YCLOAK

Mosquitoes are a year-round downside to living in subtropical Miami, but millions of bacteria-infected mosquitoes flying in a suburban neighborhood are being hailed as an innovation that may kill off more bugs that spread Zika and other viruses.

Miami-Dade County Mosquito Control and Habitat Management Division is releasing non-biting male mosquitoes infected with naturally occurring Wolbachia bacteria to mate with wild female mosquitoes.

The bacteria are not harmful to humans, but will prevent any offspring produced when the lab-bred mosquitoes mate with wild female mosquitoes from surviving to adulthood. This drives down the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that thrive in suburban and urban environments and can spread Zika, dengue fever and chikungunya.

During a six-month field trial approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, over half a billion of the mosquitoes bred by Kentucky-based MosquitoMate will be released in a suburban neighborhood split by long, narrow canals near the University of Miami, said South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard.

Miami-Dade County is testing MosquitoMate’s insects as a potential mosquito-control method about 10 miles (15 kilometers) southwest of Miami’s hip Wynwood neighborhood, where health officials confirmed the first local Zika infections spread by mosquitoes on the U.S. mainland in July 2016.

Stoddard, a zoology professor at Florida International University, said he volunteered his city for the trial, wanting to keep the outdoor cafes in his city from becoming another ground zero for a mosquito-borne virus outbreak.

“All those diseases are still a concern. They’re still in the Caribbean and could move to the mainland to cause problems,” Stoddard said.

By the end of 2016, Florida health officials had confirmed 1,456 Zika infections in the state, including 285 cases spread by mosquitoes in Miami-Dade County. Just two local Zika infections were reported in Florida last year, including one Miami-Dade case.

If MosquitoMate’s bugs perform well in South Miami, Wolbachia could be added to regular mosquito control operations as a long-term preventative strategy, said Bill Petrie, Miami-Dade County’s mosquito control chief.

Pesticides still needed

“It’s not a silver bullet. You’d want to integrate it into your existing methods,” Petrie said.

It would not replace naled, the pesticide sprayed from airplanes during the 2016 outbreak, angering Miami residents concerned the chemicals were more dangerous than Zika. Health officials credited naled among other aggressive response efforts with stopping the outbreak.

MosquitoMate’s technology appears low-tech in the field. Infected mosquitoes are shipped weekly in cardboard tubes — similar to ones used in paper towel rolls — from Lexington, Kentucky.

Each tube contains a thousand mosquitoes. In a demonstration Thursday in a city park, a cloud of mosquitoes burst from one end when a black netting cover was removed; a firm shake sent any stragglers flying out.

The trial will study how far the mosquitoes fly, how long they live in the area, and how many Aedes aegypti eggs hatch compared to untreated areas, MosquitoMate founder Stephen Dobson said a in phone interview last week.

Results from a similar trial near Key West last year are awaiting publication, Dobson said.

Last year, the EPA approved permits for MosquitoMate to sell a related mosquito species, known as the Asian tiger mosquito, infected with Wolbachia as a pest control service in 20 states and Washington, D.C. Those mosquitoes also can carry viruses, but experts consider them less of a threat for triggering outbreaks than Aedes aegypti.
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How safe is it to eat snow? A Romanian university study says it depends upon how fresh it is.

A 2017 experiment showed it was safe to eat snow that was a half-day old, and safer to eat it in the colder months. But by two days old, the snow is not safe to eat, Istvan Mathe, a professor at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, told The Associated Press.

Scientists collected snow from a park and from a roundabout in Miercurea Ciuc, central Romania, in January and February and placed it in hermetically sealed sterile containers. They then tried to grow bacteria and mold in them.

The study took place in temperatures ranging from minus 1.1 degrees Celsius to minus 17.4 C (30 degrees to 0.7 degree Fahrenheit) in the city, one of the coldest in Romania.

After one day, there were five bacteria per millimeter in January, while in February that number quadrupled.

“Very fresh snow has very little bacteria,” Mathe said Thursday. “After two days, however, there are dozens of bacteria.”

He said the microorganisms increase because of impurities in the air.

Mathe got the idea for the study when he saw his children eating snow.

“I am not recommending anyone eats snow. Just saying you won’t get ill if you eat a bit,” he said.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced $17.5 million in emergency funding to fight the spread of the spotted lanternfly in Pennsylvania.

The invasive species was first spotted in District Township in 2014. It has since spread to 12 counties and threatens the state’s $18 billion grape, orchard and logging industries.

In an announcement Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue says “decisive action” was needed to stop the insect from spreading to neighboring states.

The USDA says $8.7 million will be spent on a survey and control program for the infested area, $7.5 million will go toward insecticides and herbicides and the rest will fund public education efforts.

 

Perdue says the effort will begin before the insect starts to re-emerge in the spring.

 
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Two scientists in spacesuits, stark white against the auburn terrain of desolate plains and dunes, test a geo-radar built to map Mars by dragging the flat box across the rocky sand.

 

When the geo-radar stops working, the two walk back to their all-terrain vehicles and radio colleagues at their nearby base camp for guidance. They can’t turn to their mission command, far off in the Alps, because communications from there are delayed 10 minutes.

 

But this isn’t the Red Planet — it’s the Arabian Peninsula.

 

The desolate desert in southern Oman, near the borders of Yemen and Saudi Arabia, resembles Mars so much that more than 200 scientists from 25 nations chose it as their location for the next four weeks, to field-test technology for a manned mission to Mars.

 

Public and private ventures are racing toward Mars — both former President Barack Obama and SpaceX founder Elon Musk declared humans would walk on the Red Planet in a few decades.

 

New challengers like China are joining the United States and Russia in space with an ambitious, if vague, Mars program. Aerospace corporations like BlueOrigin have published schematics of future bases, ships and suits.

The successful launch of SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket this week “puts us in a completely different realm of what we can put into deep space, what we can send to Mars,” said analog astronaut Kartik Kumar.

The next step to Mars, he says, is to tackle non-engineering problems like medical emergency responses and isolation.

 

“These are things I think can’t be underestimated.” Kumar said.

While cosmonauts and astronauts are learning valuable spacefaring skills on the International Space Station — and the U.S. is using virtual reality to train scientists — the majority of work to prepare for interplanetary expeditions is being done on Earth.

 

And where best to field-test equipment and people for the journey to Mars but on some of the planet’s most forbidding spots?

Seen from space, the Dhofar Desert is a flat, brown expanse. Few animals or plants survive in the desert expanses of the Arabian Peninsula, where temperatures can top 125 degrees Fahrenheit, or 51 degrees Celsius.

 

On the eastern edge of a seemingly endless dune is the Oman Mars Base: a giant 2.4-ton inflated habitat surrounded by shipping containers turned into labs and crew quarters.

 

There are no airlocks.

The desert’s surface resembles Mars so much, it’s hard to tell the difference, Kumar said, his spacesuit caked in dust. “But it goes deeper than that: the types of geomorphology, all the structures, the salt domes, the riverbeds, the wadis, it parallels a lot of what we see on Mars.”

 

The Omani government offered to host the Austrian Space Forum’s next Mars simulation during a meeting of the United Nation’s Committee On the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

 

Gernot Groemer, commander of the Oman Mars simulation and a veteran of 11 science missions on Earth, said the forum quickly accepted.

 

Scientists from across the world sent ideas for experiments and the mission, named AMADEE-18, quickly grew to 16 scientific experiments, such as testing a “tumbleweed” whip-fast robot rover and a new space suit called Aouda.

 

The cutting-edge spacesuit, weighing about 50 kilograms, is called a “personal spaceship” because one can breathe, eat and do hard science inside it. The suit’s visor displays maps, communications and sensor data. A blue piece of foam in front of the chin can be used to wipe your nose and mouth.

 

“No matter who is going to this grandest voyage of our society yet to come, I think a few things we learn here will be actually implemented in those missions,” Groemer said.

 

The Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik ignited a space race between Moscow and Washington to land a crew on the Moon.

 

But before the U.S. got there first, astronauts like Neil Armstrong trained suspended on pulleys to simulate one-sixth of Earth’s gravity.

Hostile environments from Arizona to Siberia were used to fine-tune capsules, landers, rovers and suits — simulating otherworldly dangers to be found beyond Earth. Space agencies call them “analogues” because they resemble extraterrestrial extremes of cold and remoteness.

 

“You can test systems on those locations and see where the breaking points are, and you can see where things start to fail and which design option you need to take in order to assure that it does not fail on Mars,” said Joao Lousada, one of the Oman simulation’s deputy field commanders who is a flight controller for the International Space Station.

Faux space stations have been built underwater off the coast of Florida, on frigid dark deserts of Antarctica, and in volcanic craters in Hawaii, according to “Packing For Mars,” a favorite book among many Mars scientists, written by Mary Roach.

 

“Terrestrial analogs are a tool in the toolkit of space exploration, but they are not a panacea,” said Scott Hubbard, known as “Mars Czar” back when he lead the U.S. space agency’s Mars program. Some simulations have helped developed cameras, rovers, suits and closed-loop life-support systems, he said.

 

NASA used the Mojave Desert to test rovers destined for the Red Planet but they also discovered much about how humans can adapt.

 

“Human’s adaptability in an unstructured environment is still far, far better than any robot we can send to space,” Hubbard said, adding that people, not just robots, are the key to exploring Mars.

 

The European Space Agency’s list of “planetary analogues” includes projects in Chile, Peru, South Africa, Namibia, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Canada, Antarctica, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, Norway, Iceland, and nine U.S. states. Next Thursday, Israeli scientists are to run a shorter simulation in a nature preserve called D Mars.

 

However, there remain so many unknowns that simulations “are not in any way a replacement for being there,” Hubbard said.

 

The Oman team’s optimism is unflinching.

 

“The first person to walk on Mars has in fact already been born, and might be going to elementary school now in Oman, or back in Europe, in the U.S. or China,” Lousada said.

 
…

In the years after World War II, the United States’ birth rate skyrocketed. This generation of Americans became known as baby boomers. They’re a huge population segment in the U.S., and as they age, they are changing the health care industry. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The private space company SpaceX has launched its largest rocket yet Tuesday, sending a cherry red Tesla Roadster into an elliptical Earth-Mars orbit.

The Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the same launch pad from which NASA’s Apollo 11 lifted off in 1969 on the first mission that landed astronauts on the moon.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told reporters before the launch Tuesday he “would consider it a win if it just clears the pad and doesn’t blow the pad to smithereens.”

The rocket is equipped with three boosters and 27 engines designed to provide more than 2 million kilograms of thrust. If successful, it will be the most powerful rocket in use today, and the most powerful used since NASA’s Saturn 5 rockets last carried astronauts to the moon 45 years ago.

The Falcon Heavy was first designed to send humans to the moon or Mars, but Musk said Monday it is now being considered as a carrier of equipment and supplies to deep space destinations.

​While such test rockets usually use items like steel or concrete slabs as payload, but the Tesla Roadster made by another company owned by Musk, carried a mannequin “Starman” sitting at the wheel and the radio set to play David Bowie’s classic hit Space Oddity on a loop.

In a tweet last month, Musk said he loves the thought of a car driving -apparently endlessly through space and, perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future.
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Somewhere in Boise, the 500-year-old skeletons of two Native Americans found last year when a badger apparently unearthed them from their resting place in Idaho’s high desert sagebrush steppe are being stored as three tribes seek to claim them as their own and anthropologists who study Native Americans lament what they say is a lost research opportunity.

U.S. officials won’t say where the bones of the young adult and a child are being kept as they assess claims for them made to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management by the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes in eastern Idaho, Shoshone-Paiute Tribes in southern Idaho and northern Nevada and the Nez Perce Tribe in northern Idaho.

The federal agency considers its negotiations with the tribes about the bones sensitive government-to-government communications, and only confirmed the discussions after The Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

The skeletons were found in such good condition last April that Idaho authorities initially treated the southwestern Snake River Plain site as a possible crime scene. Authorities said they were either dealing with a double homicide that had happened in recent decades, bones from pioneers who died in the 19th century while traveling along the nearby Oregon Trail or the remains of Native Americans from that era or earlier.

But carbon dating tests from a lab in Florida found the young adult and the child or teen lived sometime during the 1400s to 1600s. Elmore County investigators were so surprised that they sent bone samples to be checked at another lab in Arizona, which returned similar results.

The Bureau of Land Management is using a process in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to return the skeletons. A decision is possible this spring, said agency spokesman Michael Williamson.

“We’re giving it the time it needs and looking forward to having a decision made where all parties are satisfied,” he said.

For the tribes, it’s a matter of recovering two of their own who were among the nomadic Native Americans who experts say spent winters near Snake River Canyon and summers at higher elevation prairies — eating native plants and hunting mostly deer and rabbits but occasionally elk and bison.

“We’ve always pointed out that we’ve been here for thousands of years,” Shoshone-Paiute Tribes Chairman Ted Howard said after the age of the bones was disclosed. “For our tribe and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, those are the remains of our people, our ancestors.”

Kayeloni Scott, communications director for the Nez Perce Tribe, said her tribe has historically been present in the area where the skeletons were found.

“That’s why we’re speaking on behalf of the bones,” she said in a voicemail. “Also, the primary reason was just to make sure someone was taking care of them, and they weren’t just being left alone.”

The land management bureau confirmed that the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes is the third with a claim for the bones. Tribe spokeswoman Randy’L Teton did not return a telephone message seeking comment.

The tribes don’t let researchers conduct tests on remains of ancestors and anthropologists say the unique nature of the find means that experts are losing an opportunity to learn more about how Native Americans lived in a place where the first documented visit by outsiders was in 1805.

The skeletons were discovered by an Idaho Department of Fish and Game worker checking ground squirrel hunters’ licenses about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the small city of Mountain Home. A badger digging into the ground squirrels’ burrows apparently exposed some of them.

Law enforcement authorities who treated the find as a crime scene reported finding no prehistoric items with the bones — such as stone tools or beads.

But anthropologists say evidence of how the two had lived might have been found by trained experts if the area had also been treated from the onset as a possible anthropological site. There are fewer than a dozen known Native American burial sites on the Snake River Plain, and this site was unique because none of the other sites have had the remains of more than one person.

“If there had been any indication at the outset that this was a prehistoric internment, a much more systematic process would have been conducted,” said Mark Plew, an anthropology professor at Boise State University. “These inadvertent discoveries often go into a black hole.”

Law enforcement officials after finding out the approximate age of the bones had no more testing conducted because it is costly and can involve destruction of bone material.

But Plew said a more thorough examination of the bones with isotope analysis and by anthropologists could reveal the gender of the two, what they ate, whether they had survived periods of famine and possibly their cause or causes of death.

“The opportunities are rare,” he said. “As these go away, the opportunity to do that kind of research is lost.”

For the tribes, trying to recover the remains “is a very emotional process,” said Pei-Lin Yu, a Boise State anthropology assistant professor who previously worked as a federal government official on projects to return Native American bones to tribes. The age of the bones doesn’t matter to them, she said.

“Time doesn’t actually figure into their feelings of association and responsibility as stewards of their ancestors,” Yu said.
…

The maker of the Taser says the electroshock weapon is the safest tool on a police officer’s belt – with a few caveats.

In pages of warnings, Axon Enterprise Inc advises police to beware that some people are at higher risk of death or serious injury from the weapons. Pregnant women. Young children. Old people. Frail people. People with heart conditions. People on drugs or alcohol. The list goes on.

Taken together, the tally of people particularly susceptible to harm from a Taser’s powerful shock covers nearly a third of the U.S. population, a Reuters analysis of demographic and health data found. Yet police have repeatedly used Tasers on people who fall into the very groups the company warns about.

Dailene Rosario was one of them. Last winter, a New York City police officer fired his Taser’s electrified barbs into the rib cage of Rosario, 17, as she screamed she was pregnant. Thanks to a viral video taken by a bystander, the world watched as Rosario, 14 weeks into her term, crumpled to the ground, wailing.

What happened afterward has not been told.

Rosario’s daughter Raileey survived. But the baby is not faring well. In September, Rosario said, the two-month-old was rushed to the hospital, struggling to breathe after developing tremors and coughing fits. Raileey spent nearly all of November at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx, undergoing tests for a possible seizure disorder.

“Now it happens so frequently,” Rosario said of the tremors. “We can only just monitor her and try to keep her relaxed.”

Her lawyer, Scott Rynecki, said he plans to make the baby’s health a central issue in a $5 million legal claim she has filed against the New York Police Department. The NYPD said the incident remains under investigation and declined to comment further.

There’s no telling how often police use Tasers on pregnant women and the other “higher-risk populations” the manufacturer warns about: The stun guns are unregulated as police weapons, and there is no national tracking of their use.

Yet people in those groups account for more than half of the 1,028 cases identified by Reuters in which people died after being shocked by Tasers, often along with other force. Such people, Axon’s warnings say, should be targeted “only if the situation justifies an increased risk” of injury or death.

Particularly vexing for police is the difficulty of determining which potential Taser targets belong to population cohorts deemed to be at increased risk.

Some fatalities examined by Reuters involved people who obviously fell into a higher-risk category. Four, for instance, involved people over 75.

Yet many others involved vulnerabilities difficult to spot, particularly in the chaos of confrontation. Some 245 had a heart condition. And 643 people were drunk or high on drugs – a state often, but not always, easy to identify.

“People don’t walk around with signs” listing their medical conditions, said James Ginger, a former Evansville, Indiana, policeman now working as a consultant and court-appointed monitor of police compliance with judicial orders. The Taser is an important police tool, Ginger said. But if officers avoided anyone who potentially has a higher-risk condition, “you couldn’t use it.”

Axon calls Tasers the “safest force option available to law enforcement.”

The company told Reuters its warnings and training “do not identify any population group as ‘high risk,’ rather, they recognize that certain people may be at increased risk during encounters requiring force, regardless of the force option chosen.”

But the warnings issued to police by Axon, formerly known as Taser International Inc, note explicitly that “some individuals may be particularly susceptible to the effects” of its weapons. They identify an array of “higher-risk populations” and other vulnerable groups.

Law enforcement began embracing Tasers in the early 2000s. The manufacturer began listing higher-risk populations in 2009, when it also warned of possible cardiac effects from shocks to the chest. The list grew in the next few years.

Many in the police community say Tasers nevertheless offer a valuable option for controlling combative subjects without resorting to firearms. “There have been instances where we have saved a person’s life by using this piece of equipment,” said Virginia Beach Police Chief James Cervera. But as warnings on the weapons’ risks have evolved, he added, the department has “tightened up” on their use.

Axon’s warnings and guidelines are not binding on police departments, and while more than 90 percent of police agencies deploy Tasers, there are no universal standards for usage.

The uncertainty raises a challenge, some in law enforcement say. If large swaths of people are potentially at higher risk of death or serious injury from a Taser, how can police ever be sure the weapons are safe to use?

Nearly 80 percent of the population could fit into one of the higher risk groups identified by Taser’s maker, Reuters’ analysis shows. For example, any woman of childbearing age – about 20 percent of the population – could be pregnant. Any adult male could have impaired heart function, another third of the populace.

Police often have mere seconds to weigh such factors, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank that advises police on policy issues, including use-of-force. As a result, he said, “the Taser may be the most complicated weapon that a police officer wears today.”

A big heart

Michael Mears, 39, was found on the floor in a hallway at his Los Angeles apartment complex on Christmas Eve 2014, bloodied and crying: “Help me. Help me.”

The police called to help the disabled veteran shocked him repeatedly with a Taser.

Mears had a vulnerability the officers couldn’t see: an enlarged heart.

In 2009, the manufacturer introduced the possibility that Taser shocks could affect the heart. By Christmas 2014, it had warned that “serious complications could also arise in those with impaired heart function.”

That didn’t protect Mears, nor many others like him. Of the 750 Taser-involved deaths in which Reuters obtained autopsy information, 245 involved people with pre-existing heart problems. And of the 159 cases in which coroners ruled the Taser shock caused or contributed to the death, 68, or 43 percent, involved cardiac conditions.

Mears grew up in Florida and joined the Marines after high school. At 19, he helped evacuate United Nations troops from Somalia in 1995.

He injured his back in a shipboard fall two years later, said his mother, Joanna Wysocki. Surgery to repair his spine instead left him unable to walk. After years of rehabilitation, he had begun to walk again. But he often lost feeling in his weakened legs and needed a walker or wheelchair.

Wysocki said she talked to her son by phone the morning of his death, and he was excited about having friends over for Christmas Eve dinner. But that afternoon, he began acting strangely, court records show.

He rolled a candlestick across the floor as if he were throwing a grenade, and then ran out of the apartment. A neighbor peeked through a door and saw him lying on the floor, crying for help, she told detectives. Mears was covered in blood from rolling in shards of glass from a broken fire extinguisher case.

“He has PTSD,” a friend told the paramedics who arrived. Several LAPD officers followed. The first two hit Mears with pepper spray and batons because, the autopsy report said, he appeared combative.

The Taser’s log shows Mears was shocked six times totaling 53 seconds over three minutes. The longest: 32 seconds. Taser guidelines advise officers to avoid “repeated, prolonged or continuous” shocks, noting that safety testing typically involved no more than 15 seconds of exposure.

The officer who stunned Mears testified he believed he was applying 5-second shocks and had no idea his Taser delivered electricity for as long as he held the trigger. The LAPD declined to discuss the case or make the officer available for comment.

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner ruled Mears’ death a homicide, concluding that cocaine and police efforts to restrain him, including the Taser shocks, were too much for his heart.

His parents sued the city. Jurors blamed the city for being “deliberately indifferent” to officer training and awarded them $5.5 million.

Mears died Christmas morning, while his mother was flying from Florida. “I’ll never get to say goodbye,” she said.

Nursing home tragedy

Sometimes, the vulnerabilities are more obvious.

There was no mistaking Stanley Downen was elderly when Columbia Falls police answered a call from the Montana Veterans’ Home for help with a wandering resident in June 2012. Downen, 77 with advanced Alzheimer’s, was just outside the gate, circled by several staffers urging him to come back inside.

A retired ironworker and Navy vet, Downen had scooped up landscaping rocks, one as big as a softball, and was threatening to throw them at anyone who came near. Officers Mike Johnson and Gary Stanberry approached, asking him to put down the rocks.

Downen cursed at the officers and said he wanted to go home.

They tried again; same response.

Johnson drew his Taser and fired. He later testified that Downen had reared back as if to throw one of the rocks. “I believed that I was going to be physically harmed.”

Paralyzed by the Taser’s electrified darts, Downen’s body seized and he fell forward, his head smacking the pavement. Handcuffed, he continued cursing and struggling.

Downen was taken to a nearby hospital, but his dementia worsened. He died there three weeks later.

Axon has warned since 2008 about using its weapons on “elderly” people and advises that doing so “could increase the risk of death or serious injury.” A model Taser policy from the Police Executive Research Forum includes similar warnings.

But neither designates an age threshold for “elderly,” and dozens of police department policies reviewed by Reuters specify no age limit.

Reuters identified 13 cases in which people 65 and older – the eligibility age for Medicare – died after being stunned by police with Tasers. All but two occurred well after the manufacturer’s first warnings.

By the time Columbia Falls police confronted Stanley Downen in 2012, the warnings had been in place for years. Officer Johnson later testified he never saw them.

In depositions and court records from a lawsuit filed by Tamara Downen, Stanley’s granddaughter, Johnson and the police department acknowledged he had not been trained or certified on Taser use since 2006 – two years before the manufacturer first warned against shocking the elderly. Officers are supposed to be re-trained and certified on the weapons annually, according to guidelines from the manufacturer and independent law enforcement groups.

The department also had no formal policy on Taser use, court records show, and its procedures manual never mentioned the weapon.

Tamara Downen sued the state-run nursing home and city police, alleging unsafe practices and improper Taser use in her grandfather’s death. “It just wasn’t right, what he went through,” she said. The city settled for $150,000; the state for $20,000.

Columbia Falls later hired a new police chief, Clint Peters. Citing the litigation, he declined to comment on the case or make the officers available for interviews. But he said the force now has a Taser policy based on guidelines from national law enforcement groups.

‘Totally intoxicated’

Axon has warned since 2005 that people agitated or intoxicated by drugs may face higher risks of medical consequences from Tasers’ electrical current. Data collected by Reuters underline that risk: More than 60 percent of 1,028 people who died in police confrontations involving Tasers were either drunk or on drugs.

Some who died were unmistakably intoxicated – like Doug Wiggington.

In Greenfield, Indiana, last May 12, Wiggington stumbled out of the local Elks Lodge just after 6 p.m., falling as he walked near a two-lane highway. James Fornoff, 74, called police. “He had no clue what he was doing,” Fornoff said.

When the first officer arrived at 6:27 p.m., Wiggington, 48, was lying in the grass, wiggling his feet, police dash-cam videos showed. “What have you taken?” Officer Dillon Silver asked.

As officer Rodney Vawter joined him, Silver rolled Wiggington onto his side, patting him down. Silver began to pull him onto his back but Wiggington stiffened. Silver grabbed his arm, saying, “Do not tense up on me.” Wiggington, 6 feet and 230 pounds, rolled onto his stomach.

“Tase him,” said Silver. Vawter pulled the trigger and the barbs struck Wiggington’s back. He writhed and grunted. “I’m going to do it again if you don’t listen!” Vawter said. The struggle continued. Vawter fired again.

When the officers turned him over, Wiggington was unconscious. They gave him two shots of Narcan, an overdose antidote for opioids, and started CPR. When the ambulance arrived, Wiggington had no pulse. Thirty minutes later, he was pronounced dead.

The autopsy said Wiggington died from “acute cocaine and methamphetamine intoxication.” The Taser was listed first among contributing factors.

“We have a lot of unanswered questions,” said Wiggington’s daughter, Brittany, 30, who has filed legal notice of her intent to sue the department.

By the time Wiggington was shocked, the company’s training materials had noted explicitly for years that Tasers cause “physiologic and/or metabolic effects that may increase the risk of death or serious injury” – and drug users “may be particularly susceptible.”

None of that language appeared in the Greenfield Police Department’s Taser policy at the time. The officer who shocked Wigginton, Vawter, hadn’t been re-certified on the Taser in more than three years.

Greenfield Police Chief Jeff Rasche said the two officers did not violate department policy and were cleared by an internal investigation and a separate state probe. Axon, he added, does not explicitly bar using the weapon on people under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but instead warns of the risks.

Rasche, chief since last January, said he had ordered his 42 officers to undergo a six-hour Taser re-certification class before the death. At the time of the incident, nine had completed it. Vawter wasn’t among them.

Since the death, Rasche has ordered all officers to undergo “crisis intervention training,” emphasizing de-escalation strategies in lieu of using force such as Tasers.

“We can’t just do the same thing we’ve been doing forever because it’s not working,” the chief said. “People are unfortunately dying and officers are having to use lethal force when they, you know, probably shouldn’t be.”

The pregnancy problem

At any given time, 6 percent of women of childbearing age are pregnant. But, in the early stages, the signs of pregnancy are rarely obvious.

Since 2003, Axon has warned that pregnant women are at particular risk of injury from falls after being shocked. Still, the company suggested then that the weapons’ electrical charge posed no other special risks to women or fetuses. In 2004, it cited lab tests in which an electric charge was delivered to the abdomens of pregnant pigs with “no adverse effect on fetuses.”

In 2009, Axon identified pregnant women as a “higher risk population.” By 2011, news reports described nearly a dozen women who had suffered miscarriages or other pregnancy complications after stun-gun shocks.

Definitively measuring the risks of shocking a pregnant woman is impossible: There has never been a controlled study of the Taser’s effects on pregnant women. Such tests, by their nature, are too risky to undertake.

Yet since electricity is a known cardiac hazard, doctors theorize it poses some risk.

“There may be an instantaneous fetal effect when the Taser discharges, but you may not know about that until when he is a small child,” said Michael Cackovic, an obstetrician who heads the maternal cardiac disease program at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

Cackovic said risks from a Taser shock include disrupting the flow of oxygen from the mother, potential fatal cardiac arrhythmia, damage affecting the brain and other problems that may emerge years after birth.

No government authorities track miscarriages or other problems linked to pregnant women stunned by Tasers. A Reuters review of court filings and news articles found 19 incidents of women stunned while pregnant, at least 11 of which were followed by a miscarriage, since 2001.

One such case played out on a hot August morning in Lima, Ohio, in 2016. Brittany Osberry, 24, stumbled into a crime scene as she pulled into her friend’s driveway to pick up her nieces and nephews. Police were monitoring the home because they mistakenly thought a suspect in a shooting may be inside. Within seconds, three officers swarmed her car.

“You need to leave!” officer Mark Frysinger shouted, gun drawn, the altercation captured on a neighbor’s cellphone. “This is a crime scene.”

When she asked why, Frysinger accused her of disorderly conduct and told her to leave again. She protested: She wanted first to pick up the children. The officers moved in. “Show me your hands,” Frysinger yelled, pulling her from the car. Three officers pushed her up against the door.

“You all better know I’m pregnant,” she shouted. “You all better know that.”

One officer put her in a choke-hold and lifted the 104-pound woman back so high the tips of her toes touched the driveway. Another officer, Zane Slusher, drove a Taser into her abdomen. “Oh my God!” she screamed.

In an incident report, police said Osberry was combative and struck an officer – assertions a federal judge said were “not conclusively” borne out by the video. Osberry was arrested for obstructing official business, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and assault. The charges were later dismissed. No official reason was given.

Within hours, she said, she felt stomach cramps. A month later, ultrasounds couldn’t detect the baby’s heartbeat. Other tests found a beating heart, but her doctors identified another problem: Osberry was suffering from preeclampsia, a dangerous spike in blood pressure during pregnancy that can interfere with blood flow to the placenta and fetus.

She underwent tests twice a week. The fetus wasn’t gaining weight.

Then, that New Year’s Eve, with Osberry 30 weeks pregnant, her doctor said the baby was coming. Contractions began and the baby’s heartbeat plunged, she said. On the way to the hospital, she wept, “not knowing if I would lose him.”

Kannon was born at 2 pounds, 2 ounces and stayed at the hospital nearly two months. Today, he’s generally healthy but struggles to use his left leg; doctors aren’t sure if he’ll face long-term developmental problems.

In February, Osberry filed suit against Lima Police and the officers involved. The department said it had “probable cause” to arrest her and cited “qualified immunity,” a concept providing legal protection to officers unless police violate “clearly established’’ legal principles.

In November, a federal judge rejected the department’s attempt to have the case dismissed. Lima Police have appealed the ruling.

“Given the factual allegations, I am hard-pressed to imagine a scenario less deserving of qualified immunity,” wrote U.S. District Judge James Carr. A “reasonable officer,” he said, should know not to use a Taser on a “non-resisting pregnant woman.”

 
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The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he is establishing what he calls a health reserve army to tackle emergencies and newly emerging diseases.

Ghebreyesus said he has been spending the past seven months working on a strategic plan to reform and improve the World Health Organization. He said a major focus of this plan is on implementing swifter, more effective emergency response measures.

Tedros noted this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu, which killed up to 100 million people, far more than were killed during World War I. He said the world remains extremely vulnerable to potential pandemics and newly emerging diseases, and it must be prepared to respond to them quickly.

He told VOA it is crucial to work with countries on prevention in tackling these looming threats.

“If anything happens, no country can do it alone,” he said. “So, we need to have a health reserve force, or, if you like, a health reserve army in different locations so countries who are better off can help other countries.”

What he envisions, he said, is the commitment of 50 countries that will have thousands of trained health workers on hand, ready to respond rapidly to medical emergencies wherever they occur. He said he expects countries to cover their own expenses and help those that are unable to do so.

Tedros, a former Ethiopian health minister and the first African to head the WHO, took office on July 1. Back in October, he appointed then-Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe as a WHO goodwill ambassador — a move that sparked an international outcry and nearly derailed his nascent administration. Mugabe had faced U.S. sanctions over his government’s human rights abuses. The appointment was quickly rescinded.

The WHO chief said the appointment was made in good faith, but he acknowledged the impact it had on the organization and voiced regret. He added it is time to put the controversy behind him, however, and get on with the urgent health issues at hand.
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The world’s first space sports car is cruising toward the asteroid belt, well beyond Mars.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk confirmed the new, more distant route for his rocketing Tesla Roadster, which was launched aboard the company’s Falcon Heavy from Florida.

The Heavy became the most powerful rocket flying today with Tuesday’s inaugural test flight.

Musk says the final firing of the upper stage put his red convertible into a solar orbit that stretches all the way to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The original plan had the car traveling no farther than Mars.

In the driver seat of the Tesla is a space-suited mannequin nicknamed “Starman.” Musk doesn’t plan to fly people on the Heavy, but is working on an even bigger rocket for deep-space crews.
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