Under the bright sun of a remote desert in Oman, a group of astronauts and scientists is simulating Life on Mars. They hope their experiments today will pave the way for an actual trip to Mars, the red planet, within decades. Faiza Elmasry has this story narrated by Faith Lapidus.
…
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday updated guidance to public companies on how and when they should disclose cybersecurity risks and breaches, including potential weaknesses that have not yet been targeted by hackers.
The guidance also said company executives must not trade in a firm’s securities while possessing nonpublic information on cybersecurity attacks. The SEC encouraged companies to consider adopting specific policies restricting executive trading in shares while a hack is being investigated and before it is disclosed.
The SEC, in unanimously approving the additional guidance, said it would promote “clearer and more robust disclosure” by companies facing cybersecurity issues, according to SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, a Republican.
Democrats on the commission reluctantly supported the guidance, describing it as a paltry step taken in the wake of a raft of high-profile hacks at major companies that exposed millions of Americans’ personal information. They called for much more rigorous rule-making to police disclosure around cybersecurity issues, or requiring certain cybersecurity policies at public companies.
Commissioner Robert Jackson said the new document “essentially reiterates years-old staff-level views on this issue,” and pointed to analysis from the White House Council of Economic Advisers that finds companies frequently under-report cybersecurity events to investors.
The SEC first issued guidance in 2011 on cybersecurity disclosures.
“It may provide investors a false sense of comfort that we, at the Commission, have done something more than we have,” Commissioner Kara Stein, another Democrat, said in a statement. Significant breaches have included those at Equifax Inc. consumer credit reporting agency, and at the SEC itself.
The agency announced in September its corporate filing system, known as EDGAR, was breached by hackers in 2016 and may have been used for insider trading. The matter is under review.
The new guidance will mean that corporations disclose more information about cyberattacks and risks and take steps to ensure no insider trading can occur around those events, said several attorneys who advise businesses on the subject.
“This essentially creates a mandatory new disclosure category — cybersecurity risks and incidents,” said Spencer Feldman, an attorney with Olshan Frome Wolosky LLP.
Craig A. Newman, a partner with Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, said the SEC guidance “makes clear that it doesn’t want a repeat of the Equifax situation.”
…
Cigarettes are not the only type of tobacco products that can lead to premature death or fatalities from smoking-related cancers, a U.S. study confirms.
While people who exclusively smoke cigarettes have twice the risk of premature death from all causes compared to people who avoid tobacco altogether, exclusive cigar smokers have a 20 percent higher risk of early death, researchers report in JAMA Internal Medicine.
When it comes to fatalities from specific cancers that have been tied to tobacco use, cigarette smokers have four times the risk of people who never used tobacco, but cigar smokers are 61 percent more likely to die of these cancers and pipe users have 58 percent higher odds.
“We knew exclusive users of cigars and pipes were at greater risk of disease than people who do not use tobacco,” said lead study author Carol Christensen of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products. “However, this study provides information that reflects today’s patterns of tobacco use.”
These data “underscore the importance of complete quitting,” Christensen said by email.
For the study, researchers examined nationally representative survey data, collected starting in 1985, from 357,420 participants who were followed through 2011.
Overall, 203,071 people, or about 57 percent, never used tobacco at all. Another 57,251 participants were current daily cigarette smokers, while 9,414 said they had a less frequent habit and 77,773 were former cigarette smokers.
In addition, 531 people were current daily cigar smokers, while 608 individuals used cigars less frequently and 2,398 had quit.
For pipes, 1,099 participants had a current daily habit, while 78 people used pipes less often and 5,237 had quit.
During the study period, 51,150 people died of all causes.
With a daily cigarette, cigar or pipe habit, people had an elevated risk of death from tobacco-related cancers including malignancies of the bladder, esophagus, larynx, lung, mouth and throat, and pancreas.
Nondaily users
Even with a nondaily cigarette habit, people were more than six times more likely to die of lung cancer than individuals who never used tobacco. They also had more than seven times the risk of dying from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, more than four times the odds of death from oral cancers, and 43 percent higher odds of death from a circulatory system disorder.
Current cigar smokers had more than three times the odds of dying of lung cancer, and for current pipe smokers the risk was 51 percent higher, compared with never-smokers.
The results were limited, however, by the relatively small numbers of cigar and pipe smokers in the sample, the authors noted.
Another limitation was that survey questions about tobacco use changed over time and didn’t determine how often nondaily smokers might have used cigarettes, cigars or pipes.
Even so, the results suggest that doctors may need to broaden how they discuss smoking with patients to make sure people understand they’re at risk even when they don’t have a daily habit, said Dr. Michael Ong of the University of California-Los Angeles and VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare
System.
“Patients often do not associate occasional use of cigar or pipes with health risks, but this study shows that current, particularly daily, cigar use is associated with increased overall risk of death,” Ong, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
Doctors also need to broaden their message about smoking and cigarettes to include other tobacco products that are becoming more popular, said Judith Prochaska, a researcher at Stanford University in California who wasn’t involved in the study.
Traditionally, doctors have asked just whether people smoked cigarettes, but they should instead be questioning patients more broadly about tobacco use, Prochaska said by email.
“The tobacco landscape has been changing dramatically,” Prochaska added. “While cigarettes remain the primary tobacco product used, cigars, smokeless tobacco, e-cigarettes, hookah, and even pipe tobacco have seen gains in use, while cigarette use in the U.S. has been declining.”
…
A European space probe has swung into position around Mars in preparation to analyze its atmosphere for possible signs of life.
The European Space Agency said Wednesday its Trace Gas Orbiter successfully performed a delicate maneuver known as aerobraking that involved dipping into the red planet’s upper atmosphere to slow the probe.
The agency says the orbiter will start looking for trace gases such as methane, which can result from biological or geological activity, in April. It will also search for ice that could help future Mars landings.
A NASA-made radio on board will also help relay signals from U.S. rovers on the surface back to Earth.
Europe plans to land its own rover on Mars in 2021. A European test lander crashed on the surface of Mars in 2016.
…
A federal advisory panel is recommending a new vaccine against hepatitis B.
The vaccine called Heplisav-B was licensed in November and is the first new hepatitis B vaccine in 25 years.
Hepatitis B vaccines have been in childhood shots for decades. The new vaccine is for adults.
The hepatitis B virus can damage the liver and is spread through contact with blood or other bodily fluids. Cases have been rising, a trend linked to the heroin and opioid epidemic. Meanwhile, researchers found older vaccines falter in diabetics and older adults.
The new vaccine uses an additive that boosts the body’s immune response. It is two shots given over one month.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices endorsed the vaccine Wednesday in Atlanta. The government usually adopts its recommendations.
Vice President Mike Pence has brought a newly revived advisory group to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for a rundown on how best to get Americans back to the moon, a half-century after NASA’s Apollo heydays.
Pence convened the meeting Wednesday morning inside the building where NASA once prepped pieces of the International Space Station.
This is the second meeting of the National Space Council. Pence, its chairman, named a group of candidates to advise the council that includes Buzz Aldrin and other former astronauts and aerospace industry leaders.
Wednesday’s meeting focuses on the Trump administration’s plan to return astronauts to the moon and get them to Mars and “worlds beyond.”
Pence toured Kennedy last summer just as the space council was being re-established after two decades.
…
The latest variation of an Uber ride will require a short walk.
In eight U.S. cities, the ride-hailing company is rolling out a service called “Express Pool,” which links riders in the same area who want to travel to similar destinations. Once linked, riders would need to walk a couple of blocks to be picked up at a common location. They also would be dropped off at a site that would be a short walk from their final destinations.
Depending on time of day and metro area, Express Pool could cost up to 75 percent less than a regular Uber ride and up to half the cost of Uber’s current shared-ride service called Pool, said Ethan Stock, the company’s product director for shared rides.
Pool, which will remain in use, doesn’t require any walking. Instead it takes an often circuitous route to pick up riders at their location and drops them at their destination. But that can take longer than Express, which travels a more direct route.
Uber has been testing the service since November in San Francisco and Boston and has found enough ridership to support running it 24 hours per day. Within the next two days, the around-the-clock service will start running in Los Angeles; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Miami, San Diego and Denver. More cities will follow, Uber said.
The new service could spell competition for mass transit, but just how much depends on how well it works and how good the mass transit is, said Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington State Transportation Center at the University of Washington. If buses or subways are overcrowded and Uber can provide service for a similar price, that will help with mobility.
“If, however, you are cannibalizing transit that’s not over-subscribed, then that becomes a bad thing,” Hallenbeck said.
Also, if the ride-sharing service pulls people off mass transit and creates more automobile traffic, that will add to congestion, he said.
The service could complement Uber X, the company’s door-to-door taxi service — or draw passengers away from it.
Stock said the system should work well with public transit, providing first-mile and last-mile service for transit riders and by providing service to low passenger volume areas where it’s not cost effective for public transit to serve. He also says it will reduce congestion by cutting the number of personal vehicle trips.
Express already has ride-sharing competitors such as Via, which operates in New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
Express Pool will have normal-sized cars, at least initially, and optimally will carry a maximum of three passengers so riders aren’t crammed into the vehicles. It could be expanded to six-passenger vehicles, Stock said.
It will take one to two minutes for Uber’s computers to match a rider to a driver and other riders and select a pick-up point, Stock said.
The lower cost of the service should help Uber grow, Stock said. “More riders can afford to take more trips for more reasons,” he said. Already Uber Pool accounts for 20 percent of Uber trips in the cities where it’s available.
…
A group of scientists aboard a research vessel at the “bottom of the world” are examining the effects of climate change in Antarctica. The nonprofit, environmental watchdog group Greenpeace sent the team to gather data to help build international support for declaring a part of the continent a sanctuary from industrial fishing. Arash Arabasadi reports.
…
Fuel made from plants like corn, soybeans, even algae have been around for decades. Now, researchers have developed an algae-powered fuel cell that is ,self-repairing, self-replicating, biodegradable and much more sustainable than existing models. Faith Lapidus has details.
…
South Korea’s cryptocurrency industry is anticipating much better times as the market regulator changes tack from its tough stance on the virtual coin trade, promising instead to help promote blockchain technology.
The regulator said Tuesday that it hopes to see South Korea — which has become a hub for cryptocurrency trade — normalize the virtual coin business in a self-regulatory environment.
“The whole world is now framing the outline [for cryptocurrency] and therefore [the government] should rather work more on normalization than increasing regulation,” Choe Heung-sik, chief of South Korea’s Finance Supervisory Service (FSS), told reporters.
FSS has been leading the government’s regulation of cryptocurrency trading as part of a task force.
Cryptocurrency operators have drawn a new optimism from Choe’s comments, seeing them clearly indicating the government’s cooperation in their plans for self-regulation.
“Though the government and the industry have not yet reached a full agreement, the fact that the regulator himself made clear the government’s stance on cooperation is a positive sign for the markets,” said Kim Haw-joon of the Korea Blockchain Association.
Wednesday’s news is a stark reversal of the justice minister’s warnings in January that the government was considering shutting down local cryptocurrency exchanges, throwing the market into turmoil.
Instead, South Korea banned the use of anonymous bank accounts for virtual coin trading as of January 30 to stop cryptocurrencies being used in money laundering and other crimes.
Bitcoin, the world’s most heavily traded cryptocurrency, is now changing hands at a three-week high of $11,086 on the Luxembourg-based Biststamp exchange after falling as low as $5,920.72 in early February.
South Korean electronics giant Samsung has already started production of cryptocurrency mining technologies, local media reported in January.
…
South Korea said on Wednesday it is signing free trade agreements with five Central American nations aimed at boosting market access for the Korean auto sector and electronics makers.
Trade minister Kim Hyun-chong will meet representatives from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama in Seoul on Wednesday to sign five separate bilateral pacts which will eliminate duties on about 95 percent of traded goods and services, Korea’s trade ministry said in an e-mailed statement.
The agreements are subject to parliamentary approval in each country, and is likely to take effect at different times depending on the ratification process.
The five trade pacts open South Korea to key Central American countries after its deals with the U.S., the European Union and China helped boost exports.
“The South Korea-Central America free trade deals will enable the countries to build a more comprehensive, strategic partnerships going forward,” Kim said.
The ministry expects the five deals to accelerate South Korea’s economic growth by an overall 0.02 percent in the next 10 years, by boosting exports of cars, steel, cosmetics products, and auto components.
…
President Nicolas Maduro said Tuesday that Venezuela had received $735 million in the first day of a pre-sale of the country’s “petro” cryptocurrency, aimed at pulling the country out of an economic tailspin.
Maduro is hoping the petro will allow the ailing OPEC member to skirt U.S. sanctions as the bolivar currency plunges to record lows and it struggles with hyperinflation and a collapsing socialist economy.
Blockchain experts have warned the petro is unlikely to attract significant investment. Opposition leaders have said the sale constitutes an illegal debt issuance that circumvents Venezuela’s majority-opposition legislature, and the U.S. Treasury Department has warned it may violate sanctions levied last year.
Maduro did not give details about the initial investors and there was no evidence presented for his figure. He added that tourism, some gasoline sales and some oil transactions could be made in petro.
“Today, a cryptocurrency is being born that can take on Superman,” said Maduro, using the comic character to refer to the United States, as he was flanked by mining rigs in a state television address.
The official website for the petro on Tuesday published a guide to setting up a virtual wallet to hold the cryptocurrency.
The cryptocurrency goes public next month.
Venezuelan Cryptocurrency Superintendent Carlos Vargas last week said the government was expecting to draw investors in Turkey, Qatar, the United States and Europe.
The value of the entire petro issuance of 100 million tokens would be just over $6 billion, according to details given by Maduro in recent months, though no new price information was provided Tuesday.
The tokens will each be valued at and backed by a barrel of Venezuelan crude oil, Maduro has said.
Advisers working for the government have in the past recommended that 38.4 percent of the petros should be sold in a private auction at a discount of 60 percent.
Maduro says his government is the victim of an “economic war” led by opposition politicians with the help of the government of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Sanctions levied last year by Washington block U.S. banks and investors from acquiring newly issued Venezuelan debt, effectively preventing the nation from borrowing abroad to bring in new hard currency or refinance existing debt.
The petro will not be a token on the Ethereum network, as was previously disclosed in a whitepaper provided by the government.
…
There are no talks between China and the separatists from Pakistan’s Baluchistan province regarding the protection of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a senator from the province told VOA.
First reported by The Financial Times, several newspapers in Pakistan said that China has been quietly holding talks with Baluch (natives of Baluchistan) militants for more than five years in an effort to protect the $60 billion worth of infrastructure projects it is financing.
CPEC is a Chinese-funded project. Upon completion, this 3,000-km-long project will connect China with Pakistan through rail, road pipelines and an optical cable fiber network. Through CPEC, China will gain access to the Arabian Sea.
Pakistan’s Baluchistan province is at the heart of the CPEC because the project stretches between China’s Xinjiang region and Pakistan’s Gawadar port, which is located in the Baluchistan province.
Baluchistan is the poorest and least-developed province in Pakistan, and it has been the scene of a low-level insurgency by Baluch separatist groups that demand a greater share of the province’s resources. There are fears in the country that in an attempt to push for their demands, these separatist groups can target the CPEC project. Some media reports suggest the Chinese government is holding talks with them for the protection of the project.
“The Chinese have quietly made a lot of progress,” one Pakistani official told The Financial Times. “Even though separatists occasionally try to carry out the odd attack, they are not making a forceful push.”
But Mir Kabir Muhammad Shahi, a member of the Pakistan senate, said it’s not China’s job to hold talks with Baluch separatists.
“I, or other parliamentarians, are not aware of this development, and it’s only Pakistan’s government parliament right to hold talks with Baluch separatists,” he said.
Sher Muhammad Bugti, a representative of the Baluch Republican Army separatist group, also denied having any negotiations with China. Talking to VOA Deewa from his exile in Switzerland, Bugti said separatists cannot hold talks with China.
“We do not know of any talks, nor have we been contacted (by China),” he said.
Groups such as the Baluch Republican Army are against the CPEC, and say the project is aimed at plundering the resources and grabbing the land of their province. But the Pakistani government says CPEC is a game changer in the region, and it will bring prosperity to the whole country.
Political analyst Zafar Jaspal did not rule out the possibility of China’s involvement with locals, but added that it could not be direct.
“I do not think China would have directly contacted the insurgents. I believe any contact the Chinese would make would be through the government of Pakistan.”
The Financial Times claimed that the Pakistani officials welcomed the talks between Baluch rebels and Chinese envoys, even if they do not know the details of what has been discussed.
“Ultimately, if there’s peace in Baluchistan, that will benefit both of us,” said one official in Islamabad.
VOA Deewa’s Aurangzeb Khan contributed to this report.
…
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are raising risks that malicious users will soon exploit the technology to mount automated hacking attacks, cause driverless car crashes or turn commercial drones into targeted weapons, a new report warns.
The study, published on Wednesday by 25 technical and public policy researchers from Cambridge, Oxford and Yale universities along with privacy and military experts, sounded the alarm for the potential misuse of AI by rogue states, criminals and lone-wolf attackers.
The researchers said the malicious use of AI poses imminent threats to digital, physical and political security by allowing for large-scale, finely targeted, highly efficient attacks. The study focuses on plausible developments within five years.
“We all agree there are a lot of positive applications of AI,” Miles Brundage, a research fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. “There was a gap in the literature around the issue of malicious use.”
Artificial intelligence, or AI, involves using computers to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as making decisions or recognizing text, speech or visual images.
It is considered a powerful force for unlocking all manner of technical possibilities but has become a focus of strident debate over whether the massive automation it enables could result in widespread unemployment and other social dislocations.
The 98-page paper cautions that the cost of attacks may be lowered by the use of AI to complete tasks that would otherwise require human labor and expertise. New attacks may arise that would be impractical for humans alone to develop or which exploit the vulnerabilities of AI systems themselves.
It reviews a growing body of academic research about the security risks posed by AI and calls on governments and policy and technical experts to collaborate and defuse these dangers.
The researchers detail the power of AI to generate synthetic images, text and audio to impersonate others online, in order to sway public opinion, noting the threat that authoritarian regimes could deploy such technology.
The report makes a series of recommendations including regulating AI as a dual-use military/commercial technology.
It also asks questions about whether academics and others should rein in what they publish or disclose about new developments in AI until other experts in the field have a chance to study and react to potential dangers they might pose.
“We ultimately ended up with a lot more questions than answers,” Brundage said.
…
President Michel Temer’s decision to throw in the towel on reforming Brazil’s loss-making pension system leaves the unpopular measure as a campaign issue for October’s elections and a major headache for his successor.
Monday’s announcement that Temer was abandoning an overhaul of the social security system — billed as the centerpiece of his efforts at fiscal reform — sparked immediate concern from credit rating agencies that Latin America’s largest economy was failing to put its financial house in order.
Brazil’s generous pension system is at the heart of budget deficit that ballooned from 3 percent of GDP in 2013 to a massive 10 percent in 2015, before edging back to 8 percent last year as the $1.8 trillion economy emerged from recession.
The official reason for dropping the pension bill was a military intervention in crime-plagued Rio de Janeiro state, decreed on Friday after unprecedented violence during Carnival.
Constitutional amendments such as the pension bill are blocked during federal intervention of a state.
Deploying the army in Rio will go down well with voters in a nation where polls show public safety is the top concern. Brazil has 60,000 murders a year and its cities are among the world’s most dangerous.
Temer’s critics, however, said he merely found a pretext to avoid acknowledging an embarrassing defeat.
While Temer, 77, came close to the super majority needed to pass the bill last year, he lost political capital fighting off corruption charges and the government soon discovered it had run out of time, as lawmakers seeking re-election this year refused to back the unpopular legislation.
“Now the government does not have to admit it lost the battle for pension reform,” said Fabio Sousa, a congressman for the centrist Brazilian Social Democratic Party, which backed the reform.
“The next president will have to do the fiscal adjustment, which is fine, because he will have a mandate from voters to do something about it,” Sousa said in an interview. “The good thing is that pension reform will now be an election campaign issue.”
Markets relaxed
Temer, a former vice president, replaced impeached leftist Dilma Rousseff in 2016. But he has single-digit approval ratings that rule out a presidential bid of his own.
Brazilian markets were stable Tuesday, with Sao Paulo’s BOVESPA stock index gaining 1.2 percent in mid-afternoon as investors had largely expected an already watered-down pension reform to sink in Congress.
In an effort to reassure investors, Temer’s cabinet on Monday announced plans to accelerate 15 other policies — ranging from tax breaks to privatizing Brazil’s largest utility and strengthening the central bank’s autonomy.
Yet Moody’s Investors Service promptly warned on Tuesday that the government’s pension decision was credit negative and would restrict its ability to comply with a spending ceiling approved last year.
The government is expected to meet its 2018 deficit target but it is doubtful it can do so in 2019, as a sluggish recovery from Brazil’s worst recession on record has left tax revenues struggling.
According to the main industry lobby, the CNI, the reform would have saved government coffers about 1 trillion reais ($308 billion) over the next decade.
Brazil’s gross public debt already stands at 4.9 trillion reais ($1.5 trillion) or 75 percent of GDP — relatively high for an emerging economy. Without steps to reduce heavy mandatory spending, it will continue climbing, said Felipe Salto, head of the Independent Fiscal Institute, a bipartisan Senate office that aims at transparency in government accounts.
Government projections have the debt stabilizing in 2020 at 80 percent of GDP, but without pension reform that is in doubt.
“You have to show investors it will stabilize. If there is no horizon of stabilization, the market will see a risk of insolvency and higher interest rates will be needed to finance a snowballing debt,” Salto said.
…
Yasmira Castano felt she had a fresh chance at life when she received a kidney transplant almost two decades ago. The young Venezuelan was able to finish high school and went on to work as a manicurist.
But late last year, Castano, now 40, was unable to find the drugs needed to keep her body from rejecting the organ, as Venezuela’s health care system slid deeper into crisis following years of economic turmoil.
On Christmas Eve, weak and frail, Castano was rushed to a crumbling state hospital in Venezuela’s teeming capital, Caracas. Her immune system had attacked the foreign organ and she lost her kidney shortly afterward.
Now, Castano needs dialysis three times a week to filter her blood. But the hospital attached to Venezuela’s Central University, once one of South America’s top institutions, frequently suffers water outages and lacks materials for dialysis.
“I spend nights not sleeping, just worrying,” said Castano, who weighs around 77 pounds (35 kg), as she lay on an old bed in a bleak hospital room, its bare walls unadorned by a television or pictures.
Her roommate Lismar Castellanos, who just turned 21, put it more bluntly.
“Unfortunately, I could die,” said Castellanos, who lost her transplanted kidney last year and is struggling to get the dialysis she needs to keep her body functioning.
The women are among Venezuela’s roughly 3,500 transplant recipients. After years leading normal lives, they now live in fear as Venezuela’s economic collapse under President Nicolas Maduro has left the once-prosperous OPEC nation unable to purchase sufficient foreign medicine or produce enough of its own.
Some 31 Venezuelans have seen their bodies start to reject their transplanted organs in the last month due to lack of medicine, according to umbrella health group Codevida, a nongovernmental organization.
At least seven have died due to complications stemming from organ failure in the last three months.
A further 16,000 Venezuelans, many hoping for an elusive transplant, are dependent on dialysis to clean their blood — but here, too, resources and materials are sorely lacking.
Nearly half of the country’s dialysis units are out of service, according to opposition lawmaker and oncologist Jose Manuel Olivares, a leading voice on the health crisis who has toured dialysis centers to assess the scale of the problem.
‘Straight to the cemetery’
In the last three weeks alone, seven people have died due to lack of dialysis, according to Codevida, which staged a protest to decry the critical drug shortages.
Once-controlled diseases like diphtheria and measles have returned, due partly to insufficient vaccines and antibiotics, while Venezuelans suffering chronic illnesses like cancer or diabetes often have to forgo treatment.
Hundreds of thousands of desperate Venezuelans, meanwhile, have fled the country over the past year, including many medical professionals.
Amid a lack of basics like catheters and crumbling hospital infrastructure, doctors who remain struggle to cope with ever scarcer resources.
“It’s incredibly stressful. We request supplies; they don’t arrive. We call again and they still don’t arrive. Then we realize it’s because there aren’t any,” said a kidney specialist at a public hospital, asking to remain anonymous because health workers are not allowed to speak publicly about the situation.
Venezuela’s Social Security Institute, tasked with providing patients with drugs for chronic conditions, did not respond to a request for comment.
Terrified transplant patients are indebting themselves to buy pricey medicine on the black market, begging relatives abroad to funnel drugs into the country or dangerously reducing their daily intake of pills to stretch out stock.
Larry Zambrano, a 45-year-old father of two with a kidney transplant, resorted to taking immunosuppressants designed for animals last year.
Guillermo Habanero and his brother Emerson both underwent kidney transplants after suffering polycystic kidney disease.
Emerson, a healthy 53-year-old former police officer, died in November after a month without immunosuppressants.
“If you lose your kidney, you go to dialysis but there are no materials. So you go straight to the cemetery,” said Habanero, 56, who runs a small computer repair shop in the poor hillside neighborhood of Catia.
Blaming Maduro, who blames sanctions
A Reuters reporter went to the Health Ministry to request an interview, but was asked at the entrance to give her contact details instead. No one called or emailed.
Reuters was also unable to contact the Health Ministry unit in charge of transplants, Fundavene, for comment. Its website was unavailable. Multiple calls to different phone numbers went unanswered. An email bounced back and no one answered a message on the unit’s Facebook page.
Maduro’s government has said the real culprit is an alleged U.S.-led business elite seeking to sabotage its socialist agenda by hoarding medicine and imposing sanctions.
“I see the cynicism of the right-wing, worried about people who cannot get dialysis treatment, but it’s their fault: They’ve asked for sanctions and a blockade against Venezuela,” Socialist Party heavyweight Diosdado Cabello said in recent comments on his weekly television program.
Health activists blame what they see as Maduro’s inefficient and corrupt government for the medical crisis and contend that government announcements of more imports for dialysis are totally insufficient.
Despite his unpopularity, Maduro is expected to win a new six-year term in an April 22 presidential election. The opposition is likely to boycott the vote, which it has already denounced as rigged in favor of the government.
Maduro has refused to accept food and medicine donations, despite the deepening health care crisis. Health activists and doctors smuggle in medicines, often donated by the growing Venezuelan diaspora, in their suitcases, but it is far from enough.
In the decaying hospital and dialysis center visited by Reuters, patients clamored for humanitarian aid.
Dolled up for her birthday and surrounded by cakes, the 21-year-old Castellanos took selfies with her friends and spoke excitedly about one day returning to dance, one of her passions.
But fears for her future permeated the room. A hospital worker stopped by to wish Castellanos many more birthday celebrations, but her worried face betrayed doubts.
“Other countries need to help us,” Castellanos said.
…
Sea levels will rise between 0.7 and 1.2 meters (27-47 inches) in the next two centuries even if governments end the fossil fuel era as promised under the Paris climate agreement, scientists said Tuesday.
Early action to cut greenhouse gas emissions would limit the long-term rise, driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica that will re-draw global coastlines, a German-led team wrote in the journal Nature Communications.
Sea-level rise is a threat to cities from Shanghai to London, to low-lying swaths of Florida or Bangladesh, and to entire nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean or Kiribati in the Pacific.
By 2300, the report projected that sea levels would gain by 0.7-1.2 meters, even if almost 200 nations fully meet goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero in the second half of this century.
Ocean levels will rise inexorably because heat-trapping industrial gases already emitted will linger in the atmosphere, melting more ice, it said. In addition, water naturally expands as it warms above four degrees Celsius (39.2°F).
The report also found that every five years of delay beyond 2020 in peaking global emissions would mean an extra 20 centimeters (8 inches) of sea-level rise by 2300.
“Sea level is often communicated as a really slow process that you can’t do much about … but the next 30 years really matter,” lead author Matthias Mengel, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Reuters.
Governments are not on track to meet the Paris pledges.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by burning fossil fuels, rose last year after a three-year plateau.
And U.S. President Donald Trump, who doubts that human activities are the prime cause of warming, plans to quit the Paris deal and instead promote U.S. coal, oil and natural gas.
‘Brink of inundation’
Maldives Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim, who chairs the 44-member Alliance of Small Island States, said Tuesday’s findings showed a need for faster action to cut emissions, especially by rich nations.
“Unfortunately, the study confirms what small island nations have been saying for years: Decades of procrastination on climate change have brought many of us to the brink of inundation,” he told Reuters.
Professor John Church, of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study, said 100 million people now live within one meter of the high tide mark.
“More people are moving to live within the coastal zone, increasing the vulnerable population and infrastructure,” he said in a statement. “Adaptation to sea-level rise will be essential.”
…
More than 100,000 malaria cases went untreated when Liberia’s health care system buckled under the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, according to a new study.
The research, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, shows how the toll of the Ebola outbreak goes beyond the 11,000 killed in West Africa by the virus itself. Basic health care took a major hit as well.
Ebola kills about half of the people it infects. It causes flu-like symptoms, followed by vomiting and diarrhea, and can lead to internal and external hemorrhaging. The disease spreads through contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids.
The countries of West Africa were ill-equipped to deal with the 2014-15 outbreak. Many clinics lacked the most basic tools for dealing with the disease, including latex gloves and face masks.
“Rightfully so, people were afraid to go to the clinic because they might get Ebola when they’re at the clinic,” said study lead author Brad Wagenaar at the University of Washington.
Wagenaar and colleagues found that by four months into the epidemic, clinics were delivering one-third to two-thirds fewer basic services, which he described as a “huge, dramatic decrease.”
‘Huge, dramatic decrease’
The researchers studied monthly data on health visits from 379 clinics outside the capital, Monrovia, from 2010 through 2016.
They found measles vaccinations dropped by 67 percent. Anti-malarial treatment fell by 61 percent. Thirty-five percent fewer pregnant women came in for their first pre-natal visits.
It took more than a year-and-a-half for all services to return to pre-outbreak levels.
Lost opportunities
In that time, more than three-quarters of a million clinic visits were lost, the researchers estimate, based on extrapolations from pre-outbreak trends.
That includes more than 5,000 births at health care facilities, in a country with one of the world’s highest rates of maternal death, along with a loss of 100, 000 malaria treatments. These figures, Wagenaar adds, suggest a loss of other services that may have a long-term impact, such as distributing bed nets and spraying houses with insecticides.
“Some of these other things didn’t happen during the Ebola outbreak because the health system and other partners were busy with other issues,” he said. “And now, the cases have been increasing.”
Malaria cases were 50 percent higher in December of 2017 than they were before the Ebola epidemic.
Wagenaar says the research highlights how more attention must be devoted to maintaining basic services during a health emergency. The data his group analyzed could be used in other outbreaks to prioritize services that have been overlooked.
Funding for public health systems
And after the emergency, funding should focus on strengthening public health systems.
“We know that this epidemic happened in Liberia due to multiple factors, but one being the public sector ministry of health system has been underfunded,” he said, adding that remains the case.
Donors earmarked funds for strengthening the health system, he said. But, “that money never really materialized,” he added.
…
France is ready to invest in artificial intelligence, blockchain and data mining to “transform” its sprawling bureaucracy instead of simply trimming budgets and jobs, its administration reform tsar said.
The 39-year old former telecoms executive whom President Emmanuel Macron has charged with reforming the public sector said he believed technology would win support from government employees and in the end produce less costly public services.
Macron himself is coming under pressure from budget watchdogs and Brussels to spell out how he plans to cut 60 billion euros ($74 billion) in public spending and 120,000 public sector jobs to fulfill pledges made in his election campaign.
Chatbots – software that can answer users’ questions with a conversational approach – or algorithms helping the taxman to target potential tax evaders, were some of the possibilities offered by technology, Thomas Cazenave told Reuters in an interview.
“The state … must not fall behind, get ‘uberized’ and shrivel up,” Cazenave said.
“The potential created by digitalization, data and artificial intelligence will help put fewer employees on some tasks, while reinvesting in others,” he added.
A 700-million-euro ($864-million) fund will help invest in IT projects over the next five years to help modernize administration in the highly centralized country and automate some activities.
‘Macron boy’
Cazenave is one of the ‘Macron boys’ whose mix of top civil service pedigree and private sector experience is being used to shake up France’s 5.5 million-strong army of government employees and cut one of the highest public spending ratios in the world.
Only two months younger than Macron, the two met over 10 years ago when they joined the highly selective corps of finance civil servants after graduating from ENA, a graduate school of public administration for the French elite.
Cazenave then became the number 2 human resources executive at telecoms firm Orange, a company which transitioned from government monopoly to globalized private champion. In 2016, Macron prefaced Cazenave’s book, “The State in Start-Up Mode.”
“Like me, the president feels very deeply that these are no longer times where public services can be reformed with small tweaks. Major transformations are needed,” Cazenave said.
Sensitive subject
However, despite frequently referring to transformation and revolution, Macron has taken a cautious approach on belt-tightening measures, with very few details given so far on where the ax will fall.
His budget minister said this month a voluntary redundancy plan could be on the cards, but did not elaborate. More details are expected to be announced in March/April but legislation is not expected before early 2019.
Cazenave said taking time to consult employees was necessary to get government employees on board and to review which public services still need to be ran by government, and which can be outsourced or even abandoned.
He also said previous spending cut plans, such as former conservative leader Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision not to fill one in two vacancies left by retiring baby-boomers had failed to curb spending because the state’s remit had not been changed.
Outsourcing some public services is currently being considered, he said, but the example of British outsourcing firm Carillion’s collapse showed it could not be replicated everywhere.
“There is no place for ideology on the outsourcing debate, in one way or another. The private sector doesn’t have a definitive superiority to the public sector,” he said.
A precision nutrition approach to weight loss didn’t hold up in a study testing low fat versus low carb depending on dieters’ DNA profiles.
Previous research has suggested that a person’s insulin levels or certain genes could interact with different types of diets to influence weight loss.
Stanford University researchers examined this idea with 600 overweight adults who underwent genetic and insulin testing before being randomly assigned to reduce fat or carbohydrate intake.
Gene analyses identified variations linked with how the body processes fats or carbohydrates, which the researchers thought would make them more likely to lose weight on a low-fat or low-carb diet.
But weight loss averaged about 13 pounds over a year, regardless of genes, insulin levels or diet type. Also, some people lost as much as 60 pounds and others gained 15 pounds – more evidence that genetic characteristics and diet type appeared to make no difference.
What seemed to make a difference was healthful eating. Participants on both diets who consumed the fewest processed foods, sugary drinks, unhealthy fats and ate the most vegetables lost the most weight.
The results suggest that “precision medicine is not as important as eating mindfully, getting rid of packaged, processed food” and avoiding unhealthy habits like eating while watching television, said lead author Christopher Gardner.
The study was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Participants had 22 health education classes during the study and were encouraged to be physically active, but the focus was on what they ate. They were advised to choose high-quality foods but were not given suggested calorie limits nor were they provided with specific foods. Results are based on what they reported eating.
During the first two months, dieters in each group were told to limit carbohydrates or fats to 20 grams daily, about the amount that’s in 1 1/2 slices of whole wheat bread and a handful of nuts respectively. They were allowed to increase that to more manageable levels during the rest of the study.
Fat intake in the low-fat group averaged 57 grams during the study versus 87 grams beforehand; carb intake in the low-carb group averaged 132 grams versus 247 grams previously. Both groups reduced their daily calorie intake by an average of about 500 calories.
The study was well-conducted but because participants were not provided with specific foods and self-reported their food choices, it wasn’t rigorous enough to disprove the idea that certain genes and insulin levels may affect which types of diets lead to weight loss, said Dr. David Ludwig, a Boston Children’s Hospital obesity researcher.
Dr. Frank Hu, nutrition chief at Harvard’s School of Public Health, has called precision nutrition a promising approach and said the study wasn’t a comprehensive test of all gene variations that might affect individual responses to weight loss diets.
“In any weight loss diets, adherence to the diet and the overall quality of the diet are probably more important than any other factors,” Hu said.
The United Nations children’s agency has declared Pakistan as the riskiest country for newborns, saying that out of every 1,000 babies born in Pakistan, 46 die before the end of their first month.
UNICEF released the findings Tuesday as part of its global awareness campaign to demand and deliver solutions on behalf of the world’s newborns.
Pregnant women are much less likely to receive assistance during delivery in Pakistan, where 14 skilled health professionals are available for every 10,000 people, according to the report.
It acknowledged the percentage of mothers who give birth in a health facility in Pakistan increased from 21 percent to 48 percent between 2001 and 2013. It also noted the proportion of women giving birth with a skilled attendant during the same period more than doubled from 23 percent to 55 percent.
“But despite these remarkable increases, largely the result of rapid urbanization and the proliferation of private sector providers not subject to satisfactory oversight, Pakistan’s very high newborn mortality rate fell by less than one quarter, from 60 in 2000 to 46 in 2016,” according to UNICEF’s findings.
Critics have long called for increasing the health budget in Pakistan, which spends less than one percent of its GDP on health services, as opposed to the World Health Organization benchmark of at least six percent of the GDP to ensure basic and life saving services.
Other countries
After Pakistan, the Central African Republic and war-shattered Afghanistan are the next most dangerous countries for newborns, according to UNICEF. Poverty, conflict and weak institutions in these countries are cited as primary reasons for the alarming number of newborn deaths.
Millions of young lives could be saved every year, the report noted, if mothers and babies had access to affordable, quality health care, good nutrition and clean water.
More than 80 percent of newborn deaths, the report said, are the result of premature birth, complications during labor and delivery, and infections such as sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia.
“But far too often, even these basics are out of reach of the mothers and babies who need them most.”
State-run Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) plans to add 1,745 megawatts (MW) of electricity from geothermal sources by 2025, part of a government push to end power generation from fossil fuels.
“You are aware that going forward, the government policy which all generators including KenGen and including independent power producers, is to eliminate generation from fossil fuels,” Moses Wekesa, Business Development Director, said during a visit to KenGen’s geothermal plants last week.
Kenya has an installed generating capacity of 2,370 MW and peak demand of about 1,770 MW. Of this, KenGen, which is 70 percent owned by the government, has an installed capacity of 1,631 MW, with 533 MW from geothermal.
Demand for electricity is growing at about 8 percent per year until 2020, and will rise to 9 percent in 2021, after which it will stabilize at 7 percent, according to the government’s transmission and generation plan.
“First as a rule of thumb, your supply must always be ahead of demand. The reason being, that it takes a while to put up a power plant,” Wekesa said.
The East African nation is ramping up electricity production and investing in its grid to keep up with growing demand for power and to reduce frequent blackouts. It relies heavily on renewables such as geothermal and hydro power.
Kenya is ranked at No.37 worldwide by Ernst and Young’s latest Renewable energy country attractiveness index, issued in October.
The Geothermal Resources Council ranks Kenya at no. 8 worldwide in terms of installed capacity from geothermal.
…
Items discovered underwater caverns in eastern Mexico to reveal what is believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet
Archaeologists exploring the world’s biggest flooded cave in Mexico have discovered ancient human remains at least 9,000 years old and the bones of animals who roamed the Earth during the last Ice Age.
A group of divers recently connected two underwater caverns in eastern Mexico to reveal what is believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet, a discovery that could help shed new light on the ancient Maya civilization.
The Yucatan peninsula is studded with monumental relics of the Maya people, whose cities drew upon an extensive network of sinkholes linked to subterranean waters known as cenotes.
Researchers say they found 248 cenotes at the 347-km (216-mile) cave system known as Sac Actun, near the beach resort of Tulum. Of the 200 archaeological sites they have discovered there, around 140 are Mayan.
Some cenotes acquired particular religious significance to the Maya, whose descendants continue to inhabit the region.
Apart from human remains, they also found bones of giant sloths, ancient elephants and extinct bears from the Pleistocene period, Mexico’s Culture Ministry said in a statement.
The cave’s discovery has rocked the archaeological world.
“I think it’s overwhelming. Without a doubt it’s the most important underwater archaeological site in the world,” said Guillermo de Anda, researcher at Mexico’s National Anthropology and History Institute (INAH).
De Anda is also director of the Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM), a project dedicated to the study and preservation of the subterranean waters of the Yucatan peninsula.
According to the INAH, water levels rose 100 meters at the end of the Ice Age, flooding the cave system and leading to “ideal conditions for the preservation of the remains of extinct megafauna from the Pleistocene.”
The Pleistocene geological epoch, the most recent Ice Age, began 2.6 million years ago and ended around 11,700 years ago.
Kevlar body armor saves lives, and the high end vests can even stop armor piercing rounds. But that kind of protection comes at the cost of added heavy weight. A Czech Republic university is using ceramics that bring the weight of safety way down. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…