A pesticide banned by international treaty in 2011 could be responsible for the deaths of young children in South Asia, according to new findings.

In June 2012, 14 children were brought to the Dinajpur Medical College Hospital in northern Bangladesh with acute encephalitis, a dangerous swelling of the brain. Most were unconscious within three hours, and all but one died after about 20 hours. 

Scientists from the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, a major research institution in Bangladesh, investigated what caused the outbreak. The medical team noticed that almost all the children lived next to a lychee orchard, many lived with someone who worked in the industry, and most had visited the fruit orchards shortly before becoming ill, lead author Mohammed Islam told VOA.

A report published earlier this year in The Lancet reviewed a 2014 outbreak that killed 122 children in India’s Muzaffarpur region, the country’s largest lychee-producing region and an area where there are annual outbreaks of illness resembling acute encephalitis. That report blamed the outbreak on naturally occurring toxins in lychees that can lead to dangerously low blood-sugar levels in malnourished children.

But a new report this week by Islam and his team, who analyzed the 2012 outbreak and subsequent incidents, noted that affected areas more often are places where lychees are produced, rather than consumed. And outbreaks typically ended when monsoon rains began, washing away pesticide residues from the fruit trees.

The researchers interviewed lychee orchard workers, their families and neighbors, as well as the families of children who had not fallen ill. They learned that children frequently ate unwashed fruit that fell to the ground, and peeled away the lychees’ rough-textured red skin with their teeth.

Workers in the orchards said children were sometimes recruited to help with the harvest, since they could easily climb the small lychee trees. The workers were not always able to report what pesticides were used, since the labels had been removed before pesticide containers reached the fields. However, the researchers were able to collect empty containers for testing.

The new report by Islam and his team, published in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, found that a number of pesticides — including endosulfan — were being used. Endosulfan was added to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2011, which should have ended its use in most of the world. However, slow implementation, numerous exceptions and weak enforcement led to continued use.

Endosulfan is permitted for use on some crops in Bangladesh, but not on lychees, Islam told VOA.

Overall, though, “There is very poor monitoring of the use of pesticides,” he said.

The study was not able to definitively show that each case was caused by pesticides, or identify which pesticides were responsible for the young victims’ brain inflammation. If researchers can respond rapidly to the next outbreak and collect blood samples within hours, Islam said, scientists should be able to determine which pesticides are present.

Islam said he wants to coordinate with other scientists and conduct further studies across Bangladesh and in India, Vietnam and Thailand, where similar outbreaks have been reported and endosulfan may still be used on crops.
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Al Gore admits he was frustrated upon hearing the news last month that President Donald Trump was pulling out of the Paris climate accord, but since then he’s become more optimistic.

Gore worried that a U.S. withdrawal from the treaty would compel other nations to opt out of the historic pact for adopting clean energy solutions. But that’s not what happened.

“The whole rest of the world has redoubled their commitment. And in this country, the governors and the mayors and the business leaders have all said, ‘We’re still in the agreement, and we’re going to fill the gap. We’re going to meet the U.S. commitment, regardless of what Donald Trump does,’ ” Gore told The Associated Press last week at a special screening for An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.

It follows the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth and continues the conversation of finding solutions for the effects of climate change, including an emphasis on renewable energy. Much like the first film, Gore is front and center in leading the discussion.

It’s been a remarkable second act for Gore since winning the popular vote, but losing the Electoral College in the 2000 presidential election. There’s no question that Gore was devastated by the loss, but his stature as an important voice for environmental issues has proven equally successful, as he amassed a Nobel Prize, Academy Award, an Emmy and a Grammy for his relentless dedication to climate change activism.

Grateful for the chance

“I’m under no illusion that there’s any position with as much chance to do good as president of the United States, but I’m very grateful to have found another way to serve the public interests. I’m devoting my life to this and hoping to make a big difference,” Gore said.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who also attended the premiere, agrees that Gore has done “pretty well for himself” since the disputed 2000 presidential election.

“Al Gore could have done many things after he was not inaugurated in 2001, but what he did was become the leading global spokesman for perhaps the most important scientific and environmental cause of our lifetime, and he won a Nobel Prize in the bargain. So I don’t think anyone could quarrel with how Al Gore has decided to live his life,” he said.

A big part of Gore’s mission depends on convincing people that climate change is not a hoax. Instead, it’s based on science that shows the global mean surface temperature continues to rise, due in part to an increase in greenhouse gases. So while global warming is immune to politics, the topic remains a partisan issue in the United States. That’s something the former vice president blames on corporate funding for political campaigns.

“The truth about the climate crisis is still inconvenient for the big carbon polluters, and the politicians that they support with their big campaign contributions and lobbying activities are scared to cross them. That’s the main reason. They’ve spent a lot of money trying to put out false information about it,” Gore said.

Still, he remains confident that the problem can be fixed.

“People are seeing through this now. Two-thirds of the American people want to solve this, big time. We are going to solve it. We just need to move faster on it,” Gore said.

Gore feels that change will come from the “grass roots up.” That’s why he spends a great deal of time training climate activists around the globe.

“We need to get more people involved. That’s one of the real purposes of this movie — to tell people what they need to know, to show them that there is hope and there are solutions now, and inspire them to get involved,” he said.

Davis Guggenheim directed the first film to box office and Oscar glory, bringing climate change into the mainstream. The sequel, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, picks up the conversation with more of a battle cry for saving the planet.

Knowing he was stepping into big shoes for this film, Shenk noted the importance of his predecessor’s film.

“An Inconvenient Truth was one of the most successful documentaries in history. Not only did it do fabulously well at the box office, but by almost any measure it put the words ‘global warming’ and ‘climate crisis’ on the map for the entire world,” Shenk said.

Ending updated

In order to keep the information timely, producers changed the ending from what audiences saw at the Sundance Film Festival to reflect Trump’s announcement about withdrawing the United States from the global climate agreement in time for the film’s limited release on July 28 and its wide release on August 4.

Gore also said he’d recently spoken to Hillary Clinton, and that’s “she’s going to be fine.”

Clinton won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College to Trump, just as Gore lost to George W. Bush in 2000.

As for Trump’s continued attacks on the news media, Gore feels disheartened by them.

“Well, I think that’s really unfortunate. We need someone who will unite us and not divide us. The press obviously plays an absolutely crucial role in making our democracy work. If the press isn’t free to get out there and tell people what’s going on, then we can’t make the changes we need to know about and then change,” Gore said.

Part of the news coverage called into question involves the constant flurry of revelations in the investigation of the Trump team’s possible collusion with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Every day there seems like there’s something different, and they’re not getting anything good done. That’s a problem,” Gore said.
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Countries with few health-management resources are prone to periodic outbreaks of insect-borne diseases affecting both people and livestock. One of the best ways to reduce the impact is timely vaccination and eradication of insects. But how to tell when an outbreak might occur? VOA’s George Putic spoke with a scientist from Kenya who is using satellites to predict future outbreaks.
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New technology allows scientists working on new vaccines to combat infectious diseases to test their products’ effectiveness on a model immune system in a laboratory, without putting the upgraded vaccine into humans.

Researchers have begun building model immune systems using human cells, and this lab technique should make early vaccine trials quicker, safer and cheaper, according to scientists in the United States and Britain involved in this novel approach. The technology also has the potential to be used to mass produce antibodies in the lab to supplement real immune systems that are compromised, or battling pathogens like Ebola.

A report announcing the new “in vitro booster vaccination” technique was published Monday in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, a prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Rockefeller University Press.  The research project involved produced antibodies that attack strains of tetanus, HIV and influenza.

Selecting specific antibodies

When a pathogen invades the body, the immune system develops antibodies specific to that pathogen. The antibodies latch onto the pathogen and either flag it for destruction, disrupt the life cycle of the pathogen, or do nothing.

Before now, when scientists tried to get immune cells in the lab to produce antibodies, the cells would do so indiscriminately, producing all sorts of antibodies, not just the relevant ones. Now scientists are able to get the antibodies they specifically desire by using nanoparticles that connect antigens, the active parts of a vaccine, with molecules that stimulate the immune system.

“We can make these cells very quickly in vitro — in a Petri dish — to become antibody-producing cells,” said a lead author of the new report, Facundo Batista. “This is quite important,” he told VOA, “because until now the only way that this has been done is though vaccinating people.”

Batista was one of a number of scientists involved in the study from the Ragon Institute, established in the Boston area by experts from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the goal of working toward development of an effective vaccine against HIV/AIDS. Others contributing to the new report were from the Francis Crick Institute in London and other institutions.

New technique saves time, money

The new laboratory technique will save time and money. After all the work of planning, funding and getting approval for a vaccine trial in humans, “you’re talking at least about three years in a best-case scenario, if you have a very promising product,” said Matthew Laurens, an associate professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of Maryland who was not associated with the study. That lengthy process will now be shortened to a matter of months.

This can eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, long and costly trials, and fewer volunteer subjects will be exposed to potentially dangerous vaccines.

The ease of testing new vaccines will also allow scientists to tinker more and better understand how vaccines work. With better understanding, they may be able to develop more sophisticated vaccines that can be effective against more pathogens — those that differ as a result of genetic variations. This will be important in the fight against rapidly evolving pathogens like HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Outside of vaccine testing, immune systems in laboratories can lead to greatly improved methods for the mass production of antibodies. Scientists have been trying to identify antibodies that can attack all strains of the Ebola virus; this new technology will improve their chances of developing an effective therapy.

Laurens, who studies malaria vaccine development at Maryland, called the research exciting.

“This would allow vaccine candidates to be tested very early and very quickly,” he told VOA, “with rapid turnaround and reporting of results to either advance a vaccine candidate or tell scientists they need to go back and look for other candidates.”
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The worst-ever outbreak of dengue fever in Sri Lanka has killed nearly 300 people, with the number of cases rising rapidly.

Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Health reports that the number of dengue infections has climbed above 103,000 since the start of 2017, with 296 deaths. The number of cases this year is already nearly double the number of dengue infections recorded in all of 2016, when 55,150 people were diagnosed with the disease.

The Sri Lanka Red Cross Society and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are rapidly scaling up emergency assistance to help contain the outbreak in the South Asian island nation.

“Dengue is endemic here, but one reason for the dramatic rise in cases is that the virus currently spreading has evolved and people lack the immunity to fight off the new strain,” said Dr. Novil Wijesekara, head of health at the Sri Lanka Red Cross.

Compounding the crisis, recent monsoon rains and floods have left pools of stagnant water and rotting rain-soaked trash — ideal breeding sites for mosquitoes. Ongoing downpours and worsening sanitation conditions raise concerns the disease will continue to spread.

Dengue is common in South Asia — especially during the monsoon season which runs from June to September — and, if untreated, it can be lethal.

The International Federation of Red Cross said it had released new disaster emergency funds on Monday to help about 307,000 people in three districts where dengue is rampant.

“The size of this dengue outbreak is unprecedented in Sri Lanka,” Jagath Abeysinghe, president of Sri Lanka Red Cross, said in a statement.
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Islanders in the Philippines have stayed in their homes even after an earthquake caused subsidence and floods, according to a study on Monday that questions how far global warming will trigger mass migration as sea levels rise.

Ice is thawing from Greenland to Antarctica and will raise sea levels by between 28 and 98 cm (11-38 inches) by 2100, threatening coasts from Bangladesh to Florida, according to a U.N. panel of experts.

But, in a possible window on the future, none of hundreds of impoverished residents had left four islands in the central Philippines after subsidence following a 2013 quake lowered the land by as much as 43 cms.

Many raised their homes on stilts, or mined local reefs for coral to raise floor levels after frequent floods at high tide in homes, schools and other buildings.

“Small island communities in the Philippines prefer local measures to relocation in response to sea-level rise,” according to the study led by Ma Laurice Jamero at the University of Tokyo and published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

A survey of islanders showed they were “refusing to relocate, contradicting the sea-level-rise mass migration theory that suggests that worsening floods will directly lead to migration”.

The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration says the most often quoted estimate is that 200 million people could be forced from their homes by environmental change by 2050.

Estimates range hugely from 25 million to one billion.

In the Philippines, the local government had given the islanders the option of relocating to Tubigon on the mainland, but a lack of funding meant no new homes had been built in an area also vulnerable to typhoons.

“Still, a greater problem facing the municipal government is the opposition from island residents to relocate,” the study said. Many islanders wanted to keep their fishing livelihoods.

Dominic Kniveton, a professor of climate science and society at Sussex University who was not among the authors, said the findings illustrated how far people like to stay at home.

Many other studies wrongly assumed that the poor would move if offered a better place to live. “There’s a lot of ingenuity [shown by people] to adapt,” he told Reuters. “And people say: ‘I quite like my hovel.'”
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The U.S. government says the HIV epidemic is “coming under control” in Swaziland, the country with the world’s highest prevalence of the virus.

The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) said Monday that new infections among adults in Swaziland have dropped by nearly half since 2011. It said the latest research also shows that life-saving anti-retroviral treatment has doubled in the country during the same time period and now reaches over 80 percent of infected adults.

PEPFAR has focused much of its efforts on increasing access to anti-retroviral drugs for over 11 million people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Monday’s statement also says the southern African nations of Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe “demonstrate significant progress toward controlling the HIV epidemics.”

The U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, Deborah Birx, said “These unprecedented findings demonstrate the remarkable impact of the U.S. government’s efforts … We now have a historic opportunity to change the very course of the HIV epidemic.”

The data shows that the number of people in Swaziland who have achieved a suppression of the virus – meaning the virus does not replicate to make them sick – has doubled since 2011.

While the results show large progress in combating the epidemic, it also reveals key gaps in HIV prevention and treatment. PEPFAR says the data shows that women ages 15-24 and men under age 35 are less likely to know their HIV status, be on HIV treatment, or be taking anti-retroviral drugs than older adults.

“These gaps are all areas in which PEPFAR continues to invest and innovate,” the statement said.

Swaziland’s government says about 27 percent of its population was HIV-positive in 2016, down from 31 percent of adults in 2011.

 
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