YCLOAK

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has called an emergency meeting this Wednesday in South Africa of all countries in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) following an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). Aid workers are concerned what this could mean for food security in the region, where a fall armyworm invasion and drought have decimated crops in recent years.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says besides Zimbabwe, the other countries in the region hit by the avian influenza outbreak are the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa.

While officials haven’t released figures for the numbers of birds affected, the FAO said the outbreak is currently concentrated in one province of Zimbabwe and three in South Africa. Earlier this year, the FAO issued a warning to the SADC regional bloc, after the virus was detected in the Lake Victoria area in East Africa.

David Phiri, the head of FAO in Southern Africa, told VOA it is urgent to contain the outbreak.

“Avian influenza is a trans-boundary pest and disease, and it can move from one country to another, from one site to another. So there is a possibility, very easily that it could spread in those particular countries or even beyond the borders. For this reason, we need to control it and to also ensure that there is also prevention measures – both by the countries affected and other countries that have not been affected….”

“Poultry is what a lot of families depend on for protein. It is the cheapest protein. It [The outbreak] is also coming in the backdrop of two years of heavy droughts, last being affected by El Nino. That was a disaster itself for the sub-region. More recently, we have had an outbreak of fall armyworm which has affected some farmers very, very badly. So we cannot afford another very serious outbreak that could reduce food security and livelihoods in the sub-region,” he said.

Dr. Unesu Ushewokunze-Obatolu, chief veterinary officer of the Zimbabwe Ministry of Agriculture, has this advice for farmers.

“Just make sure that birds that are produced do not have contact with anything from outside that is not well-managed. Sometimes in traditional systems, people receive poultry as gifts and they put it among the poultry that they are having at home. That is very dangerous. Normally, some of these viruses can cause diseases in people, but this one is a bit different. That gives a bit of joy, but it is not easy to deal with because it spreads very quickly and it kills birds. So those doing businesses with high numbers of birds are very, very susceptible,” said Obatolu.

In recent years, African countries have responded to avian flu outbreaks by closing their borders to poultry imports and culling large numbers of exposed birds.
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A report released this week found that climate change is part of the reasons why Indian farmers are increasingly destitute and committing suicide.  

Each year, 130,000 people die by suicide in India, many of them farmers in significant debt.  This review of three decades of weather and suicide data marks the first effort to quantify the role that climate change may play in this crisis in India, where the suicide rate has doubled since 1980.  And it is one of the first attempts to study the relationship between suicide and climate change.

Tamma Carleton, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  She found that nearly 70 additional suicides would occur for each day and each degree Celsius of temperature rise.  It’s important to note that the effect only occurred during the growing season.

In total, Carleton estimates that climate change has contributed to 59,300 deaths in India over the past three decades, and accounts for 6.8 percent of the increase.  The report is a stark reminder that humans have already begun to see the effects of climate change.

There have been previous attempts to quantify death toll from climate change, which is generally harder to quantify than effects like displacement due to sea-level rise.  A 2015 report commissioned by the governments of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations concluded that climate change was already killing 400,000 people each year though impacts like heat waves, communicable disease, flooding, and decreased crop yields.

But most of these efforts have either been focused globally or on developed countries, says Marshall Burke, assistant professor at Stanford University, who was not associated with the study.  “One of the nice contributions here is that it’s a broad scale look at the country that’s going to have the largest global population,” he told VOA.

In examining the data, Carleton looked for signals that farmers were able to adapt in any way.  For example, if they were more sensitive to short-term warming than long-term warming, that could indicate that farmers had been able to adapt over the long-term. But she found no evidence of any adaptation, and says there is a larger lesson to be learned from this.

“There’s a lot of optimism often about the future of climate because there’s sort of an assumption or a hope that we will adapt as the temperatures gradually warm,” she told VOA.  “It hasn’t looked like it’s been easy to adapt in the past and so it’s concerning when we think about what this might mean for the future.”

Burke said researchers have looked for adaptation in other ways and that those results were consistent with what Carleton found.

While researchers have extensively investigated the effect that climate change has on the environment, this report is one of the first to consider how climate change may be affecting human populations.  “There’s a lot of basic things about human responses to changes in climate that we still don’t understand, and that’s why I think papers like this are so important,” said Burke.

In 2015, an Indian farmer died after hanging himself outside a protest in New Delhi, drawing national attention to the issue and forcing a response by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  Protesters have since returned to the capital saying that campaign promises of crop insurance and loan forgiveness have not been met.  

Carleton comes from a long line of farmers and as a child, most of her food came from the garden.  “Growing my own food has been something that I’ve absolutely enjoyed… and it’s really heartbreaking to see that in many other parts of the world this occupation is so difficult and so stressful that some are choosing to commit suicide.”
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The last time a total solar eclipse blacked out the sun in Oregon nearly 40 years ago, Gene Brick was working in a timber mill that refused to shut down for the spectacle.   

 

The World War II veteran and amateur astronomer was devastated when his friends raved about experiencing a pitch-dark sky in the middle of the day.

“Everyone who was outside got to see it, and they enjoyed telling me all about it — and I was hurt by that,” said Brick, now 92. “But work is work, you know.”

Brick will get another chance to witness history this month, when a total solar eclipse begins its path across the U.S. in Oregon.

Coast to coast event

 

The one he missed in 1979 covered the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada. This total eclipse will be visible from coast to coast across the nation — something that hasn’t happened in 99 years.

Brick plans to watch the event with his son using two telescopes: a fancy new one and one the two crafted together 53 years ago in their basement.

The men will peer at the sun through both during the eclipse’s totality, when the moon’s shadow completely covers the sun for just over two minutes. They also will use special filters to photograph the eclipse through the newer machine.

For Brick, who survived a kamikaze attack on the USS Drexler during the Battle of Okinawa, the opportunity is the experience of a lifetime.

“I always loved to look at the moon,” he said, after peering through the telescope the pair crafted in 1964. “I still do.”

Prime location for viewing

The Bricks will have a prime location for their father-son moment. The town of Madras, in central Oregon, is in the high desert, where summertime skies are often clear and cloudless. Up to 100,000 people are expected to flock to the town and surrounding Jefferson County for the Aug. 21 event, creating worries about overcrowding and traffic.

Brick’s son, Bartt Brick, is on the Madras City Council and will be on call during the eclipse. But taking the time to watch the event with his father is important to him. The elder Brick got the last four credits he needed for his high school diploma by signing up for the U.S. Navy and never attended college — but even in his 90s, he’s studying particle physics.

The pair decided to build the telescope when the younger Brick was 14, after finding a piece of glass in his late grandfather’s garage that was hand-ground into a concave lens for a telescope. Gene Brick worked long, hard days cutting logs at the mill then stayed up into the night working on the project with his teenage son.

“We’d bought ourselves a book on telescopes and a new dictionary, and after about — what — four or five months, we had a telescope,” Bartt Brick recalled on a recent summer day.

 

“I’d sleep about half the night,” his father added with a chuckle.

Spotted Ring Nebula

The two dragged the telescope outside on the night they finished, aimed it toward the heavens by propping it on a stepladder, and peered into the night sky until they spied the Ring Nebula, a dying star in a constellation about 2,000 light years from Earth.

“We were so excited, we ran in and told Mom. But at 2 o’clock in the morning, she wasn’t as thrilled as we were,” the younger Brick said.

 

Over the years, the telescope got a lot of use from the family and from a string of neighborhood children who lined up most evenings to peer at the moon.

But when the 1979 total solar eclipse came along, the elder Brick was working, the younger Brick no longer lived at home, and the telescope went unused.

When Bartt Brick moved back to Madras three years ago, the stars aligned for another crack at a shared celestial show.

Three generations will gather

On Aug. 21, three generations of Bricks will assemble. They’ll have a sleek black, new telescope equipped with a remote control and a USB cord for snapping photos through a computer.

 

But they’ll also have on hand the unassuming, unmounted metal cylinder they worked on so long ago.

“Dad’s had a message for me ever since I was 2 years old, and it was, ‘Be curious,’” Bartt Brick said. “And boy, did I learn how to be curious with this.”
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Online searches about suicide and suicide methods spiked in the weeks following the release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, a show that dramatizes the suicide of a teenage girl, according to a U.S. study released Monday.

Google searches about suicide were 19 percent higher than average in the 19 days following the show’s release on March 31, translating into 900,000 to 1,500,000 more searches, researchers reported in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine. 

The study did not examine whether the actual number of suicides increased following the series’ release, but researchers said the internet search trend is troubling.

Google search volumes for things like “how to commit suicide,” “commit suicide” and “how to kill yourself” all decisively spiked during the 19-day window after the show’s release. A 2009 study suggested “suicide search trends are correlated with actual suicides,” according to a letter accompanying the study in JAMA.

Many mental health experts concluded that Netflix acted unethically by releasing the series. In it, a high school girl leaves behind 13 cassette tapes that explain the decision to take her own life. The series, which some argue glamorizes suicide, has been renewed for a second season.

The San Diego State University researcher who led the study, John Ayers, called on Netflix to reconsider the show and the effects it is having on its teenage-skewing audience.

“Psychiatrists have expressed grave concerns because the show ignores the World Health Organization’s validated media guidelines for preventing suicide,” Ayers told VOA in an email. “Tragically, it is unsurprising then that we find the show has increased suicidal thoughts.

“The show’s makers must swiftly change their course of action, including removing the show and postponing a second season. If not, subscribers should consider canceling their subscriptions so not to support programming that can cause premature death. I am no longer a subscriber.”

Currently, the most violent episodes are prefaced with warnings. Netflix has also created a website equipped with suicide hotlines for each of the countries in which it can be streamed. In a statement, Netflix defended 13 Reasons Why, saying that the show has spurred an important conversation.

“We always believed this show would increase discussions around this tough subject matter,” Netflix said. “This is an interesting quasi-experimental study that confirms this. We are looking forward to more research and taking everything we learn to heart as we prepare for season two.”

The study analyzed Google trends between March 31, 2017, and April 18. They halted their research on that date because former National Football League player Aaron Hernandez committed suicide on April 19, a development that might have skewed the data.

Researchers used the period between January and March 2017 as a control to determine the expected volume of suicide-related Google search queries.
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Evidence of the role that a healthy gut plays in overall human health, both physical and even mental, is growing every day. To strengthen gut health, food researchers are trying to incorporate live bacteria, called probiotics, into all kinds of products, even beer.
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By the end of this year, scientists may be able to create a fully artificial genome of yeast. This rapid development of genetic engineering may lead to the creation of much more complex organisms, even humans. Scientists say they are aware of the risks but also the enormous benefits.
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A proposed new law that would require carmakers to build alarms for back seats is being pushed by child advocates who say it will prevent kids from dying in hot cars.

The law also would streamline the criminal process against caregivers who cause the deaths – cases that can be inconsistent but often heavier-handed against mothers.

The latest deaths came in Arizona on triple-digit degree days over the weekend, with two baby boys found forgotten in vehicles in separate incidents.

More than two dozen child and road safety groups are backing the Senate bill introduced last week aimed at preventing those kinds of deaths by requiring cars to be equipped with technology that can alert drivers if a child is left in the back seat once the vehicle is turned off. It could be a motion sensor that can detect a baby left sitting in a rear-facing car seat and then alert the driver, in a similar way that reminders about tire pressure, open doors and seat belts now come standard in cars.

“The technology would help because if you’re in a vehicle, your child is in the back seat, and you ignore that alarm: Go jail. Do not pass go. You had a chance,” said Janette Fennell of the advocacy group Kids and Cars. “You talk to any of the judges, they’ll tell you, they’re beyond the hardest things they have to deal with.”

Police say 1-year-old Josiah Riggins was in the car for hours Saturday, discovered dead only after his father drove roundtrip, twice, between their suburban home and a Phoenix church to drop off the mother and a sibling.

Zane Endress, who was 7 months old, died Friday in Phoenix after being left in the car in the driveway at home, as his usual daycare drop-off routine was lost by his grandparents.

“A simple sensor could save the lives of dozens of children killed tragically in overheated cars each year, and our bill would ensure such technology is available in every car sold in the United States,” bill sponsor Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said in a statement. “It can take mere minutes on a hot day for a car to turn into a deathtrap for a small child.”

No charges have been filed against the caregivers in either Arizona case, as police say the death investigations are underway. Detectives will determine criminality based on the caregiver’s neglect, intent and mindset, while also being sensitive to the family’s deeply felt loss of a child, Phoenix police Sgt. Mercedes Fortune said.

“Those are the very difficult questions. Each case is different. I can’t tell you there’s a set answer for any case because there really isn’t,” Fortune said.

Kids and Cars, which has tracked more than 800 children who have died in this way since 1990, said criminal cases vary greatly, even when the circumstances are identical. Fennell said 90 percent of cases involve pure accidents, most likely a child forgotten by an adult.

In this month alone, a Tennessee couple was charged in the death of their 11-month-old daughter. A nearly 2-year-old boy was found dead in his father’s BMW in south Florida.

The nonprofit’s analysis shows charges are filed about half of the time, though very rarely are the parents found guilty objectively because it was proven that the child was left behind to be harmed. There is also a noted gender bias: Mothers are more often charged than fathers, and among the convicted, women caregivers receive longer prison sentences than men, the study found.

“I think society feels sort of like moms are in charge, and they’re supposed to do everything,” Fennell said. “It’s also a defense mechanism. If I make monsters out of these people, then it could never happen to me.”

 
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The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is reintroducing a living fossil into its waterways. The alligator gar is a fish so old, it’s thought to have evolved during the Early Cretaceous period, more than a 100 million years ago.

Alligator gar are the second largest freshwater fish in North America. Illinois fisheries biologist Randy Sauer says they disappeared from the state’s waterways in the 1990s, although they continued to thrive in southern U.S. rivers.

“We want to restore the ecosystem because it is important to have top predators to balance the species below them in order to keep check on some more abundant species,” he said.

Beyond that, alligator gar make for great big game fishing. The diamond-scaled animals, which breathe both air and water, can grow up to 2.7 meters and weigh more than 136 kilograms. In fact, Sauer says, their large size is what did them in originally in the state.

“It was pretty much extirpated out of its range because of misconceptions about it eating sport fish,” he said. “People would target it and put bounties on it.”

Everything is on the menu

The alligator gar is an opportunistic feeder, meaning it will eat whatever it encounters — from an occasional turtle or small duck to invasive species such as Asian and silver carp. Sauer hopes the re-introduction program will help the state’s efforts to control the carp.

Because gar can live up to 60 years, this program is going to take decades to fully expand.

“The (female) alligator gar does not sexually mature until 11 years, and the male not till 6 or 7 years,” Sauer said, “so at the outset of this project we’re probably going to stock more heavily than 10 or 20 years down the road when hopefully these fish will find each other and start doing the job on their own.”

To date, 7,000 alligator gar fingerlings have been fitted with tiny transponder tags so that they can be tracked and then released into Illinois waterways. As it rains and floods, biologists expect some of the fish to follow the rivers all the way down to join other populations in Louisiana and Texas.
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The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is reintroducing a living fossil into its waterways. The alligator gar is a fish so old, it’s thought to have evolved during the Early Cretaceous period, over a hundred million years ago. Erika Celeste reports from Kaskaskia River State Fish and Wildlife Area.
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According to a recent study, an examination of the brains of 111 deceased players of professional American football showed that all but one of them had a degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. Scientists say even when it looks mild, a concussion can have severe effects, so prompt diagnosis and treatment are crucial. VOA’s George Putic talked with a neurosurgeon who treats many victims of concussion.
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A bioresearch and manufacturing institute that hopes to develop transplant tissues and organs for injured American soldiers and other patients has opened in New Hampshire.

The Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, which opened Friday in Manchester, will be led by Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway personal transporter, an all-terrain electric wheelchair and several other devices. The University of New Hampshire and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will be part of the institute.

Kamen, speaking after an opening ceremony, said he was optimistic the institute could develop artificial skin, bones and nerves and eventually organs that could be implanted into patients in the next few years. He said it would start with developing the technology allowing for the production of pieces of organs and “way down the road” producing livers, kidneys and lungs. He said one of the challenges is figuring out which organs would be easiest to reproduce.

Kamen said the goal was to scale up the developments in regenerative medicine by forming this public-private partnership, which brings together 26 universities and medical centers, 80 private companies and nearly $300 million in government and private-sector funding.

“What we are saying is that there are all sorts of miracles that already exist in roller bottles and petri dishes at medical schools, labs,” Kamen said, comparing their effort to what Campbell’s Soup Co. has done with the production of soup. “We said, ‘Let’s go out to the biggest, best companies that do automation, controls, sensors, and that understand process, that understand high-level manufacturing, and let’s bring them to the same place as all the people who have the magic in their roller bottles.’ ”

The state’s Democratic congressional delegation and Republican Governor Chris Sununu welcomed the project, saying it would bring good jobs to Manchester and give the state’s college graduates opportunities to work on cutting-edge biomedical research.

“It is an exciting day for Manchester and New Hampshire, and, as Dean said, for our war fighters and the country,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen said, recalling a 2006 event she attended at Harvard University, where Kamen talked of one day being able to produce organs and replace a lost kidney.

Sununu called the opening “awesome” and said it was another sign the state’s business climate is on the upswing.
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The U.S. government is proposing cutting the nicotine level in cigarettes for the first time in its history.  

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday it has directed the agency’s staff to develop new regulations to make cigarettes less addictive. Tobacco stocks fell Friday following the news.  

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the agency plans to explore ways to limit the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.  

“A renewed focus on nicotine can help us to achieve a world where cigarettes no longer addict future generations of our kids,” Gottlieb said in a speech to staff in Silver Spring, Maryland.

E-Cigarettes

Along with reducing nicotine, the FDA plans to ease the path of entry for less-harmful nicotine delivery systems, such as e-cigarettes. The agency said it will give e-cigarette makers four more years to comply with FDA oversight of their products, giving them more time on the market without regulation.

“While there’s still much research to be done on these products and the risks that they may pose, they may also present benefits that we must consider,” Gottlieb said.

E-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is addictive, but they do not contain tar or many of the other substances in traditional cigarettes, which make them deadly. Battery-powered e-cigarettes turn liquid nicotine into an inhalable vapor.

“Nicotine itself is not responsible for the cancer, the lung disease and heart disease that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year,” Gottlieb said. “It’s the other chemical compounds in tobacco and in the smoke created by setting tobacco on fire that directly cause illness and death.”

However, Gottlieb said he was concerned that e-cigarette makers are using “kid-appealing flavors” which he said the FDA would consider regulating.

“I have real concerns about kids use of e-cigarettes and I know many others share those concerns, especially for those products marketed with obviously kid-appealing flavors,” he said.

Response

Anti-smoking activists hailed the announcement and said that reducing the level of nicotine in traditional cigarettes could make it easier for people to switch to e-cigarettes or less harmful tobacco products.

However, some activists say the amount of nicotine in cigarettes needs to be reduced dramatically, and say if nicotine is only reduced a small amount it will just encourage smokers to use more cigarettes.

Altria Group, which sells Marlboro and other cigarettes in the United States, said it would comply with all FDA rules, but said in a statement Friday that any new rules should be based on evidence and not lead to unintended consequences.

While the new policies could be bad business for cigarette companies, Altria and other groups, like Philip Morris International, have been spending billions of dollars to make to products that they say have less health risks such as e-cigarettes.  

The FDA has had the power to regulate nicotine levels since 2009 but has not yet done so.

The U.S. government says tobacco use causes more than 480,000 deaths annually, and is the leading cause of preventable heart disease.
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