A 104-year-old British-born Australian scientist who is planning to kill himself on Thursday says he doesn’t think the drugs used for assisted suicide should be available to just anyone, but that doctors should be able to prescribe them.

In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press just two days before he plans to take advantage of Switzerland’s assisted-suicide laws, David Goodall spoke of his determination to end his life. He also talked about his disbelief in the afterlife, his childhood after being born the year World War I began and his family, who lives across three continents.

Goodall, described by the right-to-die group Exit International as its first member, said he’s been contemplating the idea of suicide for about 20 years, but only started thinking about if for himself after his quality of life deteriorated over the last year. He cited a lack of mobility, doctor’s restrictions and an Australian law prohibiting him from taking his own life among his complaints, but he is not ill.

Goodall, a botanist, said he tried clumsily to take his life himself at least three times — and then finally decided to get professional help. He has been looking to draw attention to his desire to end his life in hopes that countries like Australia change their laws to be more accepting of assisted suicide.

Hundreds of people — some far more frail than Goodall, who uses a wheelchair — travel to Switzerland every year to take their lives. The best-known group to help foreigners end their days in the Alpine country is Dignitas, but others include Life Circle in Basel — Goodall’s choice.

Goodall has a libertarian bent but he knows that some religious people — which he is not — might take exception to not letting nature take its course.

“If people for religious purposes interfere with the free will of other people, I think that’s most regrettable. By all means, let them follow their own choice in respect to the end of life, but don’t impose it on other people,” he said from his hotel room near Basel’s Spalentor tower gate.

Doctors say Goodall plans to take his life with an injection of the barbiturate pentobarbitol, a chemical often used as an anesthetic but which is lethal at excessive doses. Those who take their lives through assisted suicide in Switzerland often get injections 15 times greater than that of typical medical doses for anesthesia, said Dr. Christian Weber, a Swiss anesthesiologist who will help set up Goodall for his suicide on Thursday.

Goodall said after reaching middle age, people should be allowed to decide themselves whether to use medicine to take their own lives.

“I wouldn’t suggest that it’s available to everyone, and just going and buying it off the shelf,” he said. “I think there are plenty of people who might misuse that. But I would accept that it should be done by doctors’ prescription — but they should be free to prescribe.”

 
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At least 17 people have died in an area of northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo where health officials have now confirmed an outbreak of Ebola, the health ministry said on Tuesday.

It is the ninth time Ebola has been recorded in the central African nation, whose eastern Ebola river gave the deadly virus its name when it was discovered there in the 1970s, and comes less than a year after its last outbreak which killed eight people.

“Our country is facing another epidemic of the Ebola virus, which constitutes an international public health emergency,” the ministry said in a statement.

“We still dispose of the well trained human resources that were able to rapidly control previous epidemics,” it said.

Ebola is believed to be spread over long distances by bats, which can host the virus without dying, as it infects other animals it shares trees with such as monkeys. It often spreads to humans via infected bushmeat.

Before the outbreak was confirmed, local health officials reported 21 patients showing signs of hemorrhagic fever around the village of Ikoko Impenge, near the town of Bikoro. Seventeen of those later died.

Medical teams supported by the World Health Organization and medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres were dispatched to the zone on Saturday and took five samples from suspected active cases.

Two of those samples tested positive for the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus, the ministry said.

“Since notification of the cases on May 3, no deaths have been reported either among the hospitalized cases or the healthcare personnel,” the statement said.

After Congo’s last Ebola flare-up, authorities there approved the use of a new experimental vaccine but in the end did not deploy it owing to logistical challenges and the relatively minor nature of the outbreak.

The worst Ebola epidemic in history ended in West Africa just two years ago after killing more than 11,300 people and infected some 28,600 as it rolled through Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Despite regular outbreaks every few years, death tolls in Congo have been significantly lower.

“Our top priority is to get to Bikoro to work alongside the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and partners to reduce the loss of life and suffering related to this new Ebola virus disease outbreak,” said Dr. Peter Salama, WHO Deputy Director-General, Emergency Preparedness and Response.

“Working with partners and responding early and in a coordinated way will be vital to containing this deadly disease.”

Health experts credit an awareness of the disease among the population and local medical staff’s experience treating for past successes containing its spread.

Congo’s vast, remote geography also gives it an advantage, as outbreaks are often localized and relatively easy to isolate.

Ikoko Impenge and Bikoro, however, lie not far from the banks of the Congo River, an essential waterway for transport and commerce.

Further downstream the river flows past Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa and Brazzaville, capital of neighboring Congo Republic – two cities with a combined population of over 12 million people.
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As the pre-monsoon summer heat takes hold in New Delhi, two things are as inevitable as 40-degree-Celsius days: power cuts and air pollution from the diesel generators that then kick in.

But a team of Indian engineers has figured out away to bring some good from choking generator exhaust: They are capturing it and turning it into ink.

“The alarming thing about diesel generators is they are located in the heart of densely populated areas. It’s spitting smoke right there,” said Kushagra Srivastava, one of the three engineers who developed the technology, now installed in Gurgaon, a satellite city of New Delhi, and in the southern city of Chennai.

The idea, Srivastava said, came about when he and his co-founders stopped at a sugarcane juice stall on a hot day.

They noticed a wall that had turned black behind the stand’s diesel generator, where exhaust emerged from a pipe.

They wondered if diesel exhaust might be used to produce paint — and set out to try.

The device they came up with, which attaches to generators, captures 90 percent of the soot particles from cooled diesel exhaust. The material can then be sold to ink manufacturers.

Their company, Chakr Innovation, has so far installed 50 of the devices for government firms such as Indian Oil, real estate developers and other state government offices, earning more than 11 million rupees ($200,000) in revenue in the first year, Srivastava said.

The company has plans to install another 50 devices over the coming year, he said. It has so far sold 500 kg of collected soot, which has been used to create 20,000 liters of ink, he added.

Chakr Innovations is not the first start-up to see cash in diesel exhaust. A competitor called Graviky Labs, based in Bangalore, is using similar technology to turn diesel exhaust from vehicles into ink.

Choking Air

Srivastava and his co-inventors Arpit Dhupar and Prateek Sachan see themselves as part of a movement towards cleaner air and energy in a country where major cities struggle with choking air.

About 1.1 million people a year die from the impacts of air pollution in India, according to a 2015 survey by the U.S.-based Health Effects Institute. That is about a quarter of the total number of air pollution deaths worldwide, it said.

In New Delhi, levels of the most dangerous particles in the air are sometimes 10 times higher than the safe limit, the survey noted.

Srivastava and Dhupar both grew up in New Delhi, which the World Health Organization in 2014 declared the most polluted city in the world. Sachan comes from Allahabad, the third most polluted city in WHO’s 2016 rankings.

“Earlier I remember there were a lot less cars on the road, there was a lot less congestion, and a lot more greenery,” said Dhupar, Chakr’s chief technology officer.

But as trees were felled and roads widened to accommodate more cars, Dhupar — then in high school — developed chronic respiratory problems. Doctors put him on medication and warned him to stop playing sports.

“My problem is, whenever I start to run out of air, the anxiety levels shoot up,” he said.

Dhupar said many of his family and friends have also developed long-term respiratory issues.

Diesel exhaust contributed to just 2 percent of all air pollution deaths in India in 2015, according to the Health Effects Institute.

But in “confined spaces” in urban areas, where many generators are used, it represents a larger risk, said Pankaj Sadavarte, one of the report’s researchers.

Action in New Delhi

India has in place policies to monitor and restrict air pollution, but they can be difficult to enforce, experts say.

Worries about air pollution are growing, however. Last November, the capital launched its first air quality emergency action plan during a particularly hazardous week when pollution spiked.

The government halted construction within the city, raised parking fees to discourage driving and shut schools to keep children indoors.

The national Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is drafting a national policy to clean India’s air, though its release has been delayed, said Sunil Dahiya, a senior campaigner with Greenpeace India.

“The air pollution debate and health debate is picking up in India,” Dahiya said in a telephone interview. “That momentum is forcing the policymakers to make our cities more livable.”
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Polar bears and other iconic animals could be extinct by the end of the century if ocean temperatures continue to rise at the current rate, marine biologists warned Monday.

Warming temperatures caused by climate-changing emissions may result in a catastrophic loss of marine wildlife and drastic changes to ocean food webs by 2100, scientists at the Florida Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina said in a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Ocean temperatures on rise

Much current marine life will be unable to tolerate ocean temperatures that are projected to increase by 2.8 degrees Celsius on average, according to the study.

“With warming of this magnitude, we expect to lose many, if not most, animal species from marine protected areas by the turn of the century,” said the study’s lead author, John Bruno, a biologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Marine protected areas, established as sanctuaries for polar bears, coral reefs and other wildlife threatened by human activities such as fishing and oil extraction, have failed to protect species from the impacts of global warming, the scientists said.

In Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, a large number of corals already have been destroyed by bleaching and diseases related to higher temperatures, the study noted.

Poles are most at risk

The protections in place will be ineffective by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the current rate, researchers said.

Reduced oxygen concentrations in the ocean — one consequence of global warming — will make marine protected areas uninhabitable to most species, they argued.

Richard Aronson, a co-author of the study and head of the department of ocean engineering and marine sciences at Florida Tech, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that wildlife in the Arctic and Antarctic is particularly at risk.

“Oceanic warming is happening most rapidly at the poles. Warming will threaten polar ecosystems generally, including iconic wildlife like polar bears and penguins,” he said in an email.

Oceans absorb gases

Around 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is absorbed by oceans, Aronson said.

“We have to take bold steps individually and as a society to control emissions. Shifting away from our dependence on fossil fuels would be a major step in the right direction,” he said.

“Stabilizing emissions over the next few decades could cut the rate of warming in half,” he added.
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Hawaii’s Kilauea is not your typical blow-the-top-off kind of volcano.

It’s been simmering and bubbling for about 35 years, sending superhot lava spewing up through cracks in the ground. This month’s eruptions are more of the same, except the lava is destroying houses miles from the summit.

Scientists on Monday said there’s been a slight decrease in the pressure that forces lava to the surface, but it’s likely a temporary lull. Dennison University volcanologist Erik Klemetti said similar eruptions at Kilauea have simmered for years.

“It’s going to take some time before you can say for sure whether things are winding down,” he said.

Nonstop eruptions

Kilauea is the youngest and most active of the five volcanoes on the Big Island. It’s been erupting continuously since 1983, but not the way most people think, not like Mount St. Helens in 1980, spewing straight up and everywhere.

A couple of miles below Kilauea is a constantly fed “hot spot” of superhot molten rock from deep inside Earth. It needs to find a way out.

And rather than exploding, at Kilauea “you get an oozing of lava at the surface,” explained U.S. Geological Survey volcano hazards coordinator Charles Mandeville.

The molten rock is called magma when it is underground; when it reaches the surface, it is called lava. The lava flows out through cracks in the ground, usually within the confines at the national park that surrounds Kilauea. But this time the eruptions are destroying homes.

“This kind of eruption that is occurring now is very normal for this volcano,” said volcanologist Janine Krippner of Concord University in West Virginia. “It’s really that it’s just impacting people.”

What happened this time

The past week or so has seen “a major readjustment with the volcano’s plumbing system,” Mandeville said.

On April 30, scientists got their first sign something was up. The floor of the summit’s lava pool had a “catastrophic failure,” forcing the magma east, looking for ways out, Mandeville said. That created a series of small earthquakes.

The magma escaped in “fire fountains” of lava shooting as high as 230 feet (70 meters) out of cracks, Mandeville said. The first one of those happened last Thursday, followed by at least nine more since then.

“You don’t know where the next fissure is going to open up,” he said.

What’s next

While there’s been a slight decrease in pressure, scientists won’t know for certain if Kilauea has calmed down for at least two months, according to Mandeville. He said it could be much longer before conditions are safe for people to be in the area east of the volcano’s summit. Officials have told some 1,700 residents to leave their homes.

The lava is 2,200 degrees (1,200 degrees Celsius), Mandeville said.

“It literally incinerates anything it touches,” he said.

It’s not just the molten rock, but the spewed gases can be dangerous too, Klemetti said. That includes sulfur dioxide, which reacts with water in your lungs and can form acid, he said.

Mandeville said scientists want at least two months of calm before declaring the situation better.

In the meantime, “there’s not much we can do other than get people out of the way,” he said.

Volcanoes make Hawaii

The Hawaiian Islands only exists because of volcanoes. These volcanoes were created from “hot spots” of underground magma, which are mostly but not always underwater. The molten rock erupts on the sea floor, cools and forms a volcano. With each eruption, the volcano grows until it is big enough to push out of the water and form islands.

There are about 13 hot spots like this around the globe, with the islands of Hawaii one of the most active of the bunch.

Nine-tenths of Kilauea’s surface is less than 1,000 years old, which is quite young in geology, Krippner said.

Mandeville said there are 169 active volcanoes in the United States — including underneath Yellowstone — and 1,550 in the world that are above sea level, he said.

We wouldn’t exist without volcanoes, scientists said. Volcanic eruptions provide nutrients, like nitrogen, for soil and their gases, especially water vapor, helped form the atmosphere we now have.

“It provides so much good,” Krippner said, “we just have to get out of their way while they do their thing.”
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Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and heavy rains can cause large amounts of rock and soil to collapse under their own weight and tumble down a slope. These landslides can crush everything in their path. Aided by sophisticated satellites, scientists are creating a comprehensive catalogue of landslide-prone areas, hoping it will help affected communities predict when and where they might happen. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Dogs can be trained to sniff out drugs and explosives, so Mark Ruefenacht wondered if their exquisite sense of smell could be used to detect changes in a diabetic’s blood sugar level.

A near fatal episode prompted the forensic scientist, who’s had diabetes for most of his adult life, to ask that question. In 1999, while he was training a puppy to be a guide dog for the blind, his blood sugar suddenly dropped to a dangerously low level.

“More than likely, I had a seizure, from the low blood sugar,” Ruefenacht recalled, as he explained how the puppy kept trying to rouse him. “And he stuck with me and I was able to get my blood sugar up.”

That incident made him wonder if dogs could be trained to detect the inherent chemical changes that accompany a drop in blood sugar, called hypoglycemia, then alert their owners.    

Dogs4Diabetics

Ruefenacht worked with scientists and funded research which determined that the “smell” of hypoglycemia shows up in both breath and sweat. He also worked with and studied professionals who train dogs to sniff out everything from explosives to cancer. And most important of all, Ruefenacht started training a fun-loving yellow Labrador retriever named Armstrong to alert him when he was having a dangerously low blood sugar. The training proved so successful, Armstrong is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first diabetes-detection dog.

Sitting under a poster of Armstrong, who died in 2012, Ruefenacht recalls that those early successes led some organizations to offer him large sums of money for the rights to his discoveries.  Ruefenacht says he turned those opportunities down. Instead, in 2004, he founded Dogs4Diabetics. 

He says properly training a diabetes detection dog and its owner can cost $50,000.  The organization raises money to cover these expenses, then provides the dogs at no cost to people who qualify.

The smell of hypoglycemia

The dogs are trained to identify the scent of hypoglycemia on a reliable and consistent basis. Ruefenacht uses jars containing swabs of sweat from a diabetic who had low blood sugar, randomly mixed with jars of other distracting smells, such as peanut butter, dog food and eucalyputus.  The dogs are rewarded when they select the correct jar. This “sweat jar” method for training diabetes alert dogs has been validated scientifically.

The next step is to teach them to alert their owner. The dogs are trained to use subtle signals, but if those go unnoticed, to put their paws on his lap, or balance on their back legs and put their front paws on his shoulders. They learn to snuffle at his nose and mouth, lick his face and bark.  And if all else fails, they’re trained to get someone else to come and help.

Ruefenacht says the dogs are often aware of blood sugar drops long before electronic monitoring systems send a warning alarm.

Dogs4Diabetics has placed more than 100 dogs with diabetics.  They hope to expand the program – training humanity’s most loyal companion to save lives and help diabetics around the world.  
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