Argentine health officials said Saturday that four people in a clinic in northwestern Tucuman province had died of Legionnaires’ disease, a relatively rare bacterial infection of the lungs.

Health Minister Carla Vizzotti told reporters that Legionnaires’ had been identified as the underlying cause of double pneumonia in the four, who had suffered high fevers, body aches and trouble breathing.

The deaths, all since Monday, occurred in a single clinic in the city of San Miguel de Tucuman.

The latest, on Saturday morning, was that of a 48-year-old man with underlying health problems. A 70-year-old woman who had undergone surgery in the clinic was also a victim.

Seven other symptomatic cases have been identified, all from the same establishment and nearly all involving clinic personnel, provincial officials said.

Of those seven, “four remain hospitalized, three of them under respiratory assistance, and three are under home surveillance, with less complicated clinical symptoms,” said provincial health minister Luis Medina Ruiz on Saturday.

The disease, which first appeared at a 1976 meeting of the American Legion veterans group in the U.S. city of Philadelphia, has been linked to contaminated water or unclean air-conditioning systems.

When the outbreak in Tucuman was first detected, doctors tested the afflicted for COVID-19, flu and hantavirus, but ruled all of them out.

Samples were then sent to the prestigious Malbran Institute in Buenos Aires. Tests there pointed to Legionnaires’.

Vizzotti said authorities are working to ensure the clinic is safe for patients and staff.

Hector Sale, president of the Tucuman provincial medical college, earlier this week described the bacterial infection as “aggressive.”

But he added that it is not normally transmitted person-to-person, and that no close contact of any of the 11 infected people showed symptoms. 
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The U.K. will begin its autumn COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the coming weeks after authorizing booster shots made by Pfizer and Moderna that have been modified to target both the original virus and the widely circulating omicron variant.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said Saturday that it had approved the Pfizer vaccine for use in people aged 12 and older after finding it was both safe and effective. The agency authorized the Moderna vaccine last month.

The government will offer the vaccine to everyone age 50 and over, as well as front-line health care workers and other groups considered to be particularly at risk of serious illness as the National Health Service prepares for a surge in infections this winter.

“These innovative vaccines will broaden immunity and strengthen our defenses against what remains a life-threatening virus,” Health Secretary Steve Barclay said in a statement. “If eligible, please come forward for a booster jab as soon as you are contacted by the NHS.”

Previous COVID-19 vaccines targeted the initial strain, even as mutants emerged. In the new “bivalent” boosters, half of the shot targets the original vaccine and half offers protection against the newest omicron variants.
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A protest by a group of HIV-positive people in New Delhi, demanding a regular supply of life-saving antiretroviral therapy drugs across the country, ended this week, after 42 days, as the government has reportedly resumed the interrupted supply of the drugs. 

Around 2.3 million people are infected with HIV in India. Since 2004, the government has been providing free antiviral therapy, known as ART, to HIV-positive people in India.  The therapy stops replication of the virus, helping patients live longer and cutting the risk of transmission of the virus to others. Around 1.5 million HIV patients depend on the free government-supplied ART drugs.

The demonstration, at the central office of the Health Ministry’s National AIDS Control Organization, or NACO, which manages HIV and AIDS prevention and control programs in India, began in July, after activists claimed the supply of the drugs became irregular, with many medicines no longer available in centers. The activists said many HIV-positive people were only getting drugs for three, four, or five days and others were not getting the drugs at all. 

HIV activist Hari Shankar, a leader of the Delhi protest, said this week after withdrawing from the protest that the authorities had resumed the supply of ART drugs to each patient for a month, after a gap of three or four months.

“Our network informed us this week that the ART centers across the country have begun handing out at least one month’s supply of drugs to each patient. They have fulfilled our main demand,” Shankar, a member of the HIV/AIDS activist group Delhi Network of Positive People, or DNP Plus, told VOA Thursday.

In an emailed statement, the health ministry told the VOA last month that there was “no stock-out of drugs” and there were “no instances of disruptions or non-availability of treatment services or ARV medicines at the national and state levels.”

Over 90% of HIV-positive people receiving ART cannot afford to buy the drugs from the market and they were suffering badly because of the crisis of the supply from the ART centers, the activists said during the protest. They also expressed concerns that the drug crisis could lead to many patients becoming fatally ill. 

Many HIV-positive people have expressed relief after the NACO resumed its regular supply of ART drugs this week. 

“During the crisis, in July and August, I took my daily ART doses after buying the drugs with money borrowed from relatives. I cannot afford to buy them with my meager earnings. I began worrying that very soon I would have to skip my doses,” Khelen, a 45-year-old HIV-positive man, who uses one name and works as a porter in Imphal, the capital of the northeastern state of Manipur, told VOA. 

“Now I have heard this week that there is no stock-out of the drugs at the ART centers starting this week. This is truly very happy news for me.” 

DNP Plus founder Loon Gangte said that despite resistance from different quarters he and his colleagues had to continue their protest until the authorities met their demand.

“Pressure came from many sides to make us withdraw our protest. But we were very concerned about the health of our hundreds of thousands of HIV-positive brothers and sisters in the country and so we stood our ground and kept insisting that we would not call off our protest until our main demand is met,” Gangte told VOA.

“Now we have happily ended our protest as soon as the ART centers across the country have resumed the regular monthly supply of the drugs to all patients.”
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The World Health Organization is monitoring a cluster of 10 cases of pneumonia from an unknown cause in an outbreak in Argentina that so far has included three deaths.

The cases are linked to a single private clinic in the city of San Miguel de Tucumán, located in the northwest part of the country, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional office of the WHO.

An initial report Tuesday included five health care workers and a patient who was treated in the intensive care ward of the clinic, with symptoms emerging Aug. 18-22.

On Thursday, local health officials reported another three cases, bringing the total to nine, including three deaths. All three people who died had other health conditions.

On Friday, Argentina reported an additional case.

Symptoms have included fever, muscle and abdominal pain and shortness of breath. Several patients had pneumonia in both lungs.

Tests for known respiratory viruses and other viral, bacterial and fungal agents were all negative, PAHO said. Biological samples have been sent to Argentina’s National Administration of Laboratories and Health Institutes for additional testing, which will include an analysis for the presence of toxins.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, said given that the lungs are heavily involved, the cause is likely something the patients inhaled.

He first suspected Legionnaires’ disease, which is caused by inhaling droplets of water containing Legionella bacteria, but tests have ruled that out.

PAHO and the WHO are monitoring the outbreak and assisting local health officials with the investigation.

Osterholm said “mystery illnesses” do sometimes happen, and most often they can be explained by some local outbreak that does not have pandemic implications.

Osterholm said he expects more definitive information from Argentine health officials in the next five to seven days.
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A new hormone treatment improved the cognitive function of six men with Down syndrome by 10% to 30%, scientists said this week, adding the “promising” results may raise hopes of improving patients’ quality of life.

However, the scientists emphasized the small study did not point toward a cure for the cognitive disorders of people with Down syndrome and that far more research is needed.

“The experiment is very satisfactory, even if we remain cautious,” Nelly Pitteloud of Switzerland’s Lausanne University Hospital, co-author of a new study in the journal Science, said Thursday.

Down syndrome is the most common genetic form of intellectual disability, occurring in about one in 1,000 people, according to the World Health Organization.

Yet previous research has failed to significantly improve cognition when applied to people with the condition, which is why the latest findings are “particularly important,” the study said.

Recent discoveries have suggested that how the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) is produced in the brain can affect cognitive functioning such as memory, language and learning.

GnRH hormones regulate how much testosterone and estrogen are produced, and increased levels of it help spur puberty.

“We wondered if this hormone could play any role in establishing the symptoms of people with Down syndrome,” said Vincent Prevot, study co-author and head of neuroscience research at France’s INSERM institute.

Research on mice

The team first established that five strands of microRNA regulating the production of GnRH were dysfunctional in mice specifically engineered for Down syndrome research.

They then demonstrated that cognitive deficiencies — as well as loss of smell, a common symptom of Down syndrome — were linked to dysfunctioning GnRH secretion in the mice.

The team then gave the mice a GnRH medication used to treat low testosterone and delayed puberty in humans, finding that it restored some cognitive function and sense of smell.

A pilot study was conducted in Switzerland involving seven men with Down syndrome aged 20 to 50.

They each received the treatment through their arm every two hours over a period of six months, with the drug delivered in pulses to mimic the hormone’s frequency in people without Down syndrome.

Cognition and smell tests were carried out during the treatment, as were MRI scans.

Six of the seven men showed improvement in cognition with no significant side effects, and none showed a change in sense of smell.

“We have seen an improvement of between 10% to 30% in cognitive functions, in particular with visuospatial function, three-dimensional representation, understanding of instructions as well as attention,” Pitteloud said.

The patients were asked to draw a simple 3D bed at several stages throughout the therapy. Many struggled at the beginning but by the end the efforts were noticeably better.

‘Improve quality of life’

The authors acknowledged some limitations of the study, including its size and that the choice of patients was “pushed by their parents.”

“The clinical trial only focused on seven male patients — we still have a lot of work to do to prove the effectiveness of GnRH treatment for Down syndrome,” Pitteloud said.

A larger study involving a placebo and 50 to 60 patients, a third of them women, is expected to begin in the coming months.

“We are not going to cure the cognitive disorders of people with Down syndrome, but the improvement seen in our results already seems fundamental enough to hope to improve their quality of life,” Pitteloud said.

Fabian Fernandez, an expert in cognition and Down syndrome at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, hailed the “tour de force study.”

He told AFP that while it is “difficult to envision” how such an intensive treatment could be used for young people, it might be better suited to delay the Alzheimer’s disease-related dementia suffered by many adults with Down syndrome.

It was also difficult to predict how such an improvement could impact the lives of people with the condition, he said.

“For some, it could be significant, however, as it would enable them to be more independent with daily living activities such as maintaining and enjoying hobbies, finding belongings, using appliances in the home and traveling alone.”
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The Serum Institute of India signed a deal this week with South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare to make four vaccines used in Africa.

The deal has been hailed as saving local vaccine production, which was at risk of shutting down after receiving no orders for a COVID vaccine. But medical aid group Doctors Without Borders says more efforts are needed for vaccines to be fully produced in Africa for Africans.

Four routine pediatric vaccines — pneumococcal vaccine, rotavirus vaccine, polyvalent meningococcal vaccine and hexavalent vaccine — will be made in South Africa with products from bulk drug substances supplied by India’s Serum Institute.

In addition to the 10-year agreement, South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare also anticipates receiving grant funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, CEPI.

“The partnership represents an important step for preventing the kinds of gross inequities of access to life-saving vaccines that emerged during the COVID pandemic,” said CEPI’s chief executive officer, Richard Hatchett. “We are proud to be part of an effort that will secure critically needed vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa, for Africa so that it can be ready when it faces future epidemic or pandemic threats.”

But Candice Sehoma with Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign in South Africa is calling for more than just fill-and-finish deals.

“I think it’s a great step towards realizing the improvements in the African continent’s manufacturing capacity, particularly looking at vaccines. And actually looking into routine vaccines. I think that, for me, is a great step,” Sehoma said. “But I think, definitely, we could do with a lot more and even a full sharing of technology, so that we don’t find ourselves waiting in line for vaccines that are coming from high-income countries.”

Petro Terblanche, managing director of the South African company Afrigen, which reproduced Moderna’s MRNA COVID vaccine, says Aspen’s deal with the Serum Institute may not be healthy for other companies on the continent, as it could drown out local competition.

“So, the manufacturing capacity and the technology capabilities and the reach of the Serum Institute is very dominant, it is very, very powerful. However, if Serum Institute is prepared to do partnerships with Africa and South Africa for end-to-end manufacturing and technology transfer to Africa, it’s a positive development,” Terblanche said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, deputy director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, says the agreement is an important step for African vaccine manufacturing.

“It has responded to African Union heads of state and government calls that 30 percent of our continent’s requirements for human vaccines be procured from Africa manufacturers. And we look forward to this being motivation for more expanded manufacturing of vaccines here on the continent of Africa,” Ouma said.

According to the Africa CDC, less than 1% of vaccines currently used on the continent are locally manufactured.

Aspen’s Group Communications Consultant Shauneen Beukes says they cannot comment on calls for the full African production of vaccines at this stage.
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Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela is the largest lake in South America and one of the world’s oldest. It is coming under increasing threat from oil spills, plastic pollution, and an alga popularly known locally as “verdín,” which can suffocate fish. For VOA News, Adriana Nunez Rabascall has the report.
Produced by: Cristina Caicedo Smit
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Australia has had some of the world’s strictest disease-control measures. Some of those last remaining COVID-19 restrictions now are being eased.

At the height of the pandemic, millions of people were forced into protracted lockdowns, masks were mandatory and many front-line workers, including medical staff and teachers, were told be vaccinated or face losing their jobs.

Australia banned most foreign nationals after closing its borders in March 2020, and Australians needed government permission to leave the country.

Tens of thousands of Australian citizens were trapped overseas, some unable to return home for months because of border restrictions and a lack of flights.

Australia’s COVID fortress has been dismantled and its borders have reopened with few, if any, restrictions. Other pandemic measures have persisted, but they are now being wound back.

Apart from workers in hospitals and nursing homes, the mandatory isolation period for people infected with the virus will be cut from seven to five days, if they do not have any symptoms.

Masks will no longer be required on domestic flights. The measures will come into effect Sept. 9.

However, public health experts warn the restrictions could trigger another wave of infections. They believe about a third of COVID-19 patients are still potentially infectious on day six and seven after they contract the virus.

“We will be watching very closely at how this plays out in terms of pressure on hospitals, and we will be calling on the government to revise that if we find that things are getting worse,” said Steve Robson, president of the Australian Medical Association, which represents many doctors and other health care professionals. “I think a lot of what we have seen from overseas is literally catastrophic.”

The United Kingdom abandoned its legal requirement for COVID patients to self-isolate several months ago. In England, adults with symptoms are advised to stay at home and avoid contact with other people until they recover.

Germany recently shortened its isolation period to five days. France lowered its requirement from 10 days to seven, with COVID-positive patients allowed to leave isolation on day five if they return a negative test. Japan’s isolation period remains at 10 days for those with symptoms.

Australia has recorded more than 10 million coronavirus infections since the start of the pandemic. Almost 14,000 people have died, according to government data.

Nearly 12,000 new infections were reported Friday.
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U.S. health advisers on Thursday endorsed new COVID-19 boosters that target today’s most common omicron strains, saying if enough people roll up their sleeves, the updated shots could blunt a winter surge. 

The tweaked shots made by Pfizer and Moderna promise Americans a chance at their most up-to-date protection at yet another critical period in the pandemic. They’re combination or “bivalent” shots, half the original vaccine and half protection against the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron versions now causing nearly all COVID-19 infections. 

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention struggled with who should get the new booster and when, because only a similarly tweaked vaccine, not the exact recipe, has been studied in people so far. 

But ultimately, the panel deemed it the best option considering the U.S. still is experiencing tens of thousands of COVID-19 cases and about 500 deaths every day — even before an expected new winter wave. 

“I think they’re going to be an effective tool for disease prevention this fall and into the winter,” said CDC adviser Dr. Matthew Daley of Kaiser Permanente Colorado. 

Comparing the tweak that has been studied in people and the one the U.S. actually will use, “it is the same scaffolding, part of the same roof. We’re just putting in some dormers and windows,” said Dr. Sarah Long of Drexel University. 

The CDC is expected to adopt that recommendation soon, the last step before shots can begin. Millions of doses are expected to reach vaccination sites nationwide by Labor Day, CDC officials said. 

Protection continues

The original COVID-19 vaccines still offer strong protection against severe illness and death, especially among younger and healthier people who’ve gotten at least one booster. 

But those vaccines were designed to target the virus strain that circulated in early 2020. Effectiveness drops as new mutants emerge and the longer it’s been since someone’s last shot. Since April, hospitalization rates in people over age 65 have jumped, the CDC said. 

The new, updated shots are only for use as a booster, not for someone’s first COVID vaccinations. The Food and Drug Administration cleared Pfizer’s bivalent option for people 12 and older, while Moderna’s is for adults only. 

A big unknown: exactly how much benefit people will get from one of those extra shots. 

The CDC said more than 1,400 people have been included in studies of a prior tweak to the vaccine recipe — targeting an earlier omicron strain named BA.1. That omicron-targeting combo shot proved safe and able to rev up virus-fighting antibodies — and European regulators on Thursday recommended using that type of booster. 

In the U.S., the FDA wanted fall boosters to target the currently circulating omicron strains — and rather than waiting until possibly November for more human studies to be finished, the agency accepted mouse testing that showed the newer tweak sparked a similarly good immune response. 

That’s how flu vaccines are updated every year, the CDC noted. 

Still, several CDC advisers said that to get the maximum benefit, people will need to wait longer between their last vaccination and getting the new booster than the two months that the FDA set as the minimum. Waiting at least three months would be better, from the last shot or if someone had recently recovered from COVID-19, they said. 

Before this new COVID-19 booster update, people 50 and older already were urged to get a second booster of the original vaccine — and those who did saw some extra protection, especially the longer it had been since their last shot, said CDC’s Dr. Ruth Link-Gelles. 

The new combination booster “should provide at least similar or better protection against omicron, since it’ll be a better match” to today’s virus strains, she told the panel. 
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NASA’s moon mission suffers another setback. Plus, a look back at a space travel pioneer, and a private spaceflight company continues earning frequent flyer miles. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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The U.S. National Hurricane Center reported Thursday that Tropical Storm Danielle has formed in the Atlantic Ocean and is expected to become the first hurricane of what has been an unusually quiet storm season, but one that is predicted to become busier than average. 

Forecasters at the hurricane center say that as Danielle hovers over an area of warmer-than-average ocean waters in the mid- to north Atlantic, atmospheric conditions are forecast to be favorable for it to strengthen into a hurricane in two days, and peak in intensity in about four days. 

But they also forecast it will stay in the middle of the ocean until it weakens back into a tropical depression. 

What makes the storm noteworthy is its status as the first hurricane of the season, the fourth named storm, and the first named storm since July 3. There were no named storms during the entire month of August.  

The hurricane center reports it’s the first August in 25 years without a named storm. And Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach told The Associated Press it is the first time since 1941 the Atlantic has gone from July 3 until the end of August with no named storm. 

In a separate interview, the head of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, Professor Gabriel Filippelli, told the AP two factors have contributed to the quiet season up to this point. First, exceptionally dry air masses in the Atlantic have stripped the atmosphere of the moisture needed for hurricanes and tropical storms to form. Second, there has been a fair amount of shear winds — horizontal winds — that break the structure of developing hurricanes so that they are unable to form. 

Last month, even as it revised its seasonal forecast downward, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center said atmospheric and oceanic conditions favor an above-normal 2022 Atlantic hurricane season, with the peak months of September and October still ahead. 

Filippelli told the AP it remains to be seen if September will see the quiet trend continue or if the hurricane season will pick up steam. 

 

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press. 

 
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An instrument on the U.S. space agency NASA’s Mars rover, Perseverance, has been reliably producing oxygen from the planet’s thin atmosphere for more than a year, a finding that bodes well for extended future missions to the planet.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances and led by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied the work of the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, known as MOXIE.

The study shows that since it was activated in April 2021 — two months after Perseverance landed on Mars — MOXIE was able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs, in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night, and through different Martian seasons. In each run, the instrument reached its target of producing six grams of oxygen per hour — about the rate of a modest tree on Earth.

The researchers, along with NASA scientists and planners, envision that a scaled-up version of MOXIE could be sent to Mars ahead of a human mission to continuously produce oxygen at the rate equal to several hundred trees. The system should generate enough oxygen to both sustain humans once they arrive and fuel a rocket for returning astronauts back to Earth.

The principal investigator for the study, MIT’s Dr. Michael Hecht, said in a press release the steady output that MOXIE has demonstrated is a promising first step toward those goals.

Hecht said the instrument’s performance producing oxygen on Mars also represents the first demonstration of in-situ, or on-site “resource utilization,” which is the process of using a planet’s existing materials [in this case, carbon dioxide] to make resources [such as oxygen] that would otherwise have to be transported from Earth.

Hect and his MIT co-authors were among researchers from several institutions, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which helped develop and manage MOXIE.

Some information for this report came from Reuters.
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The flight crews at one of Taiwan’s main airline carriers have voiced frustration about continued COVID-19 policies that require them to adhere to some of the strictest quarantine and testing requirements in the world. 

The policies remain in place even as other parts of the world loosen pandemic restrictions and adapt to a “new normal.” 

Upon arrival at destinations overseas, pilots and cabin crews from China Airlines must be taken directly to their hotel rooms and provided with room key cards that work only once — when they leave and embark on their next flights. 

 

One pilot for China Airlines, who wished to remain anonymous, told VOA he was “frustrated” with the current conditions. 

 

“It’s really affected [me]. Whenever I went to work, I felt so frustrated … it means I can’t go home for a period of time, and [I’m] also very tired, because I need to continuously [go] back and forth to Taipei and the U.S. or Europe. So, I have to adjust myself, try to sleep more and be more positive. [Being] stuck in a tiny room for long is really uncomfortable, but I still have to get used to it,” he said. 

 

The first officer has worked for the airline for nearly eight years, and he flies both long- and short-haul trips each month. He said the restrictions were worse in the beginning of the pandemic, as pilots were forced to wear goggles, gloves and face masks while on duty, as well as facing quarantine for seven days. And because of the quick turnaround of a pilot flying both domestically and internationally, the pilot described how he was in a constant loop of being quarantined. 

 

“There [was] a period of time we couldn’t quarantine at home, only in the hotel, so I’ve been 22 days and [still can’t] go home,” he said.

Today, the rules for vaccinated flight crews have since been relaxed slightly, removing the necessity of home quarantine in Taiwan. But when pilots and crews go abroad, they are still restricted from leaving their hotel rooms.

“At out stations, we still can’t go out. We only [can] stay in the room, until our pickup time for the next flight. It’s really unhealthy, [I] watch TV, read and sleep all day. I’ll do some workouts, too, and order Uber Eats, but that’s it,” the pilot added, referring to the food delivery service provided by Uber. 

 

Rule change

A local pilots union in Taiwan is now seeking the loosening of some restrictions. 

 

The Pilots Union Taoyuan, which represents nearly half of all pilots working for Taiwan’s airlines, has called the measures “outdated” and is requesting that the Taiwan government ease the strict controls. 

 

The head of the union, Lee Hsin-yen, referred to an in-house survey that found most of the member pilots who have had the coronavirus caught it in Taiwan, the news website Focus Taiwan reported.

VOA has requested a comment from the Civil Aeronautics Administration in Taiwan but has not yet received a reply.

Cabin crews 

 

Cabin crews also have vented their discontent about the rules and said following the restrictions is like being in prison. 

 

A woman calling herself Shirley, who didn’t want to be identified, is a cabin crew member at China Airlines and said she has worked there for nearly seven years. 

 

“The rules are: We are not allowed to leave our room; crews got one-time-use key card, or [the] hotel monitors us via [closed-circuit television] to make sure there’s no crew [leaving] their room. And we’re also not allow to have any contact with locals,” she told VOA.

She said that in pre-pandemic times, cabin crew members would often go shopping, have coffee or enjoy the summertime when overseas. 

 

“That’s how crew members [would] release their stress,” she said. 

 

Today, with the prolonged restrictions, she said, the flight crews in Taiwan are being treated unfairly in comparison to those  in the rest of the world. 

 

“In the beginning of the COVID, all these rules seemed to make sense. Nowadays, more and more countries open their borders. It feels like we [are] behind bars when we are in another country, because we can’t go anywhere. When we have [a] layover flight, the only place we can go is on the plane and hotel room. And it seems like the lockdown is endless,” she said. 

 

Taiwan tourism 

 

As the rest of the world is returning to pre-pandemic travel norms, Taiwan is currently closed to overseas tourists. Only residents and business travelers can enter Taiwan, but they must quarantine for three nights, followed by four days in self-health control. This means they are prohibited from visiting public venues or meeting groups of people.  

It is an example of how concerns about the infection still linger in East Asia, with parts of the region slow to reopen travel to the world. The trend seems to be gradually changing, as Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan have all opened their respective borders recently for visitors, each with specific measures in place. 

 

Gary Bowerman, an Asia travel analyst, told VOA that Taiwan’s cautious approach is soon going to affect its goals to boost tourism. 

 

“Taiwan is talking about a phased reopening beginning with tour groups from Southeast Asia, Japan and South Korea. This is a cautious strategy, which some Southeast Asian countries tried initially. As Southeast Asian countries discovered over the past year, it is only when full border reopenings are activated, and pre-flight and on-arrival testing and restrictions are removed, that travelers gain the confidence to visit in larger numbers,” he said. 

 

With a population of more than 23 million, despite keeping infections low at the beginning of the pandemic, Taiwan is now reporting upward of 25,000 domestic cases daily. Vaccination numbers are high, with 85% of the population inoculated, according to the website Our World in Data.
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The U.N. weather agency is predicting that the phenomenon known as La Nina is poised to last through the end of this year, a mysterious “triple dip” — the first this century — caused by three straight years of its effect on climate patterns like drought and flooding worldwide.

The World Meteorological Organization on Wednesday said La Nina conditions, which involve a large-scale cooling of ocean surface temperatures, have strengthened in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific with an increase in trade winds in recent weeks.

The agency’s top official was quick to caution that the “triple dip” doesn’t mean global warming is easing.

“It is exceptional to have three consecutive years with a La Nina event. Its cooling influence is temporarily slowing the rise in global temperatures, but it will not halt or reverse the long-term warming trend,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said.

La Nina is a natural and cyclical cooling of parts of the equatorial Pacific that changes weather patterns worldwide, as opposed to warming caused by the better-known El Nino — an opposite phenomenon. La Nina often leads to more Atlantic hurricanes, less rain and more wildfires in the western United States, and agricultural losses in the central U.S.

Studies have shown La Nina is more expensive to the United States than the El Nino.

Together El Nino, La Nina and the neutral condition are called ENSO, which stands for El Nino Southern Oscillation, and they have one of the largest natural effects on climate, at times augmenting and other times dampening the big effects of human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas, scientists say.
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A World Health Organization-UNICEF global study of health care facilities finds half lack basic hygiene services, putting around 3.85 billion people at risk of infection and death.

The study is based on data from 40 countries representing 35% of the world’s population. It presents an alarming picture of health facilities that lack water and soap for handwashing, have dirty toilets, and are unable to manage health care waste.

It says the lack of safe water, sanitation, and basic hygiene services, known as WASH, in health care facilities can lead to many preventable deaths. Rick Johnston is WHO lead WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program for WASH. He says sepsis, a major cause of mortality globally, could be prevented by improving WASH services in health care.

“It causes about 11 million avoidable deaths each year. And we know that in health care settings, sepsis mortality is linked to poor quality of care, including inadequate WASH… Still today, 670,000 neo-natal deaths occur due to sepsis. So, there is a huge burden that could be improved right there,” he said.

Data show the situation tends to be better in hospitals than in smaller health care facilities. The WHO reports the 46 least developed countries lag most behind in hygiene services, with only 32% of health care facilities providing WASH services.

Johnston says sub-Saharan Africa is the geographic region with the lowest coverage of basic services, about a third lower than globally.

“I mentioned hand hygiene services at 51% globally. It is only 38% in sub-Saharan Africa… Water services 78% globally, only 52% in sub-Saharan Africa… In sub-Saharan Africa, only 13% of health care facilities met the requirement for a basic health care service. So, lots of work to be done in sub-Saharan Africa,” he said.

The WHO estimates the cost of achieving universal basic WASH services in the 46 least developed countries at less than $10 billion between now and 2030. While that sounds like a lot, WHO officials say it comes to just under $1 per person per year. Officials say that is a fraction of what currently is being spent on health care services in those countries.
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