The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season has arrived. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there’s a 45 percent chance that this year’s activity will be above normal, with up to four major hurricanes. VOA’s George Putic visited the wind tunnel at the nearby University of Maryland to experience the hurricane-strength wind and check out the latest in the science of predicting the stormy weather.
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New government data show the health of pregnant women and babies in the U.S. is getting worse, and a report by the National Center for Health Statistics shows the number of babies born prematurely has been increasing since 2014.

Preterm American births increased in 2016 and 2015 after seven years of steady declines. Prematurity rose by 2 percent in 2016 and by 1.6 percent the year before.

Stacey Stewart, president of the March of Dimes, a nonprofit U.S. group that works to eliminate prematurity and birth defects, called the increase “an alarming indication that the health of pregnant women and babies in our country is heading in the wrong direction.”

Expand health care

Stewart called on Washington to expand access to quality prenatal care and promote proven ways to help reduce the risk of preterm birth. Noting that the U.S. Senate is considering a health care bill that many Americans believe would reduce health benefits for poor families and change coverage for maternity and newborn care, Stewart said now “is not the time to make it harder for women to get the care they need to have healthy pregnancies and healthy babies.”

In the U.S., about 400,000 babies born each year before the 37th week of pregnancy are considered preterm. No one knows all the causes of prematurity, but researchers have discovered that even late-term “preemies” face developmental challenges that full-term babies do not. Several studies show that health problems related to preterm births persist through adult life, problems such as chronic lung disease, developmental handicaps and vision and hearing losses.

African-American rates

Research also shows that African-American women are 48 percent more likely to bear a child prematurely than all other women. And African-American infants born with birth defects are much more likely to face severe outcomes, compared to other U.S. newborns.

African-American women in general are worse off than low-income white women, Stewart said.

“We want to make sure that all babies have access to opportunities to be delivered at full term,” she told VOA, “that mothers have the opportunity to have healthy pregnancies and deliver their babies full term, and we know we must do a much better job in African-American and Hispanic communities and in other communities of color,” to make sure that solutions are available.

The report from the National Center for Health Statistics, which is part of the government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shows that preterm rates rose in 17 of the 50 U.S. states, and that none reported a decline.

The incidence of low birth weight, a risk factor for some serious health problems, also rose for a second straight year in 2016. Again, rates of low birth weight babies were higher for African-Americans than for other racial groups.
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New research suggests that the ability of children in Africa to perform well in school could be dramatically improved through basic malaria education and treatment. While less fatal among older children, malaria infections often reduce a child’s ability to concentrate, as Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Poor and southern U.S. counties will get hit hardest by global warming, according to a first-of-its-kind detailed projection of potential climate change effects at the local level.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, calculates probable economic harms and benefits for the more than 3,100 counties in the United States under different possible scenarios for worldwide emissions of heat-trapping gases. It looks at agriculture, energy costs, labor costs, coastal damage from rising seas, crime and deaths, then estimates the effect on average local income by the end of the century.

Researchers computed the possible effects of 15 types of impacts for each county across 29,000 simulations.

“The south gets hammered and the north can actually benefit,” said study lead author Solomon Hsiang, a University of California economist. “The south gets hammered primarily because it’s super-hot already. It just so happens that the south is also poorer.”

The southern part of the nation’s heartland — such as Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky and southern Illinois — also feels the heat hard, he said. Michigan, Minnesota, the far northeast, the northwest and mountainous areas benefit the most.

Counties hit hardest

The county hit hardest if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated is tiny and impoverished Union County in Florida, where median income would take a 28 percent hit. And among counties with at least 500,000 people, Polk County in central Florida would suffer the most, with damages of more than 17 percent of income.

Seven of the 10 counties with the highest percentage of projected county income losses from climate change are in Florida, along with two in Texas and one in Georgia. Half of these are among the poorest counties in the country. 

Five of the 10 counties that would benefit the most from global warming are in Michigan. The others are in Alaska, Colorado, Nevada and the mountainous region of North Carolina. Mineral County in Nevada would see a 13 percent increase in income, while Tacoma, Washington’s Pierce County would benefit by about 2 percent, the most among counties with a population of more than 500,000.

“You’re going to see this transfer of wealth from the southeast to the parts of the country that are less exposed to risk,” said study co-author Robert Kopp, a Rutgers University climate scientist. “On average both in this country and on this planet just poorer people are in hotter areas.”

The whole nation’s gross domestic product would shrink by 0.7 percent for every degree Fahrenheit temperatures go up, the study calculates, but that masks just how uneven the damage could be. On average, the poorest counties would suffer a drop of 13.1 percent of income if carbon pollution continues unabated, while the richest counties would fall 1.1 percent.

Rise in fatalities

Economists and scientists who specialize in climate and disasters praised the study as groundbreaking.

“This is the most comprehensive, the most detailed information to date,” said University of Illinois finance professor Donald Fullerton, who wasn’t part of the study. “Nobody had ever done anything like this.”

The biggest economic damage comes from an increase in deaths. In the early stages of warming, overall deaths fall because the number of deaths from extreme cold falls fast. But as the world warms further, the increase in deaths from heat rises faster and results in more deaths overall by the end of the century.

Fullerton said the one place where he felt the study could overstate costs is in these deaths because it uses the same government-generated dollar value for each life — $7.9 million per person — when most of the people who die in temperature-related deaths are older and some economists prefer valuing deaths differently by age.

The study looks at production of four different crops — soy, wheat, corn and cotton. Much of the Midwest could be hit “with the type of productivity losses we saw during the Dust Bowl,” Hsiang said.

The study also examines two types of crime data: property and violent crime. Previous studies have found a direct and strong correlation between higher temperatures and higher rates of violent crime such as assault, rape and murder, Hsiang said.

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann called it “a fascinating and ambitious study.” But because many extreme weather factors weren’t or can’t yet be calculated, he said the study “can at best only provide a very lower limit on the extent of damages likely to result from projected climate changes.”
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Poor and southern U.S. counties will get hit hardest by global warming, according to a first-of-its-kind detailed projection of potential climate change effects at the local level.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, calculates probable economic harms and benefits for the more than 3,100 counties in the United States under different possible scenarios for worldwide emissions of heat-trapping gases. It looks at agriculture, energy costs, labor costs, coastal damage from rising seas, crime and deaths, then estimates the effect on average local income by the end of the century.

Researchers computed the possible effects of 15 types of impacts for each county across 29,000 simulations.

“The south gets hammered and the north can actually benefit,” said study lead author Solomon Hsiang, a University of California economist. “The south gets hammered primarily because it’s super-hot already. It just so happens that the south is also poorer.”

The southern part of the nation’s heartland — such as Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky and southern Illinois — also feels the heat hard, he said. Michigan, Minnesota, the far northeast, the northwest and mountainous areas benefit the most.

Counties hit hardest

The county hit hardest if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated is tiny and impoverished Union County in Florida, where median income would take a 28 percent hit. And among counties with at least 500,000 people, Polk County in central Florida would suffer the most, with damages of more than 17 percent of income.

Seven of the 10 counties with the highest percentage of projected county income losses from climate change are in Florida, along with two in Texas and one in Georgia. Half of these are among the poorest counties in the country. 

Five of the 10 counties that would benefit the most from global warming are in Michigan. The others are in Alaska, Colorado, Nevada and the mountainous region of North Carolina. Mineral County in Nevada would see a 13 percent increase in income, while Tacoma, Washington’s Pierce County would benefit by about 2 percent, the most among counties with a population of more than 500,000.

“You’re going to see this transfer of wealth from the southeast to the parts of the country that are less exposed to risk,” said study co-author Robert Kopp, a Rutgers University climate scientist. “On average both in this country and on this planet just poorer people are in hotter areas.”

The whole nation’s gross domestic product would shrink by 0.7 percent for every degree Fahrenheit temperatures go up, the study calculates, but that masks just how uneven the damage could be. On average, the poorest counties would suffer a drop of 13.1 percent of income if carbon pollution continues unabated, while the richest counties would fall 1.1 percent.

Rise in fatalities

Economists and scientists who specialize in climate and disasters praised the study as groundbreaking.

“This is the most comprehensive, the most detailed information to date,” said University of Illinois finance professor Donald Fullerton, who wasn’t part of the study. “Nobody had ever done anything like this.”

The biggest economic damage comes from an increase in deaths. In the early stages of warming, overall deaths fall because the number of deaths from extreme cold falls fast. But as the world warms further, the increase in deaths from heat rises faster and results in more deaths overall by the end of the century.

Fullerton said the one place where he felt the study could overstate costs is in these deaths because it uses the same government-generated dollar value for each life — $7.9 million per person — when most of the people who die in temperature-related deaths are older and some economists prefer valuing deaths differently by age.

The study looks at production of four different crops — soy, wheat, corn and cotton. Much of the Midwest could be hit “with the type of productivity losses we saw during the Dust Bowl,” Hsiang said.

The study also examines two types of crime data: property and violent crime. Previous studies have found a direct and strong correlation between higher temperatures and higher rates of violent crime such as assault, rape and murder, Hsiang said.

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann called it “a fascinating and ambitious study.” But because many extreme weather factors weren’t or can’t yet be calculated, he said the study “can at best only provide a very lower limit on the extent of damages likely to result from projected climate changes.”
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Two major studies into how bees are affected by a group of pesticides banned in Europe gave mixed results on Thursday, fueling a row over whether the chemicals, called neonicotinoids, are safe.

The studies, one conducted across three European countries and another in Canada, found some negative effects after exposure to neonicotinoids in wild and honeybee populations, but also some positives, depending on the environmental context.

Scientists who conducted the European research – in Britain, Hungary and Germany – told reporters their overall findings suggested neonicotinoids are harmful to honeybee and wild bee populations and are “a cause for concern.”

But scientists representing companies who funded the work – Germany’s Bayer AG and Switerland’s Syngenta AG – said the results showed “no consistent effect.”

Several independent experts said the findings were mixed or inconclusive.

The European Union has since 2014 had a moratorium on use of neonicotinoids – made and sold by various companies including Bayer and Syngenta – after lab research pointed to potential risks for bees, crucial for pollinating crops.

But crop chemical companies say real-world evidence is not there to blame a global plunge in bee numbers in recent years on neonicotinoid pesticides alone. They argue it is a complex phenomenon due to multiple factors.

A spokesman for the EU’s food safety watchdog EFSA, said the agency is in the process of assessing all studies and data for a full re-evaluation of neonicotinoids, expected in November.

EFSA’s scientific assessment will be crucial to a European Commission decision in consultation with EU states on whether the moratorium on neonicotinoid use should remain in place.

The two studies published on Thursday, in the peer-reviewed journal Science, are important because they were field studies that sought to examine the real-world exposure of bees to pesticides in nature.

Researchers who led the Canadian study concluded that worker bees exposed to neonicotinoids – which they said often came from contaminated pollen from nearby plants, not from treated crops – had lower life expectancies and their colonies were more likely to suffer from a loss of queen bees.

On the findings of the European study, researchers told a briefing in London that exposure to neonicotinoid crops harmed honeybee colonies in two of the three countries and reduced the reproductive success of wild bees across all three.

They noted, however, that results from Germany showed a positive effect on bees exposed to neonicotinoids, although they said this was temporary and the reasons behind it were unclear.

“This represents the complexity of the real world,” said Richard Pywell, a professor at Britain’s Center of Ecology and Hydrology who co-led the work. “In certain circumstances, you may have a positive effect … and in other circumstances you may have a negative effect”

Overall, however, he said: “We are showing significant negative effects on [bees’] critical life-cycle stages, which is a cause for concern.”

Several specialists with no direct involvement in the study who were asked to assess its findings said they were mixed.

Rob Smith, a professor at Britain’s University of Huddersfield, said the results were “important in showing that there are detectable effects of neonicotinoid treatments on honeybees in the real world”, but added: “These effects are not consistent.”

Lynn Dicks at the University of East Anglia said the findings “illustrate the complexity of environmental science.”

“If there was a really big effect of neonicotinoids on bees, in whatever circumstances they were used, it would have shown up in both of these studies,” she said.

Norman Carreck, an insect expert at Britain’s Sussex University, said: “Whilst adding to our knowledge, the study throws up more questions than it answers.”
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In the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, indigenous farmers gather at the top of mountains the night after the winter solstice — not to enjoy the view, but to forecast the timing and quantity of rains.

If the Pleiades star cluster appears large and bright, then rains will be abundant. If it looks small and dim, then the rains will be poor — in which case, the farmers delay the planting of their crops.

“What could at first glance seem like a far-fetched ancestral tradition actually showcases indigenous peoples’ ability to make useful and constructive observations on climate forecasting,” said Douglas Nakashima, head of the small islands and indigenous knowledge section at the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“While scientists know that El Niño reduces rainfall in the Andes, they were previously not aware of the link between El Niño and cloud cover,” he said.

Traditional skills and knowledge should be seen as a complement, not a barrier, to scientific knowledge and climate adaptation efforts, experts said at a conference on how communities adapt to climate change, held this week in the Ugandan capital Kampala.

Pool traditional knowledge

National policies to adapt to climate change not only often disregard traditional knowledge, they sometimes even undermine the resilience of indigenous populations, Nakashima said.

“Initiatives around the world to build large dams or boost green fuels to reduce emissions have displaced many communities,” he said.

Krystyna Swiderska, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, said that governments also largely ignore indigenous innovation in farming.

“In Peru, for example, farmers already grow hundreds of potato varieties — as opposed to relying on just a few varieties as many countries do — so they have a better chance of surviving the negative impacts of climate change,” she said.

“But there is still a strong belief among the international community that science is the best solution for climate adaptation,” she said.

Herders — who have been adapting to erratic weather for decades — have much to teach about coping with climate change, said Elizabeth Carabine, a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, a London-based think tank.

Cities and slums

Conference participants stressed that cities, and slums in particular, could also be a significant source of inspiration for climate adaptation.

One participant highlighted that slum dwellers were highly innovative and entrepreneurial, for example by converting parts of their home into a school or a soup kitchen.

Using cities’ knowledge is all the more important as people living in cities are just as affected as others — and perhaps more so — by climate change, said Julie Arrighi from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center.

“Cities are big consumers of energy and particularly exposed to threats like flooding as a result of rising sea levels,” she said. “That challenge is only going to get bigger as cities grow.”

Julie Greenwalt, an urban environment specialist at the Cities Alliance, guarded against governments ignoring the needs of cities to adapt to a changing climate, and instead focusing their resources on rural areas.

“Our definitions of urban and rural are largely driven by developed countries, but even in some cities — like in India — people keep cattle,” she said.

This, said Rebecca Carter from the World Resources Institute, means that “climate adaptation should become part of how a city works, not just an add-on.”

 
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New research suggests that the ability of children in Africa to perform well in school could be dramatically improved through the provision of basic malaria education and treatment.

Most malaria prevention programs focus on children under 5. Infections are less fatal among older children, but many harbor malaria parasites without displaying any symptoms of the disease. If such a condition is left untreated, a young victim’s health often deteriorates, said lead researcher Dr. Sian Clarke of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“The malaria parasites destroy the red blood cells, and as a consequence of that you get chronic anemia in children,” Clarke said. “Generally, children who are anemic feel weak, they’re tired, they’re generally lethargic, they are going to be less active and less fully engaged.”

The research involved nearly 2,000 schoolchildren in Mali, led by Save the Children and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, alongside the National Institute for Public Health Research in Mali.

About half the children were given a malaria control package delivered by their teachers, which included prevention education, insecticide-treated nets and anti-malarial treatment. Malaria infection rates fell from 80 percent to just 5 percent, and cases of anemia were almost halved compared with the control group.

“And the children’s capacity to pay attention for longer was increased,” Clarke said.

Save the Children has helped expand the program to 400 schools in Mali. It was the second African country to host the trial.

“The first study was done in Kenya, an area of year-round [malaria] transmission,” Clarke said. “This study was done in Mali, an area with malaria concentrated in just a few months.  And the fact that we saw similar results in both settings would suggest that where malaria is a significant problem and the levels of infection are high, then you might expect to see a similar impact in other settings.”

Aid workers say preventing anemia in Malian schoolgirls is particularly important because of high teenage marriage and pregnancy rates. Anemia during pregnancy can lead to a low birth weight and a higher risk of child mortality.
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