The fingerprints of climate change are all over the intense heat waves gripping the globe this month, a new study finds. Researchers say the deadly hot spells in the American Southwest and Southern Europe could not have happened without the continuing buildup of warming gases in the air.

These unusually strong heat waves are becoming more common, Tuesday’s study said. The same research found the increase in heat-trapping gases, largely from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas has made another heat wave — the one in China — 50 times more likely with the potential to occur every five years or so.

A stagnant atmosphere, warmed by carbon dioxide and other gases, also made the European heat wave 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter, the one in the United States and Mexico 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer and the one in China one 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) toastier, the study found.

Several climate scientists, using tree rings and other stand-ins for temperature records, say this month’s heat is likely the hottest Earth has been in about 120,000 years, easily the hottest of human civilization.

“Had there been no climate change, such an event would almost never have occurred,” said study lead author Mariam Zachariah, a climate scientist at Imperial College of London. She called heat waves in Europe and North America “virtually impossible” without the increase in heat from the mid-1800s. Statistically, the one in China could have happened without global warming.

Since the advent of industrial-scale burning, the world has warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit), so “they are not rare in today’s climate and the role of climate change is absolutely overwhelming,” said Imperial College climate scientist Friederike Otto, who leads the team of volunteer international scientists at World Weather Attribution who do these studies.

The particularly intense heat waves that Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila are now roasting through are likely to happen about once every 15 years in the current climate, the study said.

But the climate is not stabilized, even at this level. If it warms a few more tenths of a degree, this month’s heat will become even more common, Otto said. Phoenix has had a record-shattering 25 straight days of temperatures at or above 43.3 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit) and more than a week when the nighttime temperature never dropped below 32.2 Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit).

The heat in Spain, Italy, Greece and some Balkan states is likely to reoccur every decade in the current climate, the study said.

Because the weather attribution researchers started their analysis of three simultaneous heat waves on July 17, the results are not yet peer reviewed, which is the gold standard for science. But it used scientifically valid techniques, the team’s research regularly gets published and several outside experts told The Associated Press it makes sense.

The way scientists do these rapid analyses is by comparing observations of current weather in the three regions to repeated computer simulations of “a world that might have been without climate change,” said study co-author Izidine Pinto, a climate scientist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

In Europe and North America, the study doesn’t claim human-caused climate change is the sole cause of the heat waves, but it is a necessary ingredient because natural causes and random chance couldn’t produce this alone.

Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said the study was reasonable, but looks at a broad area of the U.S. Southwest, so it may not be applicable to every single place in the area.

“In the United States, it’s clear that the entire southern tier is going to see the worst of the ever-worsening heat and this summer should be considered a serious wake-up call,” said University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck.

With heat waves, “the most important thing is that they kill people and they particularly kill and hurt and destroy lives and livelihoods of those most vulnerable,” Otto said.
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In 2022, doctors recorded the first confirmed case of tick-borne encephalitis virus acquired in the United Kingdom.

It began with a bike ride.

A 50-year-old man was mountain biking in the North Yorkshire Moors, a national park in England known for its vast expanses of woodland and purple heather. At some point on his ride, at least one black-legged tick burrowed into his skin. Five days later, the mountain biker developed symptoms commonly associated with a viral infection — fatigue, muscle pain, fever.

At first, he seemed to be on the mend, but about a week later, he started to lose coordination. An MRI scan revealed he had developed encephalitis, or swelling of the brain. He had been infected with tick-borne encephalitis, or TBE, a potentially deadly disease that experts say is spreading into new regions due in large part to global warming.

For the past 30 years, the U.K. has become roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) on average compared to the historical norm. Studies have shown that several tick-borne illnesses are becoming more prevalent because of climate change. Public health officials are particularly concerned about TBE, which is deadlier than more well-known tick diseases such as Lyme, due to the way it has quickly jumped from country to country.

Gábor Földvári, an expert at the Center for Ecological Research in Hungary, said the effects of climate change on TBE are unmistakable.

“It’s a really common problem which was absent 20 or 30 years ago,” he added.

Ticks can’t survive more than a couple of days in temperatures below zero, but they’re able to persevere in very warm conditions as long as there’s enough humidity in the environment. As Earth warms on average and winters become milder, ticks are becoming active earlier in the year. Climate change affects ticks at every stage of their life cycle — egg, six-legged larva, eight-legged nymph, and adult — by extending the length of time ticks actively feed on humans and animals. Even a fraction of a degree of global warming creates more opportunity for ticks to breed and spread disease.

“The number of overwintering ticks is increasing and in spring there is high activity of ticks,” said Gerhard Dobler, a doctor who works at the German Center for Infection Research. “This may increase the contact between infected ticks and humans and cause more disease.”

Since the virus was first discovered in the 1930s, it has mainly been found in Europe and parts of Asia, including Siberia and the northern regions of China. The same type of tick carries the disease in these areas, but the virus subtype — of which there are several — varies by region. In places where the virus is endemic, tick bites are the leading cause of encephalitis, though the virus can also be acquired by consuming raw milk from tick-infected cattle. TBE has not been found in the United States, though a few Americans have contracted the virus while traveling in Europe.

According to the World Health Organization, there are between 10,000 and 12,000 cases of the disease in Europe and northern Asia each year. The total number of cases worldwide is likely an undercount, as case counts are unreliable in countries where the population has low awareness of the disease and local health departments are not required to report cases to the government. But experts say there has been a clear uptick since the 1990s, especially in countries where the disease used to be uncommon.

“We see an increasing trend of human cases,” Dobler said, citing rising cases in Austria, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, and other European countries.

TBE is not always life-threatening. On average, about 10 percent of infections develop into the severe form of the illness, which often requires hospitalization. Once severe symptoms develop, however, there is no cure for the disease. The death rate among those who develop severe symptoms ranges from 1 to 35 percent, depending on the virus subtype, with the far-eastern subtype being the deadliest. In Europe, for example, 16 deaths were recorded in 2020 out of roughly 3,700 confirmed cases.

Up to half of survivors of severe TBE have lingering neurological problems, such as sleeplessness and aggressiveness. Many infected people are asymptomatic or only develop mild symptoms, Dobler said, so the true caseload could be up to 10 times higher in some regions than reports estimate.

While there are two TBE vaccines in circulation, vaccine uptake is low in regions where the virus is new. Neither vaccine covers all of the three most prevalent sub-types, and a 2020 study called for development of a new vaccine that offers higher protection against the virus. In Austria, for example, the TBE vaccine rate is near 85 percent, Dobler said, and yet the number of human cases continues to trend upward — a sign, in his opinion, of climate change’s influence on the disease.

In central and northern Europe, where for the past decade average annual temperatures have been roughly 2 degrees Celsius above pre industrial times (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), documented cases of the virus have been rising in recent decades — evidence, some experts say, that rising global temperatures are conducive to more active ticks. The parasitic arachnids are also noted to be moving further north and higher in altitude as formerly inhospitable terrain warms to their preferred temperature range. Northern parts of Russia are a prime example of where TBE-infected ticks have moved north. Some previously tick-free mountains in Germany, Bavaria, and Austria are reporting a 20-fold increase in cases over the past 10 years.

The virus’s growing shadow across Europe, Asia, and now parts of the United Kingdom throws the dangers of tick-borne disease into sharp relief. The U.K. bicyclist who was the first domestically acquired case of the disease survived his bout with TBE, but the episode serves as a warning to the region: though the virus is still rare, it may not stay that way for long.
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Beach season has started across Japan, which means seafood for holiday makers and good times for business owners. But in Fukushima, that may end soon. 

Within weeks, the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is expected to start releasing treated radioactive wastewater into the sea, a highly contested plan still facing fierce protests in and outside Japan. 

Residents worry that the water discharge, 12 years after the nuclear disaster, could deal another setback to Fukushima’s image and hurt their businesses and livelihoods. 

“Without a healthy ocean, I cannot make a living,” said Yukinaga Suzuki, a 70-year-old innkeeper at Usuiso beach in Iwaki about 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of the plant. And the government has yet to announce when the water release will begin. 

While officials say the possible impact would be limited to rumors, it’s not yet clear if it will be damaging to the local economy. Residents say they feel “shikataganai” — meaning helpless. 

Suzuki has requested officials hold the plan at least until the swimming season ends in mid-August. 

“If you ask me what I think about the water release, I’m against it. But there is nothing I can do to stop it as the government has one-sidedly crafted the plan and will release it anyway,” he said. “Releasing the water just as people are swimming at sea is totally out of line, even if there is no harm.” 

The beach, he said, will be in the path of treated water traveling south on the Oyashio current from off the coast of Fukushima Daiichi. That’s where the cold Oyashio current meets the warm, northbound Kuroshio, making it a rich fishing ground. 

The government and the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, or TEPCO, have struggled to manage the massive amount of contaminated water accumulating since the 2011 nuclear disaster, and announced plans to release it to the ocean during the summer. 

They say the plan is to treat the water, dilute it with more than a hundred times the seawater and then release it into the Pacific Ocean through an undersea tunnel. Doing so, they said, is safer than national and international standards require. 

Suzuki is among those who are not fully convinced by the government’s awareness campaign that critics say only highlights safety. “We don’t know if it’s safe yet,” Suzuki said. “We just can’t tell until much later.” 

The Usuiso area used to have more than a dozen family-run inns before the disaster. Now, Suzuki’s half-century old Suzukame, which he inherited from his parents 30 years ago, is the only one still in business after surviving the tsunami. He heads a safety committee for the area and operates its only beach house. 

Suzuki says his inn guests won’t mention the water issue if they cancel their reservations and he would only have to guess. “I serve fresh local fish to my guests, and the beach house is for visitors to rest and chill out. The ocean is the source of my livelihood.” 

The March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s cooling systems, causing three reactors to melt and contaminating their cooling water, which has since leaked continuously. The water is collected, filtered and stored in some 1,000 tanks, which will reach their capacity in early 2024. 

The government and TEPCO say the water must be removed to make room for the plant’s decommissioning, and to prevent accidental leaks from the tanks because much of the water is still contaminated and needs retreatment. 

Katsumasa Okawa, who runs a seafood business in Iwaki, says those tanks containing contaminated water bother him more than the treated water release. He wants to have them removed as soon as possible, especially after seeing “immense” tanks occupying much of the plant complex during his visit a few years ago. 

An accidental leak would be “an ultimate strikeout. … It will cause actual damage, not reputation,” Okawa says. “I think the treated water release is unavoidable.” It’s eerie, he adds, to have to live near the damaged plant for decades. 

Fukushima’s badly hit fisheries community, tourism and the economy are still recovering. The government has allocated 80 billion yen ($573 million) to support still-feeble fisheries and seafood processing and combat potential reputation damage from the water release. 

Japanese fishing organizations strongly opposed Fukushima’s water release, as they worry about further damage to the reputation of their seafood as they struggle to recover. Groups in South Korea and China have also raised concerns, turning it into a political and diplomatic issue. Hong Kong has vowed to ban the import of aquatic products from Fukushima and other Japanese prefectures if Tokyo discharges treated radioactive wastewater into the sea. 

China plans to step up import restrictions and Hong Kong restaurants began switching menus to exclude Japanese seafood.  

Japan sought support from the International Atomic Energy Agency for transparency and credibility. IAEA’s final report, released this month and handed directly to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, concluded that the method meets international standards and its environmental and health impacts would be negligible. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said radioactivity in the water would be almost undetectable and there is no cross-border impact. 

Scientists generally agree that environmental impact from the treated water would be negligible, but some call for more attention on dozens of low-dose radionuclides that remain in the water, saying data on their long-term effect on the environment and marine life is insufficient. 
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Jill Biden has represented her country at the Olympics in Tokyo, a king’s coronation in London and a royal wedding in Jordan. She gets another chance to put her ambassadorial skills to work this week when the United States formally rejoins a United Nations agency devoted to education, science and culture around the globe.

Biden arrived in Paris early Monday, accompanied by her daughter, Ashley Biden, after flying overnight from Washington to join other VIPs and speak at a ceremony Tuesday at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The American flag will be raised to mark the U.S. return to UNESCO membership after a five-year absence.

UNESCO aims to foster global collaboration in education, science and culture. It also designates World Heritage sites, deeming them worthy of eternal preservation.

The agency on Sunday condemned Russia’s attack on a cathedral in Odesa and other heritage sites in Ukraine in recent days and said it will send a team to the Black Sea port city to assess damage.

In a statement, UNESCO noted that Odesa’s historic center was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site earlier this year and said attacks by Russian forces contradict recent promises by Russian authorities to take precautions to spare such sites across the country.

Before returning to Washington on Wednesday, Biden will tour a historic venue in France, Mont-Saint-Michel, a 1,000-year-old Benedictine abbey that was listed as a World Heritage site in 1979. It sits on an island in Normandy, in the north of the country.

A daughter and mother of U.S. service members, the first lady will also visit Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial to pay respects to the more than 4,400 U.S. service members buried there, most of whom died in Normandy and Brittany during World War II.

She will also stop at the Elysée Palace in Paris on Tuesday to catch up with Brigitte Macron, a former teacher and the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron. The women have met several times over the past two years, including in Washington last December when Macron was on a state visit to the U.S.

Senior Biden administration officials said returning to UNESCO fits President Joe Biden’s goal of strengthening global partnerships and recommitting to American leadership at the U.N. and other international organizations to serve as a counter to nations that do not share U.S. values.

Others said Jill Biden, who teaches English and writing at a Virginia community college, was best suited to represent the United States in Paris on Tuesday.

“The first lady, as a lifelong educator and believer in the power of educational opportunity across the world, is honored to help celebrate this important milestone,” said Elizabeth Alexander, a spokesperson. “She looks forward to raising the flag for the United States once again at the UNESCO headquarters, showing our country’s commitment to international cooperation in education, science, and culture.”

The U.S. pulled out of the Paris-based organization in 2018, under then-President Donald Trump, a Republican who claimed UNESCO was biased against Israel.

The administration of Biden, a Democrat, pushed to rejoin over concerns that China was filling the void in leadership created by the U.S. absence.

The administration announced in June that it would apply to rejoin the 193-member organization, which also plays a major role in setting international standards for artificial intelligence and technology education.

The organization’s governing board voted earlier this month to approve the Biden plan to rejoin, and the U.S. delivered a document certifying that it would accept the invitation to become the 194th member of UNESCO.

“Our organization is once again moving towards universality,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said at the time. She cast the U.S return as “excellent news for multilateralism as a whole. If we want to meet the challenges of our century, there can only be a collective response.”

The Trump administration in 2017 announced that the U.S. would withdraw from UNESCO, citing anti-Israel bias. That decision that took effect a year later.

The U.S. and Israel stopped financing UNESCO after it voted to include Palestine as a member state in 2011.

The Biden administration has requested $150 million for the 2024 budget to go toward UNESCO dues and arrears. The plan foresees similar requests for the ensuing years until the full debt of $619 million is repaid.

That makes up a big chunk of UNESCO’s $534 million annual operating budget. Before leaving, the U.S. contributed 22% of the agency’s overall funding.

The United States previously pulled out of UNESCO under the Reagan administration in 1984 because it viewed the agency as mismanaged, corrupt and used to advance Soviet interests. It rejoined in 2003 during George W. Bush’s presidency. Bush’s wife, Laura, a former elementary school teacher and librarian, spoke at that ceremony.

Standing in for the president at home and abroad has become a big part of a first lady’s unofficial job description, and Jill Biden travels at least several times a week to promote administration initiatives.

The trip to Paris is her fourth solo international excursion this year.

She visited Namibia and Kenya in February, followed by a trip to London in May for the coronation of King Charles III. In June, she traveled to Jordan to attend the royal wedding of a son of King Abdullah II, followed by stops in Egypt, Morocco and Portugal.

Before flying to Paris on Sunday night, she headlined fundraisers Friday and Saturday in Massachusetts for her husband’s reelection campaign.
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Researchers say the central districts in Sydney are close to becoming the first place in the world to reach the U.N.’s target for ending transmission of HIV. The city was once at the heart of Australia’s HIV epidemic but new infections among gay men have fallen by 88% between 2010 and 2022. The U.N.’s goal is a 90% reduction in cases by 2030.

In 1987, the ‘Grim Reaper’ advert warned Australians about the march of a deadly virus.

“At first, only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS,” the TV spots said, “but now we know everyone one of us could be devastated by it.”

HIV attacks the body’s immune system, and if not treated, can lead to AIDS.

In the central parts of Sydney, Australia’s biggest city, thousands of gay men died in the 1980s and ’90s.

In remarkable turnaround, researchers say that only 11 new HIV cases were recorded in central Sydney last year.

Almost all HIV-positive people in Australia are on antiretroviral drugs. They suppress the level of the virus in the blood, reducing the risk of sexual transmission. There’s also the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis. These are preventative medicines taken by people who don’t have HIV to lower their chance of infection.

Gay men make up about 20% of the male population in inner Sydney, and they represent most of the city’s HIV cases.

The research confirming the change in HIV rates in Sydney was presented to the International AIDS Society’s HIV science conference being held in the Queensland city of Brisbane by Andrew Grulich, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corp’s 7.30 program earlier this month that he’s seen HIV gradually being conquered over his academic career.

“My life in research has been over that period,” Grulich said. “So, it has been terrible, and it has been extraordinary and now it is getting close to wonderful, really, with the possibility that we have.”

However, rates of infection have fallen by only a third in some outer Sydney suburbs, where public health awareness, access to medical treatments and testing new cases are more limited.

Jane Costello, the chief executive officer of Positive Life, an organization that helps people living with HIV, told VOA about some groups still being left behind.

“Overseas-born men who have sex with men, heterosexual populations, people from culturally and linguistically-diverse backgrounds and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,” she said. “So, it is a question of equity as well.”

The AIDS conference in Brisbane has heard that parts of the United Kingdom and Western Europe have also seen rapid drops in new HIV cases. But few places, if any, can rival Sydney’s fall in infections of almost 90% over the past decade.
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Associated Press photographer Matt York, who has covered Arizona for 23 years, recently was caught off guard by the heat wave that has shattered records in Phoenix. The 50-year-old York photographed life in the city for six of seven days as temperatures hovered above 110 Fahrenheit. On Tuesday, he went in for a medical procedure to remove a skin cancer spot and learned he was suffering from heat exhaustion and was at risk of a heart attack. He shares his story as a cautionary tale.

PHOENIX — Heat never scared me before.

I’ve spent 23 years covering Phoenix as a photographer for The Associated Press, shooting golf tournaments, baseball games and other outdoor sporting events, the city’s growing homeless population, immigration and crime.

And, of course, heat.

Like most people around here, I talk about temperatures being in the teens as if it’s a given that people know to always put a one in front of that number.

But this summer’s record-shattering heat wave has been like no other.

No amount of water or Gatorade can keep you going in these conditions without adequate cool-downs throughout the day.

My phone and cameras continually glitch out and stop working. Even my car’s air conditioning has struggled to keep up.

In my car, I keep a thermometer that I once used to check the temperature of chemicals in a darkroom. The heat inside when the air conditioner is off is way hotter than the air outside, and the thermometer often goes up to 51.6 degrees Celsius.

In recent days it blew past that, with the needle registering well beyond where the numbers stop.

On the morning of July 10, I spent more than three hours off and on photographing life outdoors. Heat features are tough in part because people aren’t stupid enough to be outside, unlike photojournalists.

When I got home, I was exhausted. But I got up the next day and went back out for another consecutive day of temperatures above 43.3 Celsius.

At one point my camera stopped working, and I had to cool it down in the car. It burned my hand to hold onto it.

On July 12, I covered a cooling shelter for homeless people and photographed a man at his tent in The Zone, an area of downtown blocks dotted by tents. The black asphalt streets were radiating heat.

I was sweating so profusely it dripped off me like a basketball player in an intense game. It wasn’t the first time this has happened and it’s why I often carry a towel to dry off and keep the sweat from dripping in my viewfinder.

But then I realized there was no need to wipe down. I was dry. I’d stopped sweating altogether. My body had no more water to give. My legs started feeling chilled, an odd sensation. Then they cramped. It was obvious I needed to get out of the heat.

But I didn’t think any more of it. That night I slept fitfully as temperatures remained high, and I had a headache.

By July 14, I was super lethargic and just wanted the work week to end. I was done with covering heat. 

On July 15 I rested and thought, “I’m in Arizona. It is what it is.” 

I had a dermatology appointment on July 18 to remove a spot of basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer. Such procedures have become almost routine after so many years working in Arizona. 

That day Phoenix broke its record for the longest streak above 43.3 Celsius, marking the 19th day with such heat.

When I got checked, they told me I was a mess. My blood pressure was clocked at 178/120. After telling me that, it shot up to 200/120. The nurse wanted to send me in an ambulance to the emergency room because they thought I was going to have a heart attack.

It’s so surprising it seems funny now. I assumed I was just tired from work.

I opted to see my doctor Wednesday and was told I was suffering from heat exhaustion.

I had precautionary blood work done the next day to make sure all is normal. But not without first experiencing more heat-related fallout: they couldn’t draw blood from either arm because I was still slightly dehydrated. Unfortunately that meant they took it through my hands, which wasn’t pleasant.

The great news is, I’m fine. I spent two days inside and my blood pressure Friday was down to 128/72.

I will be more cautious going forward until this heat wave passes and have developed a plan with my fellow photographer, Ross Franklin.

In extreme heat, we will limit ourselves to 30– to 40-minute windows of photography before breaking to cool down. We’re keeping chilled, damp towels in a cooler in our cars and about two to three times as much water and Gatorade as we would have normally.

A separate cooler with plastic ice packs holds our cameras when we’re not shooting pictures. We have extra dry towels for sweat. We also plan to send all our images to the newsroom from inside a cooled building, not from our cars as we usually do.

And if we really feel bad, we promise to simply call it quits. No exceptions.

We typically fight through not feeling well on assignments — but not with heat.

It’s too risky. 
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Sea lions and dolphins are being sickened by toxic algae off the coast of California, where hundreds of animals have washed ashore. Mike O’Sullivan visited the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, California, where workers are rescuing and treating the ailing animals.
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The World Health Organization warns dengue fever is spreading to more regions and countries around the world due to the increased movement of people, urbanization, and climate-related issues.

“About half of the world’s population is at risk of dengue,” Raman Velayudhan, a top official of the WHO’s global program on the control of neglected tropical diseases, told journalists at a briefing Friday in Geneva. “Dengue affects about 129 countries. We estimate about 100 to 400 million cases are reported every year. This is basically an estimate.”

The disease, which is spread by the Aedes species of mosquito, thrives mainly in tropical and subtropical climates. WHO reports it has grown dramatically worldwide in recent decades, with cases increasing from half a million in 2000 to more than 4.2 million in 2022.

Last year, the Latin American region reported 2.8 million cases and 1,280 deaths. Just seven months into 2023, the region has already matched those figures, with nearly three million cases and an almost equal number of deaths. 

Velayudhan said dengue is a global disease, noting that the mosquito which causes dengue has been found in 24 European countries. 

He said that in Africa there recently have been reports of more than 2,000 cases and 45 deaths in Sudan, as well as new reports within the past week of dengue being present in Egypt. 

He said the presence of dengue in Africa is of special concern, noting that the figure of over 200,000 cases reported annually from the continent is likely an underestimate. 

He added that the reporting of dengue cases in Africa must be improved.

“We know it is there,” said Velayudhan. “But it has been masked by other diseases. But now that [the battle against] malaria, in particular, has made great strides and has reduced in Africa, we have seen an increasing percent of dengue, and this is something we really encourage the governments [to address].”

He said this is already happening as the WHO is currently tracking cases of the disease reported in Sudan, Ethiopia, Senegal, Kenya, Nigeria and Sao Tome.

The monsoon season has begun in Asia, a situation that health officials find very worrying as the region accounts for about 70 percent dengue cases. The WHO has issued an alert to governments to take preventive measures to control the spread of the disease.

Velayudhan said the monsoon already has hit many of the dengue endemic regions in the Indian sub-continent, where high precipitation, increased temperature and even water scarcity favor mosquitoes and pose a real threat.

“So, we really need to be better prepared and make sure that all our health facilities are alerted and as the water recedes, we need to prevent [mosquito] breeding. And this is the key message,” he said.

He said people can protect themselves by eliminating stagnant water and other possible breeding areas around their homes. 

Most people with dengue do not have symptoms and get better in one to two weeks. However, those who develop severe cases often require hospital care. 

While there is no specific treatment for dengue, WHO says patients can be treated with medicines to lower the temperature and ease body pain.

The World Health Organization says new tools, such as diagnostics, antivirals, and vaccines for preventing and controlling dengue, are under development. Indeed, it notes one vaccine is in the market, and two are in the final phase three clinical trial and review.

Meanwhile, Velayudhan noted that the mosquito that transmits dengue tends to bite during the day. So, his advice to people is “to cover up during the day to lower their risk of being bitten and getting dengue.” 
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Environmental activists and experts are increasingly concerned about the impact that military activity by India, China and Pakistan is having on the unique biodiversity and pristine ecosystems of Ladakh, an Indian-administered region high in the Himalayas.

Simmering tensions between India and China since a deadly border confrontation in 2020 have led to a surge in military deployment, with both sides fortifying their positions to ensure territorial security.

The influx of troops, equipment and infrastructure construction for military purposes has disrupted the fragile Himalayan ecosystem. The unchecked expansion of military bases, roads, helipads and related projects has led to deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and increased air and noise pollution, the experts say.

They point to the rapid degradation of sensitive habitats, such as alpine meadows, wetlands and high-altitude forests, which are home to several endangered species, including the elusive snow leopard, Tibetan antelope and black-necked crane.

“Rare birds such as the black neck crane face disturbances in their habitats due to the heavy military presence on both the Chinese and Indian sides,” said Sonam Wangchuk, an environmentalist and past winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award – sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of Asia.  

He and other experts explained that the military activities disrupt the natural breeding patterns, feeding habits and migration routes of these vulnerable species, threatening their survival.

The damage caused by military activity is exacerbating degradation already underway from rising global temperatures attributed in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide, trapping heat from the sun in Earth’s atmosphere.

Mountain regions like the Himalayas are rapidly changing because of the climate crisis, said Doug Weir, policy director at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a U.K.-based charity working to develop policies that will reduce the environmental harm caused by conflicts and military activities.

Weir told VOA that military activity is estimated to account for 5.5% of all global carbon dioxide emissions.

“Increased military spending and activity help accelerate the climate crisis and the regional changes that are already readily apparent,” he said. “While India has begun to acknowledge a need to reduce its military emissions, efforts are in their infancy. China’s views on military emissions reductions remain unclear.”

Wangchuk argued in an interview that the military buildup in Ladakh is contributing significantly to the warming climate.

“The Indian side alone emits approximately 300,000 tons of CO2 [carbon dioxide] annually, considering the substantial amount of fuel transported and burned for military operations,” he said. “Similarly, the emissions would be slightly higher on the Chinese side and somewhat lower on the Pakistani side, resulting in nearly 1 million tons of CO2 being emitted each year in this triangular junction.

“Pollution doesn’t know borders,” Wangchuk added, urging governments to prioritize the well-being of soldiers and civilians alike, irrespective of their nationalities. He compared the disputes between nations “to squabbling neighbors fighting over a fence while an impending avalanche threatens them both.”

Not only the wildlife is threatened. A recent study indicated that if temperature trends continued, the Himalayan glaciers might disappear entirely, “having a significant impact on regional water supplies, hydrological processes, ecosystem services and transboundary water sharing.”

Ladakh is particularly vulnerable to the threat, Wangchuk said. “Its glaciers play a crucial role in sustaining not only the local population but also communities across northern India and northern Pakistan. Consequently, many villages are teetering on the brink of becoming climate refugees.”

In a media report last year, the village of Kumik witnessed residents abandoning their homes and relocating to other parts of Ladakh because of water scarcity.

On a more positive note, Wangchuk said efforts are underway to collaborate with the Indian army to introduce passive solar-heated shelters, which have proven effective in significantly reducing emissions.

“These innovative zero-emission buildings have been successfully tested during two harsh winters, ensuring soldiers’ warmth without relying on conventional fuel sources,” he said, calling for China and Pakistan to adopt similar environmentally friendly practices. 
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