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MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president inaugurated a huge “super pharmacy” Friday in a bid to help patients throughout the country who are told they need a specific medicine, but their hospital doesn’t have it.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s solution was to outfit a big warehouse on the outskirts of Mexico City to centralize a supply and send it to hospitals throughout the country.

“The pharmacy is going to be big, big, big, and it is going to have all the medications that are used in the health system,” López Obrador said Friday.

The pharmacy is intended to complement local health facilities. If a patient can’t get needed medications at a local hospital, the patient, the patient’s doctor or the pharmacist would be able to have it delivered from the 40,000-square-meter Mexico City warehouse.

The armed forces, or the government-run pharmaceutical company Birmex, will ship the drugs by land or air “within 24 to 48 hours,” López Obrador pledged.

The question is whether Mexico can overcome its history of being bad at regulating the pharmaceutical industry, bad at buying medicines, bad at storing them, and bad at distributing them. Extreme centralization also hasn’t helped Mexico much in the past in many areas.

The most visible face of this problem are the parents of children with cancer, who frequently stage protests because they say that in recent years chemotherapy and other drugs have been impossible to obtain.

The problems have killed otherwise healthy people. Because Mexico has had problems in obtaining enough morphine, anesthesiologists in Mexico have had to carry around their own vials of the sedative, drawing multiple doses out of a single vial for routine procedures.

That has led to contamination of the vials, triggering outbreaks of injection-induced meningitis in two Mexican states that have killed dozens of people, including some Americans who sought treatment at clinics in the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.

In the United States, where there is no shortage of morphine, doctors are advised to draw a single dose from a vial and throw the remainder out.

López Obrador mounted a major effort to obtain COVID-19 vaccines in 2021, using the armed forces to distribute them and volunteers to administer them. By the end of that year just about anybody in Mexico who wanted a vaccine got one, for free.

But trying to replicate that model of centralized government purchasing and army distribution on a national scale for thousands of medications is not the same, according to Mauricio Rodríguez-Dorantes, a professor at the School of Medicine at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

“This is crazy,” said Rodríguez-Dorantes, noting the government is opening the centralized warehouse without answering how the system will operate, especially for urgently needed medications. He noted that concentrating all the drugs at one site increases risks and could sideline some existing distribution systems.

For decades, there have been scandals involving millions of dollars’ worth of medicines that have expired at warehouses while hospitals couldn’t get them.

The country’s medicine regulatory agency, known by its Spanish acronym as Cofepris, was so riddled with corruption before López Obrador that regulators would hide applications for approval of new medicines for years and demand bribes to approve them.

And with alarming frequency, regulators in Mexico send out alerts about falsified or knock-off medications being sold for treating everything from cancer to heart disease. Boxes, labels, vials and certifications are copied with amazing accuracy, but the bottles often contain little or none of the medication.

The fake medicine trade is so common and so lucrative in Mexico because patients or their relatives are often told by doctors to buy medications at private drug stores when they are unavailable at government hospitals.

The civic group Zero Shortages said there was a 142% increase in the number of alerts about falsified medicines between 2021 and 2022.

But some of the problems are of López Obrador’s own making. Angry at what he claimed were inflated profits made by drug distributors and importers, the president simply cut the private companies out and decided the government should directly buy all medications.

Because the government did not have much infrastructure, contacts or experience in such a massive effort, López Obrador signed an agreement with the World Health Organization to help Mexico in purchasing. But even with that help, Mexico was unable to obtain some specialized medication.

Zero Shortages said the number of prescriptions that went unfilled in Mexico rose from 1.5 million in 2019 to 22 million in 2021; disruptions because of COVID-19 probably played a role.

But even in 2022, about 12.5 million prescriptions went unfilled. 
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The U.S. military’s secretive X-37B robot spaceplane blasted off from Florida on Thursday night on its seventh mission, the first launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket capable of delivering it to a higher orbit than previous missions.

The Falcon Heavy, composed of three rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch pad from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular nighttime liftoff carried live on a SpaceX webcast.

The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays. Three earlier countdowns were aborted due to poor weather and unspecified technical issues, leading ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before proceeding with Thursday’s fight.

It came two weeks after China launched its own robot spaceplane, known as the Shenlong, or “Divine Dragon,” on its third mission to orbit since 2020, adding a new twist to the growing U.S.-Sino rivalry in space.

The Pentagon has disclosed few details about the X-37B mission, which is conducted by the U.S. Space Force under the military’s National Security Space Launch program.

The Boeing-built vehicle, roughly the size of a small bus and resembling a miniature space shuttle, is built to deploy various payloads and conduct technology experiments on long-duration orbital flights. At the end of its mission, the craft descends back through the atmosphere to land on a runway much like an airplane.

It has flown six previous missions since 2010, the first five of them carried to orbit by Atlas V rockets from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and most recently, in May 2020, atop a Falcon 9 booster furnished by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Thursday’s mission marked the first launched aboard SpaceX’s more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket, capable of carrying payloads even heavier than the X-37B farther into space, possibly into geosynchronous orbit, more than 35,000 kilometers above the Earth.

The X-37B, also called the Orbital Test Vehicle, has previously been confined to flights in low-Earth orbit, at altitudes below 2,000 kilometers.

New orbital regimes

The Pentagon has not said how high the spaceplane will fly this time out. But in a statement last month, the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office said mission No. 7 would involve tests of “new orbital regimes, experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies.”

The X-37B also is carrying a NASA experiment to study how plant seeds are affected by prolonged exposure to the harsh environment of radiation in space. The ability to cultivate crops in space has major implications for keeping astronauts nourished during future long-term missions to the moon and Mars.

China’s equally secretive Shenlong was carried to space on December 14 by a Long March 2F rocket, a launch system less powerful than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and believed to be limited to delivering payloads to low-Earth orbit.

Still, Space Force General B. Chance Saltzman told reporters at an industry conference earlier this month he expected China to launch Shenlong around the same time as the X-37B flight in what he suggested was a competitive move.

“It’s no surprise that the Chinese are extremely interested in our spaceplane. We’re extremely interested in theirs,” Saltzman said, according to remarks published in Air & Space Forces Magazine, a U.S. aerospace journal.

“These are two of the most watched objects on orbit while they’re on orbit. It’s probably no coincidence that they’re trying to match us in timing and sequence of this,” he said.

The planned duration of the latest X-37B mission has not been made public, but it will presumably run until June 2026 or later, given the prevailing pattern of successively longer flights.

Its last mission remained in orbit for well over two years before a return landing in November 2022.
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portland, oregon — As native trees in the Pacific Northwest die off due to climate change, the U.S. Forest Service, the city of Portland, Oregon, and citizen groups around Puget Sound are turning to a deceptively simple climate adaptation strategy called “assisted migration.”

As the world’s climate warms, tree growing ranges in the Northern Hemisphere are predicted to move farther north and higher in elevation.

Trees, of course, can’t get up and walk to their new climatic homes. This is where assisted migration is supposed to lend a hand.

The idea is that humans can help trees keep up with climate change by moving them to more favorable ecosystems faster than the trees could migrate on their own.

Yet not everyone agrees on what type of assisted migration the region needs — or that it’s always a good thing.

In the Pacific Northwest, a divide has emerged between groups advocating for assisted migration that would help struggling native trees, and one that could instead see native species replaced on the landscape by trees from the south, including coast redwoods and giant sequoias.

“There is a huge difference between assisted population migration and assisted species migration,” said Michael Case, forest ecologist at the Virginia-based Nature Conservancy.

Case currently runs an assisted population migration experiment at the Conservancy’s Ellsworth Creek Preserve in western Washington.

Assisted population migration involves moving a native species’ seeds, and by extension its genes, within its current growing range.

By contrast, assisted species migration involves moving a species well outside its existing range, such as introducing redwoods and sequoias to Washington.

A third form of assisted migration, called “range expansion,” amounts to moving a species just beyond its current growing range.

Case’s project involves testing whether breeds of native Douglas fir and western hemlock from drier parts of the Pacific Northwest can be used to help western Washington forests adapt to climate change. He says the Nature Conservancy is focusing on population migration because it has fewer ecological risks.

“Whenever you plant something in an area where it is not locally found you increase the risk of failure,” Case said. “You increase the risk of disturbing potential ecosystem functions and processes.”

Population migration is the only form of assisted migration currently practiced nationwide by the Forest Service, according to Dr. David Lytle, the agency’s deputy chief for research and development.

“We are very, very cautious and do not engage in the long-distance movement and establishment of plant material outside and disjunct from the historic range of a species,” Lytle said.

The Forest Service is pursuing assisted population migration because it’s likely to have few if any “negative consequences” to ecosystems, he said.

Douglas Tallamy, professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware, said one potential negative consequence of species migration is the possibility that native caterpillars might not eat the leaves of migrated nonnative tree species. Because caterpillars feed birds and other animals, this could lead to disruptions to the food web.

This could happen if the City of Portland migrates oak species from places to the south, Tallamy noted.

“Oaks are the most important plant for supporting wildlife that we have in North America,” he said, “but when you move them out of range, the things that are adapted to eating them no longer have access to them.”

The City of Portland’s Urban Forestry program is currently experimenting with the assisted migration of 11 tree species, including three oak species to the south: California black oak, canyon live oak and interior live oak.

Asked via email about potential ecological disruptions, Portland’s City Forester & Urban Forestry Manager Jenn Cairo responded: “We use research from universities, state and federal sources, and local and regional field practitioner experience.”

Another advocate for species migration is the Puget Sound-based, citizen-led PropagationNation. The organization has planted trees in several parks in the Seattle area and has the ambitious goal of “bringing a million coast redwoods and giant sequoias to the Northwest,” according to its website.

The PropagationNation website also recommends planting redwoods in areas where native western red cedar, western hemlock, Sitka spruce and big leaf maple already grow.

Western red cedar, western hemlock and big leaf maple have all seen die-offs and growth declines in recent years tied to climate.

Philip Stielstra, PropagationNation’s founder and president, and a retired Boeing employee, declined to comment for this story.

David Milarch, founder of the Michigan-based Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, which has supplied PropagationNation with redwoods and sequoias, says his trees aren’t intended to replace Pacific Northwest native species.

“All we are doing is extending the range [of redwoods and sequoias] north in the hopes that they will still be here in 100 to 200 years and not join the list of trees that are going extinct,” Milarch said.

This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and Columbia Insight, exploring the impact of climate on trees in the Pacific Northwest.
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Kinshasa, Congo — As Congo copes with its biggest outbreak of mpox, scientists warn discrimination against gay and bisexual men on the continent could make it worse.

In November, the World Health Organization reported that mpox, also known as monkeypox, was being spread via sex in Congo for the first time.

That is a significant departure from previous flare-ups, where the virus mainly sickened people in contact with diseased animals.

Mpox has been in parts of central and west Africa for decades, but it was not until 2022 that it was documented to spread via sex; most of the 91,00 people infected in approximately 100 countries that year were gay or bisexual men.

In Africa, unwillingness to report symptoms could drive the outbreak underground, said Dimie Ogoina, an infectious diseases specialist at the Niger Delta University in Nigeria.

“It could be that because homosexuality is prohibited by law in most parts of Africa, many people do not come forward if they think they have been infected with mpox,” Ogoina said.

WHO officials said they identified the first sexually transmitted cases of the more severe type of mpox in Congo last spring, shortly after a resident of Belgium who “identified himself as a man who has sexual relations with other men” arrived in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. The U.N. health agency said five other people who had sexual contact with the man later became infected with mpox.

“We have been underestimating the potential of sexual transmission of mpox in Africa for years,” said Ogoina, who with his colleagues, first reported in 2019 that mpox might be spreading via sex.

Gaps in monitoring make it a challenge to estimate how many mpox cases are linked to sex, he said. Still, most cases of mpox in Nigeria involve people with no known contact with animals, he noted.

In Congo, there have been about 13,350 suspected cases of mpox, including 607 deaths through the end of November with only about 10% of cases confirmed by laboratories. But how many infections were spread through sex isn’t clear. WHO said about 70% of cases are in children under 15.

During a recent trip to Congo to assess the outbreak, WHO officials found there was “no awareness” among health workers that mpox could be spread sexually, resulting in missed cases.

WHO said health authorities had confirmed sexual transmission of mpox “between male partners and simultaneously through heterosexual transmission” in different parts of the country.

Mpox typically causes symptoms including a fever, skin rash, lesions and muscle soreness for up to one month. It is spread via close contact and most people recover without needing medical treatment.

During the 2022 major international outbreak, mass vaccination programs were undertaken in some countries, including Canada, Britain and the U.S., and targeted those at highest risk — gay and bisexual men. But experts say that’s not likely to work in Africa for several reasons, including the stigma against gay communities.

“I don’t think we’ll see the same clamoring for vaccines in Africa that we saw in the West last year,” said Dr. Boghuma Titanji, an assistant professor of medicine in infectious diseases at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

She said that the gay and bisexual men most at risk of mpox might be fearful of coming forward in a broad immunization program. Countries should work on ways to give the shots — if available — in a way that wouldn’t stigmatize them, she said.

Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyemba, general director of Congo’s National Institute of Biomedical Research, said two provinces in Congo had reported clusters of mpox spread through sex, a concerning development.

There’s no licensed vaccine in Congo, and it would be hard to get enough shots for any large-scale program, Muyemba said. The country is trying to get a Japanese mpox vaccine, but regulatory issues are complicating the situation, he said.

Globally, only one vaccine has been authorized against mpox, made by Denmark’s Bavarian Nordic. Supplies are very limited and even if they were available, they would have to be approved by the African countries using them or by WHO. To date, the vaccine has only been available in Congo through research.

Without greater efforts to stop the outbreaks in Africa, Ogoina predicted that mpox would continue to infect new populations, warning that the disease could also spark outbreaks in other countries, similar to the global emergency WHO declared last year.
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An out-of-this-world Christmas greeting from the past. Plus, the Sun reminds humans who’s boss, and a look back at this year in the cosmos. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Socorro, Colombia — In northeast Colombia, police guard warehouses stacked high with confiscated timber with a noble new destiny: transformation into homes for bees beleaguered by pesticides and climate change.

The illegally harvested wood is used in the Santander department’s “Timber Returns Home” initiative, building hives since 2021 to house the little pollinators so critical to human survival.

So far, the project has seen about 200 cubic meters of wood transformed into 1,000 beehives, with another 10,000 planned for the next phase, according to the Santander environmental authority.

Previously, confiscated timber was turned into sawdust, donated to municipalities for projects … and sometimes just left to rot.

Now it is being repurposed to help address the “extremely serious problem” of possible bee extinction, said biologist German Perilla, director of the Honey Bee Impact Foundation.

About three-quarters of crops producing fruits or seeds for human consumption depend on pollination, but the U.N. has warned that 40% of invertebrate pollinators — particularly bees and butterflies — risk global extinction.

“The main threat is that we will run out of trees and there will be no flowers, because without flowers there are no bees, without bees there are no humans, and we will run out of food,” said beekeeper Maria Acevedo, one of the beneficiaries of the project.

In 2023 alone, she told AFP, she lost more than half of her hives. She blames pesticides used in nearby production of crops such as coffee.

Multiple threats

According to official data, some 3,000 hives, each able to house around 50,000 bees, die off in Colombia each year. Laboratory tests found traces of the insecticide fipronil in most of the dead insects.

Colombia has issued a ban on fipronil — already banned in Europe and restricted in the United States and China — starting February 2024.

According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, higher temperatures, droughts, floods and other extreme events caused by climate change reduces nectar-bearing flowers that bees feed on, and studies have also linked bee infertility to heat stress.

The Santander environmental authority seizes some 1,000 cubic meters of illegally felled timber in anti-trafficking operations in Santander every year.

The country lost 123,517 hectares of trees in 2022, mainly in the Amazon — the world’s largest rainforest.

Nearly half of all timber traded in Colombia is of illegal origin, according to the environment ministry. 
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Yuma, Arizona — As the world pivots from planet-warming fossil fuels to renewable energy, a new pollution problem is rearing its head: What to do with old or worn-out solar panels? 

Thousands of photovoltaic slabs are being installed across the United States every day, particularly in the sunny west and south of the country, as states like California race to toward greener energy production. 

But with an expected lifespan of around 30 years, the first wave of solar installations is now coming to the end of its usefulness, sparking a rush to recycle things that might otherwise end up in the landfill. 

“What is about to happen is a tsunami of solar panels coming back into the supply chain,” said Adam Saghei, chief executive of Arizona-based We Recycle Solar. 

“One of the challenges with any industry is, there hasn’t been that much planning for a circular economy,” he said. “(Solar) is a sustainable form of energy; there needs to be a plan for the retirement of those assets.” 

Saghei’s plan involves, among other things, reusing panels. 

Up to 5% of panels either have a minor production defect or get damaged during transport or installation. 

These still-working panels can be refurbished and diverted to other markets, often abroad, Saghei said. 

But for the panels that no longer function, either because they’re decrepit, or because they were damaged beyond use during installation, or smashed by hailstones, there’s treasure to be found. 

“We’re doing what’s called urban mining,” Saghei said, referring to a process that took his engineers three years to perfect. 

That mining recovers silver, copper, aluminum, glass and silicone, all commodities that have a value on the open market. 

While the uses for the metals might be obvious, what to do with silicone and glass is less so, but nonetheless intriguing. 

“You can use it for sand traps on golf courses, you can refine it for sandblast mix, you can also use it for the stones or the glass mix that you get for outdoor fireplaces,” Saghei said. 

With the capacity to process up to 7,500 panels every day at the plant in Yuma, a surprisingly small amount goes to waste. 

“Depending on the make and model of the panels … we’re able to get up to 99 percent recovery rate,” he said. 

Logistics challenges

For Meng Tao, who specializes in sustainable energy infrastructure at Arizona State University, developing an efficient lifecycle for solar panels is a pressing issue. 

With the United States among the countries committed to weaning itself off of fossil fuels, solar panel installation looks set to increase and peak two decades from now. 

“Once it matures, then the annual installation and the decommissioning will be about the same,” he told AFP.  

“But for the next 20 years … at least for the next 10 years … we’ll just have more installations than retirements,” he said. 

The problem with recycling, he said, is not just that the value of recovered materials from panels can be relatively low, but also the logistics. 

With panels distributed to thousands of sometimes far-flung rooftops, it can cost a lot of money just to get them to a recycling center. 

And unlike some jurisdictions, the United States imposes the cost of removal and recycling on the end user, making it more attractive for households just to dump their old units at the local landfill. 

“There has to be some policy support” to plug the gap between what consumers will pay and the total lifecycle cost of the panels, Tao said. 

Growing market

For Saghei, as for any business leader, profitability is important. 

“You don’t see too many getting into the business because recycling has a cost. It’s not free. It’s labor intensive. It’s energy intensive,” he said. 

But he does see a way forward. 

Recovering materials from old solar panels that can be put back into new solar panels is — he is convinced — a winning proposition. 

“These are markets that are growing,” he said. 

“Right through this process we are able, once the industry scales to even larger figures, to put those raw commodities back into the supply chain,” he said. “What’s exciting is we’re at the forefront.” 
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The COVID-19 pandemic affected students around the world, disrupting their studies and weakening their social skills. But the pandemic did generate some positive outcomes, say college counselors and international students who are back to in-person learning in the United States. VOA’s Laurel Bowman explores. Camera: Adam Greenbaum and Saqib Ul Islam.
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WASHINGTON — Arnong Mungoei has farmed rice in Thailand’s Khon Kaen province for half a century.  

Working land some 500 kilometers northeast of Bangkok never made her rich, but it provided a dependable livelihood.  

But since February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, global geopolitical tensions and weather conditions elsewhere have upended the rice markets and by 2023, worldwide rice prices had exploded.  

Yet Arnong said she made less than she has in years. 

“The mills [that buy rice] don’t increase the price. What can I do? I bring rice there to sell. Whatever they offer us, we have to sell it. We won’t take the rice back because we had to pay for the truck,” said Arnong, 68.

In 2023, the prices of wheat and grains such as oats and corn declined 20% to 30% as stocks were replenished, according to an annual report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

But according to the FAO report, rice prices remained high throughout the year due to a persistent La Niña in March, followed by an El Niño anomaly in June and India imposing restrictions on non-basmati rice in July due after a late monsoon raised fears of a production shortfall.

India’s export control removed 9 million metric tons of grain from the international market and ignited global prices. India is responsible for 40% of global rice supplies after overtaking Thailand as the world’s largest rice exporter in 2011.

The countries most reliant on India’s rice include the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam in Southeast Asia, and Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal in West Africa.

“Rice is tough, because there are just not a lot of other suppliers,” Joseph Glauber, a senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, told Bloomberg in November, adding that India’s export-control policy leaves “a big hole to fill.”

The World Bank predicted, “Rice prices will remain high into 2024, assuming India maintains its export restrictions. The outlook assumes a moderate-to-strong El Niño.”

The bank’s commodity report published on Oct. 30 said rice prices had reached their highest point in the third quarter of 2023 since the 2007-2008 food crises due to the Hamas-Israel conflict and El Niño.

While India’s controls benefit its own consumers, for the billions elsewhere in Asia and in Africa who depend on a stable rice supply, continued high prices could increase food insecurity. 

In Nigeria, the cost of rice increased 61% from September through November. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast the nation would import 2.1 million metric tons of rice in 2024. 

In the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. imposed a price cap Sept. 5 after the cost of rice hit a 14-year high in September. Marcos, who blamed the soaring prices on “smugglers, hoarders and price manipulators,” removed the cap Oct. 13 as concerns over tight supply eased.

Alfie Pulumbarit, national coordinator at MASIPAG, a Philippine-based network of farmers, scientists and nongovernmental organizations working on farmer empowerment, told VOA Thai that rising food prices significantly affected the people in the island nation with “a lot of families now going hungry.”

Citing official information, Pulumbarit said that while it takes a person at least 79 pesos or about $1.50 dollars per day to survive in the Philippines, rice now costs $1.10 dollars per kilogram.

Continued Indian controls coupled with farmers “already leaving rice production in the Philippines” could lead to “a food crisis of epic proportions,” he said.

Climate is one of the key factors in analyses for rice production and price in the coming year.

The U.S. National Weather Service forecasts that the Northern Hemisphere, home to major rice producers like China, India, and Southeast Asia nations, will likely be affected by El Niño April through June, right around sowing season for rice across Asia.

An Asian Bank Development analysis recommends that the private sector should assume a bigger role in rice trading to help stabilize domestic production loss in importing countries. It also encourages policymakers to consider more sustainable rice production.

“Rice paddy is responsible for 12% of global methane emissions and 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In Asia, rice irrigation consumes more than half of freshwater resources,” according to the analysis.

As the COP 28 meeting at Dubai was concluding, the FAO suggested stakeholders should seek out climate-friendly cultivating techniques ranging from using fertilizers that can reduce methane emission to growing plants that create rhizobacteria, which may promote producing oxygen in soil.

Smanachan Buddhajak contributed to this report.
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