One of Africa’s driest regions — the Sahel — could turn greener if the planet warms more than 2 degrees Celsius and triggers more frequent heavy rainfall, scientists said on Wednesday.

The Sahel stretches coast to coast from Mauritania and Mali in the west to Sudan and Eritrea in the east, and skirts the southern edge of the Sahara desert. It is home to more than 100 million people.

The region has seen worsening extreme weather — including more frequent droughts — in recent years.

But if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, the resulting global warming — of more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — could change major weather patterns in the Sahel, and in many different parts of the world, scientists say.

Rainfall models vary

Some weather models predict a small increase in rainfall for the Sahel, but there is a risk that the entire weather pattern will change by the end of the century, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) said.

“The sheer size of the possible change is mindboggling — this is one of the very few elements in the Earth system that we might witness tipping soon,” said co-author Anders Levermann from PIK and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of New York’s Columbia University.

If the Sahel becomes much rainier, it will mean more water for agriculture, industry and domestic use. But in the first few years of the transition, people are likely to experience very erratic weather — extreme droughts followed by destructive floods, the researchers said.

​Hard for people to plan

​This level of unpredictability makes it very hard for people to plan for coming changes, they said.

“The enormous change that we might see would clearly pose a huge adaptation challenge to the Sahel,” said Levermann.

“More than 100 million people are potentially affected that already now are confronted with a (multitude) of instabilities, including war,” he said.

The region faces a range of conflicts, including some driven by groups such as Boko Haram and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The researchers studied rainfall patterns in the months of July, August and September when the region receives most of its annual rain.

‘A range of possible outcomes’

“There’s a range of possible outcomes for societies in the Sahel which depend on the climate that eventually (develops) … and whether they are prepared for fluctuations,” lead author Jacob Schewe, from PIK, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Climate change from burning fossil fuels “really has the power to shake things up,” he said.

“It is driving risks for crop yields in many regions and generally increases dangerous weather extremes around the globe,” he added.

The study was published on Wednesday in Earth System Dynamics, a journal of the European Geosciences Union
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A novel class of personalized cancer vaccines, tailored to the tumors of individual patients, kept disease in check in two early-stage clinical trials, pointing to a new way to help the immune system fight back.

Although so-called immunotherapy drugs from the likes of Merck & Co, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Roche are starting to revolutionize cancer care, they still only work for a limited number of patients.

By adding a personalized cancer vaccine, scientists believe it should be possible to improve substantially the effectiveness of such immune-boosting medicines.

Twelve skin cancer patients, out of a total of 19 across both the trials, avoided relapses for two years after receiving different vaccines developed by German and U.S. teams, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

Larger studies are next

The small Phase I trials now need to be followed by larger studies, but the impressive early results suggest the new shots work far better than first-generation cancer vaccines that typically targeted a single cancer characteristic.

The new treatments contain between 10 and 20 different mutated proteins, or “neoantigens,” that are specific to an individual’s tumour. These proteins are not found on healthy cells and they look foreign to the immune system, prompting specialist T-cells to step up their attack on cancer cells.

One vaccine was developed at the U.S.-based Dana-Farber Institute and Broad Institute and the other by privately-owned German biotech firm BioNTech, which uses so-called messenger RNA to carry the code for making its therapeutic proteins.

Roche, the world’s largest cancer drugmaker, is already betting on BioNTech’s technology after signing a $310 million deal last September allowing it to test the German vaccine with its immunotherapy drug Tecentriq.

BioNTech’s co-founder and CEO Ugur Sahin told Reuters that combination trials using Roche’s drug were due to start later this year against a number of different cancers.

Rival biotech firm Neon Therapeutics, which was formed to exploit the U.S. research, initiated tests of its personalized neoantigen vaccine in combination with Bristol-Myer’s Opdivo drug last year.

Expensive treatment

New drugs like Opdivo and Tecentriq that enlist the body’s immune system are improving the odds of survival, but their typical price tag of more than $150,000 a year is controversial and adding a personalized vaccine will jack costs up further.

Sahin acknowledged such vaccines would be expensive at first but said costs could be brought down by economies of scale and automation.

“In the mid to long term the cost will fall dramatically … it is an individual treatment but it is a universal process,” he said. “We are at a very early stage at the moment but in the long-run this approach could change everything.”

Potential confirmed

Cornelius Melief of Leiden University Medical Center, who was not involved in either study, said the research confirmed the potential of neoantigen vaccines.

“Controlled, randomized Phase II clinical trials with more participants are now needed to establish the efficacy of these vaccines in patients with any type of cancer that has enough mutations to provide sufficient neoantigen targets for this type of approach,” he said.

Mainz-based BioNTech is one of Europe’s largest private biotech companies, with more than 500 employees and deals with Sanofi and Eli Lilly, as well as Roche. It is majority-owned by twin brothers Andreas and Thomas Struengmann, who sold generic drugmaker Hexal to Novartis in 2005.

Sahin said BioNTech would probably stay private for another two to four years before deciding on an initial public offering.

 
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Stem cell tourism involving patients who travel to developing countries for treatment with unproven and potentially risky therapies should be more tightly regulated, international health experts said Wednesday.

With hundreds of medical centers around the world claiming to be able to repair damaged tissue in conditions such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, tackling unscrupulous advertising of such procedures is crucial, the experts said.

These therapies are advertised directly to patients with the promise of a cure, but there is often little or no evidence to show they will help, or that they will not cause harm, the 15 experts wrote in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Some types of stem cell transplant — mainly using blood and skin stem cells — have been approved by regulators after full clinical trials found they could treat certain types of cancer and grow skin grafts for burns patients.

But many other potential therapies are only in the earliest stages of development and have not been approved by international regulators.

“Stem cell therapies hold a lot of promise, but we need rigorous clinical trials and regulatory processes to determine whether a proposed treatment is safe, effective and better than existing treatments,” said one of the 15, Sarah Chan of Britain’s University of Edinburgh.

The experts called for global action, led by the World Health Organization, to introduce controls on advertising and agree on international standards for the manufacture and testing of cell- and tissue-based therapies.

“The globalization of health markets and the specific tensions surrounding stem cell research and its applications have made this a difficult challenge,” they wrote. “However, the stakes are too high not to take a united stance.”
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The Trump administration will soon begin a review that will question the veracity of the climate change science used by President Barack Obama’s administration as the basis for environmental regulations.

The move by the Environmental Protection Agency to launch public debates between scientists on climate research, known as red-team, blue-team exercises, would be the first major effort by the Republican administration to challenge the long-standing scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.

Advocates who have petitioned the EPA to reverse the scientific finding underlying U.S. regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions see the proposal to scrutinize mainstream climate science as a first step in that direction.

“It’s a way to survey the landscape before reopening the endangerment finding,” said Myron Ebell, head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the groups that filed a petition with the agency to undo the 2009 scientific determination that formed the basis for the Democratic Obama administration’s regulation of greenhouse gases.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had authority under the federal Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases from cars if the agency determined they endangered human health.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has spoken several times about the merits of opening the climate change debate up to the public. The website Climatewire on Friday cited a senior administration official, who said Pruitt plans to launch the back-and-forth scientific critiques formally.

Francis Menton, a lawyer who filed an endangerment finding petition in January on behalf of the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, said Pruitt told an event at the Manhattan Institute think tank in New York on Friday that he would launch the debates in the next few months.

Menton said he asked Pruitt whether he had made a decision on reopening the endangerment finding. Pruitt said the agency is weighing its options.

The review “can create a body of scientific work that can be trustworthy and dependable to make regulatory choices and decisions,” said Rob Henneke, of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a third group that filed an endangerment finding petition.

Unlike the other two, it has challenged the legality of the endangerment findng, not the science.

Environmental groups are confident that Pruitt will not be successful if he tries to undo the endangerment finding because they expect the courts will side with the scientific consensus that human beings cause climate change.

Pruitt and the EPA would need to build up a new case that shows carbon dioxide is innocuous and counter the volumes of scientific research that support the finding.

“If he has any grasp of scientific and legal reality, he would realize that it’s a fool’s errand to reverse the endangerment determination,” said David Doniger, climate director for the Natural Resources Defense Counsel.

“This could be a way for him to keep the right-wing fringe groups occupied and also accimplish the goal of further confusing the public debate,” he said.

Ebell, who was also the transition leader of the Trump EPA, had previously been critical of Pruitt’s hesitation to take on the endangerment finding because of the time and staffing it would require.

The Trump administration has not yet appointed second-tier assistant administrators to run different policy divisions of the agency.

“I think [the red-team, blue-team process] is a logical first step, but I don’t think it commits the administrator to anything yet,” Ebell said.

 
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A team of teenage Gambian students are upset and mystified at being denied visas to attend a major global robotics contest in Washington later this month.

This comes days after an Afghan girls team was also turned down by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Neither team was given any reason.

“It’s very disappointing, knowing that we are the only two countries that aren’t going to take part in the competition,” Gambian student Fatoumata Ceesay said.

The two teams will instead enter the competition via Skype. But the video link is no substitute after the youngsters worked for months perfecting their projects and dreamed of the thrill of visiting Washington.

“It would be an experience to see and discover other robots and ask questions and exchange ideas with others. It’s more than 160 countries, so we’d have the chance to mingle,” Ceesay said.

The Gambian and Afghan students are especially puzzled because teams from Iran and Sudan, and a group of Syrian refugees were given visas. All three Muslim-majority countries are on President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Afghanistan and Gambia are not.

Lida Azizi, a 17-year old from Herat, calls the visa rejection “a clear insult for the people of Afghanistan.”

The U.S. embassies in Afghanistan and Gambia and the State Department say they cannot discuss visa requests.

WATCH: Robotics contest for youth promotes innovation

A group called FIRST Global Challenge holds the yearly robotics competition to build interest in science, technology, engineering and math around the world.

The group says the focus of the competition is finding solutions to problems in such fields as water, energy, medicine and food production.
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Hundreds of environmentalists protested in Kraków Tuesday against widespread logging in Europe’s last primeval forest as a conference of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee got underway in the historic city in southern Poland.

The environmentalists demanded that the Polish government stop felling trees in the Białowieża forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site that straddles the border with Belarus. The forest of nearly 142,000 hectares is one of the last and largest remaining parts of an immense primeval forest that stretched across the European Plain 10,000 years ago.

Separated by a police cordon, forest rangers held a counterdemonstration in Kraków. They support the government’s explanation that selective logging will help save the forest, which is north of Brest, the Belarusian capital, and Białystok in Poland.

The forest is home to many rare species of birds and plants as well as hundreds of European bison, the continent’s largest mammals. It contains a number of large, ancient oak trees, survivors of the wars in Eastern Europe during the 20th century and many earlier conflicts; the biggest trees, named after historical figures in many cases, have circumferences of over 600 centimeters (20 feet) and stand over 30 meters (98 feet) tall.

The government said it increased logging to fight an infestation of bark beetles that has affected many spruce trees. Ecologists claim authorities have been felling not only infected trees but also healthy ones. They contend the government’s stand is a pretext to increase timber production for profit.

Scientists and the European Union, which says the increased logging is illegal, have also protested the logging. In late April, the European Commission gave Polish authorities a “final warning” to address its concerns over the forest or face being summoned by the EU’s top court.

The UNESCO committee, meeting in Poland through July 11 in its 41st annual session, is expected to decide Wednesday whether to send a mission of experts to the Białowieża Primeval Forest to reassess the situation.
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Lawyers from around Africa gathered in Cameroon this week to call for tougher legislation against counterfeit medicine.

Sixty tons of counterfeit medicine was burned after being seized by customs officials in Cameroon, who say the stockpile had an estimated value of $80,000.

Customs official Marcel Kamgaing said the imitation medicine was being used to treat everything from diabetes and hypertension to cancer and erectile dysfunction. He said the forged drugs were destined for sale at shops and roadside pharmacies.

He says illicit drugs are very dangerous to the health of consumers and may even kill due to poor packaging and preservation. He says importers should be informed that Cameroon’s customs laws give them the authority to destroy all fake drugs.

Counterfeit drugs conference

The burning was scheduled to coincide with an international conference this week in Yaounde on the problem of phony drugs in Africa.

Jackson Ngnie Kamga, president of the Cameroon Bar Association, says the current penalties are not enough of a deterrent. He said traffickers should face jail time.

He says because of its deadly consequences, it is high time for Cameroon to join African states to start considering the transportation and commercialization of bogus drugs as a major crime, not a simple offense punishable by fines and seizure of the illicit goods. He says the number of people who die because of such drugs makes them consider it another form of homicide, which the international community should help Africa tackle.

The World Health Organization says falsified medical products may contain no active ingredient, the wrong active ingredient or the wrong amount of the correct active ingredient. The WHO says about 100,000 deaths-a-year in Africa are linked to counterfeit drugs.

Asian source

Issouf Baadhio, an attorney from Burkina Faso, represented the International Association of Lawyers as its vice president. He said the counterfeit drugs are primarily manufactured in Asia, especially in China, and so African countries need to focus on stopping importation.

He says besides the fact that this trade is illegal, importing fake drugs has disastrous economic consequences and as such civil society organizations and professional groups like the International Association of Lawyers should join states and make sure that markets are protected and custom controls are set up at entrances to all states to detect and stop the sale of all dangerous drugs.

Identifying counterfeit medicines can be difficult. The WHO urges officials and consumers to look for signs like misspelled words on the packaging and to check that the manufacture and expiration dates inside and outside packaging match.
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The U.N. children’s fund warns tens of thousands of malnourished children are at great risk in Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan, which are on the brink of famine.

UNICEF reports an estimated 4.7 million children in the three cholera-stricken countries are malnourished. Of these, UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac tells VOA, more than one million are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

“Let me remind you that a child who is suffering from severe acute malnutrition are nine times more likely to die of disease than a well-nourished child,” he said. “So, having cholera and diarrhea in countries where so many children are so fragile because of malnutrition among other things because of such a bad access to safe water is extremely worrying.”

Sudan outbreak

UNICEF says it also is extremely worried about an outbreak of acute watery diarrhea in Sudan, where the Federal Ministry of Health reports more than 20,000 cases of the disease, including over 400 deaths.

Boulierac says the disease has spread to 14 of 18 states and children account for more than 20 percent of the affected population.

“The situation in White Nile State, which is in central Sudan, is deeply worrying, since it is the most affected with 7,200 reported cases and since it has almost 100,000 refugees living in camps,” he said.

UNICEF says it needs access, security and more money to contain cholera and acute watery diarrhea in all four countries. It says aid operations must be scaled up. Malnourished children must receive special life-saving medication, therapeutic feeding and have access to safe drinking water.
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Dairy farmers want U.S. regulators to banish the term “soy milk,” but documents show even government agencies haven’t always agreed on what to call such drinks.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture “fervently” wanted to use the term “soy milk” in educational materials for the public, according to emails recently released in response to a lawsuit. That irked the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that oversees the rule defining milk as coming from healthy cows.

It’s “not a trivial decision,” the FDA warned in one of the 2011 emails about the USDA’s desire to use the term.

The sour history over who gets to use “milk” reaches back to at least 1997, when a soy foods group petitioned the FDA to recognize the term “soymilk.” A couple of years later, the group pointed out that the FDA itself had used the term. Even now, the National Milk Producers Federation says it’s working to build support for legislation directing the FDA to enforce the federal standard. The dairy group says both “soy milk” and “soymilk” are inappropriate ways to describe non-dairy drinks made from soybeans, and that the one-word version is just an attempt to get around the definition.

There are plenty of other food names at issue. A European Union court recently ruled that a company named TofuTown can’t describe its products as “cheese.” U.S. rice producers have railed against “pretenders ” like diced cauliflower and said they may take the issue to the FDA.

But the FDA hasn’t even always been able to get other agencies to go along, as illustrated in the emails obtained by the Good Food Institute, which advocates alternatives to industrial animal agriculture. The GFI sued the FDA for public records relating to soy milk.

The email exchange started when a nutrition adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services alerted the FDA that the USDA planned to use “soy milk” in educational materials about dietary guidelines.

“USDA staff are preparing consumer publications and fervently want to use the term ‘soy milk’ because beverages are widely marketed this way,” the adviser wrote.

The FDA bristled and provided the federal definition of milk as a “lacteal secretion” from cows. Therefore, the FDA declared that referring to soy, almond and rice drinks as “milk” would be incorrect. It suggested the other agency say “beverage” or “fortified beverage.”

When that didn’t put the matter to rest, the FDA warned that the USDA’s use of the term could undermine the FDA’s regulatory authority.

That apparently didn’t stop the USDA, either.

“They are adamant about using the term in consumer publications,” the nutrition adviser wrote. The USDA had indicated that it would use “soy beverage” in official policy documents, but it wanted to use “plain language” in materials for the public.

Despite the federal regulation, others may also consider “soy milk” an acceptable term. The Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn’t limit milk’s definition to cows, saying it is “a fluid secreted by the mammary glands of females for the nourishment of their young.”

It also allows for a “food product produced from seeds or fruit that resembles and is used similarly to cow’s milk.”

Asked how the spat was resolved, the USDA provided materials from 2011 that use both terms by referring to “soymilk (soy beverage).” The agency also uses the term elsewhere, including on its “Choose My Plate” website, which currently says “calcium-fortified soymilk (soy beverage)” is part of the dairy group.

The National Milk Producers Federation says the USDA’s usage of the term shows even other government agencies are confused about how to describe soy beverages in the absence of consistent enforcement by the FDA.

The FDA declined to comment.
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