YCLOAK

Preparations are being made to send thousands of Ebola vaccines next week to North Kivu, the site of the latest outbreak of this deadly disease.

The World Health Organization says it foresees huge difficulties ahead in efforts to combat the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

North Kivu province, the site of the new outbreak, has been riven with ethnic and political clashes for at least two decades.

WHO’s emergency response chief, Peter Salama, said the operation getting under way in North Kivu will be much more difficult and complex than past Ebola response efforts.

Salama was at the forefront of efforts to combat an Ebola outbreak this April in the DRC’s Equateur Province.

“On the scale of degree of difficulty, trying to extinguish an outbreak of a deadly high-threat pathogen in a war zone reaches the top of any of our scales,” he cautioned.

WHO reports four of six suspected cases of Ebola have been confirmed in and around Mangina, a town of about 60,000 people in North Kivu. Around 20 deaths have been reported. Salama, however, said the deaths have not yet been confirmed as Ebola cases.

He said laboratory tests indicate that this particular strain is Ebola Zaire, the same one as in Equateur Province. He added that more information will be forthcoming Tuesday when genetic sequencing results are known.

If confirmed, he said it will be possible to use the same vaccine that was used in Equateur. He told VOA that preparations are under way to deploy vaccines to the affected area next week.

The bad news, he cautioned, is that the Zaire strain carries the highest case fatality rate of any of the strains of Ebola — 50 percent or higher.

“The good news is that we do have, although it is still an investigational product, a safe and effective vaccine that we were able to deploy last time around,” he said. “But, remember last time around — and this is a critical point — we had really large-scale access despite all the logistical constraints to be able to do the contact tracing.”

Salama said security constraints will make moving around in North Kivu far more difficult. He said 3,000 doses of the vaccine that are in the capital, Kinshasa, can be deployed immediately and 300,000 additional doses can be mobilized at very short notice.

Ebola is a constant threat in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the virus thrives in heavily forested areas. The newest outbreak is the 10th since the first one was discovered in 1976.
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Remembering to take medications can be challenging for some people. But one day an implant may replace medications that need to be taken orally in certain cases. One lab in Houston is developing refillable implants placed under the skin to potentially deliver life-saving medicine at a low cost for various diseases. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from the Houston Methodist Research Institute.
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Many people on medication may find it challenging to remember to take the drugs. For some illnesses, an implant may one day replace the need to ingest the medicines.

A lab at Houston Methodist Research Institute is developing unique implants that can potentially deliver lifesaving medication, at a low cost for a variety of diseases.

Unlike current drug delivery implants that use pumps, the implants Alessandro Grattoni and his team are developing use nanochannels to release medication at the molecular level.

“This implant is inserted under the skin of the patient and then delivers the drugs for an extended period of time, for months and potentially years. And they continue releasing the drug until the drug is completely gone,” said Grattoni, chairman of the Department of Nanomedicine at Houston Methodist Research Institute.

The medicines are dispensed in a manner that is similar to the way sand moves in an hourglass. The drugs are released through membranes with the nanochannels inside the implants that range in shapes and sizes from around 2 centimeters to the size of a grain of rice. The differences would help accommodate different implantation sites and different drugs for specific diseases.

“They end up acting like the glands are like artificial glands inside of the body that do the things that the glands in the body normally do — secrete the necessary molecules when they are needed,” said Mauro Ferrari, president and chief executive officer at Houston Methodist Research Institute and an expert in biomedical nanotechnology.

Remote access

The nanochannel delivery system can either deliver a steady and constant dose of a drug, or it can be controlled remotely via a phone or Bluetooth, so drug administration can be increased, decreased or suspended over a period of time.

When treating hypertension or rheumatoid arthritis, Grattoni said, it has been shown that giving the medication at specific times during the day would provide the best efficacy with minimal side effects.

“When you want to deliver the drug at a specific time point, then an implant that can be self-modulating the drug release would make a huge difference,” said Grattoni.

A nanochannel delivery system would allow a patient to live a normal life and receive medication at the same time every day.

HIV prevention, obesity, cancer

Another area of advanced research in Grattoni’s lab involves using the implant for HIV prevention. Patients who do not take medication to prevent HIV would be at risk of being exposed to the virus that causes AIDS. Prevention medication placed inside the implant would ensure the protection of the person at risk and be most helpful in developing countries where access to a medical facility is limited. Refilling the implant would only involve a two-needle injection under the skin.

“Having an implant that would allow you to deliver the medication for maybe an entire year would also be welcome, of course, because in that case, you don’t need to have the patient directly close to a health care facility,” said Grattoni.

Another application fights obesity. A drug that has been found effective with this delivery method could help patients lose fat tissue without having to change their diets.

Grattoni said an implant the size of a grain of rice can help fight solid tumors such as triple-negative breast cancer and melanoma.

“They can be inserted via a needle, just a simple needle, inside of a tumor mass and deliver immunotherapy straight inside of the tumor,” said Grattoni.

NASA’s role

With the help of NASA, research on implants using nanotechnology reached new heights with an experiment conducted in space to solve the problem of astronauts experiencing muscle atrophy because of microgravity.

This application is also beneficial for patients on Earth who experience muscle wasting due to disease or injury. Over a period of two months, a drug that can potentially maintain muscle was placed in an implant containing nanochannel membranes and placed in mice. Researchers are now analyzing the data.

Using the implant for HIV prevention could enter the clinical trial phase within three years. It may take several more years before other applications of the implant are tested on humans as the research continues.
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New research suggests obesity may be a factor in the transmission of the influenza virus.

In a study conducted in Managua, Nicaragua, obese adults spread the influenza virus for significantly longer than non-obese individuals. The findings have significant ramifications, given that worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975, according to the World Health Organization.

Epidemiologist Aubree Gordon at the University of Michigan started looking into the correlation between obesity and the flu nine years ago. Gordon explained that “during the 2009 influenza pandemic, it became quite clear that obese individuals were at higher risk for severe influenza. And more recently, some studies have shown that obese individuals don’t respond as well to the influenza vaccine.”

Gordon collaborated with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health on a three-year research program that followed 1,783 individuals in 320 households. The researchers visited homes where at least one member reported symptoms of influenza. Researchers collected samples every few days for two weeks, tracking infected individuals and others in the home who agreed to enroll in the study.

When Gordon and her colleagues analyzed the samples, they found that obese adults shed the influenza virus 42 percent longer than non-obese adults — or about a day and a half longer period of shedding the virus.

Weaker immune system

Previous research found that obesity led to chronic inflammation and a poorer functioning immune system. Will Green, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health who was not involved in the study, explained how the immune system works to combat the virus.

“There’s an innate first responder. They’re the ones that immediately show up to fight. And then there’s the adaptive T- and B-cell memory response. You need both pieces, but the adaptive response is really the one that’s been shown to be impaired in obesity,” Green said.

Because obese people have a weakened immune system, there were concerns that the obese people in the study were shedding more of the virus simply because they were sicker. However, scientists imposed strict controls by studying only those adults who were infected but had few symptoms.

“In people who were either asymptomatic — having no symptoms — or just had one minor symptom, obese adults still shed for significantly longer than non-obese adults,” Gordon said. “In fact, they shed [viral DNA] for about twice as long.

“I think this is another piece of evidence that obese individuals really have an altered immune system, and they’re having trouble potentially clearing the infection, which could lead to higher severity,” Gordon added.

Infection rates

Nikhil Dhurandhar, chair of nutritional sciences at Texas Tech University, cautions that further research is needed. He told VOA that scientists still don’t understand how much the duration of viral shedding is linked to infection rates.

“Is it a huge amount of virus that is getting excreted? Is it very little?” Dhurandhar asked. “And also, what we don’t know is how infectious that is.”

Green also noted that if shedding the virus means that obese people either remain sick or infectious longer, “you can also equate that to the greater loss of work time and higher health care costs.”

Gordon and her colleagues’ study, published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, highlights a risk of obesity that isn’t going away anytime soon.

As Gordon told VOA, “Obesity is a growing epidemic, unfortunately, and becoming a huge problem worldwide.”
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State prosecutors who pre-emptively sued months ago to block anticipated efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken car fuel-efficiency standards blasted the Trump administration Thursday for doing so and vowed to continue their fight in the courts.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the rollback of Obama-era mileage standards would imperil the state’s efforts to curb greenhouse gases and clean up some of the nation’s most polluted air.

Becerra also promised another lawsuit if the administration makes good on plans to revoke a longstanding waiver allowing California and other states to set their own stricter auto emissions standards. At least twelve other states and the District of Columbia follow California’s rules.

Becerra connected climate change to the deadly wildfires burning out of control throughout the state.

“The Earth is not flat, and climate change is real,” Becerra said at a news conference. “Can someone please inform the folks at the White House and our federal government of those facts?”

Officials in the Trump administration said their actions would make autos more affordable and that would make roads safer because more motorists would be driving newer cars with the latest safety features.

Becerra and attorneys general from 16 other states sued in May to stop the EPA from scrapping standards that would have required vehicles by 2025 to achieve 36 miles per gallon (58 kilometers per gallon) in real-world driving, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) over the existing standards. The Trump proposal would freeze standards at 2020 levels when vehicles will be required to hit an average of 30 miles per gallon (48 kilometers per gallon) in real-world driving.

States that joined the lawsuit said the change would end up costing more money at the pump because vehicles won’t go as far on a gallon of gas, and more misery for those suffering pollution-exacerbated maladies such as asthma.

“This has to be absolutely one of the most harmful and dumbest actions that the EPA has taken,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said. “It’s going to cost drivers here and across the country hundreds of millions of dollars more at the pump.”

Pollution from cars, trucks and other on-road vehicles is California’s single-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to state data.

California has set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. It met its 2020 goals four years early, but hitting the next target will be much harder without cleaner vehicles. The state has struggled to rein in vehicle pollution. Transportation accounts for the biggest chunk of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions and is the only sector where emissions went up in 2016, the most recent data available.

The lawsuit filed in May in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia alleged the plan to dump the mileage standards violated the federal Clean Air Act and didn’t follow the agency’s own regulations.

The lawsuit is proceeding, and Becerra said lawyers will now pore over the documents filed with the proposal to help make their case.

Other states that joined in the lawsuit were: Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the District of Columbia. All have Democratic attorneys general.
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The World Health Organization says expert staff and equipment have been sent to northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo to quick-start the process of combating a new outbreak of Ebola.The last outbreak of this fatal virus in Congo was declared over just a week ago.

Ebola is a constant threat in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the virus thrives in heavily forested areas. This latest outbreak is the 10th since the first one was discovered in 1976.

The World Health Organization says this new outbreak in North Kivu province is 2,500 kilometers away from Equateur Province, the site of the previous outbreak, and there is no link between the two.

WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic says the DRC Ministry of Health informed WHO Wednesday that four of six samples taken in North Kivu tested positive for Ebola virus.

He says it is crucial to gain access to the area as quickly as possible.He says having people and material in the country from the outbreak in Equateur is very helpful in tackling the outbreak.

“We really need to get into the area to do epidemiological investigations, try to find cases, try to work with health workers, to strengthen infection prevention and control measures and also to start with the contact tracing,” he said. “It is, on the other hand, worrying that this area is a conflict zone.It is an area with lots of displacement, so the access can be hampered in that way.”

The virus was discovered in a village near the city of Beni in North Kivu, which hosts more than one million displaced people. The province shares borders with Rwanda and Uganda, with a lot of cross border movement due to brisk trade.

Jasarevic says WHO will work with these neighboring countries to try to prevent the virus from crossing over.

He says identifying the type of Ebola virus that is circulating is a priority, as that will tell scientists whether the vaccine used to help contain the outbreak in Equateur province can also be used in North Kivu.
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Canines have served as working dogs for thousands of years. They guard our homes, help in search and rescue missions and assist people with disabilities. But now scientists are training a special group of Australian dogs to use their sensitive noses — and ears — to help find one of Australia’s most endangered creatures. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Imagine this – a fully autonomous 3D-printed mobile house that can survive any weather and is completely self-powered. This is not a technological dream – it’s the ambitious project of a Ukrainian company called PassivDom. It’s working on the prototype of a printed home in Reno, Nevada. VOA’s Iuliia Iarmolenko gives us a look inside the 3D-printed walls of the futuristic house.
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The population of the white-backed vulture, which inhabits Africa and parts of South and Southeast Asia, has declined significantly over the past several decades to the point that it is now considered an endangered species. But a decade-long conservation effort in Pakistan appears to have stopped the vulture’s decline, as Ayaz Gul reports from Islamabad.
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A winner of the Fields Medal, often called the “Nobel Prize of mathematics,” had his prize stolen shortly after receiving it during a ceremony in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday.

Caucher Birkar, a Kurdish refugee from Iran teaching at Cambridge University, put the gold medal, worth around $4,000, in a briefcase and soon afterward realized that it had been stolen, according to event organizers. Four mathematicians shared this year’s honor.

Security officials at the Riocentro venue, Riocentro, found the empty briefcase in a nearby pavillion. Police reviewed security tapes and identified two potential suspects.

“The International Congress of Mathematicians is profoundly sorry about the disappearance of the briefcase belonging to mathematician Caucher Birkar, which contained his Fields Medal from the ceremony this morning,” organizers said in a note.

It was the first time that the awards, held every four years, were hosted in the southern hemisphere.
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Add plastics to the list of causes for global warming.

Scientists writing in the journal PLOS One said Wednesday that plastics emit the greenhouse gases methane and ethylene when they are exposed to sunlight and degrade.

The researchers carried out tests on such common plastic products as water bottles, shopping bags and food containers.

“Plastic represents a source of climate-relevant trace gases that is expected to increase as more plastic is produced and accumulated in the environment,” said senior researcher David Karl of the University of Hawaii.

Methane gas, both man-made and naturally occurring, is said to be a major cause of climate change.

The manufacturing and use of plastics have come under scrutiny in recent years after environmentalists discovered a massive island of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean — threatening sea life and the food supply.

Plastic drinking straws are the latest target of activists, who say they are used once and discarded because most cannot be recycled.

A graphic video of doctors pulling a plastic straw out of the bloody nose of a large sea turtle has prompted some U.S. cities and companies to phase out the straws.
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