Fruit Juice Consumption Discouraged for Young Children

Children younger than one should drink breast milk or formula, and should only drink fruit juice if advised by a doctor, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The organization made the recommendation in the journal Pediatrics amid concerns about rising childhood obesity and tooth decay.

This is the first time since 2001 that the doctors’ group has reviewed its recommendation on fruit juice, which is a leading source of dietary sugar.

Between the ages of one and four, young children should consume no more than 118 milliliters of fruit juice, the doctors’ group says. The academy recommends that children between the ages of four and six restrict their juice intake to no more than 177 milliliters a day, while children between seven and 18 should limit their fruit juice consumption to 236 milliliters.

The new guidelines recognize that 100 percent natural and reconstituted juice can be a healthy part of a child’s diet. However, the group said juice should count for no more than one of the two to two-and-a-half recommended servings of fruit per day.

If fruit juice is given to young children, the academy discourages parents from putting it in a bottle or “sippy” cup, which may be in a child’s mouth all day, promoting cavities. Instead, it’s recommended that the juice be consumed all at once in a cup.

The group had previously recommended that parents wait until a child is six months old before introducing fruit juice to the diet. However, in light of the growing rates of obesity and other negative health effects, the American Academy of Pediatrics revisited the recommendation.

Juice is a frequent beverage of choice among U.S. teenagers and children, who experts say would rather drink it than water.

Dr. Steven A. Abrams, chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, and co-author of the policy statement, said there was nothing “magical” about the academy’s revised recommendation. 

Dell said the group simply saw no need or beneficial role for juice in very young children.

Brazil Packed with Travel Riches, So Why So Few Tourists?

Brazil is home to the largest rainforest on Earth. It has miles of sandy, deserted beaches, and stunning flat-topped mountains. It invented samba and a devilish little drink called the caipirinha. It has massive reserves for native peoples and charming colonial towns built by the Portuguese.

Despite the seeming abundance of riches for travelers, it has a tourism problem. Because while you may have heard about the Amazon or the stunning beaches of Rio de Janeiro, you have probably also heard that Brazil has high crime, was swept by a Zika outbreak and that its politicians have concocted the largest graft scheme in Latin American history.

Most likely you’ve never visited Brazil. Only 6.6 million foreigners did last year, according to the Ministry of Tourism. That’s about half the number that go to the tiny city-state of Singapore, and this in a continent-sized country that the World Economic Forum ranks No. 1 in natural resources and No. 8 in cultural resources. Oh, and that hosted the 2016 Summer Olympics.

“The highest gap between potential in tourism in the world and what’s been realized so far is Brazil,” said Vinicius Lummertz, the president of Embratur, Brazil’s tourism board. “We have [everything] from Xingu [an indigenous reserve] and Indians to Oktoberfest in Santa Catarina.”

High hopes

In the face of a deep and protracted recession, the government is now hoping to change all that with several measures that aim to nearly double the number of foreign visitors in the next five years. But hoteliers, travel bloggers and others who work in tourism say there are many obstacles. 

The government plan includes a law to allow 100 percent foreign ownership of airlines, with the aim of increasing flight routes and driving down the cost of travel. Another plank will allow Americans, Canadians, Japanese and Australians — all of whom need visas to visit Brazil — to apply for visas online, instead of at a consulate.

Cheaper flights and a smoother visa process will address some tourist complaints about Brazil, but Alison McGowan says the plan ignores the most glaring problem: Nobody knows how great Brazil is in the first place.

“People don’t even get as far as [applying for a visa],” said McGowan, the CEO of hiddenpousadasbrazil.com, a guide to inns, boutique hotels and B&B’s in Brazil. “They haven’t got people wanting to go to Brazil yet.”

McGowan and other tourism professionals say the government lacks a coherent campaign to promote Brazil abroad — the real country, not just the cliches of Carnival and soccer great Pele.

Part of the government’s plan is to beef up Embratur. Officials there said they hoped that would lead to a doubling of investment in promotion. Last year, Embratur had a $16 million budget — which the agency said was much less than what other South American countries spend.

McGowan and others said Brazil is particularly bad at reaching modern global travelers who research trips and make reservations online. McGowan called the country’s main tourism portal for foreigners, visitbrasil.com, “a disgrace.”

Taxes, crime, pollution

Lummertz, the president of Embratur, says the government’s plan will help promote Brazil abroad. But he says that the nation’s tourist blues go beyond that. Latin America’s largest nation is still struggling to overcome decades of isolation and remains the most closed of the so-called BRICS economies, he says.

That has repercussions for tourism: High import taxes and other hangovers from isolation make the country expensive for travelers and reduce the quality of goods and services. Few Brazilians speak English, partly because they are unlikely to come across global travelers here.

It’s impossible, of course, to gloss over Brazil’s real problems. It has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Rio’s bay is polluted. And Zika is a risk. But the government and Embratur need a counter-narrative for tourists.

“What is the world capital of pickpockets? It’s Barcelona,” said Ricardo Freire, who founded the Brazilian travel blog viajenaviagem.com. “But [the residents] don’t tell you not to come there.”

The drawbacks of Brazil also need to be put in context. Tourists are not likely to be visiting tough urban neighborhoods where most crime happens, notes Emmanuel Rengade, the owner of the luxury, ecological hotels Pousada Picinguaba and Fazenda Catucaba. In the countryside, Rengade says he doesn’t even lock his door.

As for Zika, a mosquito-borne disease that has been linked to a rare birth defect, cases this year have fallen dramatically, and the government declared the emergency over this month. Rio’s bay might be polluted, but the country has more unspoiled nature to visit than any one person could hope to see in a lifetime.

And contrary to Brazil’s messy image, Ben Feetham says: “Everything seems to work.” Feetham, who is a reviewer for i-escape.com, a site that curates a selection of boutique hotels and inns, honeymooned in Brazil in April and said he had none of the usual stress about airport transfers or bus connections.

All of the fuss over reputation and promotion ignores the No. 1 thing tourists like best about Brazil in surveys: the people, known for being easygoing and welcoming. 

“Anybody who goes to Brazil comes back loving it,” said Pauline Frommer, the co-publisher of the Frommer’s guidebooks and frommers.com. “The key is getting people there.”

Germany, France Pledge New Efforts to Strengthen Eurozone

Germany and France pledged Monday to seek ways to strengthen the 19-nation eurozone, with harmonizing corporate taxes among the possible measures they will mull over in the coming weeks.

 

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and new French counterpart Bruno Le Maire said they are setting up a panel to produce proposals for a bilateral summit in July.

 

“We’ve been talking for years about progress in the integration of the eurozone, but things aren’t advancing quickly enough or far enough,” Le Maire said. “We are determined to get things moving faster and further, in a very concrete way.”

 

Germany and France could either propose a joint corporate tax system of their own or concentrate on pushing efforts for a harmonized assessment of corporate taxes at the European Union level, Schaeuble said.

 

“Both are ambitious,” he conceded, noting that wider tax harmonization is difficult because it would require consensus among EU leaders.

 

Le Maire said there needs to be better coordination of economic policy. He said investment will also be considered. He stressed France’s willingness to consider deeper reforms such as creating a finance minister for the 19-nation eurozone or a “European monetary fund,” an idea that Schaeuble has periodically backed.

 

He offered assurances that “France will respect its European obligations in terms of [budget] deficit reduction.”

 

The latest German-French drive to strengthen the EU’s economic coherence come as Britain, the bloc’s No. 2 economy after Germany, prepares to leave the EU.

 

“We see in Brexit an opportunity for our financial companies to be more attractive than they were before,” Le Maire said. “Our role is to create wealth for our country, to create jobs for our country. With Brexit, there is this opportunity, and we expect to seize this opportunity.”

 

New French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, also making his first trip to Berlin since President Emmanuel Macron’s new government was appointed last week, met separately with his German counterpart Sigmar Gabriel.

 

Le Drian promised to keep up Franco-German diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine that has cost almost 10,000 deaths since fighting broke out in 2014 between Russia-backed separatists and the government.

 

“France and Germany are not Europe, but without France and Germany, Europe won’t be able to move forward,” Gabriel said. “We want to use this historic window of opportunity that opened up with the election in France.”

 

Trans Surgeries Jump 20 Percent from 2015 to 2016

Gender confirmation surgeries jumped by 20 percent in the United States from 2015 to 2016, according to a new survey.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) survey says there were more than 3,200 “transfeminine” and “transmasculine” surgeries in 2016. Included in this number is everything from body contouring to full gender reassignment.

“There is no one-size-fits-all approach to gender confirmation,” said Loren Schechter, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon based in Chicago. “There’s a wide spectrum of surgeries that someone may choose to treat gender dysphoria, which is a disconnect between how an individual feels and what that person’s anatomic characteristics are.”

The survey is the first ever done by the ASPS and includes data from 2015 to 2016.

One driver is that insurance companies are increasingly covering some of the procedures, making them more accessible and affordable.

“In the past several years, the number of transgender patients I’ve seen has grown exponentially,” said Schechter. “Access to care has allowed more people to explore their options, and more doctors understand the needs of transgender patients.”

Changing attitude is also behind the increase.

‘It’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve seen this dramatic increase in demand for procedures, it’s certainly a subject that’s more talked about,’ Schechter told Daily Mail Online.

Schechter added that until recently, there were just six U.S. surgeons who were certified to do both male-to-female and female-to-male genital surgery.

“The numbers are increasing, but one of the barriers is that there’s been no formal training program,” he told the Daily Mail.

For those undergoing sex change procedure, surgery is usually just a part of the process.

“Surgical therapy is one component of the overall care of the individual,” said Schechter. “It takes a team of experts across different disciplines working together to provide comprehensive care. I often partner with doctors who may prescribe treatments such as hormone therapy and mental health professionals who help patients through their transitions.”

As Ethiopian Seeks to Head WHO, Outbreak at Home Raises Questions

Ethiopia is battling an outbreak of acute watery diarrhea (AWD) that has affected more than 32,000 people.  At the same time, Ethiopia’s former minister of health, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is a candidate to lead the World Health Organization.

 

The two facts are linked in that critics of Tedros say he has tried to minimize the outbreak by refusing to classify it as cholera, a label that could harm Ethiopia’s economic growth.

The WHO’s 194 member states will gather in Geneva for a 10-day assembly starting Monday. One of their first tasks is to choose the organization’s next director-general.

Tedros is one of three top contenders for the position, along with candidates from Britain and Pakistan.

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, told The New York Times that Ethiopia has a long history of downplaying cholera outbreaks, and the WHO could “lose its legitimacy” if Tedros, who is also a former Ethiopian minister of foreign affairs, takes over the leadership of the organization.

“Dr. Tedros is a compassionate and highly competent public health official,” he told the Times. “But he had a duty to speak truth to power and to honestly identify and report verified cholera outbreaks over an extended period.”

But others have risen to Tedros’ defense. Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the controversy over naming the outbreak is overblown. “During the time that Tedros was health minister, it would have not made any difference,” Frieden told VOA.

Cholera vs. acute watery diarrhea

Ethiopia has been accused of covering up three cholera outbreaks during Tedros’ tenure as health minister.

Declaring cholera would not have changed Ethiopia’s response to past AWD outbreaks, according to Frieden.  In fact, he says, avoiding the cholera label has not been irresponsible but rather a necessary compromise.

“It allowed public health to respond rapidly,” Frieden said.

The literature on AWD and cholera shows that treatment is the same. It calls for hydrating the patient, chlorinating water and improving sanitation. In fact, the WHO uses the terms interchangeably in their teaching materials on how to deal with an outbreak.

Lately, the development of cholera vaccines has brought the value of identifying the bacterial disease to the fore, said Frieden. “At this time, all African countries that report acute watery diarrhea should be rapidly doing lab confirmation and, if it’s cholera, considering the use of cholera vaccine in the response,” he said.

 

In the current outbreak, Ethiopia’s Somali region has been hit the hardest, with 768 deaths since January, according to a WHO report published May 12.  Almost 99 percent of the deaths and 91 percent of cases are in the same region.

The WHO representative to Ethiopia, Dr. Akpaka Kalu, says the government is right to call it AWD because regional health centers do not have the capacity to test every case.

If all cases are treated as cholera, the disease has the potential to spread more quickly when children who do not have it are brought into cholera treatment centers, Kalu said.

“We know, biologically, malnutrition causes diarrhea. Now, if you admit that child into a cholera treatment center, you’ve actually turned that center into a cholera transmission center,” he said, speaking by phone from Addis Ababa.

Current response

Over the past six weeks, the response to AWD in Ethiopia appears to have been effective.

Kalu said his team, along with regional leadership and government officials, have focused on prevention and intervention. They have instituted community-based surveillance to monitor the regional drought in general and AWD in particular, and there has been a drop in reported cases.

“We have evidence the average number of cases [dropped] from over 600 a day to about 54 a day,” he said.

Kalu argues that early interventions are getting results and doesn’t think that vaccinating 6 million people in the Somali region is feasible.

He says Ethiopia is now preparing to prevent outbreaks from spreading to other parts of the country such as the Afar and Amhara regions as the rainy season approaches.

“We need to enhance preparedness because, as the rains come, usually what happens is the rains wash and enter the water bodies including where there is open defecation,” he said. “That’s how water bodies get contaminated and people use the water and become sick. So there is a need, our focus is to build capacity to be able to detect and contain so that it doesn’t spread.”

Chinese Online Retailer Developing One-ton Delivery Drones

China’s biggest online retailer, JD.com Inc., announced plans Monday to develop drone aircraft capable of carrying a ton or more for long-distance deliveries.

 

The company said it will test the drones on a network it is developing to cover the northern Chinese province of Shaanxi. It said they will carry consumer goods to remote areas and farm produce to cities.

 

JD.com, headquartered in Beijing, says it made its first deliveries to customers using smaller drones in November. Other e-commerce brands including Amazon.com Inc. also are experimenting with drones for delivery.

“We envision a network that will be able to efficiently transport goods between cities, and even between provinces, in the future,” the chief executive of JD’s logistics business group, Wang Zhenhui, said in a statement.

JD.com operates its own nationwide network of thousands of delivery stations manned by 65,000 employees. The company says it has 235 million regular customers.

 

Drones are part of the industry’s response to the challenge of expanding to rural areas where distances and delivery costs rise.

 

Drone delivery in China and other countries faces hurdles including airspace restrictions and the need to avoid collisions with birds and other obstacles. In the United States, regulators allow commercial drone flights only on an experimental basis.

 

A 1-ton payload is heavier than what most drones available now can carry, though some can carry hundreds of kilograms and major drone makers are working on devices able to carry more.

 

China is home to the world’s biggest manufacturer of civilian drones, DJI, in the southern city of Shenzhen.

 

JD.com said its planned drone delivery network in Shaanxi would cover a 300-kilometer (200-mile) radius and have drone air bases throughout the province.

 

The company said it will set up a research-and-development campus with the Xi’an National Civil Aerospace Industrial Base to develop and manufacture drones.

 

JD.com earlier reported first-quarter revenue rose 41.2 percent over a year ago to 76.2 billion yuan ($11.1 billion). It reported profit of 843.1 million yuan ($122.4 million) compared with a loss of 864.9 million yuan a year earlier.

Study Finds that Speeding up Sepsis Care Can Save Lives

Minutes matter when it comes to treating sepsis, the killer condition that most Americans probably have never heard of, and new research shows it’s time they learn.

 

Sepsis is the body’s out-of-control reaction to an infection. By the time patients realize they’re in trouble, their organs could be shutting down.

 

New York became the first state to require that hospitals follow aggressive steps when they suspect sepsis is brewing. Researchers examined patients treated there in the past two years and reported Sunday that faster care really is better.

 

Every additional hour it takes to give antibiotics and perform other key steps increases the odds of death by 4 percent, according to the study reported at an American Thoracic Society meeting and in the New England Journal of Medicine.

 

That’s not just news for doctors or for other states considering similar rules. Patients also have to reach the hospital in time.

 

“Know when to ask for help,” said Dr. Christopher Seymour, a critical care specialist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who led the study. “If they’re not aware of sepsis or know they need help, we can’t save lives.”

 

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year began a major campaign to teach people that while sepsis starts with vague symptoms, it’s a medical emergency.

 

To make sure the doctor doesn’t overlook the possibility, “Ask, ‘Could this be sepsis?'” advised the CDC’s Dr. Lauren Epstein.

 

Sepsis is more than an infection

 

Once misleadingly called blood poisoning or a bloodstream infection, sepsis occurs when the body goes into overdrive while fighting an infection, injuring its own tissue. The cascade of inflammation and other damage can lead to shock, amputations, organ failure or death.

 

It strikes more than 1.5 million people in the United States a year and kills more than 250,000.

 

Even a minor infection can be the trigger. A recent CDC study found nearly 80 percent of sepsis cases began outside of the hospital, not in patients already hospitalized because they were super-sick or recovering from surgery.

 

There’s no single symptom

 

In addition to symptoms of infection, worrisome signs can include shivering, a fever or feeling very cold; clammy or sweaty skin; confusion or disorientation; a rapid heartbeat or pulse; confusion or disorientation; shortness of breath; or simply extreme pain or discomfort.

 

If you think you have an infection that’s getting worse, seek care immediately, Epstein said.

 

What’s the recommended care?

 

Doctors have long known that rapidly treating sepsis is important. But there’s been debate over how fast. New York mandated in 2013 that hospitals follow “protocols,” or checklists, of certain steps within three hours, including performing a blood test for infection, checking blood levels of a sepsis marker called lactate, and beginning antibiotics.

 

Do the steps make a difference? Seymour’s team examined records of nearly 50,000 patients treated at New York hospitals over two years. About 8 in 10 hospitals met the three-hour deadline; some got them done in about an hour. Having those three main steps performed faster was better — a finding that families could use in asking what care a loved one is receiving for suspected sepsis.

Who’s at risk?

 

Sepsis is most common among people 65 and older, babies, and people with chronic health problems.

 

But even healthy people can get sepsis, even from minor infections. New York’s rules, known as “Rory’s Regulations,” were enacted after the death of a healthy 12-year-old, Rory Staunton, whose sepsis stemmed from an infected scrape and was initially dismissed by one hospital as a virus.

 

What’s next?

 

Illinois last year enacted a similar sepsis mandate. Hospitals in other states, including Ohio and Wisconsin, have formed sepsis care collaborations. Nationally, hospitals are supposed to report to Medicare certain sepsis care steps. In New York, Rory’s parents set up a foundation to push for standard sepsis care in all states.

 

“Every family or loved one who goes into a hospital, no matter what state, needs to know it’s not the luck of the draw” whether they’ll receive evidence-based care, said Rory’s father, Ciaran Staunton.

 

Boeing Co. Signs Defense, Commercial Deals with Saudi Arabia

Boeing Co said on Sunday it had signed several defense and commercial deals with Saudi Arabia including for the sale of military and passenger aircraft during a visit by U.S. President Donald Trump to the kingdom.

The announcement is the latest in tens of billions of dollars in deals signed between U.S. and Saudi firms since Trump arrived in Riyadh on Saturday.

Boeing said Saudi Arabia has agreed to buy Chinook helicopters, associated support services and guided weapons systems, and intends to purchase P-8 surveillance aircraft.

The total value of the deals or how many aircraft Saudi Arabia intends to buy was not given in the statement announcing the agreements.

A Boeing spokesman declined to comment beyond the statement.

The U.S State Department announced in December plans to sell Saudi Arabia CH-47F Chinook cargo helicopters and related equipment, training and support worth $3.51 billion.

Saudi Arabia is seeking closer defense and commercial ties with the United States under Trump, as it seeks to develop its economy beyond oil and leads a coalition that is fighting a war in Yemen.

“These announcements reaffirm our commitment to the economic growth, prosperity and national security of both Saudi Arabia and the United States, helping to create or sustain thousands of jobs in our two countries,” said Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg.

Boeing also said it would negotiate the sale of up to 16 widebody airplanes to Saudi Gulf Airlines which is based in the country’s east in Dammam.

Boeing did not say which aircraft it was negotiating to sell to the privately-owned commercial airline. Saudi Gulf, which started operations last year, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Boeing will also establish a joint venture with Saudi Arabia to provide “sustainment services for a wide range of military platforms,” the statement said, whilst a separate joint venture would “provide support for both military and commercial helicopters.”

EU’s Moscovici Confident Eurogroup Will Reach Deal on Greece

The European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Pierre Moscovici, said on Sunday he was confident an agreement between Athens and its creditors could be found at a meeting of euro zone finance ministers on Monday in Brussels.

Athens needs funds to repay 7.5 billion euros ($8.4 billion) of debt maturing in July.

“We are very close to an overall agreement,” Moscovici told France Inter radio.

“Greece has assumed its responsibilities,” he said, referring to measures on pension cuts, tax hikes and reforms adopted on Thursday by the Greek Parliament.

“I now wish that we, the partners of Greece, also take our responsibilities,” he said.

Moscovici said his optimism over a deal was partly linked to the fact Germany was now aware of the need to find a structural solution to Greece’s problems.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed during a call on Wednesday that a deal was “feasible” by Monday.

WHO Optimistic on Controlling DRC Ebola Outbreak

The World Health Organization’s regional chief for Africa reports prospects for rapidly controlling the spread of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo are good.

While not underestimating the difficulties that lie ahead in bringing this latest outbreak of Ebola to an end, Matshidiso Moeti told VOA she is “very encouraged” by the speed with which the government and its national and international partners have responded to this crisis.

“I am quite optimistic because this is a government that is experienced at this, and which has got off to a very quick start and we are already on the ground with the partners.  

“We are getting logistic support from WFP (World Food Program) and from the U.N. mission.  So, I am quite optimistic,” Moeti said.

WHO has reported 29 suspected cases, including three deaths since Ebola was discovered in a remote region of DRC on April 22.   This deadly virus causes fever, bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea.  It spreads easily through bodily fluids and can kill more than 50 percent of its victims.

This is the eighth recorded outbreak of Ebola in DRC since 1976.  The outbreak was first detected in Bas-Uele Province, a densely-forested area in northeastern Congo near the border with the Central African Republic.

Outbreak isolated

Moeti calls the remoteness of the area “a mixed blessing.”

She said that there was little likelihood of a “rapid expansion of the outbreak to other localities due to population movement as happened in West Africa.  Although, we are keeping a close eye on the Central African Republic … where we are concerned that there is insecurity there.”

She said it was difficult to operate and carry out surveillance or investigations in this area because the road network leading there was not very well developed and “we have to drive long distances, not in a car, but have to use a motorbike.”

To remedy this, she said the government had fixed up a landing strip to enable helicopters to fly in the experts and material needed to deal with this crisis.

Moeti, a South African physician, replaced Luis Gomez Sambo of Angola as WHO regional head for Africa in January 2015 after he was criticized for his lackluster leadership in handling the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.  

The World Health Organization has come under scathing criticism by the international community for its slow and inept response to that unprecedented epidemic.  By the time WHO declared the Ebola epidemic at an end in January 2016, the deadly virus had killed 11,315 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.

Experience put to use

During a recent visit to Kinshasa, Matshidiso Moeti said she saw how the hard lessons that have been learned from this tragic experience were being applied in DRC.

“What I observed was that the government itself was very quick in getting out to this remote area from the central level.  

“So, they sent a team from Kinshasa within a day or two of getting this alert to go and investigate and from the provincial level very rapidly, the government got down into this local area,” she said.

Moeti is leading a reform process to transform the WHO in the African Region into what she called a “more responsive, accountable, effective and transparent organization.”

She told VOA that this process was a component of WHO’s global reform effort and she would be rolling out the plan during a side-event on May 22, the opening day of this year’s World Health Assembly.

She said the reform program focused largely on how to improve measures for more quickly and efficiently tackling emergencies and communicable diseases.

“Clearly, as we saw very starkly with the Ebola outbreak, an outbreak can quickly transform into a big humanitarian crisis with all sorts of impacts.”

While the job of health reform is far from complete, Moeti said, “I am really pleased to say that we are starting to see how those changes that we have made are making a difference in how we operate.”

 

 

Exhibit Illustrates Extreme Adaptations of Mammals Over Millennia

A giant rhinoceros the size of three African elephants once grazed on treetops in Tibet, but succumbed to climate change more than 20 million years ago.

The high treetops disappeared, along with its food source, says Xiaoming Wang of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Wang has done field research on the long-legged rhino, more formally called the Indricotherium, one of the stars of a new exhibit that shows how radical adaptations that aid survival in one setting can spell disaster in another.

Through fossils and reconstructions, the exhibit tells the story of Mother Nature’s radical gambits to keep organisms alive in changing conditions. The show was built around an earlier exhibit from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which also included ice age remains from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

Mammals that have adapted in the extreme include an ancient whale that walked on land and more recent pygmy mammoths on California’s Channel Islands, whose small size is illustrated with side-by-side jaw bones of a Columbian mammoth and its pygmy relative, which shrunk to cope with limited food resources on the islands.

Many species challenged

Climatic variations over the ages and the more recent incursion of humans have challenged many species, said Emily Lindsey of the La Brea Tar Pits, a site rich with fossils from the mammoths and giant cats that once roamed California, but died out more than 10,000 years ago.

Seen in the exhibit are the extinct American lion, “which along with the cave lion in Europe was the biggest cat that ever lived,” Lindsey said.

There are fossils from a scimitar cat, also extinct, and a long-gone subspecies of jaguar.

“And then we have the mountain lion, which is the only one of those five big cats that’s still alive today,” she notes.

Also known as the cougar, panther or puma, the species is represented with a photo of a celebrated cat that continues to roam through the hills above Los Angeles.

“People thought he would just spend a couple of days there, then continue to move on or attempt to move on,” said Miguel Ordenana, who coordinates the amateur citizens scientists who make wildlife observations to help scientists better understand the region. Mountain lions, he said, typically do not survive crossing busy freeways, but this intrepid mountain lion is a survivor, as is his species.

Arctic island was once like Florida

Other mammals in the exhibit include the Batodonoides, a long-extinct shrewlike mammal from 50 million years ago so tiny that it could have perched on a pencil. The South American Macrauchenia, with a camellike body and giraffelike neck, had a flexible trunk, like an elephant. It went extinct a mere 10,000 years ago, but is represented here in a reconstruction.

Earth’s extreme changes can be seen in a diorama of Ellesmere Island in the Arctic.

Just 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, it was home to warm swamps 50 million years ago and a host of animals adapted to a Floridalike climate.

Those intense changes served many species well, but presented extreme problems. Especially as environmental conditions caused the Arctic freeze over, leaving Ellesmere Island one of the coldest and driest locations on Earth.

An earlier version of this report had Xiaoming Wang’s name misspelled. VOA regrets the error.

G20 Health Ministers Take on Antibiotic Resistance

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.

 

Eastern US Trees Shift North, West With Climate Change

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.

‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Entrance Repaired After Arctic Ice Thaw

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.

Pentagon Displays Technology of the Future

Robot teammates and “snake” arms that can find a crack .005 millimeter long were just two of the U.S. military’s latest technological innovations on display at the Pentagon this week.

The Defense Laboratory Enterprise showcased more than 80 exhibits on its biennial Lab Day on Thursday. The enterprise is a network of 63 defense laboratories, warfare centers and engineering centers that operate across the United States, and the event provided the Defense Department community with an up-close look at projects in various stages of development and readiness.

Here are some of VOA’s favorites:

Soldier Visual Integrated Technology

Imagine a soldier comes across a suspicious object that she has never seen before. As she stops to explore, she immediately sees an enemy fighter and has to spring into action without time to fully raise her weapon’s sight up to her eye. And she’s unable to see another enemy lurking around the corner.

With Soldier Visual Integrated Technology, the soldier can better see her surroundings and needs less time to react to dangers accurately.

Ronald Geer, a staff sergeant assigned to the Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center, says SVIT wirelessly links three pieces of technology on the soldier: a reticle eyepiece, a thermal device on the gun and a communications system attached to the chest.

“What this is going to do is increase my speed and lethality on the battlefield, especially in a close combat situation,” Geer said. “I don’t have to worry so much about raising my weapon to an exact point where I’m able to view through this [his thermal device], because as I raise the weapon, what this is looking at, I’m able to immediately see pulled into the reticle device.”

The connectivity also allows soldiers to use their guns to see what’s around a corner without having to move their bodies into harm’s way.

SVIT updates in real time as well, providing a way to virtually “mark” obstacles or enemy weaponry so that other soldiers can see what the SVIT user views.

Remote Access Nondestructive Evaluation

Jokingly called a “snake on a plane” by some at the Air Force Research Laboratory, R.A.N.D.E. (pronounced Randy) is a robotic arm that can wriggle through an opening as small as 7 centimeters to inspect the interior of aircraft wings or other structures without dismantling them.

Senior Materials Engineer Charles Buynak told VOA that any sensing device can be attached to R.A.N.D.E. to look for minute structural defects.

“We’re looking for things on the order of 1/50,000th of an inch [.00508mm] — before a crack becomes a major thing … and becomes a serious problem to the aircraft,” Buynak said.

The system is driven by a controller from an Xbox 360 home video game console. Buynak said that makes R.A.N.D.E. easy for young operators to use. Another reason is that the Air Force wanted to take advantage of technologies already available.

“Why go spend money developing something that’s easily available that we can adapt to our application here?” he said.

Robots as teammates

The U.S. Army is developing ways to use robots not as tools but as teammates. The Army Research Laboratory displayed several robots this week that can be used as hosts for developing software algorithms for artificial intelligence and machine learning purposes.

Stuart Young, chief of the Asset Control and Behavior Branch, told VOA the goal is to protect soldiers by using technology to “manipulate unknown objects in an unknown world.”

His team is trying to develop AI algorithms that can generalize and understand what’s going on in a robot’s environment. “And then once we have that information,” Young said, “we can manipulate it to accomplish the mission that the robot needs to accomplish.”

Such robot missions could range from breaching an enemy’s defensive position to removing improvised explosive devices, or just moving large objects out of the way while soldiers are in a safer location.

Softbank-Saudi Tech Fund Becomes World’s Biggest With $93B of Capital

The world’s largest private equity fund, backed by Japan’s Softbank Group and Saudi Arabia’s main sovereign wealth fund, said Saturday that it had raised over $93 billion to invest in technology sectors such as artificial intelligence and robotics.

“The next stage of the Information Revolution is under way, and building the businesses that will make this possible will require unprecedented large-scale, long-term investment,” the Softbank Vision Fund said in a statement.

Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, chairman of Softbank, a telecommunications and tech investment group, revealed plans for the fund last October, and since then it has obtained commitments from some of the world’s most deep-pocketed investors.

In addition to Softbank and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the new fund’s investors include Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment, which has committed $15 billion, Apple Inc., Qualcomm, Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology and Japan’s Sharp Corp.

The new fund made its announcement during the visit of President Donald Trump to Riyadh and the signing of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of business deals between U.S. and Saudi companies. Son was also in Riyadh on Saturday.

After meeting with Trump last December, Son pledged $50 billion of investment in the United States that would create 50,000 jobs, a promise Trump claimed was a direct result of his election win.

Saudi tech access

The fund may also serve the interests of Saudi Arabia by helping Riyadh obtain access to foreign technology. Low oil prices have severely damaged the Saudi economy, and policymakers are trying to diversify into new industries.

The PIF signaled an interest in the tech sector last year by investing $3.5 billion in U.S. ride-hailing firm Uber.

Saturday’s statement did not say how much the PIF had committed to the fund, but previously it had said it would invest up to $45 billion over five years. Softbank is investing $28 billion.

The new fund said it would seek to buy minority and majority interests in both private and public companies, from emerging businesses to established, multibillion-dollar firms. It expects to obtain preferred access to long-term investment opportunities worth $100 million or more.

Other sectors in which the fund may invest include mobile computing, communications infrastructure, computational biology, consumer internet businesses and financial technology. The fund aims for $100 billion of committed capital and expects to complete its money-raising in six months, it added.

Job Prospects for 2017 College Grads, Best in More Than a Decade

About 3 million Americans will enter the job pool this year as graduation ceremonies get underway at various colleges and universities across the United States. With unemployment at a 10-year low, 2017 is shaping up to be a good year for new grads. But as Mil Arcega reports, success for many will depend on a desire to keep learning and a willingness to go where the jobs are.

Hey, Graduates: Good Jobs Exist With or Without 4-Year Degree

About three million American university graduates will enter the job market this year. And with unemployment currently at a 10-year low, it’s a good time to be graduating, says Nicole Smith, chief economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW).

“We are at one of the lowest unemployment rates we’ve had since May of 2007, so what that means for the graduating class of 2017 is that the likelihood of getting a job is really, really good,” she said.

The U.S. Labor Department says unemployment for those with a four-year bachelor’s degree or higher is 2.5 percent, compared to the overall jobless rate of 4.5 percent. For those with a high school diploma or less, the average unemployment rate is 6.8 percent.

Demand for graduates with associate, bachelor’s and master’s degrees is particularly strong in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, according to the latest survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

However, Smith says, a four-year degree is not necessary to compete in today’s economy.

“There are about 28 million jobs or so in the U.S. economy that are good-paying jobs; that are high-skilled jobs for people without a B.A,” she said.

While higher learning can give new workers the upper hand, Smith says almost a third of students with bachelor’s degrees are under-unemployed.

“So we have to do this cakewalk, this tightrope walk, to understand exactly what the market demands,” she said.

Options without college degree

A survey of the hottest employment sectors in 2017 shows some of the fastest-growing fields don’t require a four-year degree, according to Bankrate.com senior analyst Mark Hamrick.

“You don’t have to have a college degree for some of those technical jobs, where, let’s say, a kind of therapy might be involved — physical or occupational therapy,” he said.

Health care and service-oriented jobs aimed at the needs of a graying population are bound to remain strong as baby boomers — those born between 1946 to 1964 — continue to retire. But, Hamrick says, some skills are harder to learn in school.

“One of the skills which has been in strong demand really involves people skills — closing the deal, sales … business strategy; charting the course for a viable enterprise, that’s something that’s needed,” he said.

What is clear is that jobs that fueled the economy three or four decades ago are not the same jobs driving the economy today. In the 1970s, manufacturing accounted for nearly two of every five jobs; today, those manufacturing jobs account for fewer than one in 10.   

“The types of manufacturing jobs that remain are jobs that are really high-skill, high-tech, high-demand manufacturing jobs. So those jobs require a lot more skills than their predecessors did,” Smith said.

Life-long learning key

Today’s job market also differs from the past because rapid technological and societal change demands a commitment to life-long learning, which means that getting a degree is just the beginning, according to Smith.  

“Each year, there’s a new … version of technology that we must use,” she said. “So what the students need to be aware of is that they will need to come back to re-up their certification, to re-up their skills.”

Participating in today’s economy also means older and newer workers must be willing to move where the jobs are. Demand for workers is greatest where local economies are dynamic and where populations are growing, says Bankrate.com’s Hamrick. That means the exodus toward bigger cities on the East and West coasts will continue. 

“That’s a process that’s accelerating,” Hamrick said. “It’s not slowing down, and so having the right skills, going where the jobs are located — those are the keys to obtaining and maintaining employment.”

The most recent jobs report shows the U.S. economy added 211,000 jobs in April, and unemployment fell to 4.4 percent. That’s a sharp contrast to the dark days that followed the 2008 financial crisis, when the U.S. economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month and unemployment peaked at 10 percent. 

Climate Change Fueling Rapid Greening of Antarctic Peninsula

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 Declares End to Cholera Epidemic That Infected Over 2,000

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.