VOA Thai that rising food prices significantly affected the people in the island nation with “a lot of families now going hungry.”

Citing official information, Pulumbarit said that while it takes a person at least 79 pesos or about $1.50 dollars per day to survive in the Philippines, rice now costs $1.10 dollars per kilogram.

Continued Indian controls coupled with farmers “already leaving rice production in the Philippines” could lead to “a food crisis of epic proportions,” he said.

Climate is one of the key factors in analyses for rice production and price in the coming year.

 

The U.S. National Weather Service forecasts that the Northern Hemisphere, home to major rice producers like China, India, and Southeast Asia nations, will likely be affected by El Niño April through June, right around sowing season for rice across Asia.

An Asian Bank Development analysis recommends that the private sector should assume a bigger role in rice trading to help stabilize domestic production loss in importing countries. It also encourages policymakers to consider more sustainable rice production.

“Rice paddy is responsible for 12% of global methane emissions and 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In Asia, rice irrigation consumes more than half of freshwater resources,” according to the analysis.

As the COP 28 meeting at Dubai was concluding, the FAO suggested stakeholders should seek out climate-friendly cultivating techniques ranging from using fertilizers that can reduce methane emission to growing plants that create rhizobacteria, which may promote producing oxygen in soil.

Smanachan Buddhajak contributed to this report.
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Tokyo, Japan — Japan’s SLIM space probe entered the moon’s orbit Monday in a major step toward the country’s first successful lunar landing, expected next month.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is nicknamed the “Moon Sniper” because it is designed to land within 100 meters (328 feet) of a specific target on the lunar surface.

If successful, the touchdown would make Japan only the fifth country to have successfully landed a probe on the moon, after the United States, Russia, China and India.  

On Monday, SLIM “successfully entered the moon’s orbit at 04:51 p.m. Japan time” (0751 GMT), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a statement released Monday evening.  

“Its’ trajectory shift was achieved as originally planned, and there is nothing out of the ordinary about the probe’s conditions,” the agency said.

The lander’s descent toward the moon is expected to start around 12:00 a.m. Japan time on January 20, with its landing on the surface scheduled for 20 minutes later, JAXA said.  

The H-IIA rocket lifted off in September from the southern island of Tanegashima carrying the lander, after three postponements linked to bad weather.

JAXA said this month that the mission would be an “unprecedentedly high precision landing” on the moon.

The lander is equipped with a spherical probe that was developed by a toy company.

Slightly bigger than a tennis ball, it can change its shape to move on the lunar surface.

Compared to previous probes that landed “a few or 10-plus kilometers” away from targets, SLIM’s purported margin of error of under 100 meters suggests a level of accuracy once thought impossible, thanks to the culmination of a 20-year effort by researchers, according to JAXA.  

With the advance of technology, demand is growing to pinpoint targets like craters and rocks on the lunar surface, Shinichiro Sakai, JAXA’s SLIM project manager, told reporters this month.

“Gone are the days when merely exploring ‘somewhere on the moon’ was desired,” he said.  

Hopes are also high that SLIM’s exactitude will make sampling of the lunar permafrost easier, bringing scientists a step closer to uncovering the mystery around water resources on the moon, Sakai added.  

Japanese missions have failed twice — one public and one private.  

Last year, the country unsuccessfully sent a lunar probe named OMOTENASHI (outstanding moon exploration technologies demonstrated by nano semi-hard impactor) as part of the United States’ Artemis 1 mission.   

In April, Japanese startup ispace tried in vain to become the first private company to land on the moon, losing communication with its craft after what it described as a “hard landing.”
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2023 demolished temperature records worldwide. It was the hottest year on record, and some scientists say the hottest in 125,000 years. Those supercharged temperatures helped drive a series of climate disasters around the world. VOA’s Steve Baragona has a look back.
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KYIV, Ukraine — When Alexis Cholas lost his right arm as a volunteer combat medic near the front lines in eastern Ukraine, his civilian career as a surgeon was over. But thanks to a new bionic arm, he was able to continue working in health care and is now a rehab specialist helping other amputees.

The 26-year-old is delighted with his sleek black robotic arm — he described it as “love at first sight” — and realizes how lucky he was to get one.

“There are fewer (bionic) arms available than lost ones,” Cholas said.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has created a massive need for prosthetic limbs. An estimated 20,000 Ukrainians have had amputations since the war started in February 2022, many of them soldiers who lost arms or legs due to blast wounds.

Only a small number was able to receive bionic prostheses, which are more advanced and can provide greater mobility than the traditional prosthetic limbs.

They are also far more costly than conventional prostheses.

Bionic artificial limbs typically pick up electrical signals from the muscles that remain above the amputation site, thanks to something called myoelectric technology, to carry out an intended motion.

Cholas’ bionic arm was made by Esper Bionics. Before 2022, the Ukrainian startup primarily targeted the United States market, but due to the sharp rise in demand for prosthetic limbs caused by the war, Esper now distributes 70% of its products at home.

The company’s production hub in the capital of Kyiv is working at full capacity, with more than 30 workers producing about dozen bionic hands a month.

In one corner of the factory, a small group of engineers huddle as they program, assemble and test the elegant bionic arms — known as Esper Hand. Each finger’s movement on the robotic hand is accompanied by a soft whirring sound, assuring the engineers of its smooth operation.

Bohdan Diorditsa, head of strategic relations at the company, says that despite ramping up production, Esper Bionics is struggling to keep up with demand, with almost 120 people on the waitlist.

In Ukraine, the company says it provides the bionic prostheses at zero profit for about $7,000 apiece, just enough to cover production costs. In the United States, the Esper Hand sells for more than $20,000.

“We do not consider Ukraine as a market, but rather as an opportunity to help,” says Diorditsa.

Compared to a conventional prosthesis, which is designed to replicate simple basic functions of a missing arm or leg, a bionic one offers the capability to restore fine motor skills.

“Everyone wants them,” says Anton Haidash, a prosthetist at Unbroken, a municipal center in the city of Lviv that focuses on rehabilitation of civilians and soldiers affected by the war. The center has helped provide prosthetic limbs to about 250 people so far, including about 20 bionic arms.

The difference in cost is significant. While bionic limbs can cost up to $50,000, conventional artificial limbs are priced at $800-$2,700, Haidash says.

Ukrainians can get the regular artificial limbs free of charge through the public health care system. However, to get a bionic prosthesis, they normally need additional funding from charities or rehabilitation centers such as Unbroken, which depend on donations.

And while patients can make the final decision about the type of prostheses they want, a variety of factors, including the nature of the injury and the person’s occupation, also play a role.

Unbroken purchases bionic prostheses from German and Icelandic companies as well as Esper Bionics, whose notable advantage is having both a manufacturing and a service center in Ukraine. This means people don’t need to travel abroad when a repair or resizing is required.

Another outstanding characteristic of the Esper Hand, which is powered by artificial intelligence, is its ability to adapt over time, learning the user’s unique interactions with the hand.

After getting outfitted with his bionic arm, Cholas went back to volunteering as a combat medic on the front lines, while in his day job in Kyiv he works as a rehabilitation specialist in a public hospital. Most of his patients are members of the military or civilians who, like him, have lost limbs. He says their shared experience helps him quickly develop a rapport with his patients.

“I now know a lot not only from textbooks but also from my own experience,” he says.

Cholas speaks to his patients encouragingly as he examines their injuries. His movements with the bionic hand are natural and fluid. He effortlessly removes a bandage and dresses a patient’s wounds without the assistance of nurses.

The bionic prosthesis allows him to perform even delicate movements, such as picking up a grape without crushing it, he says.

“I feel uncomfortable when I’m without the prosthesis,” he says. “But when I have the bionic arm on, I feel comfortable. It’s like a part of you.”
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PORTLAND, Maine — Unfounded claims about offshore wind threatening whales have surfaced as a flashpoint in the fight over the future of renewable energy.

In recent months, conservatives including former President Donald Trump have claimed construction of offshore wind turbines is killing the giant animals.

Scientists say there is no credible evidence linking offshore wind farms to whale deaths. But that hasn’t stopped conservative groups and ad hoc “not in my back yard”-style anti-development groups from making the connection.

The Associated Press sorts fact from fiction when it comes to whales and wind power as the rare North Atlantic right whale’s migration season gets under way:

Where are US offshore wind projects?

To date, two commercial offshore wind farms are under construction in the United States. Danish wind energy developer Ørsted and the utility Eversource are building South Fork Wind, located 56 kilometers east of Montauk Point, New York. Ørsted announced December 7 that the first of its 12 turbines there is now sending electricity onto the grid. Vineyard Wind is building a 62-turbine wind farm 24 kilometers off Massachusetts. Both plan to open by early next year, and other large offshore wind projects are obtaining permits.

There are also two pilot projects — five turbines off Rhode Island and two off Virginia. The Biden administration aims to power 10 million homes with offshore wind by 2030 — a key piece of its climate goals.

Lawsuits from community groups delayed Ørsted’s two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey, and the company recently announced it’s canceling those projects. That decision was based on their economic viability and had nothing to do with offshore wind opposition in New Jersey, said David Hardy, group executive vice president and CEO Americas at Ørsted.

Are US wind farms causing whale deaths?

Experts say there’s no evidence that limited wind farm construction on the Atlantic Coast has directly resulted in any whale deaths, despite politically motivated statements suggesting a link.

Rumors began to swirl after 2016, when an unusual number of whales started to be found dead or stranded on New England beaches — a trend that predates major offshore wind farm construction that began this year.

“With whale strandings along the Northeast earlier this year in places like New Jersey, the reality is that it’s not from offshore wind,” said Aaron Rice, a marine biologist at Cornell University.

In answering questions about whale strandings earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that around 40% of recovered whale carcasses showed evidence of death from fishing gear entanglement or vessel strikes. The others could not be linked to a specific cause.

In Europe, where offshore wind has been developed for more than three decades, national agencies also have not found causal links between wind farms and whale deaths.

Meanwhile, U.S. scientists are collecting data near offshore wind farms to monitor any possible impacts short of fatality, such as altered behavior or changes to migration routes. This research is still in preliminary stages, said Doug Nowacek, a marine biologist at Duke University who helped put trackers on whales this summer off Massachusetts as part of a five-year federally-funded study.

What real dangers do whales face?

While the exact causes of recent whale strandings along the East Coast mostly are not known, whales do face dangers from human activities.

The biggest threats are shipping collisions and entanglement in fishing gear, according to scientists and federal authorities. Underwater noise pollution is another concern, they say.

Some advocates for protecting whales have characterized the push against offshore wind power as a distraction from real issues. “It seems that this is being used in an opportunistic way by anti-wind interests,” said Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign director at the environmental group Oceana.

Since 2016, humpback whales have been dying at an advanced rate — one the federal government terms an “unusual mortality event.” The much rarer North Atlantic right whale with fewer than 360 on Earth is also experiencing an unusual mortality event.

NOAA reports 83 whales have died off the East Coast since December 1, 2022. Roughly half were humpbacks between Massachusetts and North Carolina, and two were critically-endangered right whales in North Carolina and Virginia.

What’s being done to protect whales near wind farms?

Federal law sets limits on human-generated sound underwater for continuous noise and short sudden bursts.

Marine construction projects can reduce possible impact on marine mammals, including by pausing construction during migration seasons, using “bubble curtains” to contain sound from pile-driving and stationing trained observers with binoculars on ships to look for marine mammals.

Offshore wind developers are taking steps required by regulators, but also are voluntarily adopting measures to ensure marine mammals are not harmed. Ørsted won’t drive piles between December 1 and April 30, when whales are on the move. It uses additional lookout vehicles, encircles monopiles for turbines with bubble curtains and does underwater acoustic monitoring.

Equinor plans to use acoustic monitoring and infrared cameras to detect whales when it starts developing two lease areas off Long Island with its partner bp. The company says it will limit pile driving to months when right whales are least likely to be present.

Why are some people alleging wind farms cause whale deaths?

One vocal opponent of offshore wind is the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the foundation’s center for energy, climate and environment, wrote in November that Ørsted’s scrapped New Jersey wind project was “unsightly” and a threat to wildlife.

“Whales and birds … stand to gain if offshore wind abandons the Garden State,” Furchtgott-Roth wrote.

Ørsted’s Hardy said claims about wind farms killing whales are “not scientific” but “very much politically-driven misinformation.”

The Heartland Institute, another conservative public policy group, has also pushed back at offshore wind projects. H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the institute, said the wind projects are subject to unfairly lax regulatory restrictions compared to fossil fuel projects.

“We think it should be held to the same standard that any oil and gas project would be,” Burnett said.

Smaller anti-wind groups have also organized in coastal communities to oppose projects they feel jeopardize water views, coastal industries and recreation.

What’s the impact of misinformation?

Offshore wind opponents are using unsupported claims about harm to whales to try to stop projects, with some of the loudest opposition centered in New Jersey.

Misinformation can cause angst in coastal communities where developers need to build shoreside infrastructure to operate a wind farm.

Republican politicians have taken opposition from shore towns and community groups seriously. GOP congressmen from New Jersey, Maryland and Arizona got the U.S. Government Accountability Office to open an investigation into the offshore wind industry’s impacts on commercial fishing and marine life and want a moratorium on projects.

New Jersey’s Democrat-controlled Legislature remains steadfastly behind the industry.

Are whales affected by climate change?

One reason whale advocates push for renewable energy is that they say climate change is harming the animals — and less reliance on fossil fuels would help solve that problem.

Scientists say global warming has caused the right whale’s preferred food — tiny crustaceans — to move as waters have warmed.

That means the whales have strayed from protected areas of ocean in search of food, leaving them vulnerable to ship strikes and entanglements. Large whales play a vitally important role in the ecosystem by storing carbon, so some scientists say they are also part of the solution to climate change.
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SYDNEY — Australia’s national weather agency on Saturday warned of extreme to severe heatwave conditions over northern parts of the country through Sunday.

A lower-intensity heatwave is expected for much of the east coast starting Tuesday.

The heatwaves continue the scorching start of summer in Australia. In early December, a heatwave warning affected areas in every state and territory, with the exception of Tasmania.

Weather is considered a heatwave when the maximum and minimum temperatures are unusually hot over three days.

Local councils in Sydney are setting up heat shelters to help residents escape the punishing conditions. Temperatures in Australia’s largest city already have exceeded 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).

“In Western Sydney … the temperatures in the last 10, 20 years in particular have been increasing substantially,” said Tony Bleasdale, mayor of Blacktown, which is in Sydney’s western suburbs.

Blacktown has set up shelters in libraries and other council buildings.

“It is about saving lives,” Bleasdale said. “It is about protecting the community. …  So many people lose their lives because of the increases in these temperatures.”

Indeed, authorities say the scorching heat is a silent killer, and high energy prices are making it difficult to find relief.

“The cost of electricity here in Sydney is exorbitant, and so we have people who are struggling … sitting in cold baths because that is the only way they can get cool,” Christine Bayliss Kelly, a Uniting Church minister in the Sydney suburb of Penrith, told VOA.

“They cannot afford, even if they had it, air conditioning,” she said.

The El Nino weather pattern is helping fuel the extreme heat, experts say, and climate change will make heatwaves more frequent and intense.

Politicians, environmental activists and scientists are concerned about the increasing number of natural disasters in the country. While northeastern Australia is cleaning up after this week’s record-breaking rainfall, other parts of the country have been battling bushfires.

Australia’s left-leaning government has legislated a target to cut carbon emissions by 43% from 2005 levels by 2030 and to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
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ISLAMABAD — Only 12 children around the world have been paralyzed by wild poliovirus so far this year, all of them in Pakistan and Afghanistan — with six reported in each.

They are the last two countries in which the highly infectious disease still exists.

Moreover, the World Health Organization has warned that the countries’ vaccination programs continue to miss a large number of children, posing a significant risk to gains made against the crippling wild Type 1 poliovirus.

In addition, Pakistan’s campaign to repatriate undocumented Afghans has increased the risk of cross-border poliovirus spread and spread within the two countries, the WHO said in a statement Friday.

Since mid-September, nearly half a million Afghans have returned to Afghanistan, escaping the crackdown on foreigners living illegally in Pakistan. The number of returning Afghans is expected to reach 1.7 million.

Pakistani officials have reported a sharp increase in environmental detections lately, documenting 60 positive samples since September and bringing the year’s total to 82.

Samples have been found in major cities, including Quetta, Karachi, Peshawar, Rawalpindi and the national capital, Islamabad, the WHO said.

It said political instability, insecurity in some areas and vaccination boycotts continue to hinder anti-polio efforts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, whose capital is Peshawar. The province borders Afghanistan, and four of this year’s six reported polio infections were in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The rest were detected in Karachi, the country’s most populous southern port city, which had recorded zero cases in the last two years. Officials said both polio cases are children from Afghan refugee families.

Pakistan, with a population of about 241 million, came close to eradicating polio in 2021, when it reported only one case of paralysis from the virus. However, the country saw a spike in 2022, with 20 confirmed cases of infection.

Afghanistan has not reported new polio cases since August, and the virus has been cornered in its eastern Nangarhar border province, which reported all six infections this year.

The WHO cited an improvement in the quality of the vaccination campaign in the eastern regions of Afghanistan.

It noted in its Friday statement, though, that difficulties remain in various southern provinces, where almost 200,000 children are yet to be reached during the vaccination campaign.

“Any setback in Afghanistan poses a risk to the program in Pakistan due to high population movement,” the U.N. health agency said.
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Coral Springs, florida — Joyce Loaiza lives alone, but when she returns to her apartment at a Florida senior community, the retired office worker often has a chat with a friendly female voice that asks about her day.

A few miles away, the same voice comforted Deanna Dezern, 83, when her friend died. In central New York, it plays games and music for Marie Broadbent, 92, who is blind and in hospice, and in Washington state, it helps Jan Worrell, 83, make new friends.

The women are some of the first in the country to receive the robot ElliQ, whose creators, Intuition Robotics, and senior assistance officials say is the only device using artificial intelligence specifically designed to alleviate the loneliness and isolation experienced by many older Americans.

“It’s entertaining. You can actually talk to her,” said Loaiza, 81, whose ElliQ in suburban Fort Lauderdale nicknamed her “Jellybean” for no particular reason. “She’ll make comments like, ‘I would go outside if I had hands, but I can’t hold an umbrella.'”

The device, which looks like a small table lamp, lights up and swivels. It remembers each user’s interests and their conversations, helping tailor future chats, which can be as deep as the meaning of life or as light as a horoscope.

ElliQ tells jokes, plays music and provides inspirational quotes. On an accompanying video screen, it provides tours of cities and museums. The device leads exercises, asks about the owner’s health and gives reminders to take medications and drink water. It can also host video calls and contact relatives, friends or doctors in an emergency.

Intuition Robotics says none of the conversations are heard by the company, with the information staying on each owner’s device.

Inspired by grandfather’s needs

Intuition Robotics CEO Dor Skuler said the idea for ElliQ came before he launched his Israeli company eight years ago. His widowed grandfather needed an aide, but the first one didn’t work out. The replacement, though, understood his grandfather’s love of classical music and his “quirky sense of humor.”

The average user interacts with ElliQ more than 30 times daily, even six months after receiving it, and more than 90% report lower levels of loneliness, he said.

The robots are mostly distributed by assistance agencies in New York, Florida, Michigan, Nevada and Washington state, but can also be purchased individually for $600 a year and a $250 installation fee. Skuler wouldn’t say how many ElliQs have been distributed so far, but the goal is to have more than 100,000 out within five years.

That worries Brigham Young University psychology professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, who studies the detrimental effects loneliness has on health and mortality.

Although a device like ElliQ might have short-term benefits, it could make people less likely to seek human contact, she said.

“It is not clear whether AI is actually fulfilling any kind of need or just dampening the signal,” Holt-Lunstad said.

Skuler and agency heads distributing ElliQ agreed it isn’t a substitute for human contact, but not all seniors have social networks. Some are housebound, and even seniors with strong ties are often alone.

Skuler said ElliQ was purposely designed so it wouldn’t fully imitate humans. He said his company wants “to make sure that ElliQ always genuinely presents herself as an AI and doesn’t pretend to be human.”

But some of the seniors using ElliQ say they sometimes need to remember the robot isn’t a living being. They find the device easy to set up and use, but if they have one complaint it’s that ElliQ is sometimes too chatty. There are settings that can tone that down.

‘It was so what I needed’

Dezern said she felt alone and sad when she told her ElliQ about her friend’s death. It replied it would give her a hug if it had arms. Dezern broke into tears.

“It was so what I needed,” the retired collections consultant said. “I can say things to Elli that I won’t say to my grandchildren or to my own daughters. I can just open the floodgates. I can cry. I can giggle. I can act silly. I’ve been asked: Doesn’t it feel like you’re talking to yourself? No, because it gives an answer.”

Worrell lives in a small town on Washington’s coast. Widowed, she said ElliQ’s companionship made her change her mind about moving to an assisted living facility, and she uses it as an icebreaker when she meets someone new to town.

“I say, ‘Would you like to come over and visit with my robot?’ And they say, ‘A vacuum?’ No, a robot. She’s my roommate,” she said and laughed.

Broadbent, like the other women, says she gets plenty of human contact, even though she is blind and ill. She plays organ at two churches in the South New Berlin, New York, area and gets daily visitors. Still, the widow misses having a voice to talk with when they leave. ElliQ fills that void with her games, tours, books and music.
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new york — Look for flu and COVID-19 infections to ramp up in the coming weeks, U.S. health officials say, with increases fueled by holiday gatherings, too many unvaccinated people and a new version of the coronavirus that may be spreading more easily. 

High levels of flu-like illnesses were reported last week in 17 states — up from 14 the week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. 

“Folks are traveling a lot more this season. They want to see their families,” said the CDC’s Dr. Manisha Patel. “And all of that sort of adds to the mix” in the spread of viruses. 

Health officials are keeping an eye on a version of the ever-evolving coronavirus known as JN.1. The omicron variant was first detected in the U.S. in September and now accounts for an estimated 20% of cases. The CDC expects it to reach 50% in the next two weeks, Patel said. 

It may spread easier or be better at evading our immune systems, but there is no evidence that the strain causes more severe disease than other recent variants, health officials say. And current evidence indicates vaccines and antiviral medications work against it. 

As for flu, early signs suggest current vaccines are well-matched to the strain that is causing the most illnesses, and that strain usually doesn’t cause as many deaths and hospitalizations as some other versions. 

But the bad news is vaccinations are down this year, officials say. About 42% of U.S. adults had gotten flu shots by the first week of December, down from about 45% at the same time last year, according to the CDC. 

Americans have also been slow to get other vaccinations. Only about 18% have gotten an updated COVID-19 shot that became available in September. At nursing homes, about a third of residents are up to date with COVID-19 vaccines. 

And only 17% of adults 60 and older had received new shots against another respiratory virus. RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, is a common cause of mild cold-like symptoms, but it can be dangerous for infants and older people. 

The CDC last week took the unusual step of sending a health alert to U.S. doctors urging them to immunize their patients against the trio of viruses. 

The Carolinas are currently seeing the heaviest traffic for respiratory infections in emergency rooms, according to CDC data posted this week. 

It’s not as dire as some past winters, but some patients are still waiting days to get a hospital bed, noted Dr. Scott Curry, an infectious-disease specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. 

“We’ve barely been cold in South Carolina, and flu tends to hit us very hard when people actually get some cold weather to deal with,” he said. “We could get worse, very easily, in the next four to eight weeks.” 
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PARIS — Bird flu is likely to spread further in the Antarctic region, causing immense damage to wildlife, according to experts on the highly contagious disease that has killed hundreds of millions of birds worldwide in recent years.

The spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, commonly called bird flu, to the remote southern region has raised concerns for isolated populations of species, including penguins and seals, that have never been exposed to the virus.

The H5 strain of the virus was detected in the region on October 8 in a brown skua on Bird Island, part of the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, according to a report by OFFLU, which gathers experts from the World Organization of Animal Health and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Around the same time, the virus was detected in fulmars and albatrosses in the nearby Falkland Islands.

“HPAI H5 virus is likely to spread further among Antarctic wildlife, potentially infecting the 48 species of birds and 26 species of marine mammals which inhabit this region,” OFFLU said in its report on Thursday.

“The negative impact of HPAI H5 on Antarctic wildlife could be immense, because their presence in dense colonies of up to thousands of pinnipeds [seals] and hundreds of thousands of birds facilitates virus transmission and may result in high mortality,” the report said.

Elephant seals in South Georgia could have been infected by migrating seals from South America, where there was a large die-off of the species, OFFLU said. Infected elephant seals could possibly transport the virus to neighboring islands and further south to the Antarctic Peninsula.

“If HPAI H5 virus completes the above-suggested stage of spread, further virus spread in the Antarctic region is likely given the many avian and mammalian species that probably are susceptible to infection,” the report said.

Bird flu in Antarctica particularly threatens the emperor penguin species, considered under near threat of extinction. If the virus was to enter an emperor penguin colony, it could spread to the whole population, OFFLU said.

It urged continued monitoring and surveillance of wildlife populations and biosafety measures to reduce the risk of human-mediated spread of the virus to new areas and to reduce the risk of human infection.

OFFLU uses the biogeographical definition of the Antarctic region, based on species and ecosystems distribution. It is wider than the Antarctic Treaty region, including all ice shelves.
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