YCLOAK

China plans to expand use of ethanol in gasoline nationwide by 2020 to curb smog and fossil fuel demand, the government said Wednesday, joining United States, Brazil and other nations that use blended fuel.

The announcement adds to a series of initiatives to clean up smog-choked Chinese cities and control surging demand for imported oil. The government is spending heavily to develop an electric car industry and has raised sales taxes on vehicles with larger engines.

Plans call for China to develop a demonstration facility by 2020 that can make 50,000 tons of ethanol a year from cellulose, according to the Cabinet’s National Energy Administration. It said that would expand to commercial scale by 2025.

“It is an ideal alternative to fossil fuel,” said an unidentified NEA official quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency.

China is the world’s biggest energy consumer and auto market. It started producing ethanol from corn in 2004 but banned use of food crops in 2007, prompting suppliers to switch to straw stalks and other materials. About one-fifth of gasoline produced in China has added ethanol, according to Xinhua.

Regulators later eased the ban on use of food crops in some areas. Xinhua said the latest plan is intended in part to use up aging stockpiles of corn.

Other governments including Brazil and the United States require gasoline to contain from 10 percent to as much as 85 percent ethanol to curb emissions and reduce petroleum demand.

The NEA gave no indication what level of ethanol would be required, but Xinhua said it would be 10 percent.

On Saturday, a deputy industry minister said Beijing is developing a timetable to phase out production and sales of traditional fuel cars. France and Britain announced similar plans in July. 
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A puzzling study of U.S. pregnancies found that women who had miscarriages between 2010 and 2012 were more likely to have had back-to-back annual flu shots that included protection against swine flu.

Vaccine experts think the results may reflect the older age and other miscarriage risks for the women, and not the flu shots. Health officials say there is no reason to change the government recommendation that all pregnant women be vaccinated against the flu. They say the flu itself is a much greater danger to women and their fetuses.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reached out to a doctor’s group, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, to warn them the study is coming out and help them prepare for a potential wave of worry from expectant moms, CDC officials said.

“I want the CDC and researchers to continue to investigate this,” said Dr. Laura Riley, a Boston-based obstetrician who leads a committee on maternal immunization. “But as an advocate for pregnant women, what I hope doesn’t happen is that people panic and stop getting vaccinated.”

Past studies have found flu vaccines are safe during pregnancy, though there’s been little research on impact of flu vaccinations given in the first three months of pregnancy.

Flu and its complications kill thousands of Americans every year. The elderly, young children and pregnant women are especially at risk. When a new “swine flu” strain emerged in 2009, it killed 56 U.S. pregnant women that year, according to the CDC.

The study’s authors, two of whom are CDC researchers, saw a big difference when they looked at women who had miscarried within 28 days of getting a shot that included protection against swine flu, but it was only when the women also had had a flu shot the previous season.

They found 17 of 485 miscarriages they studied involved women whose vaccinations followed that pattern. Just four of a comparable 485 healthy pregnancies involved women who were vaccinated that way.

The first group also had more women who were at higher risk for miscarriage, like older moms and smokers and those with diabetes. The researchers tried to make statistical adjustments to level out some of those differences but some researchers don’t think they completely succeeded.

Other experts said they don’t believe a shot made from killed flu virus could trigger an immune system response severe enough to prompt a miscarriage. And the authors said they couldn’t rule out the possibility that exposure to swine flu itself was a factor in some miscarriages.

Two other medical journals rejected the article before a third, Vaccine, accepted it. Dr. Gregory Poland, Vaccine’s editor-in-chief, said it was a well-designed study that raised a question that shouldn’t be ignored. But he doesn’t believe flu shots caused the miscarriages. “Not at all,” said Poland, who also is director of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic.

Though this study may cause worry and confusion, it is evidence “of just how rigorous and principled our vaccine safety monitoring system is,” said Jason Schwartz, a Yale University vaccine policy expert.

Some of the same researchers are working on a larger study looking at more recent data to see if a possible link between swine flu vaccine and miscarriage holds up, said James Donahue, a study author from the Wisconsin-based Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. The results aren’t expected until next year at the earliest, he said.
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Microsoft, Walt Disney Co. and General Motors are among hundreds of companies calculating how much they spend on carbon emissions to show investors they are concerned about global warming, a study said on Tuesday.

More than 700 other businesses around the world plan by 2018 to introduce so-called carbon pricing, said the report by the U.S.-based Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES).

The findings come amid efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to scale back climate change-related regulations on grounds they are burdensome to the economy.

Putting a monetary value on carbon dioxide emissions helps limit the burning of fossil fuel, which contributes to global warming, and signals to investors that companies are aware of the financial risks posed by global warming, the study said.

Some 500 companies, including 80 in the United States, reported using carbon pricing, it said, drawing on an array of previous research.

Many oil and gas companies such as British energy company BP use an internal, or “shadow,” accounting method to track their carbon emissions, it said.

“It just stands to reason that investors, in looking at enterprises, of course are looking at ‘Are they resilient to all kinds of changes in the future?'” Bob Stout, vice president for BP America, said during a telephone briefing with reporters and others.

“Climate change and carbon pricing as a policy obviously are key factors that businesses need to look at,” he said.

Other companies charge carbon fees to internal business units.

Microsoft, which charges its business units for emissions ranging from electricity consumption to employee air travel, sees carbon pricing as crucial “regardless of national policies,” said Liz Willmott, a company program manager.

“We as companies can enable partnership and collaborations with countries to help them meet the Paris targets,” she said.

Trump has withdrawn the United States from the historic 2015 Paris global agreement to fight climate change, saying the accord would cost the nation trillions of dollars, kill jobs and hinder oil, gas, coal and manufacturing industries.

According to the World Bank, 42 governments have or plan to have a way to tax carbon emissions or have a cap-and-trade system that allows industries with low emissions to sell their unused permitted capacity to larger emitters.

The United States is not among them.
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From Houston and Miami, to cities in South Asia, 2017 has been a year of intense weather and devastating floods. A combination of climate change and urban development has created a perfect storm for catastrophe.

“We are living in a warmer world. We are living in a world where potentially, hurricanes could be more damaging,” said Bill Patzert, climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Sea levels are rising. They have risen almost nine inches (22 centimeters) in the last century,” he said. Rising sea levels, however, make up only a small fraction of the problem, he said.

“It has the appearance that flooding due to great storms or during the monsoon season over Asia is becoming more severe. So what is really happening is that the population of the planet, especially along the great river valleys of Asia and along the coast, for instance, of the United States, we tend to migrate toward the coasts.” Patzert added, “so there is just more infrastructure. There are more people.  There is more damage.”

An example is the recent flooding in neighborhoods near dams and levees in the Houston, Texas from Hurricane Harvey. 

“It is a symptom of the way that we have not been able to control development and to control where and how developers build,” said Kian Goh, assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Architects and urban planners said many cities in potentially flood-prone areas should rethink how they are built and their relationship with water.

“Many urban designers have acknowledged that leaving out natural systems is actually a big problem and the reasons why these cities are flooding is because we have taken away wetlands; we have paved over rivers, we have largely ignored the interaction between physical and natural systems,” said Goh.

One approach to fight floods is what architects call “passive design.”   

“Passive approach, which is effectively what nature has done from the beginning, tries to minimize damage. Or as the Dutch have discovered, the water will be there, but how do you make it design in such a way that when it comes and goes, that recovery is not catastrophic,” said Rives Taylor, a long-time Houston resident and architect at Gensler, an architecture, design and planning firm.   

“So passive means in a lot of ways, less technology, and more kind of learning from nature,” said Taylor.

“For instance, we could design for more parks that for most of the year it would just be lovely park land that you can play with your kids or just visit, and in the once or twice a year events where it does flood, it is fine. It is a field, it will flood and it will come back,” said Goh.

Another design idea with multiple benefits is building a green roof, “which is good because it also cools the neighborhood, urban heat island, every day, but the roof could slow the water down,” said Taylor.

Another factor to consider in designing cities in flood-prone areas is transportation, including looking at cities with a “car culture,” such as Houston.

“For every Houston inhabitant, there are between 25 and 30 parking spaces,” Taylor continued. “That’s another urban design rethink. Do we need that much parking in this era of Uber and Lyft and autonomous vehicles?”

Goh said studies show that spending money on redesigning and planning a city will show long-term positive results in future rain events.  

Planners, however, said since local officials determine how a city is built, it will be up to them to decide how to rebuild after a devastating flood and where the money will come from.  
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More than 60 percent of the world’s nations are expected to meet some of their health targets in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The targets include reducing child and maternal deaths and deaths from malaria. However, fewer than five percent are projected to meet their targets on reducing the number of overweight children, tuberculosis infections and traffic deaths.

The news comes in a report published Wednesday by the British journal The Lancet that analyzed health-related Sustainable Development Goals in 188 countries. The 17 wide-ranging goals spearheaded by the U.N. focus on improving health and education, ending poverty, combating climate change, making cities more sustainable and protecting oceans and forests. They were adopted at a U.N. summit in 2015.

Singapore, Iceland and Sweden were the highest performing countries in the health-related goals. Somalia, Central African Republic and Afghanistan ranked the lowest. Nordic and other European countries plus Australia, Canada, Antigua and Barbuda rank in the top 20. The U.S. ranks 24th. 

The report, which was funded by the U.S. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the findings should help shape policies in order to address long-standing and emerging health challenges.

Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute of Health Metrics Evaluation and a professor of global health at the University of Washington, was the lead author.

Murray said in The Lancet, “China, Cambodia and many other middle and low-income nations deserve recognition for improving their citizens’ lives, as evidenced by impressive improvements in under-five mortality, neonatal mortality, vaccine coverage, maternal mortality, and malaria.”

The report was prepared ahead of the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly, beginning in New York later this month.

The authors pointed to policies that set the stage for substantial improvement. For instance, China expanded its health insurance scheme to rural populations and unemployed urban residents in the first years of this century and followed with further reforms in 2009-10; similarly, Cambodia’s health reforms from 1990 onwards have laid the groundwork toward national health planning.

Having access to health care seems to be key. Between the turn of the century and 2016, a number of countries made notable improvements in achieving universal health care. They included Cambodia, Rwanda, Equatorial Guinea, Laos, Turkey and China; however, some low-income countries, such as Lesotho and the Central African Republic, as well as high-income countries, such as the U.S., showed minimal gains.

Kazakhstan, Timor-Leste, Angola, Nigeria and Swaziland were projected to have the largest improvements on the overall health-related goals index by 2030. 

On the downside, only seven percent of countries were projected to meet the HIV/AIDS target, and no country was projected to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) target on tuberculosis.

To reach their conclusions, the study authors measured 37 of 50 health-related indicators from 1990 until 2016 for 188 countries. Then, on the basis of these past trends, they projected health-related progress to 2030. They said understanding both gains and gaps is essential for decision-makers as they aim to improve the health of their populations.
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Two U.S. astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut blasted off from Kazakhstan on Wednesday for a six-hour trip to the International Space Station, a NASA TV broadcast showed.

Commander Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos and flight engineers Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 3:17 a.m. local time on Wednesday (2117 GMT/1717 EDT on Tuesday).

The crew is set for a fast-track transit to the station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, to begin a five-month mission.

They are due to arrive at the Space Station by mid-morning on Wednesday but should the fast-track approach fails, the Soyuz will take two days to reach the ISS.

Misurkin, Vande Hei and Acaba will join NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, Russia’s Sergey Ryazanskiy and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space agency who have been aboard the orbital outpost since July.

To commemorate the upcoming 60th anniversary on Oct.4 of the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, the Soyuz crew are using its small model as a zero gravity indicator.
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Former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Tom Frieden on Tuesday announced the start of a new public health initiative funded by private philanthropies to fight heart disease and stroke and shore up infectious disease capabilities around the world.

The new initiative, called Resolve, will be funded by $225 million in backing from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“There are proven strategies every country can use to prevent deaths from heart disease, stroke and epidemics — but progress has been painfully slow,” said Frieden, president and chief executive of Resolve, which will be housed at Vital Strategies, a New York-based global health organization that works in more than 60 countries.

For Frieden, the initiative allows him to take on some unfinished business. As part of the $5.4 billion in Ebola emergency funding for fiscal 2015, the CDC got $1.2 billion for international efforts to bolster countries’ capabilities to identify and fight infectious disease outbreaks.

“Those dollars will expire within the next year or so,” Frieden said in a telephone briefing.

To fight heart disease, the group will invest in efforts to reduce the amount of artery-clogging transfats from their menus, a reprise of Frieden’s efforts in 2006 as New York City health commissioner to ban transfats from restaurants.

They also aim to support countries’ efforts to reduce sodium and increase treatment of high blood pressure, which kills 10 million people every year, more than from all infectious diseases combined.

“If the world is able to increase our blood pressure control rate from the current 14 percent to 50 percent, reduce dietary sodium by 30 percent and get to zero transfats, we can save 100 million lives from cardiovascular disease over the next 30 years,” Frieden told reporters on a conference call.

The effort also continues Frieden’s push at the CDC to bolster global capabilities to identify and respond to infectious disease.

“The Ebola epidemic revealed how vulnerable we are to threats, and was a stark reminder of the human and economic costs caused by the absence of strong public health systems,” he said.

Resolve’s infectious disease arm attempts to plug gaps in low- and middle-income countries’ capabilities to respond to outbreaks. These efforts will focus on building disease tracking systems, laboratory networks and disease detectives “so new threats are identified quickly,” he said.
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More than 1.3 billion people live on agricultural land that is deteriorating, putting them at risk of worsening hunger, water shortages and poverty, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) said Tuesday.

People’s use of the earth’s natural reserves has doubled in the last 30 years. Now a third of the planet’s land is severely degraded, and every year 15 billion trees and 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost, UNCCD said.

“The land we live on is being strained to breaking point. Restoration and conservation are key to its survival,” UNCCD said in a report launched in Ordos, China.

UNCCD promotes good land stewardship, and is the only legally binding international agreement on land issues.

As land becomes less productive — which can happen through deforestation, overgrazing, flash floods and drought — people are forced to migrate to cities or abroad, there is greater likelihood of conflict over dwindling resources, and countries’ economies are hit, said UNCCD deputy executive secretary Pradeep Monga.

“If you don’t fix land degradation, we get into a cycle where people are losing their livelihoods, their homes, their fields,” he said.

And if the amount of productive land shrinks, less will be available to feed the world’s population, which is predicted to increase to more than 9 billion people by 2050, up from 7 billion today.

“If we can stop land degradation and green our deserts, we can easily become food secure,” Monga told Reuters.

Small choices, like families cutting back on food waste, as well as improvements to land management, smarter ways to farm, and national policies to stop degradation, can make a lot of difference, he added.

China, which introduced the world’s first law to prevent and control desertification in 2002, has greened hundreds of thousands of hectares of desert in Inner Mongolia resulting in more food, more jobs and a better life for the local people, Monga said.

“People’s confidence in their quality of life is back, and these places become much more habitable,” he said.

Drought degrades land, but if countries have good drought plans in place and act on them, then people can be protected from its worst impacts.

“We cannot prevent drought, but we can prevent the calamity and crisis that comes with that. It’s like facing a hurricane — we have time,” he said. “If we manage the land well, the world will become a much better place to live in every sense.”
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At least a dozen children who had heart surgery at Children’s Hospital New Orleans between late May and July have infected incisions, apparently from contaminated equipment.

The hospital’s chief medical officer says the infections were linked to a machine that regulates a patient’s temperature during heart surgery.

Dr. John Heaton says the machine was replaced and patients are responding to intravenous antibiotics.

He says a handful who haven’t shown symptoms will see doctors this week, to make sure.

Heaton says the hospital’s paying for treatment and related costs, such as parents’ hotel rooms and meals.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes the bacteria in question as common in water, soil and dust. It says contaminated medical devices can infect the skin and soft tissues under the skin.
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The end of this week will also see the end of a glorious decades-long space mission that thrilled space scientists, sending huge amounts of data about a distant alien world. On Friday, the space probe Cassini-Huygens will descend into Saturn’s atmosphere until it burns and disintegrates. VOA’s George Putic looks back at the achievements of the joint NASA-ESA mission.
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The past few years have seen a drastic decline in the number of kids who play American football. One of the main reasons is the fear of brain injuries due to the constant helmet on helmet bashing. A new study is just more proof that too much football is seriously damaging the brains of players. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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