YCLOAK

Some days, all Tsimamorekm Aly eats is sugary water. He’s happy if there’s a handful of rice. But with six young kids and a wife to support, he often goes without. 

This is the fourth year that drought has devastated Aly’s home in southern Madagascar. Now more than one million people, or two out of five residents, of his Grand Sud region require emergency food aid in what the United Nations is calling a “climate change famine.” 

“In previous years there was rain, a lot of rain. I grew sweet potatoes and I had a lot of money… I even got married because I was rich,” said Aly, 44.   

“Things have changed,” he said, standing on an expanse of ochre dirt where the only green to be seen is tall, spiky cacti. 

Climate change is battering the Indian Ocean island and several U.N. agencies have warned in the past few months of a “climate change famine” here. 

“The situation in the south of the country is really worrying,” said Alice Rahmoun, a spokeswoman with the United Nations’ World Food Programme in Madagascar. “I visited several districts… and heard from families how the changing climate has driven them to hunger.”   

Rainfall patterns in Madagascar are growing more erratic — they’ve been below average for nearly six years, said researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara. 

“In some villages, the last proper rain was three years ago, in others, eight years ago or even 10 years ago,” said Rahmoun. “Fields are bare, seeds do not sprout and there is no food.”   

Temperatures in southern Africa are rising at double the global rate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says. Cyclones, already more frequent in Madagascar than any other African country, are likely getting stronger as the earth warms, the U.S. government says. 

Conflict has been a central cause of famine and hunger in countries such as Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, when fighting stopped people moving to find food. But Madagascar is at peace.   

“Climate change strongly impacts and strongly accentuates the famine in Madagascar,” President Andry Rajoelina said while visiting the worst-affected areas earlier this month. “Madagascar is a victim of climate change.”   

The country produces less than 0.01% of global carbon dioxide emissions, the World Carbon Project says. 

Half a million children are expected to be acutely malnourished in southern Madagascar, 110,000 severely so, the U.N. Children’s Fund says, causing developmental delays, disease and death. 

Nutriset, a French company that produces emergency food Plumpy’Nut, opened a plant in southern Madagascar last week. It aims to annually produce 600 tones of therapeutic fortified food made of peanuts, sugar and milk for malnourished children. 

The Malagasy government is also giving parcels of land to some families fleeing the worst-hit areas. Two hundred families received land with chickens and goats, which are more drought-resilient than cows. They were also encouraged to plant cassava, which is more drought-resilient than maize. 

“It’s a natural disaster,” said Aly. “May God help us.” 
…

From the door of the expedition base, a few small steps to the left an autonomous rover passes by. A few giant leaps to the right is an array of solar panels. The landscape is rocky, hilly, tinged with red. Purposefully it resembles Mars.

Here, in the Ramon Crater in the desert of southern Israel, a team of six – five men and one woman – has begun simulating what it will be like to live for about a month on the red planet.

Their AMADEE-20 habitat is tucked beneath a rocky outcrop. Inside they sleep, eat and conduct experiments. Outside they wear mock space suits fitted with cameras, microphones and self-contained breathing systems.

“We have the motto of fail fast, fail cheap, and have a steep learning curve. Because for every mistake we make here on Earth, we hope we don’t repeat it on Mars,” said Gernot Gromer, director of the Austrian Space Forum.

The Austrian association is running the project together with the Israel Space Agency and local group D-MARS.

A number of recent Mars probes have captivated astronomy fans across the world with robotic rovers like NASA’s Perseverance and, for the first time, the helicopter Ingenuity, offering a glance of the planet’s surface. But a manned mission is likely more than a decade off.

With AMADEE-20, which was supposed to happen in 2020 but was postponed due to COVID-19, the team hopes to bring new insight that will help prepare for that mission, when it comes.

“The habitat, right now, is the most complex, the most modern analog research station on this planet,” said Gromer, standing beside the 120-square meter structure shaped like two large, connected yurts.

The six team members are constantly on camera. Their vital signs monitored, their movements inside are tracked to analyze favorite spots for congregating. All this to better understand the human factor, Gromer said.

Outside, other engineers and specialists work with a drone and rover to improve autonomous navigation and mapping on a world where GPS is not available.

Altogether they will carry out more than 20 experiments in fields including geology, biology and medicine and hope to publish some of the results when finished.

“We are six people working in a tight space under a lot of pressure to do a lot of tests. There are bound to be challenges,” said Alon Tenzer, 36, wearing the space suit that carries some 50 kilograms of equipment. “But I trust my crew that we are able to overcome those challenges.”
…

The World Health Organization is calling on governments to allocate the money needed to increase access to mental health treatment.  WHO has published a new Mental Health Atlas marking World Mental Health Day Sunday.   

Data collected from 171 countries show none of the World Health Assembly targets for the provision of mental health care by 2020 has been achieved.  Therefore, WHO says it is extending its Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan to 2030.  

Fahmy Hanna is a technical officer in WHO’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Use. He says lack of money is a major reason these goals have been missed.  He says governments allocate just 2.1% of their overall health budgets to mental health services. 

“And in the majority of the countries, most of this budget goes to psychiatric hospitals—long-stay, in-patient facilities instead of being spent on community-based mental health services, which are more human-rights-oriented and less decentralized and more accessible to the population,” Hanna said.

The WHO reports more than a billion people globally suffer from mental health illness.  The most common such illnesses include anxiety disorders, depression, bipolar and eating disorders, as well as psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia.

The data in the atlas was collected in 2019 and reflects the status of pre-pandemic mental health services.  However, health officials agree COVID-19 is having a major impact on people’s mental health and more investments must be made in treating them.

Hanna says WHO has carried out two surveys during the pandemic.  He says the findings show major disruptions in services offered to people suffering from neurological illnesses and substance abuse.

“At the time, where there was cause for scaling up mental health services around the world, we found from data of the surveys that were conducted in 2021 that actually 23% of countries have reported scaling back their community-based mental health services,” he added.

Besides the human costs, WHO says skimping on investing in mental health makes no economic sense.  It says lost productivity from depression and anxiety alone, two of the most common mental health disorders, costs the global economy $1 trillion each year.  However, it notes there is a return of $5 for every dollar invested in treating these conditions.
…

A report in The New York Times says that the manufacturers of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine which “appears to be the world’s best defense against COVID-19, has been supplying its shots almost exclusively to wealthy nations, keeping poorer countries waiting and earning billions in profit.”

The newspaper said their report is based on information from Airfinity, a data firm that tracks vaccine shipments. 

According to the Times account, Moderna has shipped approximately a million shots of its vaccines to poor countries. In comparison, Pfizer has shipped 8.4 million shots and Johnson and Johnson has delivered about 25 million doses to low-income countries.

In addition, the Times said government officials in some middle-income countries have reported that their countries have had to pay more for Moderna’s shots than the U.S. and the European Union.

Protests in Rome

Meanwhile, thousands of protesters took the streets of Rome Saturday to protest Italy’s new “Green Pass” vaccine certification that becomes mandatory for public and private workplaces, beginning October 15.

Workers and employees will be fined if they do not comply with the certification requirements. Government workers face suspension, if they come to work five times without the pass that documents that the holder has been inoculated with at least one COVID vaccine or recovered from the coronavirus in the last six months or has tested negative in the last 48 hours.

The pass is already a requirement for many indoor venues, including restaurants, museums and theaters. It is also needed for long-distance train and bus rides and domestic flights.

The chief of Britain’s Health Security Agency says the U.K. is facing an “uncertain” winter with the circulation of the flu and the coronavirus which causes the COVID infection.

“We are likely to see flu, for the first time in any real numbers, co-circulating with COVID,” Dr. Jenny Harries said. “Early evidence suggests that you are twice as likely to die from having two together, than just having COVID alone.” 

Texas politician has COVID

In the U.S., a politician who has not been vaccinated has announced that he has COVID and is being treated with monoclonal antibody injections. Allen West, a candidate for the Republican nomination for the governor of Texas, said on his Twitter account that while he was not inoculated with a COVID vaccine, his wife was, but she has also contracted COVID.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that there are more than 237 million global coronavirus infections and nearly 5 million global deaths. The center said 6.4 billion vaccines have been administered.
…

When Russian regulators approved the country’s own coronavirus vaccine, it was a moment of national pride, and the Pavlov family was among those who rushed to take the injection. But international health authorities have not yet given their blessing to the Sputnik V shot.

So when the family from Rostov-on-Don wanted to visit the West, they looked for a vaccine that would allow them to travel freely, a quest that brought them to Serbia, where hundreds of Russian citizens have flocked in recent weeks to receive Western-approved COVID-19 shots.

Serbia, which is not a member of the European Union, is a convenient choice for vaccine-seeking Russians because they can enter the allied Balkan nation without visas and because it offers a wide choice of Western-made shots. Organized tours for Russians have soared, and they can be spotted in the capital, Belgrade, at hotels, restaurants, bars and vaccination clinics.

“We took the Pfizer vaccine because we want to travel around the world,” Nadezhda Pavlova, 54, said after receiving the vaccine last weekend at a sprawling Belgrade vaccination center.

Her husband, Vitaly Pavlov, 55, said he wanted “the whole world to be open to us rather than just a few countries.”

Vaccination tours

Vaccination tour packages for Russians seeking shots endorsed by the World Health Organization appeared on the market in mid-September, according to Russia’s Association of Tour Operators.

Maya Lomidze, the group’s executive director, said prices start at $300-$700, depending on what’s included.

Lauded by Russian President Vladimir Putin as world’s first registered COVID-19 vaccine, Sputnik V emerged in August 2020 and has been approved in some 70 countries, including Serbia. But the WHO has said global approval is still under review after citing issues at a production plant a few months ago.

On Friday, a top World Health Organization official said legal issues holding up the review of Sputnik V were “about to be sorted out,” a step that could relaunch the process toward emergency use authorization.

Other hurdles remain for the Russian application, including a lack of full scientific information and inspections of manufacturing sites, said Dr. Mariangela Simao, a WHO assistant director-general.

Apart from the WHO, Sputnik V is also awaiting approval from the European Medicines Agency before all travel limitations can be lifted for people vaccinated with the Russian formula.

Getting into Europe

The long wait has frustrated many Russians, so when the WHO announced yet another delay in September, they started looking for solutions elsewhere.

“People don’t want to wait; people need to be able to get into Europe for various personal reasons,” explained Anna Filatovskaya, Russky Express tour agency spokeswoman in Moscow. “Some have relatives. Some have business, some study, some work. Some simply want to go to Europe because they miss it.”

Serbia, a fellow-Orthodox Christian and Slavic nation, offers the Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Chinese Sinopharm shots. By popular demand, Russian tourist agencies are now also offering tours to Croatia, where tourists can receive the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, without the need to return for a second dose.

“For Serbia, the demand has been growing like an avalanche,” Filatovskaya said. “It’s as if all our company is doing these days is selling tours for Serbia.”

The Balkan nation introduced vaccination for foreigners in August, when the vaccination drive inside the country slowed after reaching around 50% of the adult population. Official Serbian government data shows that nearly 160,000 foreign citizens so far have been vaccinated in the country, but it is unclear how many are Russians.

In Russia, the country’s vaccination rate has been low. By this week, almost 33% of Russia’s 146 million people have received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine, and 29% were fully vaccinated. Apart from Sputnik V and a one-dose version known as Sputnik Light, Russia has also used two other domestically designed vaccines that have not been internationally approved.

Amid low vaccination rates and reluctance by the authorities to reimpose restrictive measures, both Russia and Serbia have seen COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations reach record levels in the past weeks.

The daily coronavirus death toll in Russia topped 900 for a second straight day on Thursday, a day after reaching a record 929. In Serbia, the daily death toll of 50 people is the highest in months in the country of 7 million that so far has confirmed nearly 1 million cases of infection.

Pavlova said the “double protection” offered by the Pfizer booster shots would allow the family “to not only travel around the world, but also to see our loved ones without fear.”

Since the vaccine tours exploded in popularity about a month ago, they have provided welcome business for Serbian tour operators devastated by the pandemic in an already weak economy. The owner of BTS Kompas travel agency in Belgrade, Predrag Tesic, said they are booked well in advance.

“It started modestly at first, but day by day numbers have grown nicely,” Tesic said.

He explained that his agency organizes everything, from airport transport to accommodations and translation and other help at vaccination points. When they return for another dose in three weeks, the Russian guests also are offered brief tours to some of popular sites in Serbia. 
…

The COVID-19 outbreak has apparently sparked a global rise in depression and anxiety.

According to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet, there were millions more of such cases last year than had been projected. Women and young people were the groups most affected by pandemic-related depression and anxiety.

The report also said there has been “no reduction in the global prevalence or burden … for either disorder since 1990, despite compelling evidence of interventions that reduce their impact.”

“This pandemic has created an increased urgency to strengthen mental health systems in most countries,” the survey said. “Taking no action to address the burden of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders should not be an option,” the researchers said.

On Friday, Brazil’s health ministry said the country’s COVID-19 death toll has passed 600,000. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resources Center has recorded 21.5 million COVID-19 cases in the South American country.

Russia’s state statistics service reported nearly 50,000 coronavirus deaths in the country in August, taking the toll since the beginning of the pandemic to over 400,000, nearly double the official government figure.

Rosstat released its figures late Friday, reporting that 49,389 people died from COVID-19 in August, a figure much higher than 24,661, the government tally for the same month.

Overall, Rosstat says around 418,000 people have died in Russia since the pandemic began. This nearly doubles the official total death toll of 214,000 published by the Russian coronavirus task force earlier Friday.

Russian officials explained the discrepancy, saying COVID-19 deaths are counted differently by the two agencies. The government coronavirus task force counts only fatalities for which an autopsy confirms COVID-19 as the primary cause of death, while Rosstat uses a broader definition for deaths linked to the virus.

In other developments Friday, the World Health Organization announced it has established and released the first standardized clinical definition of what is commonly known as “long COVID” to help boost treatment for sufferers.

Speaking virtually to reporters from the agency’s Geneva headquarters, WHO Head of Clinical Management Janet Diaz said the definition was agreed on after global consultations with health officials.

She said the condition, in which symptoms of the illness persist well beyond what is commonly experienced, is usually referred to as “post COVID.” Moreover, it occurs in people who have had confirmed or probable new coronavirus infections, “usually three months on from the onset of the COVID-19, with symptoms that last for at least two months and cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis.”

 

Those symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive dysfunction, she said, but there also are others that generally have an adverse effect on everyday functioning. Diaz said that until now, a lack of clarity among health care professionals about the condition has complicated efforts in advancing research and treatment.

In the United States, officials said they would accept the use by international travelers of any COVID-19 vaccine authorized by U.S. regulators or the WHO. Last month, the White House announced that it would lift travel restrictions on people from 33 countries who show proof of vaccination. Officials did not say at that time which vaccines would be accepted, however.

The Associated Press reports that the number of Americans getting COVID-19 vaccines has reached a three-month high, averaging 1 million per day, as more employers mandate the shots and some Americans seek boosters. That figure is almost double the level for mid-July but still well below last spring, according to the AP.

Meanwhile, a senior White House official announced Friday that the U.S. government is shipping more than 1.8 million doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to the Philippines — a donation that will be executed through the WHO-managed COVAX vaccine cooperative. The doses will arrive in two shipments, probably Sunday and Monday, according to the official.

U.S. drugmaker Moderna announced earlier Friday it was planning to deliver another 1 billion doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to low-income countries next year. In a message posted to the company’s website, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the company was investing to expand its capacity to deliver the additional doses.

The disclosure is part of what Bancel describes as his company’s five-pillar strategy to ensure low-income countries get access to the company’s vaccine. The plan includes not enforcing its vaccine patents, expanding its production capacity worldwide, and working with the United States and others to distribute their surplus doses of vaccine.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 

 

 

 

 

 

 
…

When the remnants of Hurricane Ida dumped record-breaking rain on the East Coast this month, staircases into New York City’s subway tunnels turned into waterfalls and train tracks became canals.

In Philadelphia, a commuter line along the Schuylkill River was washed out for miles, and the nation’s busiest rail line, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor running from Boston to Washington, was shut down for an entire day.

Nearly a decade after Superstorm Sandy spurred billions of dollars in investment in coastal flooding protection up and down the East Coast — some of which remains unfinished — Hurricane Ida and other storms this summer provided a stark reminder that more needs to be done — and quickly — as climate change brings stronger, more unpredictable weather to a region with some of the nation’s oldest and busiest transit systems, say transit experts and officials.

“This is our moment to make sure our transit system is prepared,” said Sanjay Seth, Boston’s “climate resilience” program manager. “There’s a lot that we need to do in the next 10 years, and we have to do it right. There’s no need to build it twice.”

In New York, where some 75 million gallons (285 million liters) of water were pumped out of the subways during Ida, ambitious solutions have been floated, such as building canals through the city.

But relatively easy, short-term fixes to the transit system could also be made in the meantime, suggests Janno Lieber, acting CEO of the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

Installing curbs at subway entrances, for example, could prevent water from cascading down steps into the tunnels, as was seen in countless viral videos this summer.

More than 400 subway entrances could be affected by extreme rains from climate change in coming decades, according to projections from the Regional Plan Association, a think tank that plans to put forth the idea for a canal system.

“The subway system is not a submarine. It can’t be made impervious to water,” Lieber said. “We just need to limit how quickly it can get into the system.”

In Boston, climate change efforts have focused largely on the Blue Line, which runs beneath Boston Harbor and straddles the shoreline north of the city.

This summer’s storms were the first real test of some of the newest measures to buffer the vulnerable line.

Flood barriers at a key downtown waterfront stop were activated for the first time when Tropical Storm Henri made landfall in New England in August. No major damage was reported at the station.

 

Officials are next seeking federal funds to build a seawall to prevent flooding at another crucial Blue Line subway stop, says Joe Pesaturo, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The agency has also budgeted for upgrading harbor tunnel pumps and is weighing building a berm around an expansive marsh the Blue Line runs along, he said.

In Philadelphia, some flood protection measures completed in Superstorm Sandy’s wake proved their worth this summer, while others fell short.

Signal huts that house critical control equipment were raised post-Sandy along the hard-hit Manayunk/Norristown commuter line, but it wasn’t high enough to avoid damage during Ida, said Bob Lund, deputy general manager of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.

On the bright side, shoreline “armoring” efforts prevented damaging erosion in what was the highest flooding in the area since the mid-1800s. That has buoyed plans to continue armoring more stretches along the river with the cable-reinforced concrete blocks, Lund said.

If anything, he said, this year’s storms showed that flood projections haven’t kept up with the pace of environmental change.

“We’re seeing more frequent storms and higher water level events,” Lund said. “We have to be even more conservative than our own projections are showing.”

In Washington, where the Red Line’s flood-prone Cleveland Park station was closed twice during Hurricane Ida, transit officials have begun developing a climate resiliency plan to identify vulnerabilities and prioritize investments, said Sherrie Ly, spokesperson for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

That’s on top of the work WMATA has undertaken the last two decades to mitigate flood risks, she said, such as raising ventilation shafts, upgrading the drainage systems and installing dozens of high-capacity pumping stations.

 

On balance, East Coast transit systems have taken laudable steps such as sketching out climate change plans and hiring experts, said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at Tulane University in New Orleans who co-authored a recent study examining climate change risks to Boston’s T.

But it’s an open question whether they’re planning ambitiously enough, he said, pointing to Washington, where subway lines along the Anacostia and Potomac rivers into Maryland and Virginia are particularly vulnerable.

Similar concerns remain in other global cities that saw bad flooding this year.

In China, Premier Li Keqiang has pledged to hold officials accountable after 14 people died and hundreds of others were trapped in a flooded subway line in Zhengzhou in July. But there are no concrete proposals yet for what might be done to prevent deadly subway flooding.

In London, efforts to address Victorian-age sewer and drainage systems are too piecemeal to dent citywide struggles with flooding, says Bob Ward, a climate change expert at the London School of Economics.

The city saw a monsoon-like drenching in July that prompted tube station closures.

“There just isn’t the level of urgency required,” Ward said. “We know these rain events will get worse, and flooding will get worse, unless we significantly step up investment.”

Other cities, meanwhile, have moved more swiftly to shore up their infrastructure.

Tokyo completed an underground system for diverting floodwater back in 2006 with chambers large enough to fit a space shuttle or the Statue of Liberty.

Copenhagen’s underground City Circle Line, which was completed in 2019, features heavy flood gates, raised entryways and other climate change adaptations.

How to pay for more ambitious climate change projects remains another major question mark for East Coast cities, said Michael Martello, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher who co-authored the Boston study with Keenan.

Despite an infusion of federal stimulus dollars during the pandemic, Boston’s T and other transit agencies still face staggering budget shortfalls as ridership hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.

The stunning images of flooding this summer briefly gave momentum to efforts to pass President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion infrastructure plan. But that mammoth spending bill, which includes money for climate change preparedness, is still being negotiated in Congress.

“It’s great to have these plans,” Martello said. “But has to get built and funded somehow.”
…

Russia’s state statistics service reported nearly 50,000 coronavirus deaths in the country in August, taking the toll since the beginning of the pandemic to over 400,000, nearly double the official government figure.

Rosstat released its figures late Friday, reporting that 49,389 people died from COVID-19 in August, a figure much higher than 24,661, the government tally for the same month.

Overall, Rosstat says around 418,000 people have died in Russia since the pandemic began. This nearly doubles the official total death toll of 214,000 published by the Russian coronavirus task force earlier Friday.

Russian officials explained the discrepancy, saying COVID-19 deaths are counted differently by the two agencies. The government coronavirus task force counts only fatalities for which an autopsy confirms COVID-19 as the primary cause of death, while Rosstat uses a broader definition for deaths linked to the virus.

In other developments Friday, the World Health Organization announced it has established and released the first standardized clinical definition of what is commonly known as “long COVID” to help boost treatment for sufferers.

Speaking virtually to reporters from the agency’s Geneva headquarters, WHO Head of Clinical Management Janet Diaz said the definition was agreed on after global consultations with health officials.

She said the condition, in which symptoms of the illness persist well beyond what is commonly experienced, is usually referred to as “post COVID.” Moreover, it occurs in people who have had confirmed or probable new coronavirus infections, “usually three months on from the onset of the COVID-19, with symptoms that last for at least two months and cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis.”

Those symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive dysfunction, she said, but there also are others that generally have an adverse effect on everyday functioning. Diaz said that until now, a lack of clarity among health care professionals about the condition has complicated efforts in advancing research and treatment.

In the United States, officials said they would accept the use by international travelers of any COVID-19 vaccine authorized by U.S. regulators or the WHO. Last month, the White House announced that it would lift travel restrictions on people from 33 countries who show proof of vaccination. Officials did not say at that time which vaccines would be accepted, however.

The Associated Press reports that the number of Americans getting COVID-19 vaccines has reached a three-month high, averaging 1 million per day, as more employers mandate the shots and some Americans seek boosters. That figure is almost double the level for mid-July but still well below last spring, according to the AP.

Meanwhile, a senior White House official announced Friday that the U.S. government is shipping more than 1.8 million doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to the Philippines — a donation that will be executed through the WHO-managed COVAX vaccine cooperative. The doses will arrive in two shipments, probably Sunday and Monday, according to the official.

U.S. drugmaker Moderna announced earlier Friday it was planning to deliver another 1 billion doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to low-income countries next year. In a message posted to the company’s website, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the company was investing to expand its capacity to deliver the additional doses.

The disclosure is part of what Bancel describes as his company’s five-pillar strategy to ensure low-income countries get access to the company’s vaccine. The plan includes not enforcing its vaccine patents, expanding its production capacity worldwide, and working with the United States and others to distribute their surplus doses of vaccine.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 

 
…

President Joe Biden on Friday signed legislation that will provide financial support to U.S. government employees believed to be suffering from the so-called Havana syndrome, mysterious health incidents that have affected American intelligence officers, diplomats and other personnel around the world.

“Today, I was pleased to sign the HAVANA Act into law to ensure we are doing our utmost to provide for U.S. Government personnel who have experienced anomalous health incidents,” Biden said in a statement released by the White House.

The Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act, or HAVANA Act, was passed unanimously by the Senate on June 7 and the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

In his statement, Biden acknowledged that American civil servants, intelligence officers, diplomats and military personnel around the world have been affected by “anomalous health incidents,” and some are struggling with debilitating brain injuries that have curtailed their careers. He vowed to commit the full resources of the U.S. government to provide medical care to victims and determine what causes it and who is responsible.

The Havana syndrome — a set of ailments that includes migraines, nausea, dizziness, tinnitus, visual and hearing problems, vertigo, memory lapses, and even mental breakdown — became public in 2016 after dozens of diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Havana complained of the symptoms. Since then, other U.S. personnel in China, Russia, Poland, Austria and other countries have reported similar symptoms.

Robyn Garfield, an advocate for Havana syndrome victims, welcomed the signing but said much more needs to be done. As a Commerce Department officer, Garfield was evacuated from Shanghai, China, with his wife and two children in June 2018 after experiencing symptoms.

“We remain deeply concerned by the continued disparity in treatment and support among different agencies of our government,” Garfield said in a statement to VOA. “In concert with implementation of the HAVANA Act, we urge the Administration to adopt a uniform diagnostic and treatment protocol across agencies to ensure that all who serve, and their families, have access to the best possible care.”

Garfield said that for too long, too many victims have faced skepticism and have been treated as adversaries instead of partners by the agencies they worked for. “That needs to stop.”

While the cause of Havana syndrome remains under investigation by the intelligence community, a 2020 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy appears to be the most plausible mechanism in explaining” these anomalous health incidents.

Dr. David Relman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University who chaired the committee that produced the report, welcomed the legislation.

“This is good news. This has been a long time— too long, in coming,” Relman said in a statement to VOA. “The public needs to acknowledge the many sacrifices by these folks, and their families, who serve our nation in so many ways.”

Frustrated victims

Several diplomats and government personnel who believe they are suffering from Havana syndrome expressed their frustration over having to fight a skeptical bureaucracy when reporting incidents and finding care.

“How are we going to take care of ourselves, our family and our kids?” said one civil servant who spoke to VOA on condition of anonymity.

They also complain that government acknowledgement of their suffering differs according to the country where the incident happened.

“The people who were impacted in Cuba all got plaques saying you were attacked,” said one diplomat who also asked not to be named. “The people in China — only one person has been acknowledged by the State Department to have been impacted in some way.”

The White House denied the accusation when asked by VOA.

“Our objective and the president’s commitment is to standardizing the reporting process, is to ensuring we’re improving the quality and speed of medical care, is to ensuring every case that comes forward is taken seriously, treated seriously,” said press secretary Jen Psaki.

“That has not always been the case, but that is our objective and the commitment of this administration,” Psaki added. She pointed out that Biden was the first president to acknowledge the existence of Havana syndrome and underscored that steps were being taken to coordinate reporting among the different agencies.

New cases

On the same day Biden signed the bill, German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that German police were investigating several cases of “alleged sonic weapon attack on employees of the U.S. Embassy” in Berlin.

In August, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ flight from Singapore to Vietnam was delayed by several hours after reports of a “possible anomalous health incident,” according to the State Department.

The legislation that Biden signed authorizes the CIA director and the secretary of state to provide injured employees with additional financial support for brain injuries. The CIA and State Department would be required to create regulations detailing fair and equitable criteria for payment and report to Congress on how this authority was being used.

The bill was authored by Senator Susan Collins of Maine and co-sponsored by Senators Mark Warner, Marco Rubio and Jeanne Shaheen.

“These Americans who experienced traumatic brain injuries from likely directed energy attacks while serving our country should have been treated the same way we treat a soldier who suffered a traumatic brain injury on the battlefield,” said Collins in a statement released after the signing.

“Now that the HAVANA Act has been signed into law, Havana syndrome victims will finally receive the financial assistance and medical support that they deserve,” Collins said. “As we continue our efforts to support victims, we must also redouble our whole-of-government approach to identify and stop the heartless adversary who is harming U.S. personnel.”

Marc Polymeropoulos, a 26-year veteran of the CIA, was forced to retire in 2019 after being hit by a suspected directed energy attack in Moscow in late 2017. He welcomed Biden’s announcement.

“The signing of the Havana Act is a watershed moment for the victims. It is an acknowledgement from the (U.S. government) that the attacks are real, and an admission that the (U.S. government) for a long time has not treated victims properly,” he told VOA in a statement. “I am very thankful to Congress, on both sides of the aisle, who has championed the victims’ cause, as well as the Biden administration — for finally acting to provide financial relief to those with terrible injuries.”

It is unclear just how many people have fallen victim to Havana syndrome, but various media reports estimate as many as 200 Americans around the world have come forward to describe symptoms. 

 

 
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Firefighters and numerous studies credit intensive forest thinning projects with helping save communities like those recently threatened near Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, but dissent from some environmental advocacy groups is roiling the scientific community. 

States in the U.S. West and the federal government each year thin thousands of acres of dense timber and carve broad swaths through the forest near remote communities, all designed to slow the spread of massive wildfires.

The projects aim to return overgrown forests to the way they were more than a century ago, when lower-intensity blazes cleared the underbrush regularly and before land managers began reflexively extinguishing every wildfire as soon as possible. 

Such so-called fuel reduction efforts also include using fire to fight fire, with fires deliberately set in the cooler, wetter months to burn out dangerous fuels. Forest managers credit such burns with helping protect the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park. The state of California eased some regulations to increase the use of that tactic. 

While most scientific studies find such forest management is a valuable tool, environmental advocates say data from recent gigantic wildfires support their long-running assertion that efforts to slow wildfires have instead accelerated their spread. 

The argument is fueling an already passionate debate. 

It has led to a flurry of citations of dueling studies and fed competing claims that the science may be skewed by ideology. 

The debate came to a head over this year’s giant Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon. 

“Not only did tens of thousands of acres of recent thinning, fuel breaks and other forest management fail to stop or slow the fire’s rapid spread, but … the fire often moved fastest through such areas,” Los Padres ForestWatch, a California-based nonprofit, said in an analysis, joined by the John Muir Project and Wild Heritage advocacy groups. 

James Johnston, a researcher with Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, called the groups’ conclusions “pretty misleading,” “irresponsible” and “self-contradicting.” 

“Claims that modern fuel-reduction thinning makes fire worse are not credible,” Johnston said.

The debate focused on a project where the Klamath Tribes and the Nature Conservancy have spent a decade thinning smaller trees and using planned fires. 

They and the U.S. Forest Service said the treatments slowed the fire’s spread and lessened its intensity, while critics said the blaze made its fastest northern run through the same area, spreading 5 miles (8 kilometers) in about 13 hours.

Scientists say climate change has made the American West much warmer and drier and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive, accelerating the need for more large-scale forest treatments. 

Critics say forest thinning operations are essentially logging projects in disguise.

Opening up the forest canopy and leaving more distance between trees reduces the natural humidity and cooling shade of dense forests and allows unimpeded winds to push fire faster, said Chad Hanson, forest and fire ecologist with the John Muir Project.

Such reasoning defies the laws of physics, said other experts: Less fuel means less severe fire. Fewer trees means it’s more difficult for fires to leap from treetop to treetop.

The critics contend recent massive California wildfires also moved quickly through thinned areas that failed to protect communities. 

Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who heads Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, said this year’s giant Dixie Fire blew sparks past containment lines, igniting piles of dry branches left by a thinning operation near Paradise. The town was nearly destroyed in 2018 in the nation’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire in modern times. 

Thom Porter, director of California’s firefighting agency, said critics miss the point: Fuel breaks are one tool that can help slow and channel wildfires while protecting rural homes and communities. 

“The problem is, when you have a head fire that is a mile or miles wide and it’s running through timber like it’s grass, there isn’t a fuel break out there that’s going to stop it,” Porter said. 

Each side can point to plenty of competing examples, said John Bailey, professor of silviculture and fire management at Oregon State University. Some forest thinning has indeed been mishandled, yet “anywhere that we’ve done an effective fuels treatment, we have modified fire behavior and reduced the intensity.”

The contrasting views prompted a contentious debate, with one paper suggesting supporters of spotted owl habitat, including Hanson of the John Muir Project, are “selectively using data that support their agendas.” Another paper said such dissenting views have “fostered confusion” and can slow what the authors contend are necessary forest treatments. 

Hanson dismissed the criticism as “character assassination” driven by those who benefit from logging or are reluctant to embrace what he insists is the evolving science. 

“On average, all things being equal, the thinned areas tend to burn more rapidly and more intensely most of the time,” he said, citing his own research, including a broad 2016 review of three decades of 1,500 fires across the Western U.S. conducted with the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity and Oregon-based Geos Institute. 

The division “reflects both evidence and understandable emotion” when wildfires destroy homes or ecological treasures, said Erica Fleishman, a professor at Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. 

The competing arguments are part of the legitimate policy and scientific debate, according to Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at California’s Pomona College who has written extensively about wildfires, including with Hanson.

Forest managers cite examples like where a 400-foot-wide (120-meter) fuel break helped protect rural Sierra Nevada homes. 

The U.S. Forest Service produced a video called “Fuels Treatments Work — A Creek Fire Success Story,” and Cal Fire featured it in a fuels reduction guide. 

“Clearly it’s a matter of debate in policy arenas and management, but I think in terms of the scientific literature, the evidence is overwhelming,” said John Battles, a professor of forest ecology at the University of California-Berkeley.
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A case of Ebola has been confirmed in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to an internal report on Friday from the national biomedical laboratory, five months after the end of the most recent outbreak there. 

Congo’s health minister declined to confirm the information but said a statement would be published shortly. 

It was not immediately known if the case was related to the 2018-20 outbreak that killed more than 2,200 people in eastern Congo, or the flare-up that killed six this year. 

The report from the biomedical lab, the INRB, said the positive result came from a 2-year-old in a densely populated neighborhood of the city of Beni, one of the epicenters of the 2018-20 outbreak, which was the second deadliest on record. 

Three of the baby’s neighbors presented symptoms consistent with Ebola last month and then died, the report said, but none were tested for the virus. 

It is not unusual for sporadic cases to occur following a major outbreak, health experts say. Particles of the virus can remain present in semen for months after recovery from an infection. 

Congo has recorded 11 outbreaks since the disease, which causes severe vomiting and diarrhea and is spread through contact with body fluids, was discovered near its Ebola River in 1976. 

The country’s equatorial forests have been a breeding ground for the virus.
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