YCLOAK

Health ministers of the G20 leading economies, meeting for the first time Saturday, agreed to work together to tackle issues such as a growing resistance to antibiotics and to start implementing national action plans by the end of 2018.

Germany, which holds the G20 presidency this year, said it was an “important breakthrough” that all nations had agreed to address the problem and work toward obligatory prescriptions for antibiotics.

Pandemics

Saying that globalization caused infectious diseases to spread more quickly than previously, the 20 nations also pledged to strengthen health systems and improve their ability to react to pandemics and other health risks.

“By putting global health on the agenda of the G20 we affirm our role in strengthening the political support for existing initiatives and working to address the economic aspects of global health issues,” the communique said.

The results of the meeting will feed into a G20 leaders’ summit in Hamburg in July.

Overprescription

While the discovery of antibiotics has provided cures for many bacterial infections that had previously been lethal, overprescription has led to the evolution of resistance strains of many bacteria.

An EU report last year found that newly resistant strains of bacteria were responsible for more than 25,000 deaths a year in the 28-member bloc alone.

Germany has argued that even having a discussion about it will help raise public awareness about the problem. The G20 also said they agreed to help improve access to affordable medicine in poorer countries.

 
…

A warmer, wetter climate is helping push dozens of Eastern U.S. trees to the north and, surprisingly, west, a new study finds.

The eastern white pine is going west, more than 80 miles (130 kilometers) since the early 1980s. The eastern cottonwood has been heading 77 miles north (124 kilometers), according to the research based on about three decades of forest data.

The northward shift to get to cooler weather was expected, but lead author Songlin Fei of Purdue University and several outside experts were surprised by the move to the west, which was larger and in a majority of the species.

New trees tend to sprout farther north and west while the trees that are farther south and east tend to die off, shifting the geographic center of where trees live. 

86 tree species

Detailed observations of 86 tree species showed, in general, the concentrations of eastern U.S. tree species have shifted more than 25 miles west (45 kilometers) and 20 miles (33 kilometers) north, the researchers reported in the journal Science Advances Wednesday.

One of the more striking examples is the scarlet oak, which in nearly three decades has moved more than 127 miles (205 kilometers) to the northwest from the Appalachians, he said. Now it’s reduced in the Southeast and more popular in the Midwest.

“This analysis provides solid evidence that changes are occurring,” former U.S. Forest Chief Michael Dombeck said in an email. “It’s critical that we not ignore what analyses like these and what science is telling us about what is happening in nature.”

Dryer South, wetter West

The westward movement helped point to climate change, especially wetter weather, as the biggest of many culprits behind the shift, Fei said. The researchers did factor in people cutting down trees and changes to what trees are planted and where, he said.

With the Southeast generally drying and the West getting wetter, that explanation makes some sense, but not completely, said Brent Sohngen at Ohio State University, who was not involved in the study.

“There is no doubt some signature of climate change,” he said in an email. But given the rapid rates of change reported, harvesting, forest fires and other disturbances, are probably still playing a more significant role than climate change, he wrote.
…

Norway is repairing the entrance of a “doomsday” seed vault on an Arctic island after an unexpected thaw of permafrost let water into a building meant as a deep freeze to safeguard the world’s food supplies.

The water, limited to the 15-meter (50-foot) entrance hall in the melt late last year, had no impact on millions of seeds of crops including rice, maize, potatoes and wheat that are stored more than 110 meters inside the mountainside.

Still, water was an unexpected problem for the vault on the Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the North Pole. It seeks to safeguard seeds from cataclysms such as nuclear war or disease in natural permafrost.

“Svalbard Global Seed Vault is facing technical improvements in connection with water intrusion,” Norwegian state construction group Statsbygg, which built the vault that opened in 2008, said in a statement on Saturday. “The seeds in the seed vault have never been threatened.”

Spokeswoman Hege Njaa Aschim said Statsbygg had removed electrical equipment from the entrance — a source of heat — and was building waterproof walls inside and ditches outside to channel away any water.

The number of visitors would be reduced to limit human body heat, she said. Some of the water that flowed in re-froze and had to be chipped out by workers from the local fire service.

An underlying problem was that permafrost around the entrance of the vault, which had thawed from the heat of construction a decade ago, has not re-frozen as predicted by scientists, Aschim said.

Temperatures in the Arctic region have been rising at twice the global average in a quickening trend that climate scientists blame on man-made greenhouse gases. Svalbard has sometimes had rain even in the depths of winter when the sun does not rise.

“There’s no doubt that the permafrost will remain in the mountainside where the seeds are,” said Marie Haga, head of the Bonn-based Crop Trust that works with Norway to run the vault. “But we had not expected it to melt around the tunnel.”

Haga said the trust had so far raised just over $200 million toward an $850 million endowment fund to help safeguard seeds in collections around the globe. “That is an extremely cheap insurance policy for the world,” she said.
…

One of the coldest areas in the world is getting greener, and researchers say it’s because of global warming.

Researchers from the University of Exeter in England who first studied the increase of moss and microbes in the Antarctic Peninsula in 2013, now say the greening of the region is widespread.

“This gives us a much clearer idea of the scale over which these changes are occurring,” says lead author Matthew Amesbury of the University of Exeter.

“Previously, we had only identified such a response in a single location at the far south of the Antarctic Peninsula, but now we know that moss banks are responding to recent climate change across the whole of the Peninsula.”

The peninsula, researchers say, is one of the more rapidly warming area in the world, adding that temperatures have risen by about a half-degree Celsius each decade since the 1950s.

For their study, researchers looked at five more core samples from three areas of moss banks over 150 years old. The new samples included three Antarctic Islands off the peninsula.

The cores, researchers say, showed “increased biological activity” over the past 50 years as the peninsula warmed. Researchers say their findings show “fundamental and widespread change,” and that the change was “striking.”

The changes are likely to continue.

“Temperature increases over roughly the past half-century on the Antarctic Peninsula have had a dramatic effect on moss banks growing in the region, with rapid increases in growth rates and microbial activity,” says Dan Charman, who led the research. “If this continues, and with increasing amounts of ice-free land from continued glacier retreat, the Antarctic Peninsula will be a much greener place in the future.”

The next step for researchers is to look back even further in history to see how climate change affected the region before humans made an impact.

The findings appeared in Current Biology on May 18.
…

Mozambique has declared an end to a cholera epidemic that was triggered by heavy rains and infected more than 2,000 people, a senior government official said Friday.

The outbreak was another setback for Mozambique, which is grappling with a financial crisis as it strives to woo investors to develop huge offshore gas reserves.

“The epidemic is under control: In the last 28 to 29 days, we have not registered new cases of cholera and so we are declaring the epidemic terminated,” Francisco Mbofana, national director of public health, told a news conference.

Five cholera treatment centers installed in the most affected provinces have already been dismantled, Mbofana said.

Four people died between Jan. 5 and April 22 out of the 2,131 cases registered by health authorities. Last year, in the same period, 103 people died of cholera across the country.

Cholera causes severe vomiting and diarrhea and is often lethal if not treated swiftly.
…

Yemen could see as many as 250,000 new cases of cholera within six months, in addition to 50,000 already reported, the World Health Organization said Friday.

“The speed of the resurgence of this cholera epidemic is unprecedented,” Nevio Zagaria, WHO country representative for Yemen, told reporters during a conference call on Friday.

He said the death toll from the outbreak has already reached 240 and more than 50,000 cases have been registered in the past three weeks.

Two years into a war between Houthi rebels and government forces allied with a Saudi-led Arab military coalition, which has killed more than 8,000 people, Yemen has declared a state of emergency Sunday in the capital, Sana’a, over the outbreak.

Fighting has taken a toll on medical facilities in the war-torn country, as more than half of Yemen’s facilities, which are now operated by Houthi rebels, no longer function.

The U.N. says some 17 million of Yemen’s 26 million people lack sufficient food and at least three million malnourished children are in “grave peril.”

Yemen, which is the Arab world’s poorest nation, is now classified by the World Health Organization as a level three emergency, alongside Syria, South Sudan, Nigeria and Iraq. This is the country’s second cholera outbreak in less than a year.

Cholera is highly contagious and can be contracted from ingesting contaminated food and water.
…

The World Health Organization has delivered dramatic news about the causes of death for young people the world over. Governments and health agencies have made great strides in reducing deaths of young children through immunization and programs that address maternal and infant care. But adolescents have somehow fallen through the cracks.

Dr. Anthony Costello, director of WHO’s Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health told VOA, “We’re finding 1.2 million (adolescents) die each year. That’s 3,000 deaths a day. That’s 10 jumbo jets.” What’s more, Costello says these deaths are largely preventable.

The study shows traffic injuries are the top cause of death among adolescents, those between 10 and 19. In most cases, the adolescent is struck by a car while walking or riding a bicycle.

Other leading causes of death include lower respiratory infections and suicide, the report found. The causes differ by gender, age and region. Boys between 15 and 19 years old are more likely to die from traffic injuries than girls or than younger boys. In sub-Saharan Africa, children are more likely to contract HIV.   

Girls between 10 and 14 are at risk for getting respiratory infections from indoor air pollution and from breathing in fumes from cooking fuels. Older girls, between 15 and 19, had a greater risk of death from pregnancy complications, childbirth or unsafe abortions. Teenage girls generally have small pelvises which lead to difficult labor.  

Costello said pregnant adolescent girls are also “more likely to get high blood pressure; they may be more vulnerable to bleeding, they may be more anemic. They may be in situations more vulnerable to malaria, to HIV.”  

The point of the study that was conducted by the WHO and partners at other U.N. agencies and the World Bank.

Looking forward

While the study focuses on the causes of death, Costello said the point was to help develop a framework and a plan to improve the health of adolescents. If adolescents had access to good health services, education and social support, fewer young people would die. In the case of traffic related deaths, he said better traffic laws, speed limits, the use of seatbelts could save lives in countries that don’t have strict driving safety laws. Costello pointed out that “In India, for example, there are 90,000 deaths on the road each year; many of those are adolescents and children.”

Dr. Flavia Bustreo, the assistant director-general at WHO, said, “Adolescents have been entirely absent from national health plans for decades.” The report proposes changing these plans and trying to help adolescents develop healthy lifestyle habits.

Costello said, “The roots of diabetes, of heart attacks, of strokes, of lung cancer, the root of that lies in the adolescent years, how the adolescents approach nutrition, and diet and exercise, whether they start to smoke or not, or abuse other substances.

Concept shift

Costello said countries need to create more adolescent friendly cities so adolescents have places to play, gather together safely and avoid gang violence.  

“Governments have got to invest in young people,” Costello said, because “they’re the future. We mustn’t be afraid to involve children in designing their own environments, in coming up with creative ideas, in working with peer groups, and investing in things that will give them an exciting life without exposing them to long term risks that could be avoidable.”

A study published in The Lancet in April shows that improving the physical, mental and sexual health of adolescents could result in significant economic returns. The study contends that an investment of about $4.60 per person per year would yield more than 10 times as much in benefits to society. This study was conducted by researchers from Victoria University and the University of Melbourne along with the United Nations Populations Fund.
…

Commercial development of the globe’s huge reserves of a frozen fossil fuel known as “combustible ice” has moved closer to reality after Japan and China successfully extracted the material from the seafloor off their coastlines.

But experts said Friday that large-scale production remains many years away, and if not done properly could flood the atmosphere with climate-changing greenhouse gases. 

Frozen mix of water, gas

Combustible ice is a frozen mixture of water and concentrated natural gas. Technically known as methane hydrate, it can be lit on fire in its frozen state and is believed to comprise one of the world’s most abundant fossil fuels. 

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that the fuel was successfully mined from beneath the South China Sea on Thursday. Chinese Minister of Land and Resources Jiang Daming declared the event a breakthrough moment heralding a potential “global energy revolution.” 

A drilling crew in Japan reported a similar successful operation two weeks earlier, on May 4 along the Shima Peninsula. 

For Japan, methane hydrate offers the chance to reduce its heavy reliance on imported fuels. In China, it could serve as a cleaner substitute for coal-burning power plants and steel factories that have polluted much of the country with lung-damaging smog.

Estimated reserves are large

Methane hydrate has been found beneath seafloors and buried inside Arctic permafrost and beneath Antarctic ice. 

Estimates of worldwide reserves range from 280 trillion cubic meters (10,000 trillion cubic feet) up to 2,800 trillion cubic meters (100,000 trillion cubic feet), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By comparison, total worldwide production of natural gas was 3.5 billion cubic meters (124 billion cubic feet) in 2015, the most recent year available.

That means methane hydrate reserves could meet global gas demands for 80 to 800 years at current consumption rates.

Yet efforts to successfully extract the fuel at a profit have eluded private and state-owned energy companies for decades. That’s in part because of the cost of extraction techniques, which involve large amounts of water and power to flood methane hydrate reserves so the fuel can be released and brought to the surface.

There are also environmental concerns, said David Sandalow, a former senior official with the U.S. State Department now at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

If methane hydrate leaks during the extraction process, it can increase greenhouse gas emissions. If it can be used without leaking, it has the potential to replace dirtier coal in the power sector.

“The climate implications of producing natural gas hydrates are complicated.There are potential benefits, but substantial risks,” Sandalow said.
…

Scientists have discovered a possible cure for all five known Ebola viruses, one of which ravaged West Africa in recent years.

The so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies were discovered in the blood of a survivor of the West African epidemic, which ran from late 2013 to mid-2016. The deadly virus killed more than 11,000 people of the nearly 29,000 who became infected in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Ebola got its name from the first documented outbreak, which occurred along the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, in 1976. Since then, there have been two dozen outbreaks of Ebola in Africa, including a current one that has infected nine people in the DRC. Three people have died.

Kartik Chandran, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York, helped identify the antibodies, which were described online in the journal Cell. He is optimistic that the antibodies can be used as a single therapy to treat all Ebola viruses.

“Based on the nonhuman primate studies that are ongoing, and given the fact that they are pretty predictive, I would be optimistic that they could be used to protect people and reverse disease,” Chandran said.

350 antibodies isolated

Researchers isolated about 350 antibodies from the human blood sample, two of which showed promise in neutralizing three viruses in tissue culture. The antibodies work by interfering with a process that the pathogen uses to infect and multiply inside cells.

The drug company Mapp Pharmaceutical Inc. is now testing the antibodies in monkeys to make sure they are safe and effective.

A forerunner of the experimental drug, called Zmapp, was in the experimental stages when it was pressed into service during the last epidemic. Zmapp is a combination of cloned antibodies discovered in mice that enlist the body’s natural immune system to fight infection. If given up to five days after symptoms appear, it can cure the disease.

The problem, Chandran said, is Zmapp is not terribly specific and works to neutralize only Ebola Zaire, one of the five known viruses. He said the broadly neutralizing human antibodies attack and destroy all of the viruses.   

It took scientists just six months to discover the antibodies, according to Chandran, “so this is really incredibly fast and incredibly gratifying.  And we are hoping that things will continue at this pace and that in very short order we will be in a position to be able to test these things in people.”

While the broadly neutralizing antibodies are being developed as a treatment, Chandran envisions using them in a vaccine that can be given ahead of an Ebola outbreak to guard against infection.
…

Heavy rain shaped the Martian landscape billions of years ago, according to a new study.

According to researchers at the Smithsonian Institution and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, rain on Mars once carved river beds and created valleys much like rain on Earth has, and does. It no longer rains on the Red Planet, and the water that remains is mostly in the form of ice.

The rain appears to have slowly changed over time, researchers said, noting that changes in the Martian atmosphere influenced how heavy the rain was, particularly the size of the raindrops.

When Mars formed 4.5 billion years ago, it had a much thicker atmosphere and higher atmospheric pressure. Pressure, researchers say, influences the size of raindrops.

They say that early in the planet’s history, the rain would have actually been more like fog, so it would unlikely have made much of an impact on the terrain. But as the atmosphere thinned over time, larger raindrops could form and were heavy enough to “cut into the soil” changing the shape of craters and leading to running water that could have carved valleys.

Specifically, researcher say the atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet was about four bars, compared to one bar on Earth today. This means the raindrops could not have been bigger than three millimeters across. Over time the pressure dropped to 1.5 bars allowing for larger drops measuring about 7.3 millimeters across.

“By using basic physical principles to understand the relationship between the atmosphere, raindrop size and rainfall intensity, we have shown that Mars would have seen some pretty big raindrops that would have been able to make more drastic changes to the surface than the earlier fog-like droplets,” said Ralph Lorenz of John Hopkins APL.
…

Colon cancer patients who adopt a healthy lifestyle after treatment could potentially reduce their risk of death from a recurrence by more than 40 percent, according to new research.

The findings were released ahead of a conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world’s largest organization of clinical cancer professionals.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco analyzed data gathered in a prospective study of 1,000 advanced, stage III colon cancer patients from across the United States who were enrolled from 1999-2001. The volunteers, from 13 institutions, were evaluated over a period of seven years.

At two points during the trial, participants filled out a questionnaire asking whether their lifestyle following treatment matched prevention guidelines recommended by the American Cancer Society.

Body weight

The guidelines include maintaining a healthy body weight, eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, limiting consumption of red and processed meats, and engaging in regular physical activity.

Nine percent of patients in the study adhered to the guidelines. Of those, there was a reduction in death by 42 percent and a 31 percent lower risk of cancer recurrence compared to patients who did not follow the guidelines. In the study, colon cancer returned in 355 patients, 256 of whom died.

The federally-funded study was the first to look at colon cancer survivorship. Other studies have focused on cancer prevention through adoption of a healthy lifestyle.

There are a reported one million colon cancer survivors in the United States; the disease is the second-leading cause of cancer death. 

UCSF lead author Erin Van Blarigan said treated colon cancer patients are living longer than ever before, but there needs to be more emphasis on survivorship care. She called for an increase in resources to help more people adopt a healthy lifestyle in the aftermath of a diagnosis and treatment.

“There is a pressing need for improved survivorship care and resources to help people adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle after cancer diagnosis,” Blarigan said.

Harvard University in Massachusetts administered the lifestyle questionnaire. The results were analyzed by researchers at the University of California.
…