As the Trump administration reviews a government report that contradicts its views on climate change, another report confirms that humans have pushed the planet to record-setting temperatures. VOA’s Steve Baragona reports.
…
Four U.S. Senate Republicans from oil-refining states Thursday urged the Trump administration not to block oil shipments from Venezuela as part of U.S. sanctions against the country, saying it could raise costs for U.S. fuel consumers.
The United States sanctioned President Nicolas Maduro and other Venezuelan officials after Maduro established a constituent assembly run by his Socialist Party loyalists and cracked down on widespread opposition. It has not placed sanctions on the OPEC member’s oil industry.
Four senators
Senators John Cornyn of Texas, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker of Mississippi said in the letter, which was seen by Reuters, that unilaterally blocking oil exports could harm the U.S. economy and the Venezuelan people.
The United States imports about 740,000 barrels per day of oil from Venezuela.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the letter, which was addressed to President Donald Trump.
“We believe it is critical to consider the role the U.S. energy industry and refining sector play in our economic and national security interest,” the senators wrote. “Blockading imports could inflict great harm on this industry and burden U.S. taxpayers with the cost.”
Effects on Venezuela
The senators said sanctions on shipments of Venezuelan oil to the United States could also increase the likelihood of a disorderly default by Venezuela, given the oil business is its main source of revenue. Creditors could then seize Venezuelan oil assets and cut off the government’s remaining sources of financing.
They also noted that such sanctions could expand the interests of China and Russia in Venezuela’s oil business. Both countries have invested in Venezuela for years.
Sources have said the United States could use heavy crude from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve held in caverns along the Gulf Coast, to relieve any short-term supply pressure if Venezuela’s shipments were blocked. Nearly 680 million barrels of oil are in reserve.
A drilling boom in the United States has allowed the government to store more oil than it needs to meet international spare supply agreements.
…
Arctic fjords that hid Soviet nuclear-powered submarines during the Cold War are now being used as a weapon in the sanctions war with Europe – to rear fish that Russia can no longer import.
Three years ago, Russia banned food imports from the West in response to a series of Western sanctions that aimed to punish Moscow for its role in the Ukraine crisis, including its annexation of the Crimean peninsula.
Trout and salmon, grown specially for Russia’s vast market at farms in Norway next door, were among the first victims of the sanctions war.
Moscow’s ban on the largest exporter of red fish to Russia led to a sharp hike in prices, while also offering lucrative prospects for Russian fish farmers.
In the Murmansk region in Russia’s northwest, where the rocky coastline of the Ura Bay still features deserted Soviet-era bases and top secret berths for today’s submarine fleet, huge fish farming cages are now becoming part of the landscape.
Thousands of adult trout and salmon swarm inside the open-sea cages as workers toss in generous portions of high-calorie feed.
The cages belong to Russian Aquaculture which farms salmon and trout in the Barents Sea off Murmansk and in Russia’s northern Karelia region.
When they mature, the fish are loaded onto special ships and, still alive, are brought to a Murmansk factory for processing.
Here the fish are either deep frozen or turned into filets and steaks.
Russian Aquaculture reared fish before the Ukraine crisis but under a different name. Once the sanctions were introduced, it increased production to fill the gap in the market previously occupied by Norwegian imports.
The company’s drive to increase output hit difficulties in 2015 when many of its fish succumbed to diseases. It says it has now overcome those problems, and is pushing hard again to produce more fish.
Over the next five to 10 years, Russian Aquaculture aims to ramp up its output to produce 25,000-30,000 tons of fish per year. In the first half of this year, the company produced 8,400 tons of fish.
…
Climate change is affecting the timing of river floods across Europe, and societies may have to adapt to avoid future economic and environmental harm, scientists said Thursday.
River floods are among the costliest natural disasters worldwide, causing annual damage of more than $100 billion. They affect millions of people each year because many towns and cities are built along rivers.
Examining flood data across 50 years, researchers found significant shifts in timing along the Atlantic coast of Western Europe from 1960 to 2010.
According to a paper published in the journal Science, half of the measurement stations from England to Portugal showed floods were occurring on average at least 15 days earlier by 2010 compared with a half century earlier.
In northeastern Europe, earlier snowmelts also brought river floods forward by at least eight days over the 50 years, while areas around the North Sea are now seeing floods happen more than a week later than in 1960.
“If the trends in flood timing continue, considerable economic and environmental consequences may arise, because societies and ecosystems have adapted” to the average timing of floods, the authors concluded.
Farming, water provision
They cited possible harm to farming around the North Sea from later winter floods that leave the ground softer going into spring. Water utility companies in northeastern Europe may need to begin filling reservoirs with the earlier water surges rather than waiting for later flooding to ensure sufficient supply for hydropower plants and irrigation, they said.
The study’s authors, led by Guenter Bloeschl of Vienna’s Technical University, cautioned that the precise mechanism by which flood patterns change is complex and still needs to be fully understood.
While data on the timing of floods showed a clearer link with climate change than past studies that looked into flood severity, the researchers noted that several factors affect the timing of floods — including the amount of rainfall, the nature of the soil, upriver snowmelt and land use. Not all the shifts are necessarily caused by man-made global warming, they said.
Bloeschl said the researchers would try to use their findings to predict future changes in the timing of seasonal floods.
“We really expect these trends to increase,” he said.
…
Artificial intelligence robots are turbocharging the race to find new drugs for the crippling nerve disorder ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The condition attacks and kills nerve cells controlling muscles, leading to weakness, paralysis and, ultimately, respiratory failure.
There are only two drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to slow the progression of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), one available since 1995 and the other approved just this year. About 140,000 new cases are diagnosed a year globally, and there is no cure.
“Many doctors call it the worst disease in medicine, and the unmet need is huge,” said Richard Mead of the Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience, who has found artificial intelligence (AI) is already speeding up his work.
Such robots — complex software run through powerful computers — work as tireless and unbiased super-researchers.
They analyze huge chemical, biological and medical databases, alongside reams of scientific papers, far quicker than humanly possible, throwing up new biological targets and potential drugs.
Cell deaths prevented
One candidate proposed by AI machines recently produced promising results in preventing the death of motor neurone cells and delaying disease onset in preclinical tests in Sheffield.
Mead, who aims to present the work at a medical meeting in December, is now assessing plans for clinical trials.
He and his team in northern England are not the only ones waking up to the ability of AI to elucidate the complexities of ALS.
In Arizona, the Barrow Neurological Institute last December found five new genes linked to ALS by using IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Without the machine, researchers estimate the discovery would have taken years rather than only a few months.
Mead believes ALS is ripe for AI and machine-learning because of the rapid expansion in genetic information about the condition and the fact there are good test-tube and animal models with which to evaluate drug candidates.
That is good news for ALS patients seeking better treatment options. Famous sufferers include Gehrig, the 1923-39 New York Yankees baseball player; actor and playwright Sam Shepard, who died last month; and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, a rare example of someone living for decades with the condition.
If the research goes on to deliver new medicines, it would mark a notable victory for AI in drug discovery, bolstering the prospects of a growing batch of startup companies focused on the technology.
Those firms are based on the premise that while AI robots won’t replace scientists and clinicians, they should save time and money by finding drug leads several times faster than conventional processes.
British ‘unicorn’
Mead from Sheffield is working with BenevolentAI, one of a handful of British “unicorns” — private companies with a market value above $1 billion, in this case $1.7 billion — which is rapidly expanding operations at its offices in central London.
Others in the field include Scotland’s Exscientia and U.S.-based firms Berg, Numerate, twoXAR, Atomwise and InSilico Medicine — the last of which recently launched a drug discovery platform geared specifically to ALS.
“What we are trying to do is find relationships that will give us new targets in disease,” said Jackie Hunter, a former drug hunter at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) who now heads Benevolent’s pharma business. “We can do things so much more dynamically and be really responsive to what essentially the information is telling us.”
Unlike humans, who may have pet theories, AI scans through data and generates hypotheses in an unbiased way.
Conventional drug discovery remains a hit-and-miss affair, and Hunter believes the 50 percent failure rates seen for experimental compounds in mid- and late-stage clinical trials due to lack of efficacy is unsustainable, forcing a shift to AI.
A key test will come with a study by Benevolent to assess a previously unsuccessful compound from Johnson & Johnson in a new disease area — this time for treating Parkinson’s disease patients with excessive daytime sleepiness.
Big pharmaceutical companies like GSK, Sanofi and Merck are now exploring the potential of AI through deals with startups.
Being careful
They are treading cautiously, given the failure of “high throughput screening” in the early 2000s to improve efficiency by using robots to test millions of compounds. Yet AI’s ability to learn on the job means things may be different this time.
CPR Asset Management fund manager Vafa Ahmadi, for one, believes it is a potential game-changer.
“Using artificial intelligence is going to really accelerate the way we produce much better targeted molecules. It could have a dramatic impact on productivity, which in turn could have a major impact on the valuation of pharmaceutical stocks,” he said.
Drugmakers and startups are not the only ones chasing that value. Technology giants including Microsoft, IBM and Google’s parent Alphabet are also setting up life sciences units to explore drug R&D.
For Benevolent’s Hunter, today’s attempts to find new drugs for ALS and other difficult diseases amount to an important test vehicle for the future of AI, which is already being deployed in other high-tech areas such as autonomous cars.
“The aim is to show that we can deliver in a very difficult and complex area, ” Hunter said. “I believe if you can do it in drug discovery and development, you can show the power of AI anywhere.”
…
Venezuelan homemaker Carmen Rondon lives in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, but has spent weeks cooking with firewood due to a chronic shortage of home cooking gas – leaving her hoarse from breathing smoke.
Finding domestic gas cylinders has become increasingly difficult, a problem that oil industry analysts attribute to slumping oil output in the OPEC nation – which is struggling under an unraveling socialist economy.
State oil company PDVSA says the problem is due to difficulties in distributing tanks amid four months of anti-government protests in which its trucks have been attacked.
“I’ve spent three weeks cooking with wood and sometimes the food does not even soften properly, I can’t stand it anymore,” said Rondon, as she lined up to buy a cylinder under the scorching sun in the city of San Felix in southern Venezuela.
More than 100 people were ahead of her in line.
Nine out of 10 Venezuelan homes rely on cylinders for home gas usage, with only 10 percent receiving it via pipelines, according to official figures. The government launched a plan 12 years ago to bring some 5 million households onto the natural gas network but was unable to follow through.
Venezuela’s socialist economy has been in free-fall since the oil price collapse in 2014, creating shortages of everything from diapers to cancer medication and spurring inflation to triple-digit levels.
President Nicolas Maduro says he is the victim of an “economic war” by the opposition, and says violent street protests are part of an effort to overthrow him.
With oil output near 25-year lows, PDVSA has been forced to import liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, which is used to fill natural gas cylinders. Venezuela imported 26,370 barrels per day of LPG in the first half of 2017, according to data seen by Reuters.
PDVSA did not respond to a request for comment.
Long lines to buy cylinders have spurred protests.
Demonstrators in May burned 22 PDVSA trucks in a single day in response to the shortages.
The company says it is now distributing gas cylinders at night and before daybreak due to such protests, which also include roadblocks that prevent free movement of vehicles.
“It’s not fair that a country with so much oil is going through this,” complained Maria Echeverria, a 44-year-old homemaker, who started waiting at dawn to buy a gas cylinder in San Cristobal, near the border with neighboring Colombia.
…
Talks between African and U.S. officials to review the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) free-trade deal ended Thursday with no decision and a feeling on all sides that it has achieved little since it was set up.
President Donald Trump’s top trade negotiator, Robert E. Lighthizer, and other U.S. officials have been in the tiny West African nation of Togo over the past two days to discuss the Clinton-era trade pact with sub-Saharan Africa.
Trump’s “America First” campaign has seen him withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, threaten to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement and seek to renegotiate the U.S.-South Korea free-trade deal. But his administration has said little about Africa, and had not previously mentioned the 2000 AGOA trade agreement.
It is not clear whether the U.S. wants to change the deal before it expires in 2025 or extend it. No decision was made on either count.
AGOA allows tariff-free access for thousands of goods from 38 African nations to U.S. markets.
“The number of countries benefiting from AGOA is very limited, as is the number of sectors,” Peter Barlerin, deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, said at the forum Wednesday. “We will see if the situation improves in the coming years, but it is also up to the beneficiary countries to enhance their business climate.”
‘Constraints’ on some
Bernadette Legzim-Balouki, Togo’s trade minister, who presided over the meeting, was equally lukewarm on AGOA.
“Not all the countries eligible have benefited from the law,” she said. “We are trying to examine the constraints that prevent some African countries from profiting.”
Legzim-Balouki added that the United States and the nations eligible for AGOA had agreed on some loose aims, including: development of a better plan to take full advantage of the pact; bilateral talks between the U.S. and each eligible country; development of a mechanism to protect African producers from price volatility.
The U.S. trade deficit with the AGOA countries shrank to about $7.9 billion last year from a peak of $64 billion in 2008, as U.S. shale oil production increases have lessened the need for oil imports from major exporters Nigeria and Angola.
“AGOA is an excellent opportunity but we aren’t making the most of it, mainly due to a lack of knowledge about it,” Beninois agribusinessman Sylvain Adewoussi told Reuters.
…
Croatia revoked on Thursday its decision to raise import fees on some farm products by 220 percent, avoiding a trade war with its Balkan neighbors who had threatened to hit back with counter-measures.
European Union-member Croatia last month raised its fees for phytosanitary controls — agricultural checks for pests and viruses on fruits and vegetables — at its borders to 2,000 kuna ($317.52) from 90 kuna, citing compliance with EU standards and protection of its consumers.
EU candidates Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro, as well as fellow EU aspirant Bosnia, have called on Croatia to withdraw its decision, saying otherwise each of them would take counter-measures it considered adequate to protect its economic interests.
Serbia, which is the only country in the region that operates a trade surplus with its neighbor, has already stepped up phytosanitary controls on all organic produce from Croatia and said it would increase them further.
Croatia’s agriculture ministry said in a statement on Thursday that it cut the import fee for a shipment of one brand of fruits and vegetables to 90 kuna, and that the decision will become effective on Friday.
The ministry also agreed with neighboring countries that agricultural inspections on their borders will go back to normal routine as of Friday, while all other pending issues will be analyzed and discussed, it said in the statement.
Most countries in the region import more than they export to Croatia, except for Serbia. Serbia’s exports to Croatia in 2016 reached 116 million euros ($136.04 million) versus imports worth 79 million euros.
Neighboring countries welcomed Croatia’s move.
“Bringing the prices back at the previous level will contribute to the relaxation of relations among the countries of the region,” said Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic.
($1 = 0.8527 euros)
($1 = 6.2989 kuna)
…
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis kicked off his first official visit to the U.S. technology industry on Thursday with a tour of Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, the first stop on a two-day outreach campaign intended to highlight the Pentagon’s commitment to tech innovation.
Mattis was scheduled to visit Mountain View, California, later in the day to tour the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Experimental Unit, or DIUx, a Silicon Valley outpost set up in 2015 by his predecessor, Ash Carter.
He was also expected to visit Alphabet’s Google headquarters in Palo Alto on Friday.
“A pleasure to host #SecDef James Mattis at Amazon HQ in Seattle today,” Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos wrote on Twitter.
The visit comes as the Trump administration has sparred with the technology industry on a host of issues, including immigration, privacy and net neutrality.
A hundred teenage girls from seven countries are gathered in Malawi for a ‘Women in Science’ camp. Lameck Masina has the story from the Malawi University of Science and Technology in the Thyolo district of southern Malawi.
…
Egypt’s official statistics agency says the country’s inflation rate has jumped to 33 percent in July – up from 29.8 percent in June.
The announcement comes as Egyptians struggle in the face of steep price hikes as part of the government’s economic reform plan.
The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics made the announcement Thursday.
Economists believe the hike is driven by an increase in fuel prices. They expect inflation to remain above 30 percent over the next two months, especially after an increase in electricity, transportation and drinking water prices.
Egypt raised fuel prices in June by 55 percent for the commonly used 80-octane gasoline and diesel. It also doubled the price of the butane gas canisters, used in the majority of Egyptian households for cooking.
…
China has sent an unbreakable code from a satellite to the Earth, marking the first time space-to-ground quantum key distribution technology has been realized, state media said Thursday.
China launched the world’s first quantum satellite last August, to help establish “hack proof” communications, a development the Pentagon has called a “notable advance.”
The official Xinhua news agency said the latest experiment was published in the journal Nature Thursday, where reviewers called it a “milestone.”
Quantum key technology
The satellite sent quantum keys to ground stations in China between 645 km (400 miles) and 1,200 km (745 miles) away at a transmission rate up to 20 orders of magnitude more efficient than an optical fiber, Xinhua cited Pan Jianwei, lead scientist on the experiment from the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, as saying.
“That, for instance, can meet the demand of making an absolute safe phone call or transmitting a large amount of bank data,” Pan said.
Any attempt to eavesdrop on the quantum channel would introduce detectable disturbances to the system, Pan said.
“Once intercepted or measured, the quantum state of the key will change, and the information being intercepted will self-destruct,” Xinhua said.
The news agency said there were “enormous prospects” for applying this new generation of communications in defense and finance.
China lags in space
China still lags behind the United States and Russia in space technology, although President Xi Jinping has prioritized advancing its space program, citing national security and defense.
China insists its space program is for peaceful purposes, but the U.S. Defense Department has highlighted its increasing space capabilities, saying it was pursuing activities aimed at preventing adversaries from using space-based assets in a crisis.
…
China urged the U.S. government Thursday to act “prudently” to avoid damaging economic relations between the two countries, in a strongly worded response to Washington’s preliminary decision to place anti-dumping duties on Chinese aluminum foil.
In a statement posted on the Ministry of Commerce’s Wechat account, the government said the United States had ignored cooperation offered by Beijing and Chinese companies in making its ruling this week.
The statement, attributed to Wang Hejun, head of the Commerce Ministry’s trade remedy and investigation bureau, was more strongly worded than typical responses to trade disputes with the United States.
The statement said there were no grounds to accuse China’s aluminum producers of benefiting from subsidies.
The WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding for a baby’s first six months and continued breastfeeding up to two years of age. Uganda’s parliament has been promoting breastfeeding with a free, day care center for female legislators and staffers. Halima Athumani reports for VOA.
…
A study published this month in the online scientific journal Nature stunned the world: Scientists were able to fix a hereditary genetic mutation in a human embryo. The milestone achievement was quickly tempered by the ethical question: Will this lead to the making of designer babies?’ VOA’s George Putic explains.
…
The planet has a bit of a waste problem. Every year, at least 200 million tons of raw sewage goes untreated. This is an environmental and health crisis. But one enterprising startup in Kenya is turning all that waste into fuel. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…
More than 20 million people are working as modern slaves, and a technology developer is hoping artificial intelligence can help clean up the world’s supply chains and root out worker abuse.
Developer Padmini Ranganathan said mobile phones, media reports and surveillance cameras can all be mined for real-time data, which can in turn be fed into machines to create artificial intelligence (AI) that helps companies see more clearly what is happening down the line.
“The time to do this now is better than ever before, with so many countries and companies focusing on modern slavery,” she said. “At the start of the decade, the driving force for compliance was fear of being penalized. Now companies are looking at social impact and saying they want to do this.”
More scrutiny of modern-day slavery
Modern-day slavery has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, putting regulatory and consumer pressure on companies to ensure their supply chains are free from forced labor, child workers and other forms of slavery.
Almost 21 million people are victims of forced labor, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), with migrant workers and indigenous people particularly vulnerable.
But Ranganathan said there are new digital ways to stamp out exploitation, given humans have failed to end modern slavery.
“The technology can filter over 1 million articles a day using forced labor specific key words and highlight potential areas of risk in a supply chain,” she said.
Ranganathan works for information technology services company SAP Ariba, which helps companies better manage their procurement processes.
She said a new program could map weak links in corporate supply chains by culling data from a host of sources, from surveillance cameras to non-profits and other agencies.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning can use these huge volumes of data and extract meaningful information,” she said.
Forced labor worth $150 billion
Forced labor in the private economy generates $150 billion in illegal profits per year, according to the ILO.
Ranganathan hopes her new program will curb that market and help create “supply chains with a conscience.”
For instance, she said it could help detect if child labor was used to pollinate cotton, which in turn was used to produce a branded shirt. Or it could help monitor labor conditions on cocoa plantations, giving companies “real-time exposure” so they can purge their supply chains of abuse right away.
“The convergence of technology will make things more transparent and real-time exposure can be created,” she said.
“In the AI world, techniques are being piloted where we could arm the lowest level supplier with a mobile app, ensure hotlines in factories, use of surveillance cameras and make this all a part of the contract.”
Ranganathan conceded that mapping the “last mile” of any supply chain was the hardest part, with many outsourcing work to homeworkers and small units, where data was harder to gather.
…
Researchers in the United States have unveiled a prototype of a battery-free mobile phone, using
technology they hope will eventually come to be integrated into mass-market products.
The phone is the work of a group of researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle and works by harvesting tiny amounts of power from radio signals, known as radio frequency or ‘RF’ waves.
“Ambient RF waves are all around us so, as an example, your FM station broadcasts radio waves, your AM stations do that, your TV stations, your cellphone towers. They all are transmitting RF waves,” team member Vamsi Talla told Reuters.
The phone is a first prototype and its operation is basic — at first glance it looks little more than a circuit board with a few parts attached and the caller must wear headphones and press a button to switch between talking and listening.
But researchers said there are plans to develop further prototypes, featuring a low-power screen for texting and even a basic camera. They also plan a version of the battery-free phone that uses a tiny solar cell to provide power.
The researchers plan to release a product in eight to nine months time, thought they would not give further details. One team member however, was prepared to give a glimpse of how their work will impact the future of cellphone technology.
“In the future every smartphone will come with a battery-free mode where you can at least make a voice call when your battery’s dead,” said the researcher.
The initiative is not the only one seeking to improve the way that mobile technology is powered. Researchers at the Universities of Bristol and Surrey in Britain, are developing supercapacitors, which they believe will eventually allow devices to charge in a period of a few minutes.
…
Many indigenous populations suffer from high rates of viral hepatitis, and are 2 to 5 times as likely as the surrounding general population to contract it. But efforts to eliminate the diseases have begun to show promise, some researchers say.
Globally, 71 million people have hepatitis C and 257 million have hepatitis B. The viruses cause inflammation of the liver and can lead to cirrhosis and, especially with hepatitis C, liver cancer.
Most cases come from contact with infected blood, drug use, tattoos with unclean needles, or sexual transmission. Before the screening of blood in 1992, blood transfusions were a frequent source. The infection also can pass from a mother to her newborn child.
At the World Indigenous People’s Conference on Viral Hepatitis this week in Anchorage, Alaska, scientists reported on the problem and the efforts to solve it, including one of the first efforts to eliminate hepatitis C from a population.
Reasons for high rates of infection
Homie Razavi and Devin Razavi-Shearer, epidemiologists from the Polaris Observatory, examined why infection rates were so high among indigenous communities. In Canada, hepatitis B rates were five times higher than the general population, and hepatitis C, three times higher. In Australia, indigenous people were four times as likely to contract hepatitis B and three times as likely to contract hepatitis C.
The researchers said the rates were likely because to “disproportionately high rates of poverty, injection drug use, and incarceration in indigenous populations. This, in combination with the lack of access to health care and prevention measures, greatly increases the risk and thus prevalence of hepatitis C.”
But great progress is being made. In the 1980s, vaccination programs began to cut infection rates of hepatitis B.
Dr. Brian McMahon, director of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, told the conference that new surveys have shown that the disease has been virtually eliminated in young indigenous people in Alaska.
Eliminating infection
Jorge Mera, director of infectious diseases for Cherokee Nation Health Services in Oklahoma, reported on an effort there to eliminate hepatitis C.
“Of the people we think have hepatitis C in the community, we’ve treated one-third of them,” he told VOA, “and that’s pretty good for a program that we started two years ago.”
That program is the first effort in the United States, and one of the first in the world, to attempt to wipe out the virus. Treatments for hepatitis C have improved dramatically over the past decade, making these efforts possible.
Mera said there are many programs around the world in the planning stages, and he pointed to a number of things those programs can learn from the Cherokee Nation’s effort.
“Most of the patients that we’re detecting positive are coming in through the urgent care and emergency department,” he said, “so if you have limited resources, these are areas that I would focus on.”
Health officials in the Cherokee Nation are screening everyone between the ages of 20 and 69. This effort includes screening people during dental appointments.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended screening older adults, but Mera said there were high rates of hepatitis infection in people in their 20s and 30s. He suggested that others setting up elimination programs first determine the prevalence of infection in their respective communities before deciding whom to screen.
He said history has led to high rates of hepatitis in indigenous populations.
“When you have a population that has been oppressed or traumatized for centuries due to the nature of how the Western colonization process developed, those are factors that may lead substantial portions of that population to seek some relief in nonconventional ways like intravenous drug use,” Mera said.
Preventing transmission is crucial to eliminating hepatitis C, Mera said. One way to combat transmission, he said, is to legalize and expand needle exchanges and opiate-substitution programs.
…
Facebook on Wednesday made its biggest move to date to compete in the television market by expanding its video offerings with programming ranging from professional women’s basketball to a safari show and a parenting program.
The redesigned product, called “Watch,” will be available initially to a limited group in the United States on Facebook’s mobile app, website and television apps, the company said.
The world’s largest social network added a video tab last year, and it has been dropping hints for months that it wanted to become a source of original and well-produced videos, rather than just shows made by users.
Reuters reported in May that Facebook had signed deals with millennial-focused news and entertainment creators Vox Media, BuzzFeed, ATTN, Group Nine Media and others to produce shows, both scripted and unscripted.
Daniel Danker, Facebook’s product director, said in a statement Wednesday: “We’ve learned that people like the serendipity of discovering videos in News Feed, but they also want a dedicated place they can go to watch videos.”
Facebook said the shows would include videos of the Women’s National Basketball Association, a parenting show from Time Inc and a safari show from National Geographic. Facebook is broadcasting some Major League Baseball games and that would continue, the company said.
Eventually, the platform would be open to any show creator as a place to distribute video, the company said.
The company, based in Menlo Park, California, faces a crowded market with not only traditional television networks but newer producers such as Netflix and Alphabet’s YouTube as well as Twitter and Snap.
…
A ferocious seagoing crocodile that menaced coastal waters about 164 million years ago during the Jurassic Period has been given a name honoring the similarly ferocious heavy-metal rocker Lemmy, the late frontman for the British band Motörhead .
Scientists said on Wednesday they had named the 19-foot-long (5.8 meters) reptile Lemmysuchus, meaning “Lemmy’s crocodile.” Its fossils were unearthed near the eastern English city of Peterborough in 1909 and were recently re-examined and determined to be a distinct genus in need of a name.
Its enlongated, narrow snout resembled those of modern fish-eating crocs from India called gharials. It boasted large, blunt teeth, perfect for crushing turtle shells or other hard-bodied prey like hard-scaled fish, said University of Edinburgh paleontologist Michela Johnson, lead author of the study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
“It’s big, ugly and quite scary. We think that Lemmy would have liked it. For me, this is a career high, and I can now die happy,” added another of the researchers, Lorna Steel, who came up with the name.
Known for hard living and hard rocking, gravelly voiced Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, died of cancer at age 70 in 2015 in Los Angeles. He formed his influential band Motörhead in 1975.
“I wanted to name something after Lemmy after he died,” said Steel, senior curator for fossils from the croc family, birds and flying reptiles at the Natural History Museum in London.
“At that time, late December 2015, I was working with colleagues from Edinburgh University on this particular fossil specimen,” she said. “I kept the thought to myself for a while but then floated the idea past the others. They all thought it was great, and it really is the most appropriate fossil to bear Lemmy’s name.”
Lemmysuchus was a member of a group called teleosaurs, seagoing crocodiles that thrived for tens of millions of years during the age of dinosaurs. The seas at the time were also populated by a number of types of marine reptiles, including long-necked plesiosaurs and dolphin-like ichthyosaurs.
Johnson studied the fossil specimen held at the Natural History Museum and determined that it had been incorrectly classified as another teleosaur called Steneosaurus.
…
Scientists have the first major evidence that blood tests called liquid biopsies hold promise for screening people for cancer. Hong Kong doctors tried it for a type of head and neck cancer, and boosted early detection and one measure of survival.
The tests detect DNA that tumors shed into the blood. Some are used now to monitor cancer patients, and many companies are trying to develop versions of these for screening, as possible alternatives to mammograms, colonoscopies and other such tests. The new study shows this approach can work, at least for this one form of cancer and in a country where it’s common.
“This work is very exciting on the larger scale” because it gives a blueprint for how to make tests for other tumor types such as lung or breast, said Dr. Dennis Lo of Chinese University of Hong Kong. “We are brick by brick putting that technology into place.”
He led the study, published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine. Lo is best known for discovering that fetal DNA can be found in a mom’s blood, which launched a new era of non-invasive testing for pregnant women.
The study involved nasopharyngeal cancer, which forms at the top of the throat behind the nose. It’s a good test case for DNA screening because it’s an aggressive cancer where early detection matters a lot, and screening could be tried in a population where the cancer is most common — middle-aged Chinese men.
Also, the Epstein-Barr virus is involved in most cases, so tests could hunt for viral DNA that tumors shed into the blood in large quantities, rather than rare bits of cancer cells themselves.
About 20,000 men were screened, and viral DNA was found in 1,112, or 5.5 percent. Of those, 309 also had the DNA on confirmatory tests a month later. After endoscope and MRI exams, 34 turned out to have cancer.
More cases were found at the earliest stage — 71 percent versus 20 percent of a comparison group of men who had been treated for nasopharyngeal cancer over the previous five years. That’s important because early cases often are cured with radiation alone, but more advanced ones need chemotherapy and treatment is less successful.
Screening also seemed to improve how many survived without worsening disease — 97 percent at three years versus 70 percent of the comparison group.
Only one person who tested negative on screening developed nasopharyngeal cancer within a year.
The researchers estimate 593 people would need to be screened at a total cost of $28,600 to identify one cancer case. It may be worth it in Hong Kong, but maybe not in places like the U.S. where the disease is rare, and more people would have to be screened at a greater cost to find each case, said Dr. Richard Ambinder of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who wrote a commentary in the journal.
Still, “this is showing that liquid biopsies have great promise,” he said. “This is an advance that will indeed save lives.”
The study was sponsored by an Asian foundation and the Hong Kong government. Lo and some other authors founded Cirina, a Hong Kong-based company focused on early cancer detection, and get royalties related to DNA blood tests. In May, Cirina merged with Grail Inc., a California company working on cancer screening blood tests with more than $1 billion from drug companies and big-name investors such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
…
The exchange of threats and harsh rhetoric between North Korea and Donald Trump has rattled many investors. Stock prices fell in Asia, Europe and the United States, while demand rose for safe-haven investments like gold.
Key stock indexes in Hong Kong, Germany, and France were down by one percent or more. U.S. stocks were down as much as four-tenths of a percent in Wednesday’s mid-day trading. Before Tuesday’s angry exchange of words, U.S. stocks had been setting a series of record highs.
Demand for gold, a traditional way of protecting assets in troubled times, pushed up the price for the precious metal by about one percent in Wednesday’s trading. Oil prices also posted gains.
South Korea is home to more than 50 million people and major companies like Samsung and Hyundai. World Bank data show South Korea has a $1.4 trillion economy, which is nearly two percent of global economic activity.
…
A former Google software engineer, who wrote an internal memo criticizing the company’s diversity policies, has filed a labor complaint, saying he was wrongfully fired.
In a statement emailed to news agencies, James Damore said he filed the complaint with the National Labor Relations Board prior to his termination and that, “It’s illegal to retaliate against the NLRB charge.”
Damore said he was subjected to “coercive statements” while working at Google. According to the Associated Press, a Google spokesperson said the company could not have retaliated against Damore because it was not aware of the complaint until hearing about it in the news media after he was dismissed.
Damore caused an uproar after the website Gizmodo published a leaked copy of the memo he wrote, encouraging Google to “treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group,” and questioning the effectiveness of diversity programs at the company.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive officer, criticized Damore’s memo in an email for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
In the 10-page internal memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” Damore asserted that fewer women are employed in the technology field because they “prefer jobs in social and artistic areas,” while men are more inclined to become computer programmers — a fact he said was due to “biological causes.”
Danielle Brown, Google’s new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance, said the memo “advanced incorrect assumptions about gender” and promotes a viewpoint not encouraged by the company.
“Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions,” she said. “But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.”
The controversy comes as Silicon Valley faces accusations of sexism and discrimination. Google is in the midst of a Department of Labor investigation over allegations women there are paid less than men.
…