YCLOAK

Renewed action and boosted funding to fight malaria could prevent 350 million cases of the disease in the next five years and save 650,000 lives across commonwealth countries, health experts said Wednesday.

Seeking to reignite efforts to wipe out the deadly mosquito-borne disease, philanthropists, business leaders and ministers from donor and malaria-affected countries pledged 2.7 billion pounds ($3.8 billion) to drive research and innovation and improve access to malaria prevention and treatments.

Spearheaded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, the leaders warned against complacency in fighting malaria — a disease that kills around half a million people, mainly babies and young children, each year.

While enormous progress has been made over the past 20 years in reducing malaria cases and deaths, in 2016, for the first time in a decade, the number of malaria cases was on the rise and in some areas there was a resurgence, according to the World Health Organization.

The disease’s stubbornness is partly due to the fact that the mosquito that transmits the disease and the parasite that causes it have developed resistance to the sprays and drugs used to fight them, health experts say. It is also partly due to stagnant global funding for fighting malaria since 2010. Climate change and conflict can also exacerbate malaria outbreaks.

“History has shown that with malaria there is no standing still — we move forward or risk resurgence,” Gates said in a statement ahead of a “Malaria Summit” in London on Wednesday.

​$1 billion extra pledged

His multibillion-dollar philanthropic fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is co-convening the summit, pledged an extra $1 billion through to 2023 to fund malaria research and development to try to end malaria for good.

“It’s a disease that is preventable, treatable and ultimately beatable, but progress against malaria is not inevitable,” Gates said. “We hope today marks a turning point.”

The malaria summit was designed to coincide with a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London this week. The 53 Commonwealth countries, mostly former British colonies, are disproportionately affected by malaria — accounting for more than half of all global cases and deaths, although they are home to just a third of the world’s population.

Among new funding and research commitments announced at the summit, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said $2 billion would be invested in 46 countries affected by malaria between 2018 and 2020.

Pharmaceutical firms GSK and Novartis also increased investment into malaria research and development — of 175 million pounds ($250 million) and $100 million, respectively. And five agrichemical companies launched a joint initiative to speed up development of new ways to control mosquitoes.
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The U.S. government on Tuesday proposed tightening rules governing the amount of prescription opioid painkillers that drugmakers can manufacture in a given year, in hopes of reining in the deadly opioid epidemic.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Drug Enforcement Administration’s proposed changes to regulations covering addictive-drug manufacturing quotas. The plan could sharply reduce the annual production of painkillers.

“Under this proposed new rule, if DEA believes that a company’s opioids are being diverted for misuse, then they will reduce the amount of opioids that company can make,” Sessions said in prepared remarks.

The plan could affect opioid makers such as Purdue Pharma LP, Johnson & Johnson, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Mallinckrodt, as well as companies that distribute the drugs.

Hours before the announcement, federal, state and local law enforcement officials in West Virginia announced a crackdown on an opioid trafficking ring in Huntington, known as “ground zero” for the epidemic.

West Virginia sued the DEA in December over drug quota rules, arguing the agency’s policy wrongfully sets manufacturing quotas based on amounts of pills drugmakers expect to sell, not legitimate medical needs.

That approach, the state argued, has contributed to the growing addiction problem and the illegal diversion of pain medication.

“We must end senseless death in West Virginia,” said the state’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey. West Virginia is among the states that have suffered most from the crisis.

​National emergency declared

The Trump administration has made combating the opioid epidemic a top priority.

Last year, Trump declared it a national emergency, in a move to shore up more resources to expand access to treatment and give the government more flexibility in waiving rules and restrictions to expedite action.

Sessions has created an opioid task force and deployed prosecutors to hard-hit areas of the country with a mandate to bring more cases against traffickers.

While some enforcement efforts have focused on illicit traders and doctors who overprescribe, the government has also increasingly been taking aim at the drug companies themselves.

Recently, it sought permission from a federal court to participate in settlement negotiations aimed at resolving lawsuits by state and local governments against opioid manufacturers and distributors.

The DEA proposal calls for quotas to be set after considering the potential for diversion of the drugs into illicit channels, and weighing input from states and other federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Sessions said the DEA has also entered into a prescription drug information-sharing arrangement with 48 state attorneys general to help them sniff out criminals peddling dangerous painkillers.

According to the CDC, 42,000 people died nationwide from opioid overdoses in 2016, the last year with publicly available data.
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Wildlife managers in the American Southwest say a once-rare bat important to the pollination of plants used to produce tequila has made a comeback and is being removed from the U.S. endangered species list.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s announcement Tuesday made the lesser long-nosed bat, which ranges from Mexico to southern Arizona and New Mexico, the first bat ever removed from the nation’s list of threatened and endangered species.

The decision comes a year after first being proposed and three years after Mexico delisted the animal, which depends on the nectar of agaves, cactuses and other flowering plants.

It has taken 30 years of conservation efforts by biologists and volunteers in both countries as well as tequila producers and agave growers in Mexico to rebuild a healthy population.

There were once thought to be fewer than 1,000 lesser long-nosed bats in 14 known roosts throughout the region. Now, there are about 200,000 of the nectar-feeding animals and dozens of roost sites.

With the population trending upward, regional officials with the Fish and Wildlife Service say the science shows threats to the bat have been eliminated or reduced to the point where they can consider the species recovered.

In Mexico, tequila producers who rely on agaves are integrating more harvest and cultivation practices in recognition of the bats being key pollinators. Some are marketing “bat-friendly tequila.”

In southern Arizona, residents for a decade have monitored bats’ nighttime use of hummingbird feeders. It provided biologists with a clearer understanding of migration timing and allowed for the opportunity to capture bats and affix radio transmitters that aided in finding roost sites.

Scientists and state wildlife managers describe the delisting as a conservation success that resulted from decades of work.

“The story of the lesser long-nosed bat shows that conservation and science can work together to provide species the chance to recover and persist,” Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, said in a statement.

To ensure the bats continue to thrive, the Fish and Wildlife Service is preparing a monitoring plan that will focus on roosting sites and availability of forage.

Federal land managers in New Mexico and Arizona, including at the U.S. Army’s Fort Huachuca, already are including forage plants such as agaves, saguaros and other cactuses in their resource management plans to help the species.

Limiting human access to caves with roost sites and abandoned mines in the U.S. also has benefited bat populations.

Recovery efforts have included education aimed at changing attitudes about bats and improving identification of different species. Historically, the lesser long-nosed bat was a victim of campaigns to control vampire bats over rabies concerns and their effects on livestock.

In reviewing the species, biologists considered the potential effects that climate change may have on the “nectar trail” that the bats follow as they migrate. They say the bat is flexible and adaptive enough to remain viable under changing conditions.
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In a medical first, a French surgeon says he has performed a second face transplant on the same patient — who is now doing well and even spent a recent weekend in Brittany.

Dr. Laurent Lantieri of the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris first transplanted a new face onto Jerome Hamon in 2010, when Hamon was in his mid-30s. But after getting ill in 2015, Hamon was given drugs that interfered with the anti-rejection medicines he was taking for his face transplant.

Last November, the tissue in his transplanted face began to die, leading Lantieri to remove it.

That left Hamon without a face, a condition that Lantieri described as “the walking dead.” Hamon had no eyelids, no ears, no skin and could not speak or eat. He had limited hearing and could express himself only by turning his head slightly, in addition to writing a little.

“If you have no skin, you have infections,” Lantieri told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “We were very concerned about the possibility of a new rejection.”

In January, when a second face donor for Hamon became available, Lantieri and his team performed a second face transplant. But before undergoing the second transplant, doctors had to replace all of the blood in Hamon’s body in a monthlong procedure to eliminate some potentially worrisome antibodies from previous treatments.

“For a man who went through all this, which is like going through a nuclear war, he’s doing fine,” Lantieri said. He added that Hamon is now being monitored like any other face transplant patient.

Hamon’s first face was donated by a 60-year-old. With his second transplanted face, Hamon said he managed to drop a few decades.

“I’m 43. The donor was 22. So I’ve become 20 years younger,” Hamon joked on French television Tuesday.

‘Hope’ for other patients

Other doctors applauded the French team’s efforts and said the techniques could be used to help critically ill patients with few options.

“The fact that Professor Lantieri was able to save this patient gives us hope that other patients can have a backup surgery if necessary,” said Dr. Frank Papay of the Cleveland Clinic. He said the techniques being developed by Lantieri and others could help doctors achieve what he called “the holy grail” of transplant medicine: How to allow patients to tolerate tissue transplants from others.

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac of Harvard University, who has done face transplants in the U.S., said similar procedures would ultimately become more common, with rising numbers of patients.

“The more we see what’s happening with [face transplant] patients, the more we have to accept that chronic rejection is a reality,” Pomahac said. “Face transplants will become essentially non-functional, distorted and that may be a good time to consider re-transplanting.”

He said it’s still unknown how long face transplants might last, but guessed they might be similar to kidneys, which generally last about 10 to 15 years.

“Maybe some patients will get lucky and their faces will last longer. But it will probably be more common that some will have to be replaced,” he said, noting there are still many unknowns about when chronic rejection might occur.

Lantieri said he and his team would soon publish their findings in a medical journal and that he hoped cases like Hamon would remain the exception.

“The other patients I’m following, some have had some alteration of their transplant over time, but they are doing fine,” he said. “I hope not to do any future transplants like this.”
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Fragments of a meteorite that fell to Earth about a decade ago provide compelling evidence of a lost planet that once roamed our solar system, according to a study published Tuesday.

Researchers from Switzerland, France and Germany examined diamonds found inside the Almahata Sitta meteorite and concluded they were most likely formed by a proto-planet at least 4.55 billion years ago.

The diamonds in the meteorite, which crashed in Sudan’s Nubian Desert in October 2008, have tiny crystals inside them that would have required great pressure to form, said one of the study’s co-authors, Philippe Gillet.

“We demonstrate that these large diamonds cannot be the result of a shock but rather of growth that has taken place within a planet,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Switzerland.

Gillet, a planetary scientist at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, said researchers calculated a pressure of 200,000 bar (2.9 million psi) would be needed to form such diamonds, suggesting the mystery planet was as least as big as Mercury, possibly even Mars.

Scientists have long theorized that the early solar system once contained many more planets — some of which were likely little more than a mass of molten magma. One of these embryo planets — dubbed Theia — is believed to have slammed into a young Earth, ejecting a large amount of debris that later formed the moon.

“What we’re claiming here,” said Gillet, “is that we have in our hands a remnant of this first generation of planets that are missing today because they were destroyed or incorporated in a bigger planet.”

Addi Bischoff, a meteorite expert at the University of Muenster, Germany, said the methods used for the study were sound and the conclusion was plausible. But further evidence of sustained high pressure would be expected to be found in the minerals surrounding the diamonds, he said.

Bischoff wasn’t involved in the study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications.

This story has been corrected to show that the meteorite fragments fell to Earth about a decade ago, not more than a decade ago.
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More than 100 parts for U.S. space agency NASA’s deep-space capsule Orion will be made by 3-D printers, using technology that experts say will eventually become key to efforts to send humans to Mars.

U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin, 3-D printing specialist Stratasys, and engineering firm PADT have developed the parts using new materials that can withstand the extreme temperatures and chemical exposure of deep-space missions, Stratasys said Tuesday.

“In space, for instance, materials will build up a charge. If that was to shock the electronics on a space craft, there could be significant damage,” Scott Sevcik, Vice President Manufacturing Solutions at Stratasys told Reuters.

3-D printing, or additive manufacturing, has been used for making prototypes across a range of industries for many years, but is being increasingly eyed for scale production.

The technology can help make light-weight parts made of plastics more quickly and cheaply than traditional assembly lines that require major investments into equipment.

“But even more significant is that we have more freedom with the design … parts can look more organic, more skeletal,” Sevcik said.

Stratasys’ partner Lockheed Martin said the use of 3-D printing on the Orion project would also pay off at other parts of its business.

“We look to apply benefits across our programs — missile defense, satellites, planetary probes, especially as we create more and more common products,” said Brian Kaplun, additive manufacturing manager at Lockheed Martin Space.

Orion is part of NASA’s follow-up program to the now-retired space shuttles that will allow astronauts to travel beyond the International Space Station, which flies about 260 miles (420 km) above Earth.

The agency’s European counterpart, ESA, has suggested that moon rock and Mars dust could be used to 3-D print structures and tools, which could significantly reduce the cost of future space missions because less material would need to be brought along from Earth.
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U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a bill on Tuesday that would fine opioid drug manufacturers for deceptive marketing and implement the harshest penalties yet on drugmakers found responsible for contributing to the drug epidemic.

Sanders, an independent who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, said the bill aimed to hold opioid manufacturers accountable for their role in the epidemic and force them to help pay for the crisis, which the White House

Council of Economic Advisers has estimated cost more than $500 billion in 2015.

The legislation, called the Opioid Crisis Accountability Act of 2018, would ban marketing that falsely suggests an opioid does not have addictive qualities or risks and would fine companies that are found liable for contributing to the epidemic $7.8 billion.

Companies that violate the marketing provision would be fined 25 percent of the profits from their opioid products.

The legislation would also create criminal liability for top executives of pharmaceutical companies that are found to have contributed to the epidemic.

“At a time when local, state and federal government are spending many billions of dollars a year, those people will be held accountable and asked to contribute to help us address the crisis,” Sanders said in an interview. “It shouldn’t just be the taxpayer that has to pay for the damage that they did.”

The bill does not yet have any co-sponsors, and with Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, it is unlikely to move forward anytime soon.

More than 63,600 people died because of drug overdoses in 2016, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Congress has held several hearings on the opioid crisis in recent months and recently appropriated billions of dollars to address the epidemic. It is considering dozens of bills to address the crisis, but the legislation so far has been fairly limited in scope, including bills that address government policies and authorize the creation of grant programs.

Several states, including Ohio and Kentucky —  among the hardest hit by drug addiction — have filed lawsuits against opioid manufacturers for fueling the epidemic.

“The real legal struggles have taken place at the state level,” Sanders said. “It seems to me that it’s appropriate to take that fight… here to the federal government.”

 
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The European Union’s top court has ruled that Poland violated environmental laws with its massive logging of trees in one of Europe’s last pristine forests.

The ruling Tuesday by the European Court of Justice said that, in increasing logging in the Bialowieza Forest, Poland failed to fulfil its obligations to protect natural sites of special importance.

Poland had argued that felling the trees was necessary to fight the spread of bark beetle infestation.

Environmentalists say the large-scale felling of trees in Bialowieza was destroying rare animal habitats and plants, in violation of regulations. They held protests and brought the case before the court last year.

Poland has since replaced its environment minister and stopped the logging. Warsaw has said it will respect the EU court’s ruling. 

 
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Global warming is screwing up nature’s intricately timed dinner hour, often making hungry critters and those on the menu show up at much different times, a new study shows.

Timing is everything in nature. Bees have to be around and flowers have to bloom at the same time for pollination to work, and hawks need to migrate at the same time as their prey. In many cases, global warming is interfering with that timing, scientists said.

A first-of-its-kind global mega analysis on the biological timing of 88 species that rely on another life form shows that on average species are moving out of sync by about six days a decade, although some pairs are actually moving closer together. 

While other studies have looked at individual pairs of species and how warming temperatures have changed their migration, breeding and other timing, the study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences gives the first global look at a worsening timing problem.

These changes in species timing are considerably greater than they were before the 1980s, the study said.

“There isn’t really any clear indication that it is going to slow down or stop in the near future,” said study lead author Heather Kharouba, an ecologist at the University of Ottawa. 

For example in the Netherlands, the Eurasian sparrow hawk has been late for dinner because its prey, the blue tit, has — over 16 years — arrived almost six days earlier than the hawk.

It’s most noticeable and crucial in Washington state’s Lake Washington, where over the past 25 years, plant plankton are now blooming 34 days earlier than the zooplankton that eat them. That’s crucial because that’s messing with the bottom of the food chain, Kharouba said.

In Greenland, the plants are showing up almost three days earlier than the caribou, so more of the baby caribou are dying “because there wasn’t enough food,” Kharouba said.

With warmer temperatures, most species moved their habits earlier, but interdependent species didn’t always move at the same rate. It’s the relative speed of changes in timing that’s key, Kharouba said.

Because of the small number of species involved in small areas over different studies, Kharouba’s team could not find a statistically significant link between temperature and changes in how species sync together. But what she saw, she said, “is consistent with climate change.”

Scientists not involved in the study praised the work.

“It demonstrates that many species interactions from around the world are in a state of rapid flux,” Boston University biology professor Richard Primack said in an email. “Prior to this study, studies of changing species interactions focused on one place or one group of species.”
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For the first time, a treatment that boosts the immune system greatly improved survival in people newly diagnosed with the most common form of lung cancer. It’s the biggest win so far for immunotherapy, which has had much of its success until now in less common cancers. 

In the study, Merck’s Keytruda, given with standard chemotherapy, cut in half the risk of dying or having the cancer worsen, compared to chemo alone after nearly one year. The results are expected to quickly set a new standard of care for about 70,000 patients each year in the United States whose lung cancer has already spread by the time it’s found.

Another study found that an immunotherapy combo — the Bristol-Myers Squibb drugs Opdivo and Yervoy — worked better than chemo for delaying the time until cancer worsened in advanced lung cancer patients whose tumors have many gene flaws, as nearly half do. But the benefit lasted less than two months on average and it’s too soon to know if the combo improves overall survival, as Keytruda did.

All of these immune therapy treatments worked for only about half of patients, but that’s far better than chemo has done in the past.

“We’re not nearly where we need to be yet,” said Dr. Roy Herbst, a Yale Cancer Center lung expert who had no role in the studies.

Results were discussed Monday at an American Association for Cancer Research conference in Chicago and published by the New England Journal of Medicine. The studies were sponsored by the drugmakers, and many study leaders and Herbst consult for the companies.

About the drugs

Keytruda, Yervoy and Opdivo are called checkpoint inhibitors. They remove a cloak that some cancer cells have that hides them from the immune system. The drugs are given through IVs and cost about $12,500 a month.

Keytruda was approved last year as an initial treatment with chemo for the most common form of advanced lung cancer, but doctors have been leery to use it because that was based on a small study that did not show whether it prolongs life.

The new study, led by Dr. Leena Gandhi of NYU’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, gives that proof. In it, 616 patients were given chemo and some also received Keytruda. Those not given Keytruda were allowed to switch to it if their cancer worsened.

After one year, 69 percent of people originally assigned to Keytruda were alive versus 49 percent of the others — a result that experts called remarkable considering that the second group’s survival was improved because half of them wound up switching.

How much it ultimately will extend life isn’t known — more than half in the Keytruda group are still alive; median survival was just over 11 months for the others.

The Keytruda combo also delayed the time until cancer worsened — an average of nine months versus five months for the chemo-only group.

That’s a big difference for such an advanced cancer, said Dr. Alice Shaw, a Massachusetts General Hospital lung cancer expert and one of the conference leaders. “This is really a pivotal study … a new standard of care,” said Shaw, who has no ties to the drugmakers.

Rates of serious side effects were similar, but twice as many in the Keytruda group dropped out because of them. More than 4 percent of that group developed lung inflammation and three patients died of it.

The competition

Dr. Matthew Hellmann of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York led a study testing the Opdivo-Yervoy combo versus chemo in a slightly different group of newly diagnosed advanced lung cancer patients.

The study design was changed after it was under way to look at results according to patients’ tumor mutation burden — a measure of how flawed their cancer genes are, according to a profiling test by Foundation Medicine. Medicare recently agreed to cover the $3,000 test for advanced cancers.

Of 679 patients, 299 had a high number of gene flaws in their tumors. In that group, survival without worsening of disease was 43 percent after one year for those on the immunotherapy drugs versus 13 percent of those on chemo. The immunotherapy drugs did not help people with fewer tumor gene flaws.

“We have a tool that helps us determine who are the patients that are most likely to benefit from this combination,” Hellmann said.

The median time until cancer worsened was about 7 months on the immunotherapy drugs versus 5.5 months for chemo. Serious side effects were a little more common in the chemo group.

Another rival, Genentech, recently announced that its checkpoint inhibitor, Tecentriq, improved survival in a study similar to the one testing Keytruda. Details are expected in a couple of months.
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Scientists in Britain and the United States say they have engineered a plastic-eating enzyme that could help in the fight against pollution.

The enzyme is able to digest polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — a form of plastic patented in the 1940s and now used in millions of tons of plastic bottles. PET plastics can persist for hundreds of years in the environment and currently pollute large areas of land and sea worldwide.

Researchers from Britain’s University of Portsmouth and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory made the discovery while examining the structure of a natural enzyme thought to have evolved in a waste-recycling center in Japan.

Finding that this enzyme was helping a bacteria to break down, or digest, PET plastic, the researchers decided to “tweak” its structure by adding some amino acids, said John McGeehan, a professor at Portsmouth who co-led the work.

This led to a serendipitous change in the enzyme’s actions — allowing its plastic-eating abilities to work faster.

“We’ve made an improved version of the enzyme better than the natural one already,” McGeehan told Reuters in an interview.

“That’s really exciting because that means that there’s potential to optimize the enzyme even further.”

The team, whose finding was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, is now working on improving the enzyme further to see if it could be capable of breaking down PET plastics on an industrial scale.

“It’s well within the possibility that in the coming years we will see an industrially viable process to turn PET, and potentially other [plastics], back into their original building blocks so that they can be sustainably recycled,” McGeehan said.

‘Strong potential’

Independent scientists not directly involved with the research said it was exciting, but cautioned that the enzyme’s development as a potential solution for pollution was still at an early stage.

“Enzymes are non-toxic, biodegradable and can be produced in large amounts by microorganisms,” said Oliver Jones, a Melbourne University chemistry expert. “There is strong potential to use enzyme technology to help with society’s growing waste problem by breaking down some of the most commonly used plastics.”

Douglas Kell, a professor of bioanalytical science at Manchester University, said further rounds of work “should be expected to improve the enzyme yet further.”

“All told, this advance brings the goal of sustainably recyclable polymers significantly closer,” he added.
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