WINCHESTER, England — In the half-light of dusk, Martin Edwards surveys the shadows of the ancient woodland from a high seat and waits. He sits still, watching with his thermal camera.

Even the hares don’t seem to notice the deer stalker until he takes aim. The bang of his rifle pierces the stillness. He’s killed a buck, one of many wild deer roaming this patch of forest in Hampshire, southern England.

Edwards advocates humane deer management: the culling of deer to control their numbers and ensure they don’t overrun forests and farmland in a country where they no longer have natural predators. For these advocates, shooting deer is much more than a sport. It’s a necessity because England’s deer population has gotten out of control.

There are now more deer in England than at any other time in the last 1,000 years, according to the Forestry Commission, the government department looking after England’s public woodland.

That has had a devastating impact on the environment, officials say. Excessive deer foraging damages large areas of woodland including young trees, as well as the habitats of certain birds like robins. Some landowners have lost huge amounts of crops to deer, and overpopulation means that the mammals are more likely to suffer from starvation and disease.

“They will produce more young every year. We’ve got to a point where farmers and foresters are definitely seeing that impact,” said Edwards, pointing to some young hazel shrubs with half-eaten buds. “If there’s too many deer, you will see that they’ve literally eaten all the vegetation up to a certain height.”

Forestry experts and businesses argue that culling the deer — and supplying the meat to consumers — is a double win: It helps rebalance the ecosystem and provides a low-fat, sustainable protein.

While venison — a red meat similar to lean beef but with an earthier flavor — is often perceived as a high-end food in the U.K., one charity sees it as an ideal protein for those who can’t afford to buy other meats.

“Why not utilize that fantastic meat to feed people in need?” said SJ Hunt, chief executive of The Country Food Trust, which distributes meals made with wild venison to food banks.

Pandemic population boom

An estimated 2 million deer now roam England’s forests.

The government says native wild deer play a role in healthy forest ecosystems, but acknowledges that their population needs managing. It provides some funding for solutions such as building deer fences.

But experts like Edwards, a spokesman for the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, believe lethal control is the only effective option, especially after deer populations surged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic was a boon to deer because hunters, like everyone else, stayed home and the restaurant market — the main outlet for venison in the U.K. — vanished overnight.

“There were no sales of venison and the price was absolutely on the floor,” said Ben Rigby, a leading venison and game meats wholesaler. “The deer had a chance to breed massively.”

Rigby’s company now processes hundreds of deer a week, turning them into diced venison or steaks for restaurants and supermarkets. One challenge, he said, is growing the domestic appetite for venison so it appears on more dinner plates, especially after Brexit put new barriers up for exporting the meat.

“We’re not really a game-eating nation, not like in France or Germany or Scandinavia,” he said. “But the U.K. is becoming more and more aware of it and our trade is growing.”

From the forest to the table

Shooting deer is legal but strictly regulated in England. Stalkers must have a license, use certain kinds of firearms and observe open seasons. They also need a valid reason, such as when a landowner authorizes them to kill the deer when their land is damaged. Hunting deer with packs of dogs is illegal.

Making wild venison more widely available in supermarkets and beyond will motivate more stalkers to cull the deer and ensure the meat doesn’t go to waste, Edwards said.

Forestry England, which manages public forests, is part of that drive. In recent years it supplied some hospitals with 1,000 kilograms of wild venison, which became the basis of pies and casseroles popular with patients and staff, it said.

The approach appears to have been well received, though it has attracted some criticism from animal welfare group PETA, which advocates veganism.

Hunt, the food charity chief, said there’s potential to do much more with the meat, which she described as nutritious and “free-range to the purest form of that definition.”

Her charity distributed hundreds of thousands of pouches of venison Bolognese meals to food banks last year — and people are hungry for more, she said.

She recalled attending one food bank session where the only protein available was canned sardines, canned baked beans and the venison meals.

“There were no eggs. There was no cheese. That’s all that they could do, and people were just saying, ‘Thank you, please bring more (of the venison),” she said. “That’s fantastic, because people realize they’re doing a double positive with helping the environment by utilizing the meat as well.” 
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LONDON — There are certain phrases that Wachuka Gichohi finds difficult to hear after enduring four years of living with long COVID, marked by debilitating fatigue, pain, panic attacks and other symptoms so severe she feared she would die overnight.

Among them are normally innocuous statements such as, “Feel better soon” or “Wishing you a quick recovery,” the Kenyan businesswoman said, shaking her head.

Gichohi, 41, knows such phrases are well-intentioned. “I think you have to accept, for me, it’s not going to happen.”

Recent scientific studies shed new light on the experience of millions of patients like Gichohi. They suggest the longer someone is sick, the lower their chances of making a full recovery.

The best window for recovery is in the first six months after getting COVID-19, with better odds for people whose initial illness was less severe, as well as those who are vaccinated, researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States found. People whose symptoms last between six months and two years are less likely to fully recover.

For patients who have been struggling for more than two years, the chance of a full recovery “is going to be very slim,” said Manoj Sivan, a professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Leeds and one of the authors of the findings published in The Lancet.

Sivan said this should be termed “persistent long COVID” and understood like the chronic conditions myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or fibromyalgia, which can be features of long COVID or risk factors for it.

Waning attention

Long COVID, defined as symptoms persisting for three months or more after the initial infection, involves a constellation of symptoms from extreme fatigue to brain fog, breathlessness and joint pain.

It can range from mild to utterly disabling, and there are no proven diagnostic tests or treatments, although scientists have made progress on theories about who is at risk and what might cause it.

One British study suggested almost a third of those reporting symptoms at 12 weeks recovered after 12 months. Others, particularly among patients who had been hospitalized, show far lower rates of recovery.

In a study run by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, 2 million people self-reported long COVID symptoms this past March. Roughly 700,000, or 30.6%, said they first experienced symptoms at least three years previously.

Globally, accepted estimates have suggested between 65 million and 200 million people have long COVID. That could mean between 19.5 million and 60 million people face years of impairment based on the initial estimates, Sivan said.

The United States and some countries like Germany continue to fund long COVID research.

But more than two dozen experts, patient advocates and pharmaceutical executives told Reuters that money and attention for the condition is dwindling in other wealthy countries that traditionally fund large-scale studies. In low- and middle-income countries, it was never there.

“The attention has shifted,” said Amitava Banerjee, a professor at University College London who co-leads a large trial of repurposed drugs and rehabilitation programs.

He says long COVID should be viewed as a chronic condition that can be treated to improve patients’ lives rather than cured, like heart disease or arthritis.

‘Profoundly disabling’

Leticia Soares, 39, from northeast Brazil, was infected in 2020 and has battled intense fatigue and chronic pain ever since. On a good day, she spends five hours out of bed.

When she can work, Soares is a co-lead and researcher at Patient-Led Research Collaborative, an advocacy group involved in a review of long COVID evidence published recently in Nature.

Soares said she believes recovery seldom happens beyond 12 months. Some patients may find their symptoms abate, only to recur, a kind of remission that can be mistaken for recovery, she said.

“It’s so profoundly disabling and isolating. You spend every time wondering, ‘Am I going to get worse after this?'” she said of her own experience.

Soares takes antihistamines and other commonly available treatments to cope with daily life. Four long COVID specialist doctors in different countries said they prescribe such medicines, which are known to be safe. Some evidence suggests they help.

Others have less success with mainstream medicine.

Gichohi’s illness was dismissed by her doctor, and she turned to a functional medicine practitioner, who focused on more holistic treatments.

She moved out of her hectic home city of Nairobi to a small town near Mount Kenya, policing her activity levels to prevent fatigue and receiving acupuncture and trauma therapy.

She has tried the addiction treatment naltrexone, which has some evidence of benefit for long COVID symptoms, and the controversial anti-parasitic infection drug ivermectin, which does not but she says helped her.

She said shifting from “chasing recovery” to living in her new reality was important.

A piecemeal treatment approach is to be expected while research progresses, and perhaps longer-term, said Anita Jain, a long COVID specialist at the World Health Organization.

Meanwhile, long-haulers face a new challenge with each spike in COVID cases. A handful of studies have suggested re-infection can exacerbate existing long COVID.

Shannon Turner, a 39-year-old cabaret singer from Philadelphia, got COVID in late March or early April of 2020.

She was already living with psoriatic arthritis and antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, autoimmune diseases for which she regularly took steroids and an immunotherapy. Such conditions may increase the risk of developing long COVID, researchers say.

This past summer, Turner got COVID again. Once again, she is extraordinarily tired and uses a walker for mobility.

Turner is determined to pursue her music career despite ongoing pain, dizziness and a racing heart rate, which regularly land her in hospital.

“I don’t want to live my life in bed,” she said.  
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BAKU, Azerbaijan — Cities in Asia and the United States emit the most heat-trapping gas that feeds climate change, with Shanghai the most polluting, according to new data that combines observations and artificial intelligence.

Seven states or provinces spew more than 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, all of them in China, except Texas, which ranks sixth, according to new data from an organization co-founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and released Friday at the United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Nations at the talks are trying to set new targets to cut such emissions and figure out how much rich nations will pay to help the world with that task.

Using satellite and ground observations, supplemented by artificial intelligence to fill in gaps, Climate Trace sought to quantify heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, as well as other traditional air pollutants worldwide, including for the first time in more than 9,000 urban areas.

Earth’s total carbon dioxide and methane pollution grew 0.7% to 61.2 billion metric tons with the short-lived but extra potent methane rising 0.2%. The figures are higher than other datasets “because we have such comprehensive coverage and we have observed more emissions in more sectors than are typically available,” said Gavin McCormick, Climate Trace’s co-founder.

Plenty of big cities emit far more than some nations

Shanghai’s 256 million metric tons of greenhouse gases led all cities and exceeded those from the nations of Colombia or Norway. Tokyo’s 250 million metric tons would rank in the top 40 of nations if it were a country, while New York City’s 160 million metric tons and Houston’s 150 million metric tons would be in the top 50 of countrywide emissions. Seoul, South Korea, ranks fifth among cities at 142 million metric tons.

“One of the sites in the Permian Basin in Texas is by far the No. 1 worst polluting site in the entire world,” Gore said. “And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but I think of how dirty some of these sites are in Russia and China and so forth. But Permian Basin is putting them all in the shade.”

In terms of states and provinces, seven of them emit more than 1 billion metric tons of carbon pollution, led by Shandong, China’s 1.28 billion metric tons. Other billion-ton polluters are Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Jiangsu and Guangdong, all in China, and Texas.

Which countries are going up, and which are going down

China, India, Iran, Indonesia and Russia had the biggest increases in emissions from 2022 to 2023, while Venezuela, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States had the biggest decreases in pollution.

The dataset — maintained by scientists and analysts from various groups — also looked at traditional pollutants such as carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and other chemicals associated with dirty air. Burning fossil fuels releases both types of pollution, Gore said.

Burning fossil fuels releases both types of pollution, said Gore, and noted the millions of people who die worldwide each year from air pollution.

This “represents the single biggest health threat facing humanity,” Gore said.

Gore criticized the hosting of climate talks, called COPs, by Azerbaijan, an oil nation and site of the world’s first oil wells, and by the United Arab Emirates last year.

“It’s unfortunate that the fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree,” Gore said. “Next year in Brazil, we’ll see a change in that pattern. But, you know, it’s not good for the world community to give the No. 1 polluting industry in the world that much control over the whole process.”

Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called for more to be done on climate change and has sought to slow deforestation since returning for a third term as president. But Brazil last year produced more oil than both Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 
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A study by the World Bank on Thursday said urgent action is needed to address rising sea levels in the Pacific atoll islands of Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu, which under current projections could be 50% to 80% submerged in the next 50 years.

The World Bank’s “Pacific Atoll Countries Country Climate and Development Report” says the low-lying nations and the roughly 200,000 people who live on them face some of the most severe existential threats from climate change of any region in the world.

The study cites projected sea level rises of up to a half meter in the last half of this century and suggests 50% to 80% of major urban areas in the countries could be underwater.

The region is already seeing annual losses from climate events — such as more frequent and powerful storms — equivalent to 7% of the total economic output in Tuvalu. About 3% to 4% of output in the Marshall Islands and Kiribati are projected to increase.

The bank said that without urgent global and local action, a 1-in-20-year climate event in Tuvalu could lead to damage and losses equivalent to 50% of current annual output by 2050.

The study makes near-, medium- and long-term recommendations for the island nations. The near- and medium-term suggestions include investments in sustainable construction to protect freshwater resources, fisheries and energy supplies, among other crucial infrastructure.

The study’s long-term suggestions include investments in education, legal and regulatory frameworks, economic development and climate resilience.

The study also called on the international donor community to make contributions to the Pacific atoll countries, which still face a significant climate funding gap.

The World Bank produces diagnostic country climate and development reports, CCDRs, that integrate climate change and development considerations and suggest concrete actions that countries can take to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The bank has completed over 45 CCDRs around the world as of October 2024.
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Islamabad — The World Health Organization has labeled a forced repatriation of Afghan nationals from Pakistan as a “major setback” for polio eradication efforts, contributing to the regional resurgence of the paralytic disease.

Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only two polio-endemic nations, reporting 49 and 23 cases respectively, so far this year, up from only six cases each in 2023. 

The latest case in Pakistan was confirmed Thursday in the southwestern province of Balochistan, which sits on the Afghan border and accounts for half the cases reported in 2024.

“Until you get rid of polio completely, it will resurge and come back, and this is what we are seeing now in Pakistan [where] nearly half of the districts are infected, and in Afghanistan, a third of the provinces are infected,” Hamid Jafari, the WHO director for the Eastern Mediterranean, said Wednesday while discussing causes of polio resurgence in both countries. 

“I think the major setback was a forced repatriation of Afghan nationals that led to a massive and unpredictable movement of populations within Pakistan and across both borders and within Afghanistan, so the virus moved with these populations,” Jafari told the virtual discussion hosted by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, or GPEI. 

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has said that Pakistan’s crackdown on undocumented foreign nationals has resulted in more than 730,000 Afghan migrants returning to Afghanistan since August 2023.

Jafari also mentioned other factors contributing to the rise of polio in Pakistan, including authorities’ inability to consistently carry out vaccination campaigns in areas affected by militancy, where children cannot be effectively immunized against the crippling disease. He also highlighted the presence of “significant vaccine hesitancy and community boycotts” rooted in public frustration over the lack of essential services in impoverished districts.

Pakistani and WHO officials say vaccine boycotts in some regions also result from the false propaganda that anti-polio campaigns are a Western plot to sterilize Muslim children. Additionally, anti-government militants in violence-hit regions occasionally stage deadly attacks on polio teams, suspecting them of spying for authorities, routinely disrupting vaccination drives in districts near the Afghan border. 

Afghan polio ban

While sharing the latest polio situation in Afghanistan, the senior WHO official stated they are collaborating with various humanitarian actors and partners to promote vaccination against polio and all other diseases.

“We cannot implement house-to-house vaccination,” Jafari stated, referencing the ban imposed by Taliban authorities on polio teams over security concerns. 

“The program is working closely with [Taliban] authorities to re-update micro plans and work closely with the communities and local officials to make sure children are mobilized to vaccination sites,” he added. 

In September, the Taliban abruptly halted house-to-house vaccine deliveries in parts of southern Afghanistan, including Kandahar, without publicly stating any reason. 

An independent monitoring board of the GPEI recently said that the Taliban’s action had stemmed from their “administration’s concerns about covert surveillance activities.” The report quoted de facto Afghan authorities as explaining that their leadership is living in Kandahar and has concerns about their security.

Jafari stated that Pakistan and Afghanistan are taking measures to address the challenges in their bid “to rebuild community confidence” and work closely with security agencies in both countries to be able to access all children. 

He cautioned that the current resurgence of polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan does not guarantee a low point next year.

“We are confident that we will come very close to elimination, but the key is to make sure that in these final safe havens for poliovirus in insecure areas, among migrant and mobile populations, and vaccine-hesitant communities, we can finally overcome these residual challenges to make sure that finally polio is eradicated,” the regional WHO director said. 

Polio once paralyzed an estimated 20,000 children in Pakistan each year until the country initiated national vaccination campaigns in the 1990s to control the infections, according to the WHO. In 2019, there were 176 reported cases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2021 and 2022, however, the countries reported only one and two infections, respectively.
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BAKU, Azerbaijan — For the third straight year, efforts to fight climate change haven’t lowered projections for how hot the world is likely to get — and recent developments in China and the United States are likely to slightly worsen the outlook, according to an analysis Thursday.

The analysis comes as countries come together for the 29th edition of the United Nations climate talks, hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan, where nations are trying to set new targets to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and figure out how much rich nations will pay to help the world with that task.

But Earth remains on a path to be 2.7 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times, according to Climate Action Tracker, a group of scientists and analysts who study government policies and translate that into projections of warming.

If emissions are still rising and temperature projections are no longer dropping, people should wonder if the United Nations climate negotiations known as COP are doing any good, said Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare.

“There’s an awful lot going on that’s positive here, but on the big picture of actually getting stuff done to reduce emissions … to me it feels broken,” Hare said.

Climate action is stifled by the biggest emitters

The world has already warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. That’s near the 1.5-degree limit that countries agreed to at 2015 climate talks in Paris. Climate scientists say the atmospheric warming, mainly from human burning of fossil fuels, is causing ever more extreme and damaging weather including droughts, flooding and dangerous heat.

Climate Action Tracker does projections under several different scenarios, and in some cases, those are going up slightly.

One projected track based on what countries promise to do by 2030 is up to 2.6 degrees Celsius, a tenth of a degree warmer than before. And even the analysts’ most optimistic scenario, which assumes that countries all deliver on their promises and targets, is at 1.9 Celsius, also up a tenth of a degree from last year, said study lead author Sofia Gonzales-Zuniga of Climate Analytics, one of the main groups behind the tracker.

“This is driven highly by China,” Gonzales-Zuniga said. Even though China’s fast-rising emissions are starting to plateau, they are peaking higher than anticipated, she said.

Another upcoming factor not yet in the calculations is the U.S. elections. A Trump administration that rolls back the climate policies in the Inflation Reduction Act, and carries out the conservative blueprint Project 2025, would add 0.04 degree Celsius to warming projections, Gonzales-Zuniga said. That’s not much, but it could be more if other nations use it as an excuse to do less, she said. And a reduction in American financial aid could also reverberate even more in future temperature outlooks.

“For the U.S. it is going backwards,” said Hare. At least China has more of an optimistic future with a potential giant plunge in future emissions, he said.

“We should already be seeing (global) emissions going down” and they are not, Hare said. “In the face of all of the climate disasters we’ve observed, whether it’s the massive floods in Nepal that killed hundreds of people or whether it’s the floods in Valencia, Spain, that just killed hundreds of people. The political system, politicians are not reacting. And I think that’s something that people everywhere should be worried about.”

Experts say $1 trillion is needed in climate cash for developing nation

The major battle in Baku is over how much rich nations will help poor countries to decarbonize their energy systems, cope with future harms of climate change and pay for damage from warming’s extreme weather. The old goal of $100 billion a year in aid is expiring and Baku’s main focus is coming up with a new, bigger figure.

A special independent group of experts commissioned by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued its own estimate of costs and finances on Thursday, calling for a tripling of the old commitment.

“Advanced economies need to demonstrate a credible commitment” to helping poor nations, the report said.

A coalition of poor nations at the Baku talks are asking for $1.3 trillion in annual climate finance. The independent experts’ report said about $1 trillion a year is needed by developing nations from all outside sources, not just government grants.

The report detailed how expensive decarbonizing the world’s economy would be, how much it would cost and where the money could come from. Overall climate adaption spending for all countries is projected to reach $2.4 trillion a year.

“The transition to clean, low-carbon energy, building resilience to the impacts of climate change, coping with loss and damage, protecting nature and biodiversity, and ensuring a just transition, require a rapid step-up in investment in all countries,” said the report.
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Washington — National Geographic scientists say they’ve discovered the world’s largest coral near the remote Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean — an undersea mass that is so big, it can be seen from space.

The man who found it, Manu San Felix, director of cinematography for National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas, a program dedicated to marine conservation, says the giant organism measures 34 meters wide and 32 meters long and is “close to the size of a cathedral.”

“I see this as a living library that has the information of the conditions of the oceans for centuries,” he told reporters this week, underscoring it is a reminder of the need to better protect the ocean from global climate change.

Eric Brown, a Pristine Seas coral scientist, said the enormous coral species, Pavona clavus, is healthy and has “high reproductive potential,” making it essential to help other coral reef ecosystems recover from the damage of a warming ocean.

Corals “are very vulnerable ecosystems. So, it’s important for us to do whatever we can to protect these environments that are both small and mighty,” Brown said at a Tuesday press briefing to announce the find.

The announcement comes as world leaders gather for the United Nations climate conference, known as COP29, in Azerbaijan. Attendees are trying to agree on new mechanisms to finance a global energy transition to renewables and help nations like the Pacific Islands pay for the cost of adapting to rising oceans.

Pristine Seas is also encouraging nations to designate marine protected areas, or MPAs. The goal is to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. is attending the summit. Palau has walled off 80% of its waters to development, while the nearby Pacific Island nation of Niue has designated 40% of its waters for protection.

“It cannot just be big countries. Small countries need to do their part,” he told VOA in an interview. “So, it’s all of us working together … protecting our oceans, because we know that healthy oceans are an important part of the ecosystem and important in regulating climate.”

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele agreed.

“Our survival depends on healthy coral reefs, so this exciting discovery underlines the importance of protecting and sustaining them for future generations,” he said in a press release.

But so far, the Solomon Islands has created a network of 79 designated ocean conservation areas — less than 1% of its exclusive economic zone. What’s more, its economy is largely dependent on forestry — the very industry that threatens the viability of coral through sedimentation.

“All that sediment is going onto a reef, and it’s smothering the reef, thereby preventing the corals from being able to feed, to grow, to reproduce,” Molly Timmers, Pristine Seas lead scientist on the Solomon Islands, said at the press briefing.

According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an online platform that seeks to visualize the distribution of international trade, the Solomons exported $308 million in rough wood in 2022, with $260 million of it going to China.

VOA asked Chief Dennis Marita, director of culture at the Ministry of Culture & Tourism, how the government can find a balance.

“Much of the logging activities are happening on the mainland” away from the coral, Marita said in an interview, but “there needs to be a serious awareness about the impacts of what’s happening in the logging industry to the marine environment.”

Marita sees this coral discovery as a way to attract researchers, biologists and tourists to bring in revenue to the small island nation of 740,000 people. Earlier this week, the Solomon Islands signed an agreement with China to provide visa-free travel between the two countries.

“Suddenly, people will start coming to the island, but then we need to be prepared for them, and also, we need to ensure that the coral is safeguarded,” Marita said.

Dr. Daniel Barshis of Old Dominion University’s Ecological Sciences Department in Norfolk, Virginia, said that idea has merit.

“I would imagine this discovery would draw tourists to the area, similar to how old-growth trees inspire folks to visit,” he told VOA via email.

“The fact that [corals] like this still exist is a reminder that coral reefs are still surviving and deserve us working as hard as we possibly can to save them from some of the worst-case scenarios if we don’t reverse course on greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible,” said Barshis.

William Yang contributed to this report.
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The world’s largest coral colony has been discovered near the remote Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean – an undersea mass that is so big, it can be seen from space, National Geographic scientists announced Nov. 12, 2024.   
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NEW YORK — The decline in U.S. drug overdose deaths appears to have continued this year, giving experts hope the nation is seeing sustained improvement in the persistent epidemic. 

There were about 97,000 overdose deaths in the 12-month period that ended June 30, according to provisional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released Wednesday. That’s down 14% from the estimated 113,000 for the previous 12-month period. 

“This is a pretty stunning and rapid reversal of drug overdose mortality numbers,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends. 

Overdose death rates began steadily climbing in the 1990s because of opioid painkillers, followed by waves of deaths led by other opioids like heroin and — more recently — illicit fentanyl. Provisional data had indicated a slight decline for 2023, and the tally released Wednesday showed that the downward trend has kept going. 

Of course, there have been moments in the last several years when U.S. overdose deaths seemed to have plateaued or even started to go down, only to rise again, Marshall noted. 

“This seems to be substantial and sustained,” Marshall said. “I think there’s real reason for hope here.” 

Experts aren’t certain about the reasons for the decline, but they cite a combination of possible factors. 

One is COVID-19. In the worst days of the pandemic, addiction treatment was hard to get, and people were socially isolated — with no one around to help if they overdosed. 

“During the pandemic we saw such a meteoric rise in drug overdose deaths that it’s only natural we would see a decrease,” said Farida Ahmad of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. 

Still, overdose deaths are well above what they were at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The recent numbers could represent the fruition of years of efforts to increase the availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, and addiction treatments such as buprenorphine, said Erin Winstanley, a University of Pittsburgh professor who researches drug overdose trends. 

Marshall said such efforts likely are being aided by money from settlements of opioid-related lawsuits, brought by state, local and Native American governments against drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies. Settlement funds have been rolling out to small towns and big cities across the U.S., and some have started spending the money on naloxone and other measures. 

Some experts have wondered about changes in the drug supply. Xylazine, a sedative, has been increasingly detected in illegally manufactured fentanyl, and experts are sorting out exactly how it’s affecting overdoses. 

In the latest CDC data, overdose death reports are down in 45 states. Increases occurred in Alaska, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington. 

The most dramatic decreases were seen in North Carolina and Ohio, but CDC officials voiced a note of caution. Some jurisdictions have had lags in getting death records to federal statisticians — particularly North Carolina, where death investigations have slowed because of understaffing at the state medical examiner’s office. The CDC made estimates to try to account for incomplete death records, but the decline in some places may ultimately turn out not to be as dramatic as initial numbers suggest. 

Another limitation of the provisional data is that it doesn’t detail what’s happening in different groups of people. Recent research noted the overdose deaths in Black and Native Americans have been growing disproportionately larger. 

“We really need more data from the CDC to learn whether these declines are being experienced in all racial ethnic subgroups,” Marshall said.
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Harare, Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe has recorded new cases of cholera several months after declaring the end of an outbreak that killed more than 700 people over an 18-month period. 

On Wednesday, Zimbabwe confirmed a new outbreak of cholera has been recorded in the district of Kariba — on the border with Zambia — where 21 cases have been confirmed and one person died. 

Dr. Godfrey Muza, the Kariba district medical officer, said the government is working to contain the situation: 

“We have set up cholera equipment camp and also some oral rehydration points within the affected villages,” said Muza. “We are getting assistance from our local and regional partners like MSF [Medecins Sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders] and UNICEF. And our teams are on the ground doing risk communication and community engagement activities on health promotion, hygiene promotion and assisting the community in terms of improving sanction.”  

In August, the Zimbabwe government declared that the 18-month long cholera outbreak was over. The outbreak  affected up to 35,000 people and claimed more than 700 lives.

Zimbabwe has dealt with cholera outbreaks in the past.  In 2008, an outbreak resulted in more than 98,000 cases and more than 4,000 reported deaths.  

Independent health experts such as Dr. Norman Matara of Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights said the government needs to address the conditions that enable the waterborne disease to spread. 

“In public health, we often say cholera is a disease of poverty which mainly affects people with inadequate access to safe water and basic sanitation,” said Matara. “In Zimbabwe, we have witnessed perennial cholera outbreaks in recent years and these outbreaks are being caused by a lack of safe drinking water supply and a broken-down sanitation system which leaves residents in densely populated communities surrounded by flowing sewer. This sewer will then contaminate alternative sources of water such as shower wells, streams, rivers and even boreholes resulting in people drinking or eating food contaminated with the cholera bacteria.” 

He said that those conditions have been chronic over the years in Zimbabwe, contributing to the repeated outbreaks. 

How does Zimbabwe get out of this cycle of recurring cholera outbreaks? 

“We need to make sure that our hospitals are well-supposed with the real addressing solutions and medicines so that people can be assisted,” said Matara. ” … Also, those high-risk communities, especially in towns and urban cities, we may give them the oral cholera vaccine so that they may be protected. In the long term, the government needs to invest more in proper sanitation facilities and infrastructure as well as making sure that people are provided with clean safe water for drinking and cooking.” 

Matara said he hopes the current outbreak is contained quickly and does not spread to other parts of Zimbabwe. 

But with raw sewage flowing in some streets of Harare, it might be a question of time.  
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BAKU, Azerbaijan — When more than two dozen world leaders deliver remarks at the United Nations’ annual climate conference on Wednesday, many have detailed their nations’ firsthand experience with the catastrophic weather that has come with climate change.

“Over the past year, catastrophic floods in Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as well as in southern Croatia have shown the devastating impact of rising temperatures,” said Croatia’s prime minister, Andrej Plenkovic. “The Mediterranean, one of the most vulnerable regions, calls for urgent action.”

The Greek prime minister said Europe and the world needs to be “more honest” about the trade-offs needed to keep global temperatures down.

“We need to ask hard questions about a path that goes very fast, at the expense of our competitiveness, and a path that goes some much slower, but allows our industry to adapt and to thrive,” he said. His nation this summer was hammered by successive heat waves after three years of below-average rainfall. In Greece, the misery included water shortages, dried-up lakes and the death of wild horses.

Other speakers on the list include Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose nation has seen deadly flooding this year from monsoon rains that scientists say have become heavier with climate change. Just two years ago, more than 1,700 people died in widespread flooding. Pakistan has also suffered from dangerous heat, with thousands of people hospitalized with heatstroke this spring as temperatures soared to 47 degrees Celsius.

Also on the list of speakers Wednesday is Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Edward Davis. Like many other countries in the Global South, the Bahamas has piled up debt from warming-connected weather disasters it did little to cause, including Hurricanes Dorian in 2019 and Matthew in 2016. Leaders have been seeking help and money from the Global North and oil companies.

Early on Wednesday, ministers and officials from African nations called for initiatives to advance green development on the continent and strengthen resilience to extreme weather events — from floods to droughts — across the region.

Plenty of big names and powerful countries are noticeably absent from COP29 this year. That includes the 13 largest carbon dioxide-polluting countries — a group responsible for more than than 70% of the heat-trapping gases emitted last year — were missing. The world’s biggest polluters and strongest economies — China and the United States — didn’t send their No. 1s. Neither did India and Indonesia.

But U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was there, and he announced an 81% emissions reduction target on 1990 levels by 2035, in line with the Paris Agreement goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. That’s up from the 78% the U.K. had already pledged.

The main focus of this year’s talks is climate finance — wealthier nations compensating poor countries for damages from climate change’s weather extremes, helping them pay to transition their economies away from fossil fuels and helping them with adaptation.
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TORONTO, canada — A teenager is in critical condition in a British Columbia children’s hospital, sick with Canada’s first presumptive human case of avian influenza.

“This was a healthy teenager prior to this, so no underlying conditions,” said provincial health officer Bonnie Henry in a news conference on Tuesday. “It just reminds us that in young people this is a virus that can progress and cause quite severe illness, and the deterioration that I mentioned was quite rapid.”

British Columbia health officials said on Saturday the province had detected Canada’s first human case of H5 bird flu in a teenager.

Henry said the province is still identifying the exact strain but assumes the case is H5N1.

The World Health Organization says H5N1’s risk to humans is low because there is no evidence of human transmission, but the virus has been found in an increasing number of animals, including cattle in the United States.

Henry would not disclose the teen’s gender or age but said the patient had first developed symptoms on November 2 and was tested on November 8, when admitted to a hospital. Symptoms included conjunctivitis, fever and coughing.

As of Tuesday, the teen was hospitalized with acute respiratory distress syndrome, she said.

The teen had no farm exposure but had been exposed to dogs, cats and reptiles, Henry said. No infection source had been identified. “That is absolutely an ongoing investigation.”

More severe illness takes place when the virus binds to receptors deep in the lungs, she said.

Public health officials had identified and tested about three dozen contacts and had not found anyone infected with the virus.

There has been no evidence that the disease is easily spread between people. But if that were to happen, a pandemic could unfold, scientists have said.

Earlier in November, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked that farm workers exposed to animals with bird flu be tested for the virus even if they did not have symptoms.

Bird flu has infected nearly 450 dairy farms in 15 U.S. states since March, and the CDC has identified 46 human cases of bird flu since April.

In Canada, British Columbia has identified at least 26 affected premises across the province, Henry said Tuesday, and numerous wild birds have tested positive.

Canada has had no cases reported in dairy cattle and no evidence of bird flu in samples of milk.
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BAKU, Azerbaijan — World leaders are converging Tuesday at the United Nations annual climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan although the big names and powerful countries are noticeably absent, unlike past climate talks which had the star power of a soccer World Cup.

But 2024’s climate talks are more like the International Chess Federation world championship, lacking recognizable names but big on nerd power and strategy. The top leaders of the 13 largest carbon dioxide-polluting countries will not appear. Their nations are responsible for more than 70% of 2023’s heat-trapping gases.

The world’s biggest polluters and strongest economies — China and the United States — aren’t sending their No. 1s. India and Indonesia’s heads of state are also not in attendance, meaning the four most populous nations with more than 42% of all the world’s population aren’t having leaders speak.

“It’s symptomatic of the lack of political will to act. There’s no sense of urgency,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. He said this explains “the absolute mess we’re finding ourselves in.”

Transition to clean energy

The world has witnessed the hottest day, months and year on record “and a master class in climate destruction,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the world leaders who did show up.

But Guterres held out hope, saying, in a veiled reference to Donald Trump’s re-election in the United States, that the “clean energy revolution is here. No group, no business, no government can stop it.”

United Nations officials said in 2016, when Trump was first elected, there were 180 gigawatts of clean energy and 700,000 electric vehicles in the world. Now there are 600 gigawatts of clean energy and 14 million electric vehicles.

Host Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev kicked off two scheduled days of world leaders’ speeches by lambasting Armenia, western news media, climate activists and critics who highlighted his country’s rich oil and gas history and trade, calling them hypocritical since the United States is the world’s biggest oil producer. He said it was “not fair” to call Azerbaijan a “petrostate” because it produces less than 1% of the world’s oil and gas.

Oil and gas are “a gift of the God” just like the sun, wind and minerals, Aliyev said. “Countries should not be blamed for having them. And should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market because the market needs them.”

As the host and president of the climate talks, called COP29, Aliyev said his country will push hard for a green transition away from fossil fuels, “but at the same time, we must be realistic.”

Lack of star power

Aliyev, United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are the headliners of around 50 leaders set to speak on Tuesday.

There’ll also be a strong showing from the leaders of some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. Several small island nations presidents and over a dozen leaders from countries across Africa are set to speak over the two-day World Leaders’ Summit at COP29.

As a sense of how the bar for celebrity has lowered, on Tuesday morning photographers and video cameras ran alongside one leader walking through the halls of the meeting. It was the emergency management minister for host country Azerbaijan.

United Nations officials downplayed the lack of head of state star power, saying that every country is represented and active in the climate talks.

One logistical issue is that next week, the leaders of the most powerful countries have to be half a world away in Brazil for the G20 meetings. The United States recent election, Germany’s government collapse, natural disasters and personal illnesses also have kept some leaders away.

The major focus of the negotiations is climate finance, which is rich nations trying to help poor countries pay for transitioning their economies away from fossil fuels, coping with climate change’s upcoming harms and compensating for damages from weather extremes.

Nations are negotiating over huge amounts of money, anywhere from $100 billion a year to $1.3 trillion a year. That money “is not charity, it’s an investment,” Guterres said.

“Developing countries must not leave Baku empty-handed,” Guterres said. “A deal is a must.”
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