Nobody is safe from air pollution, the United Nations warned on World Environment Day, with nine out of 10 people on the planet now breathing polluted air.

This has led to a growing, global health crisis, which already causes about 7 million deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Burning fossil fuels for power, transport and industry is a major contributor to air pollution as well as the main source of planet-warming carbon emissions — and tackling both problems together could bring substantial benefits for public health.

Here are some facts on the human impacts of air pollution and its links with climate change:

1. Air pollution kills 800 people every hour or 13 every minute, accounting for more than three times the amount of people who die from malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS combined each year.

2. Some of the same pollutants contribute to both climate change and local air pollution, including black carbon or soot — produced by inefficient combustion in sources like cookstoves and diesel engines — and methane.

3. The five main sources of air pollution are indoor burning of fossil fuels, wood and other biomass to cook, heat and light homes; industry, including power generation such as coal-fired plants and diesel generators; transport, especially vehicles with diesel engines; agriculture, including livestock, which produces methane and ammonia, rice paddies, which produce methane, and the burning of agricultural waste; and open waste burning and organic waste in landfills.

4. Household air pollution causes about 3.8 million premature deaths each year, the vast majority of them in the developing world, and about 60% of those deaths are among women and children.

5. 93% of children worldwide live in areas where air pollution exceeds WHO guidelines, with 600,000 children under 15 dying from respiratory tract infections in 2016.

6. Air pollution is responsible for 26% of deaths from ischemic heart disease, 24% of deaths from strokes, 43% from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 29% from lung cancer. In children, it is associated with low birth weight, asthma, childhood cancers, obesity, poor lung development and autism, among other health defects.

7. 97% of cities in low- and middle-income countries with more than 100,000 inhabitants do not meet the WHO minimum air quality levels, and in high-income countries, 29% of cities fall short of guidelines.

8. About 25% of urban ambient air pollution from fine particulate matter is contributed by traffic, 20% by domestic fuel burning and 15% by industrial activities including electricity generation.

9. Keeping global warming “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F), as governments have pledged to do under the 2015 Paris Agreement, could save about a million lives a year by 2050 through reducing

air pollution alone.

1. In the 15 countries that emit the most planet-warming gases, the cost of air pollution for public health is estimated at more than 4% of GDP. In comparison, keeping warming to the Paris Agreement temperature limits would require investing about 1% of global GDP.

Sources: U.N. Environment, World Health Organization, World Bank, Every Breath Matters campaign.
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In a courtroom packed with environmental activists, federal judges wrestled Tuesday with whether climate change violates the constitutional rights of young people who have sued the U.S. government over the use of fossil fuels.

A Justice Department attorney warned three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that allowing the case to go to trial would be unprecedented and open the doors to more lawsuits.

“This case would have earth-shattering consequences,” Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark said. 

He called the lawsuit “a direct attack on the separation of powers” and said the 21 young people who filed it want the courts to direct U.S. energy policy, instead of government officials.

The young people are pressing the government to stop promoting the use of fossil fuels, saying sources like coal and oil cause climate change and violate their Fifth Amendment rights to life, liberty and property. 

The judges seemed to feel the enormity of the case, which the plaintiffs’ lawyer compared in scope to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that mandated desegregation of schools in the 1950s.

If the case moves forward, the judiciary would be “dealing with different branches of government and telling them what to do,” said Judge Andrew Hurwitz, instead of issuing court orders telling officials to stop doing something deemed unconstitutional.

The dire threat to people, particularly the young, demands such action, said Julia Olson, chief legal counsel for Our Children’s Trust, which is representing the plaintiffs. 

“When our great-grandchildren look back on the 21st century, they will see that government-sanctioned climate destruction was the constitutional issue of this century,” Olson told the judges.

​The lawsuit asks the courts to declare federal energy policy that contributes to climate change unconstitutional, order the government to quickly phase out carbon dioxide emissions to a certain level by 2100 and mandate a national climate recovery plan. 

The Obama and Trump administrations have tried to get the case dismissed since it was filed in Oregon in 2015.

“It’s just really disappointing to see the lengths that they go to – to not only not let us get the remedy that we’re seeking, but not even let us have the chance to prove our facts or present our case at trial,” said Nathan Baring, a 19-year-old from Fairbanks, Alaska, who joined the lawsuit when he was 15.

Baring said a social media campaign in the early days featured the hashtag #KidsvsGov, which was changed to #YouthvsGov as they got older.

“I think eventually it’s just going to have to be #AdultsvsGov,’’ Baring said, laughing.

As the case drags on, sea ice that protects coastal Alaska communities from fierce storms is forming later in the year, leaving those villages vulnerable, he said. 

The young people argue that government officials have known for more than 50 years that carbon pollution from fossil fuels causes climate change and that policies promoting oil and gas deprive them of their constitutional rights.

Lawyers for President Donald Trump’s administration say the young people didn’t find any “historical basis for a fundamental right to a stable climate system or any other constitutional right related to the environment.”

The lawsuit says the young are more vulnerable to serious effects from climate change in the future. The American Academy of Pediatrics, 14 other health organizations and nearly 80 scientists and doctors agreed in a brief filed with the appeals court.

They pointed out that the World Health Organization estimates 88% of the global health burden of climate change falls on children younger than 5.

The case has become a focal point for many youth activists, and the courtroom in Portland was packed. 

If the 9th Circuit judges decide the lawsuit can move forward, it would go before the U.S. District Court in Eugene, where the case was filed. The appeals court judges will rule later.
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Argentina’s Supreme Court upheld the country’s glacier protection law Tuesday, rejecting an effort by mining giant Barrick Gold Corp. to have it declared unconstitutional.

The decision was praised by environmentalists and marked a setback for one of the world’s biggest gold miners. 

 

Barrick argued that the 2010 law could affect its projects near glacial areas in Argentina. But the top court said Barrick had not proved that the law curbing mining on and around the country’s glaciers to protect water supplies caused any damage to the company.

Barrick owns Pascua-Lama, a high-altitude mine that straddles the Argentina-Chile border. It also runs the Veladero mine in Argentina’s San Juan province.

The Argentine law broadly defines glaciers, so it protects not only the icy masses most people think of but also “rock glaciers” and frozen groundwater on mountaintops where glaciers have melted away from the surface. The Argentine National Glacier Institute, which had a big hand in drafting the law, pushed the definition because it is believed most glacial water actually comes from such reserves.

“We celebrate the ruling because there’s no doubt that glaciers must be protected,” Greenpeace Argentina spokesperson Gonzalo Strano said in a statement.

“Barrick’s request to declare the unconstitutionality of the national law was a perverse play that fortunately lost,” Strano said. “Now, the law must be followed and Veladero must be closed. We can no longer allow mining on Argentine glaciers.” 

 

Representatives at Barrick could not immediately be reached for comment.
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From late-night tumbles on the way to the bathroom to accidents outdoors, more and more elderly Americans are dying after a fall, with the risk doubling since 2000, according to a study published Tuesday.

The figures confirm a trend that has also been observed in Europe. 

In the United States, the absolute number of deaths among people over 75 years old attributed to falling almost tripled from 2000 to 2016 (8,613 to 25,189).

While the population has grown since that time, it still represents a doubling in the rate of such deaths for men as well as women, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The research was led by Klaas Hartholt at the Reinier de Graaf Groep in the Netherlands.

“Approximately one in three persons aged 65 years or older falls every year,” Marco Pahor, director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Florida, wrote in an editorial on the subject for the journal. 

“Falling is a potentially catastrophic and life threatening event for older persons.”

High cost

But the risk of death from head trauma and internal bleeding isn’t where it ends. Fractures to hips, knees or ankles can mark the start of a vicious cycle: hospitalization, reduced independence, physical rehabilitation and long-lasting effects on morale and mental health.

One in five people who break their hips will never walk again, according to Atul Gawande, a doctor and the author of the book “Being Mortal.”

In the U.S., the costs linked to falls is among the most expensive categories for hospital care.

“Falls represent a major emerging epidemic among older persons,” Pahor told AFP.

In the Netherlands, Spain, Australia and Canada where falls were also recently studied, the trend has been similar since 2000. In France, the problem is described as a “major public health issue.”

Links to medication

The reasons for the spike have not been well studied, but geriatricians have some ideas.

It’s possible that the elderly of today are more active than those of the past. Rising obesity levels could also play a role since it is linked to a weakening of the muscles.

Perhaps most of all, though modern medicine has done a good job of improving the treatment of chronic illnesses, it has neglected quality of life for people in their old age.

“Unfortunately, some medications can increase fall risk,” Elizabeth Burns, a health scientist at the Centers for Disease and Control who co-authored the JAMA study, told AFP.

“Some medications, like psychoactives, can cause side effects such as vision impairment, confusion, and sleepiness,” she said, adding that the use of such drugs including opioids has increased substantially in recent years. 

George Taler, a geriatrician at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center who makes home visits in the U.S. capital, added that the method he most favors for lowering the risk of falling is simple: “de-prescribing” medication that is no longer necessary.

Studies have shown that when the number of prescription drugs taken daily is four or more, dizziness and loss of balance rise significantly.

“We’re very good at writing prescriptions for medications. We’re not so good about taking them away, even when they’re no longer helpful or necessary,” Taler told AFP.

“I’ll just give you a case today: this is an older woman who’s had multiple falls, and she has swelling in her ankles.

“Well, if I gave her a prescription for a diuretic to get rid of the swelling, and all the fluid disappears, she is likely to have a fall from dehydration. So we need to adjust the medicine to her reality.”

Physical exercise

Another study published in JAMA led by Teresa Liu-Ambrose at the University of British Columbia found that physical exercise played a role in reducing falling.

In a relatively small experiment carried out in the Greater Vancouver area with around 300 septuagenarians, researchers tested the effectiveness of the Otago Exercise Program, a home-based program supervised by a physical therapist.

It involves numerous strength-building exercises for knees, hips and ankles as well as balance-training (including walking backwards, standing on a leg, etc), repeated three times a week with participants asked to also walk 30 minutes at least twice per week.

The physical therapist visited at various intervals to keep things on track, with their fifth and final visit six months after the program began.

The program “significantly reduced the rate of subsequent falls” compared to those in a control group, but the researchers cautioned that the results required replication in other clinical settings.

One thing that has intrigued researchers has been the positives associated with physical exercise even when it did not increase muscle mass.

“The very act of exercise just makes people more aware of their body, more aware of their space, feeling better about themselves,” said Taler. “And even though we may not be able to measure that, it still has its measurable benefits in terms of falls.” 
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Cameroon’s forest tribes have long depended on insects to supplement their diets. The palm weevil grub, a fat worm found in palm trees, is such a popular source of protein that it has squirmed out of the forests and onto the plates at popular restaurants.

In Cameroon’s capital, some unusual ingredients are wiggling into city kitchens.

At Le Cercle Municipal restaurant, Chef Emile Engoulou cooks palm weevil grubs to create dishes of international standard.

Engoulou says they are the best protein that exist and they have not even finished making an inventory of all the benefits they obtain by eating the palm tree worms.

For people used to eating meat and fish, finding worms on their dinner plate can be a shock.

But the palm weevil grub can also be a pleasant surprise for many consumers like Paul Ndom.

He says the service is very well done, the dish well prepared and they are enjoying it. He says he hadn’t seen this way of cooking yet, but that it is great.

The high demand from chefs has led to a shortage of palm weevil grubs.

Villagers like Valentin Bidja, who used to gather the grubs in the forest, see it as an opportunity for people in rural areas.

Bidja says when they raise worms in the village, it is less stressful and more profitable and that in the village, they spend less energy.

The growing popularity of the grub in Cameroon, Chef Engoulou says, has made it several times more expensive than beef.

“When we do gastronomy in Cameroon, we need authentic, natural, organic and precious ingredients. I often like to say that the palm tree worm is the equivalent in Africa of caviar in Europe,” he said.

People already eat palm weevil in other African countries and in South America and Southeast Asia. Only time will tell if it climbs onto menus in Europe and beyond.

 

 

 
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California officially gave its blessing to coffee Monday, declaring the beverage does not pose a “significant” cancer risk.

The rule, proposed a year ago by regulators, means coffee won’t have to carry ominous warnings that the beverage may be bad for you.

The state took the rare move after a Los Angeles judge found Starbucks Corp. and other companies failed to show that benefits from drinking coffee outweighed risks from a byproduct of the roasting process.

That ruling put the industry in jeopardy of hefty civil penalties and in the position of either developing a process to remove the chemical or warning consumers about the risk of cancer. 

The chemical in question, acrylamide, is on a list that California says causes cancer, though other groups classify it as a “probable” carcinogen.

Under a law passed more than three decades ago by California voters, products that contain chemicals that cause cancer or birth defects must warn consumers about those risks.

The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which implements the law, concluded there was no significant risk after a World Health Organization review of more than 1,000 studies and found inadequate evidence that coffee causes cancer. Further, it concluded coffee reduces the risk of some types of cancer. 

“Coffee is a complex mixture of hundreds of chemicals that includes both carcinogens and anti-carcinogens,” said Sam Delson, a spokesman for the agency. “The overall effect of coffee consumption is not associated with any significant cancer risk.”

 It was the first time the state has declared such a brew of chemicals safe despite the presence of carcinogens, Delson said.

The coffee industry cheered the rule.

“This is a great day for science and coffee lovers,” said William Murray, president and chief executive of the National Coffee Association USA. 

“With this news, coffee drinkers around the world can wake up and enjoy the smell and taste of their coffee without hesitation.”

The Council for Education and Research on Toxics, which successfully sued the coffee industry in a case that has dragged on more than eight years in Los Angeles Superior Court, will challenge the validity of the state’s regulation in court, said attorney Raphael Metzger.

Metzger, who represents the small nonprofit in its lawsuit against Starbucks and about 90 coffee companies, said the regulation was adopted in violation of state law and disregards the statutes the agency is supposed to implement. He said the regulation can’t be applied retroactively to nullify the judge’s ruling.
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Two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya is temporarily allowed to compete without lowering her testosterone levels, following a ruling by Switzerland’s supreme court.

The court ordered the International Association of Athletics Federations to temporarily suspend their regulations until the organization makes its arguments to the court.

The suspension of the IAAF regulations is the latest in a line of legal disputes between the South African 800-meter runner and the governing body for track and field.

Hyperandrogenism

In April 2018, the IAAF put in places rules requiring women with higher-than-normal testosterone levels — known as hyperandrogenism — to artificially lower the hormone level in their bodies if they wanted to compete in distance races between 400 meters to a mile.

“This is an important case that will have fundamental implications for the human rights of female athletes,” Dorothee Schramm, the Swiss-based lawyer leading Semenya’s appeal, said after the ruling.

Semenya challenged the regulation and ultimately lost her case in the Court of Arbitration for Sport last month.

“Necessary, reasonable, proportionate” 

The court then acknowledged that the IAAF regulations were discriminatory, but that the regulations were “necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF’s aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics in the restricted events.”

Following the CAS ruling, Semenya appealed to the Switzerland supreme court. Semenya is still appealing the CAS ruling to get the IAAF testosterone rules permanently stricken.
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Two years have passed since U.S. President Donald Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement on June 1, 2017. No other country has followed the U.S. lead, and momentum to fight global warming has continued. But the world remains short of the goal set in Paris to avoid catastrophic climate change. VOA’s Steve Baragona reports.
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Hundreds of tornadoes and widespread floods have ravaged the U.S. Midwest and Great Plains states over the past couple of weeks. The flooding is breaking some weather records, and at least 38 people have been killed by tornadoes in the United States so far this year.

Blame climate change?

Scientists have been studying possible links between climate change and the frequency and ferocity of tornadoes.

Villanova University professor Stephen Strader says it is not yet clear how much influence the warming atmosphere and other changes have on these deadly storms.

In a VOA interview, the extreme weather scientist said, “We’re not there from a scientific standpoint, yet.” He said it does seem likely, but not certain, that we will see more severe weather of various kinds in the future.

Flooding

National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Andy Foster in Kansas City, Missouri, says there has been “major record flooding” across much of the central U.S.

He told VOA that heavy snow cover melted and combined with large amounts of rain from “multiple storm systems” saturated the ground and caused river flooding. Foster said when still more major storms brought “copious amounts” of rain, there was nowhere for the water to go, sparking flash floods in several states, inundating roads, towns and farmland.

Storms that led to flooding also included an unusual flurry of tornado activity.

Tornadoes

U.S. records show that destructive and deadly twisters are common during the spring months, particularly in an area called “Tornado Alley,” which covers several Midwestern states. The midsection of the United States is where cold air from the Rocky Mountains collides with warm, moist air flowing up from the Gulf of Mexico — prime conditions for tornadoes to form.

The mixture is part of the complex recipe for compact but powerful storms that tear roofs off buildings, toss huge trucks across farm fields, uproot trees and shred multistory brick buildings, all of which produce flying debris that can kill people.

Research scientist Harold Brooks says clusters of tornadoes occur every five or 10 years, but “the second half of May is going to go down as one of the busiest two-week periods on record.”

In a phone interview from the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, Brooks said the clearest trend in the data is not more or stronger tornadoes, but more days each year with multiple storms.

Villanova professor Strader said scientists currently have a hard time predicting tornadoes even “a few hours before the event,” so making projections about how many deadly storms may erupt years or decades from now is a daunting task.

Saving lives

As the annual death toll from tornadoes dropped significantly from the 1920s to the 1990s, the value of predicting violent storms has become more apparent. Brooks and other experts say lives have been saved through better forecasting, improved building codes and more effective warnings.

Strader said those improvements “stalled out” in recent years, prompting officials to seek better ways to educate the public and communicate timely, effective warnings. He said some people stay in mobile homes and other vulnerable places even after they get warnings in time to move to shelter.

As a start, weather experts are teaming up with social scientists to craft warnings that people will heed to find safety, either in a sturdy building or other safe place, Strader said.

“We’re bridging the physical science with social scientists to really look at what we can do to continue to solve this tornado issue,” he said.

 
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A new form of drug drastically improves survival rates of pre-menopausal women with the most common type of breast cancer, researchers said on Saturday, citing the results of an international clinical trial. 

The findings, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, showed that the addition of cell-cycle inhibitor ribociclib increased survival rates to 70 percent after 3½ years.

The mortality rate was 29 percent less than when patients were randomly assigned a placebo.

Lead author Sara Hurvitz told AFP the study focused on hormone receptor-positive breast cancer, which accounts for two-thirds of all breast cancer cases among younger women and is generally treated by therapies that block estrogen production.

“You actually can get synergy, or a better response, better cancer kill, by adding one of these cell-cycle inhibitors” on top of the hormone suppression, Hurvitz said.

The drug works by inhibiting the activity of cancer-cell promoting enzymes known as cyclin-dependent 4/6 kinases.

The treatment is less toxic than traditional chemotherapy because it more selectively targets cancerous cells, blocking their ability to multiply.

An estimated 268,000 new cases of breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S. in 2019, while the advanced form of the disease is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women aged 20 to 59. 

Growing menace

Though advanced breast cancer is less common among younger women, its incidence grew 2 percent per year between 1978 and 2008 for women aged 20 to 39, according to a previous study. 

The new trial, which looked at more than 670 cases, included only women under the age of 59 who had advanced cancer — stage four — for which they had not received prior hormone-blocking therapy.

“These are patients who tend to be diagnosed later, at a later stage in their disease, because we don’t have great screening modalities for young women,” said Hurvitz.

In addition, patients who develop breast cancer early tend to have more complex cases. 

“That’s what makes us so excited, because it’s a therapy that’s affecting so many patients with advanced disease,” added Hurvitz.

A pill is administered daily for 21 days, followed by seven days off to allow the body time to recover, since two-thirds of patients have a moderate to severe drop in white cell count.

Jamie Bennett, a spokeswoman for Novartis, which markets the drug under the brand name Kisqali and funded the research, said it cost $12,553 for a 28-day dose. 

But, she added, “the majority of patients in the U.S. with commercial insurance will pay $0 per month for their Kisqali prescription.”

There is no cure for metastatic breast cancer, and the majority of the women on the drug will require some form of therapy for the rest of their lives. 

‘Significant survival benefit’

Oncologist Harold Burstein, who was not involved in the research, said it was “an important study,” having established that the use of cyclin inhibitors “translates into a significant survival benefit for women.”

Burstein, who is with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said, “Hopefully, these data will enable access for this product for more women around the world, particularly in health care systems which assess value rigorously as part of their decisions for national access to drugs.”

Moving forward, Hurvitz said she was interested in investigating whether ribociclib could help nip cancer in the bud at an earlier stage. 

“We want to go and look at those women diagnosed with early stage disease, small tumors, tumors that haven’t gone to the lymph nodes or haven’t gone to other parts of the body, and see if we can stop it from returning later,” she said. 

A new global clinical trial is now underway. 
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You know things are not going well for your industry when one of your best customer gives a keynote speech at your annual conference to talk up your competition.

At the Virginia Coal and Energy Alliance’s 40th Annual Conference in May, electric utility Dominion Energy highlighted the company’s agreement with Smithfield Foods to generate electricity from hog waste.

“That’s right,” Dominion lobbyist James Beamer told the coal crowd, “Hog poop to green energy.”

Speakers from both main utilities at the conference said they have big plans for renewable energy, and they aim to reduce their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide 80% by 2050. 

None of this was good news for coal, the most carbon-heavy fuel for power generation.

Saturday marks the two-year anniversary of President Trump’s announcement that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. But momentum to combat climate change continues anyway.

But it’s not enough. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise in the United States and globally, putting the world farther and farther from the goal set in Paris to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Gloom in coal country

Beamer told the crowd at the Virginia coal conference that Dominion’s biggest upcoming investment in coal country would be a storage facility for renewable power. The company plans to build 3 gigawatts of solar by 2022 and a pioneering offshore wind project, he added. 

Although the Trump administration has acted to loosen regulations on mining and burning coal for power, utilities aren’t interested. Since 2010, 289 coal-fired power plants have shut down or plan to, according to the Sierra Club.  That’s more than half the national fleet. No new coal plants have been built. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts coal will continue to lose market share to natural gas and renewable energy through at least 2050. 

Kentucky’s energy and environment secretary, Charles Snavely, a former coal executive, told the conference that EIA may be underestimating. 

“If we’re already projecting a significant decrease over time,” he said, “I think that it will probably be worse than that.”

Private sector pressure

One big reason utilities are moving away from fossil fuels is that some of their biggest customers are demanding renewable energy. Big, energy-hungry corporations are pushing for solar and wind power in states where fighting climate change is not a priority. 

In Alabama, for example, the state public service commission first opened the door to large-scale solar projects in 2015 “based solely on the Walmart decision to come in and use solar power,” according to Commissioner Jeremy Oden, speaking on a panel of state utility regulators at the Virginia coal conference.

The company aims to power half its operations with renewable energy by 2025. 

Other corporations that Alabama is courting, including Toyota and Amazon, also have goals to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and are willing, in some cases, to pay a premium to get it. 

Companies like these are telling state regulators that they want renewable energy “no matter what,” said Missouri Public Service Commission Chairman Ryan Silvey. 

“No matter what,” agreed Kentucky Public Service Commissioner Talia Mathews.

Federal climate

Major corporations also are lobbying the federal government to do more. Levi’s, Nike, Mars Incorporated, Microsoft, PepsiCo, eBay and dozens of others are making the case that “we need federal policy. We need a price on carbon. And this is an issue that is not only about the future of our planet, our families, our kids, but our economy,” said CEO Mindy Lubber with the corporate sustainability nonprofit Ceres. 

Since the November 2018 elections swept a wave of left-leaning lawmakers into office, several states have stepped up their plans to fight climate change. 

This year, New Mexico, Nevada and Washington committed to producing 100 percent clean energy by 2050 or earlier. California and Hawaii already passed similar laws. 

The 2018 elections put climate change on the agenda at the federal level, too, for the first time in a decade. Democrats see an opportunity to campaign against Republican climate denial and inaction in the 2020 presidential election. 

World falling short

No other country has followed the United States on its path out of the Paris climate agreement. 

President Trump and his supporters have said the agreement puts the United States at a competitive disadvantage because it requires Americans to cut their emissions but does not impose the same restrictions on other countries. 

“The biggest emitters in the emerging economies, including China, India and Indonesia, all have very ambitious pledges under Paris,” said Andrew Light, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute and a former Obama administration climate advisor. “And it looks like they are on track to meeting them.” 

Meeting those pledges still would not keep the planet from disastrous warming. And efforts so far have not stopped greenhouse gas levels from rising, in the United States or globally. Emissions reached an all-time high last year, climbing more than 2% over 2017,  at a time when U.N. scientists say global emissions must fall 45% by 2030 to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. 

Some 80 countries are prepared to announce bigger steps to cut their emissions at the U.N. climate summit in September, according to U.N. climate envoy Luis Alfonso de Alba, although he did not specify which ones. 

“I am asking leaders not to come with beautiful speeches but to come with concrete plans to promote the climate action we need,” said U.N. Secretary-General Luis Guterres.
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A California company says its experimental blood test was able to detect many types of cancer at an early stage and gave very few false alarms in a study that included people with and without the disease.

Many companies are trying to develop early detection “liquid biopsy” tests that capture bits of DNA that cancer cells shed into blood.

Grail’s new results are from 2,300 people. The test detected 55% of known cancers and gave false alarms for 1%. It also accurately suggested where the cancer may be about 90% of the time.

The company gave results in news release Friday and will report them Saturday at a conference in Chicago. They have not been published or reviewed by other scientists.
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Chinese scientists have discovered that carbon dioxide is more efficient to use in fracking than water.

Fracking is the controversial process in which water or other fluids are injected into underground rocks at high pressure to release oil and natural gas deposits. 

U.S. environmentalists have denounced the process because of the huge amounts of water needed, the contamination of underground water supplies, and small earthquakes it triggers.

In a new report in the journal Joule, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China University of Petroleum discovered that using CO2 instead of water resulted in as much as 20 times more oil.

​”These real-world results revealed that as compared to water fracturing, CO2 fracturing is an important and greener alternative,” especially in arid areas where the water has to be trucked in, the report says.

Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. 

The scientists say the CO2 used in fracking would stay underground and not be released into the atmosphere.

The scientists say further research is needed as well as the winning over of cooperation from the industry.
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Government health officials say there have been 971 cases of measles in the United States so far this year, the most cases since 1994, when there were 963 cases for the entire year.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday if current outbreaks in and around New York City continue into the fall, the United States could lose its status as a country that has eliminated measles.

“That loss would be a huge blow for the nation and erase the hard work done by all levels of public health,” a CDC statement said.

Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, and the CDC says one of the primary reasons is the availability and widespread use of a safe and effective vaccine.

Fighting anti-vaccine propaganda

The CDC, World Health Organization, and other experts are fighting propaganda from parents and anti-vaccine activists who refuse to inoculate their children, insisting the vaccine is dangerous.

“Again, I want to reassure parents that vaccines are safe, they do not cause autism. The greater danger is the disease that vaccination prevents,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said. “Measles is preventable and the way to end this outbreak is to ensure that all children and adults who can get vaccinated do get vaccinated.”

Before vaccine, 4 million cases

Before 1963, when the measles vaccine was considered perfected, the CDC says as many as 4 million Americans got the disease every year and up to 500 victims died.

The measles virus is highly contagious and is spread primarily by coughing and sneezing.

Along with the refusal of some people to vaccinate their children, the CDC says the current nationwide outbreak is linked to travelers who are suspected of bringing back the virus from countries with their own large outbreaks, including Israel, the Philippines and Ukraine.
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The World Health Organization warns that more than 40 percent of smokers globally die from lung diseases, such as cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and tuberculosis. The warning comes ahead of World No Tobacco Day this Friday, with the theme being, “Don’t let tobacco take your breath away.”

The World Health Organization says that every year, tobacco use kills at least eight million people. The U.N. agency reports 3.3 million users will die from lung-related diseases. This number includes people exposed to second-hand smoke, among them more than 60,000 children under age five who die of lower respiratory infections due to passive smoking.

Vinayak Prasad, the acting director of the WHO’s Department for the Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases, says the global economic cost of using tobacco is $1.4 trillion. This is due to health expenditures, loss of productivity from illness and other expenses resulting from smoking-related diseases. He says both lives and money could be saved if people stopped smoking.

“What we see also is that if people who are smoking, almost 20 percent of the world is smoking, if they quit, some of the benefits actually come very quickly, especially the lung diseases. Within two weeks, the lung functions actually start to become normal,” he said.

The World Health Organization reports that globally, the prevalence of smoking has gone down from 27 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2016. But the WHO, notes that the number of tobacco users worldwide has remained stable at 1.1 billion because of population growth.

Kerstin Schotte, WHO technical officer in the same department as Prasad, notes a steeper decline in the prevalence of smoking in wealthier countries, compared to poorer ones.

“And, some low-and-middle income countries even have increasing smoking prevalence rates. This is where the tobacco industry is going at the moment,” she said. “They know a little bit that it is a lost cause in Europe and North America, so they are going into the low-and-middle-income countries, targeting especially women and children there.”

The World Health Organization recommends a number of effective, low-cost measures countries can adopt to reduce tobacco consumption.

These include the creation of smoke-free environments, imposing a ban on all forms of tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship. WHO also suggests putting a high tax on the sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products to make them unaffordable for many, especially young people.

 

 

 
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The World Health Organization says success in ending the Ebola epidemic in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo hinges upon improving security in North Kivu and Ituri provinces. The region has been engulfed in conflict for many years, and many locals do not trust outsiders, even the ones trying to stop the spread of the deadly virus.

The U.N. health agency reports security incidents in eastern DRC have increased dramatically in the past few months. So far this year, it reports 174 attacks by armed groups in North Kivu on health care facilities, workers and patients. These include five deaths and 51 injuries.

In mid-April, Cameroonian Dr. Richard Mouzoko was shot and killed while working in a hospital in Butembo, North Kivu. This incident was seen as a big setback to the Ebola operation.

This past Saturday, villagers killed a health worker in the health sector of Mabalako.

WHO Regional Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, says health workers are being intimidated and threatened by armed men and live in fear, not knowing when the next violent attack may occur.

She says this insecurity is leading to a lack of access and driving the increase in cases.

“When the response cannot reach people,” she said, “they do not get the chance to be vaccinated or to receive life-saving treatment if they do fall ill.

“The technical means to stop this Ebola outbreak are available,” she added. “But without access or a secure operating environment, they cannot be deployed optimally and effectively enough. …This is why the response is one of the most complex health emergencies the world has faced.”

The latest WHO figures show 1,920 Ebola cases in the region, including 1,281 deaths. A new structure for coordinating and strengthening the Ebola response was presented at the World Health Assembly this week.

WHO Executive Director of Health Emergencies Michael Ryan says key partners will have to scale up their operations and take charge of crucial aspects of the new strategy.

“We believe the work on security, the work on non-humanitarian interventions and the work on sustainable financing are the things that need to happen to provide the environment in which public health operations can continue to progress and be successful,” he said.

However, he warns if there are further large-scale security incidents than all bets are off. He says the likely impact of this ongoing instability will have on the Ebola emergency operation is unpredictable, but worrisome.
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Roberta Boltz keeps her doors unlocked at night. The former coal mine worker says it is just one perk of living in the small Pennsylvania town of Hegins.

But last Christmas morning, she had her first epileptic seizure, and her only worry about rural life took center stage: access to health care. There is no hospital in her community of 812 residents, and she says she does not trust the one closest to her.

“I’ve heard people say they wouldn’t send their dog to that hospital,” Boltz said. “They’re so understaffed.”

Seated upright in a platinum nightgown, with gauze covering her thin forehead, Boltz recently made the one-hour commute to Danville, Pennsylvania’s, eight-story, 559-bed Geisinger Medical Center to receive care, as she has done during several critical life moments. Geisinger treated her son’s Crohn’s disease when he was a child, and more recently, after her husband suffered a heart attack. 

Located beside a 300-acre forest, Danville is not much more urban than Hegins. With a population of 4,631, it could not by itself support a hospital this size that serves all of central Pennsylvania and has grappled with its own issue of filling medical staff positions.

Geisinger has tried to solve its own staffing problem by hiring immigrants from Jamaica, India, the Philippines, South Korea, Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana and others — many of whom have come to live in a borough (town) that is 94% white. 

In interviews with VOA, Geisinger staff referred to the nursing shortage crisis as one of its biggest supply-and-demand challenges. Despite being the region’s “employer of choice,” they say local talent recruitment alone has fallen short of their needs.

Big shortage

The entire United States faces a massive shortage of health care professionals over the next decade, including up to 120,000 physicians by 2030. One-third of currently active doctors in the country will reach retirement age during that span.

Unless the health care workforce gap is addressed, rural areas are likely to bear the brunt of its effects, says Andrew Lim, director of quantitative research at New American Economy, a bipartisan research organization.

“If you look at urban areas, there are over 200 doctors per 100,000 people. But if you look at rural counties, the number of doctors to go around is much less — something like 82 for every 100,000,” Lim told VOA.

The population of Danville more than doubles when Geisinger — with its 6,200 employees — is fully staffed. Among the workers: 415 internationally trained physicians and 57 foreign-born registered nurses.

“Not only is Geisinger trying to recruit (international nurses), many other health systems are,” Julene Campion, vice president of human resources at Geisinger, told VOA. “We could probably use another 100 easily (across the Geisinger network), but there aren’t enough available.”

“We’ve outgrown our ability to supply,” added Crystal Muthler, Geisinger’s vice president of nursing — a 30-year veteran. 

The community’s needs, combined with an aging workforce, she says, are ultimately what led Geisinger to reevaluate its staffing model and implement an international nurse initiative in 2018.

“We have to look at how we attract people to the area,” Muthler said. 

According to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, health care is projected to be the largest-growing sector of new job creation over the next decade, accounting for more than 1.3 million new jobs, roughly one-third of them for registered nurses.

But for those looking to find opportunity in the United States, while helping fill a critical shortage, obstacles remain.

Doctors have been impacted by the Trump administration’s travel ban, while some health aides and nursing assistants could be barred from getting a green card.

It is unclear whether Trump’s new immigration plan, announced on May 16, will help health care staffing. The merit-based system would favor immigrants who fall into broad “high-skill” categories, including “professional and specialized vocations,” at the cost of family-based and humanitarian immigrant visas.

‘Kindness is my language’

Even now, foreign-born health care professionals represent more than their share of the overall U.S. population; 14.7% of nurses and 22.7% of health aides are immigrants, according to NAE, compared to 13.7% of the population as a whole.

Thirty-five-year-old Hemoy Drummond, a recent Geisinger hire from Jamaica, has an EB-3 employment-based immigrant visa. She has 13 years of experience as a registered nurse.

“I was very nervous. It was a new setting, new expectations,” Drummond said. “But when I got here, I realized that people are kind. … I said, ‘That’s my language.'”

Danville, with its lush hillsides and nearby cornfields, reminds her of the sugar cane fields her father harvested in her native Clarkstown, Jamaica. Her community is safe. The mother of two can walk home alone after a late shift.

The nursing work is easier in Danville than in a short-staffed Montego Bay hospital.

“It’s easier to care for four to six (patients at Geisinger) than 18 (in Jamaica),” Drummond said. “I love to talk with (patients) that extra minute.”

Willing to stay

In town, locals generally welcome — or at least tolerate — their new international neighbors. 

“They’re magnificent!” remarked one woman on Danville’s Mill Street. “We’d be stupid not to let them into our country.”

Two hours southeast of Danville, along the Susquehanna River in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, views are more mixed. A foreign-born doctor described Chambersburg as “where blue meets red.” 

Yet Chambersburg Hospital, too, has been trying to solve its health care staffing problems with immigrants.

In Chambersburg, population 20,878, VOA spoke with 10 foreign-born doctors from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Poland and Hungary. Nine of them expressed a willingness to remain in rural Pennsylvania long term, including Indian physicians affected by a per-country green card backlog that has placed their families’ future in limbo. 

​U.S.-born physicians do not want to go to Chambersburg, much less stay, explained Dr. Golam Mostofa, chairman of the department of hospital medicine at Chambersburg Hospital.

“Fifty percent of our hospital medicine physicians are foreign graduates,” Mostofa said. “If we interview 10 American graduates, maybe one shows up.”

Dr. Muhammad Khokhar, a gastroenterologist from Lahore, Pakistan, has been in Chambersburg for 16 years. He remains committed to the town, even after his sixth grade daughter’s classmates at a Montessori school accused her of making bombs.

“(When) you have invested so much in the community, and you have built up relationships with your partners and the practice, it’s difficult,” Khokhar said. 

“I’m here,” he added. “This is my retirement place.”

 

 
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Whether you live in a city of somewhere more rural, there are always things in the air, invisible to the naked eye that could make you sneeze or cause major illness. Detecting these microscopic materials such as pollen, mold and pollutants could be time consuming and costly. A lab at the University of California, Los Angeles is trying to solve that problem by developing a handheld allergen detector for consumers. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details.
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The U.S. faces a massive shortage of health care professionals over the next decade, including up to 120,000 physicians by 2030, according to data by the Association of American Medical Colleges. With an aging U.S. population and workforce, immigrant doctors and nurses are playing a growing role in health care, especially in rural areas where staff shortages are most severe. But as VOA’s Ramon Taylor reports, their help alone may not be enough to end the crisis.
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A civil lawsuit brought by the state of Oklahoma against drugmaker Johnson & Johnson went to trial Tuesday over the company’s alleged role in the U.S. opioid epidemic. 

The first-of-its-kind trial, which holds opioid manufacturers responsible for the drug crisis gripping the country, could have a large impact on other states seeking similar compensation.

In opening statements, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter called the prescription opioid epidemic the “worst man-made public health crisis in the history of our state and country.”

Hunter further characterized Johnson & Johnson as being motivated by greed and having been engaged in “a cynical, deceitful multimillion-dollar brainwashing campaign.”

Drugmakers named in the lawsuit denied claims made by the state, which is located in the U.S. Great Plains. Two of those companies settled with the state before the trial began.

In an opening statement, Larry Ottaway, a Johnson & Johnson defense lawyer, told the court that Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, advertised its drugs in compliance with a Food and Drug Administration consensus that said opioids “only rarely caused addiction.”

The state of Oklahoma alleges Johnson & Johnson created a surplus of painkillers and is responsible for creating a “public nuisance.”

“If you have an oversupply, people will die,” said Brad Beckworth, a private attorney hired by the state of Oklahoma. In explaining some of the numbers behind the crisis, he told the court there were 135 opioid pills available for every adult in Cleveland County, which has a population of about 280,000. Cleveland County is where the trial is being held.

County District Judge Thad Balkman will decide the case, in lieu of a jury.

On Sunday, Israel-based Teva Pharmaceuticals Ltd. reached an $85 million settlement with the state. Teva said in a statement, “The settlement does not establish any wrongdoing on the part of the company. Teva has not contributed to the abuse of opioids in Oklahoma in any way.”

In March, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, settled with the state for $270 million.

Other lawsuits

Nationwide, states, cities and tribal governments have brought more than 1,600 lawsuits against drugmakers, seeking compensation for money spent addressing the opioid epidemic.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, there were 388 overdose deaths involving opioids in Oklahoma in 2017, a rate of 10.2 deaths per 100,000 persons. The national rate was 14.6 deaths per 100,000 persons.

In his opening statement, Attorney General Hunter said opioid overdoses had killed 4,653 people in the state from 2007 to 2017.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdose deaths involving prescription opioids rose from 3,442 in 1999 to 17,029 in 2017, the latest year for such data. Drug overdose deaths involving any opioid — prescription opioids (including methadone), synthetic opioids and heroin — rose from 18,515 deaths in 2007 to 47,600 deaths in 2017, according to the CDC.
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A joint rapid response team of experts from the United States and the U.N. World Health Organization arrived in Pakistan Tuesday to support the response to the country’s “biggest” outbreak of HIV infections in a southern district where more than 700 people, mostly children, have been diagnosed over the past month.

Nearly 22,000 individuals have been subjected to blood screening since the outbreak was first reported in Larkana on April 25. The district, with an estimated population of 1.5 million, is located in Sindh province and it has previously also experienced repeated, though limited, outbreaks of the virus, which causes AIDS.

The major testing program is ongoing and local officials say hundreds of people line up everyday outside screening camps to get tested voluntarily after watching news on television about the HIV epidemic in their area.

“More than 80% of those infected are children less than 15 years old,” said Dr. Maria Elena G. Filio-Borromeo, UNAIDS’ country director for Pakistan and Afghanistan. She spoke to VOA from the Pakistani province where her agency is leading the coordination and facilitation of support from U.N. agencies to help local partners effectively respond to the crisis.

Borromeo noted that more than half the children affected are under the age of 5. “This poses a particular challenge. It is likely that they got the virus through unclean needles and syringes, or through unsafe blood transfusion,” she said.

The UNAIDS country chief would not, however, speculate on exactly what might have caused the HIV outbreak. “It is a very different profile of outbreak, so a thorough investigation is needed,” Borromeo emphasized.

She said that the 11-member visiting team of experts from WHO and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) landed in the provincial capital of Karachi.

Borromeo added the team is visiting the country at the request of the Pakistani government and they would work closely with local partners to carry out the investigation for up to three weeks to ascertain the source of the outbreak and controlling it.

After the outbreak investigation, she stressed, a “huge amount” of work is expected ensuring that the root cause of the outbreak will be addressed, and future outbreaks will be prevented.

“In most cases, parents of the infected children have been tested negative for HIV, which is a rare and extremely worrisome finding,” according to Zafar Mirza, who is the advisor on health to the federal government.

Mirza said that used syringes being repackaged and sold in Pakistan, contaminated blood transfusion as well as a “faulty” infection prevention and control system in hospitals could be the factors behind the outbreak in Larkana.

“Either unsafe injections are spreading the virus in children or there is another reason that we have been unable to determine so far,” the Pakistani advisor explained.

He said he was hopeful the international rapid response team would be able to ascertain the reasons, noting the ongoing efforts to control and investigate the underlying causes of the HIV outbreak in Larkana were not sufficient.

Critics say the outbreak demonstrated “public health failure” particularly in Sindh, though the health sector elsewhere in Pakistan also faces critical challenges stemming from a lack of funding and priority.

Pakistani and U.N. officials do not rule out the possibility that the HIV outbreak is the outcome of shady medical practices in private as well as public hospitals.

Out of an estimated 600,000 unqualified doctors unlawfully practicing in Pakistan, 270,000 of them are working in Sindh, according to UNAIDS.

Mirza cautioned that reported cases of HIV/AIDS in Pakistan are far less than the actual magnitude of the problem. He says that official estimates put the number of HIV/AIDS carriers in the country at around 163,000.

“But only 25,000 of them are registered with our national and provincial HIV/AIDS treatment centers, and out of them, merely 16,000 visit the programs routinely to receive their medicine,” the advisor noted.

 
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The idea of pumping excess carbon emissions underground has been around for a while. As the process gets cheaper and more practical scientists are testing new ways to lock away their greenhouse gases. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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