Progress in fighting Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ebola outbreak, the second worst ever, will be reversed if fighting continues around the disease hot spots of Beni and Butembo, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday.

“We have reached a critical point in the Ebola response,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. “After an intensification of field activities, we were seeing hopeful signs in many areas, including a recent decrease in cases in Beni. 

 

“These gains could be lost if we suffer a period of prolonged insecurity, resulting in increased transmission. That would be a tragedy for the local population, who have already suffered too much.” 

 

The disease has killed 356 of the 585 people infected during the almost six-month outbreak, and one-fifth of the cases have occurred within the past three weeks, according to a weekly update from WHO. 

 

The epidemic in a volatile part of DRC is now surpassed only by the 2013-16 outbreak in West Africa, where more than 28,000 cases were confirmed. 

 

Congo has suffered 10 Ebola outbreaks since the virus was discovered there in 1976. It spreads through contact with bodily fluids and causes hemorrhagic fever with severe vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding. 

 

On Thursday, Congo’s Health Ministry said 24 patients fled an Ebola treatment center in Beni when it came under attack by people protesting the cancellation of voting in the eastern city in Sunday’s presidential election. 

 

“Protests at government buildings in Beni spilled over to an Ebola transit center, frightening people waiting for Ebola test results and the staff who were caring for them. Staff at the center temporarily withdrew and most suspected cases were transferred to a nearby treatment center,” Tedros said. 

 

Health teams in Beni were prevented from carrying out critical field work, including vaccinations, tracing of potential Ebola carriers, and following up on alerts of potential new cases. 

 

In Butembo, health workers were unable to give vaccinations or trace people who may have come into contact with the disease — a critical part of preventing its spread. 

 

In other areas, the fight against Ebola has continued, and local communities have been generally supportive of the health teams, Tedros said.
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International migrants who relocate to high-income countries to work, study or join family members are less likely to die prematurely than people born in their new homelands, a research review suggests. 

For the analysis, researchers examined data from 96 studies with mortality estimates for more than 15.2 million international migrants in 92 countries. 

Overall, migrants were about 30 percent less likely to experience premature death from all causes than other people in the general populations of the countries where they moved, the analysis found. 

“Migrants to rich countries have lower rates of death due to most major disease areas compared to the general population,” said lead study author Robert Aldridge of University College London in the U.K. 

“We know from U.N. data that the majority of migrants to these rich countries tend to be moving for work or study,” Aldridge said by email. 

About 258 million people worldwide reside outside their countries of birth, accounting for more than 3 percent of the world’s population, researchers note in The Lancet. 

In many high-income nations, public perception that migrants place an undue burden on society in general and on health resources in particular has led to restrictions on migrants’ access to care, the authors write. 

But the current analysis suggests that, if anything, migrants may use fewer health resources than native-born residents, Aldridge said by email. 

Diseases, external causes

The only causes of death that were more common among migrants were infectious disease and external causes like homicide, the analysis found. 

Immigrants were 28 percent more likely to die of external causes and more than twice as likely to die of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis and HIV than people who were born in their adopted homelands. 

However, immigrants were less likely to die from a variety of other causes including heart disease, digestive disorders, endocrine or circulatory problems, mental health disorders, cancers or diseases of the respiratory or nervous systems. 

Both men and women appeared to have a longevity advantage after migration. Male immigrants were 28 percent less likely to die prematurely from all causes than native-born men, while female immigrants were 25 percent less likely to die prematurely. 

The vast majority of the studies in the analysis focused on migration to high-income countries, not on refugees or asylum seekers. Researchers also excluded studies from their analysis that focused just on migrants with serious or chronic health problems or just on maternal and infant health outcomes. 

It may be, however, that migrants in the study were healthier than people in their native countries who didn’t migrate, said Anjali Borhade, director of the Disha Foundation in Gurugram, India, and co-author of an editorial accompanying the study. 

“Educated migrants have better sources of income and being healthy doesn’t affect their choice to migrate,” Borhade said by email. “Also, educated migrants have better living or working conditions and their health status is similar to the host populations, both for risks as well as outcomes.” 

Infectious disease and homicide deaths may be higher among migrants than other people in the general population because of unfavorable conditions immigrants face at work and in their new communities, Borhade added. That’s because many young, relatively healthy migrants may take low-paying and dangerous jobs and only be able to afford housing in subpar conditions. 

“Hazardous jobs and low living conditions increase their risk of dying due to external causes and infectious diseases,” Borhade said. “However, since migrants are healthier to begin with, their mortality due to other causes might be lower.” 
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Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said Friday that the world’s biggest social network has “fundamentally” changed to focus on securing its systems against manipulation and misinformation. 

 

Capping a tumultuous year marked by data protection scandals and government probes, Zuckerberg said he was “proud of the progress we’ve made” in addressing Facebook’s problems. 

 

“For 2018, my personal challenge has been to focus on addressing some of the most important issues facing our community — whether that’s preventing election interference, stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation, making sure people have control of their information, and ensuring our services improve people’s well-being,” he wrote on his Facebook page. 

 

“We’re a very different company today than we were in 2016, or even a year ago. We’ve fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services, and we’ve systematically shifted a large portion of our company to work on preventing harm.” 

 

He said Facebook now has more than 30,000 people “working on safety” and invests billions of dollars in security. 

Misuse of data

 

Zuckerberg’s comments come at the close of a year when Facebook was roiled by revelations about the misuse of personal data by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 U.S. election and on data sharing with business partners.  

But he said the questions around Facebook are “more than a one-year challenge” and that the California giant was in the process of “multiyear plans to overhaul our systems.” 

 

“In the past we didn’t focus as much on these issues as we needed to, but we’re now much more proactive,” he said. 

 

The comments follow a message from Zuckerberg in January, before many of Facebook’s troubles emerged, when he outlined his goals of stemming abuse and hate and foreign interference, among other things, on the network used by more than 2 billion people. 

 

“My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues,” Zuckerberg said in January. 

Artificial intelligence

 

In Friday’s message, Zuckerberg enumerated a series of steps taken over the past year, including fact-checking partnerships, advertising transparency and artificial intelligence to remove harmful content. 

 

He added that Facebook’s systems were also being retooled with the aim of helping “improve people’s well-being,” based on research it conducted. 

 

The research, he said, “found that when people use the internet to interact with others, that’s associated with all the positive aspects of well-being. … But when you just use the internet to consume content passively, that’s not associated with those same positive effects.” 

 

One of the changes aims to reduce “viral videos” that are shared across the Facebook platform. 

 

“These changes intentionally reduced engagement and revenue in the near term, although we believe they’ll help us build a stronger community and business over the long term,” Zuckerberg said.
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Chemical attacks, cloning and giant black holes. The year in science was an odd and diverse series of headlines. VOA’s Kevin Enochs takes a look at some of the big stories of the year.
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The Trump administration on Friday said limits on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants were no longer necessary as their costs outweighed the benefits, a move environmentalists said was favorable for the coal industry and could increase health hazards.

Under the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or MATS, enacted under former President Barack Obama, coal plants have been forced to install expensive equipment to cut output of mercury, which can harm pregnant women and put infants and children at risk of developmental problems.

Since August, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been reconsidering the justification for the rule.

Electric utilities have pushed back on the potential loosening of requirements, saying they have already invested in technology to cut emissions of the dangerous pollutant.

In a statement issued Friday during a partial government shutdown, the EPA said the emission standards of the MATS rule would remain in place. But it proposed to withdraw the justification for the requirements.

“EPA is proposing that it is not ‘appropriate and necessary’ to regulate HAP emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants … because the costs of such regulation grossly outweigh the quantified HAP benefits,” it said.

The industry had challenged a 2016 conclusion by Obama’s EPA that the rule was justified because savings to U.S. consumers on health care costs would exceed compliance costs. The calculations accounted for how pollution-control equipment would reduce emissions of other harmful substances in addition to mercury.

Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has targeted rolling back Obama-era environmental and climate protections to maximize production of domestic fossil fuels, including crude oil. U.S. oil production is the highest in the world, above Saudi Arabia and Russia, after a boom that was triggered more than a decade ago by improved drilling technology.
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A cleft lip or cleft palate is one of the most common birth defects worldwide. Before birth, babies can have a split, or cleft, in their lip and the roof of the mouth. This split normally closes between the 6th to 11th week of pregnancy. If this doesn’t happen, and the baby is born with this split, doctors can usually fix it. But if the cleft isn’t fixed, the baby can have serious health problems and a shortened life.

In the U.S. and other developed countries, corrective surgery is done when a baby is between three months and 18 months old.  Surgical intervention is less common in less developed nations.

Dr. Albert Oh, a pediatric plastic surgeon, said he performs one or two corrective surgeries a week at Children’s National hospital in Washington.

“We’re one of the busiest centers in the United States, and so my partner and I, we average over a hundred primary cases per year.”

About one out of every 1,500 babies in the U.S. is born with a cleft palate. One out of every 900 babies is born with cleft lip. Babies of African descent have lower odds — one out of every 1,200 births.

Dr. Yang Chai at the University of Southern California said Asians are most at risk.

“If you look at a patient population worldwide, if you are Asian, the prevalence is about 1 out of 700.”

These children are often stigmatized because of the way they look. But complications from a cleft lip and cleft palate go beyond the cosmetic. They impact speech and cause dental problems. A baby with a cleft palate cannot suck and is at risk of being malnourished. Malnutrition, in turn, causes stunted growth.

Dr. Ben Gitterman, a pediatrician who has worked as a volunteer in low-income countries to help these children, said the experience was life-changing.

“Seeing these kids and thinking, ‘What a cute little 3 or 4 year old,’ and finding that 3 or 4 year old was 7, 8 or 9.  And because of the fact that they couldn’t process food, they couldn’t eat well. They had been so stunted … by malnutrition. Not malnutrition from the lack of food in the community, but because they couldn’t feed properly because of the cleft lip and palate situation. These were tiny little kids, and I was in shock.”

Gitterman has volunteered numerous times with Operation Smile, one of the charities that organizes surgical missions to help these children.  In a Skype interview with Dr. Bill Magee, Operation Smile’s founder, Magee said his organization’s mission has expanded in the more than 35 years of its existence.

“Up until about 1999, all of our volunteers pretty much came out of the United States. Today, 70 to 80 percent of our missions are done by local people in their countries that we have trained.”

Charitable organizations perform more than 80 percent of cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries in Vietnam, according to a 2016 study issued by Dr. William Magee III and his colleagues at the University of Southern California. Magee III is the son of the founder of Operation Smile.

The report showed how difficult it is for parents to get the surgery their children need in low and middle income countries. It’s common in these countries for medical care to be paid in advance, which many families cannot afford.  

Operation Smile is working to change that.

“It’s given us this incredible opportunity to understand how the infrastructure of surgery is so important … and how to advance that infrastructure in countries all over the world,” Magee said.

As for what causes this condition, genetic factors account for about 30 percent of cleft conditions. The mother’s health is a contributing factor, but scientists are still searching for other causes with the hope of one day being able to prevent children from being born with cleft lips or palates.
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From floods to extreme heat, 10 of the worst climate-linked disasters in 2018 caused at least $84.8 billion worth of damage, said a study released by the charity Christian Aid on Thursday.

Extreme weather driven by climate change hit every populated continent this year, the British relief organization said, warning urgent action was needed to combat global warming.

“This report shows that for many people, climate change is having devastating impacts on their lives and livelihoods right now,” said Kat Kramer, who heads Christian Aid’s work on climate issues, in a statement.

Experts say a warming world will lead to sweltering heatwaves, more extreme rainfall, shrinking harvests and worsening water shortages, causing both monetary losses and human misery.

Almost 200 nations are aiming to limit the rise in average world temperatures under the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, though some warn progress to meet targets has been slow.

The 20 warmest years on record have been within the last 22 years, the United Nations said last month, with 2018 on track to be the fourth hottest.

The most expensive climate-linked weather events of 2018 were Hurricanes Florence and Michael, which caused at least $32 billion worth of damage as they slammed into the United States, the Caribbean and parts of Central America, the report said.

The United States also suffered at least $9 billion of losses from wildfires that caused dozens of deaths and destroyed thousands of homes in California.

Japan was badly hit by severe floods over the summer, followed by the powerful Typhoon Jebi in autumn, which together caused more than $9.3 billion in damages, said the report.

It also cited droughts in Europe, floods in southern India and Typhoon Mangkhut in the Philippines and China among the most expensive climate-linked disasters of 2018.

The report’s authors collated total cost figures using data from sources including governments, banks and insurance firms, though in some cases the figures only covered insured losses and also failed to take account of the human costs of such events.

They added that rising temperatures would continue to drive extreme weather events as they urged action to prevent further global warming which would impact the poorest and most vulnerable communities hardest.

“The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle,” said Michael Mann, professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University, in a statement on the study.

“The world’s weather is becoming more extreme before our eyes – the only thing that can stop this destructive trend from escalating is a rapid fall in carbon emissions.”

 
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The last year was a 12-month champagne toast for the legal marijuana industry as the global market exploded and cannabis pushed its way further into the financial and cultural mainstream.

Liberal California became the largest legal U.S. marketplace, while conservative Utah and Oklahoma embraced medical marijuana. Canada ushered in broad legalization , and Mexico’s Supreme Court set the stage for that country to follow.

U.S. drug regulators approved the first marijuana-based pharmaceutical to treat kids with a form of epilepsy, and billions of investment dollars poured into cannabis companies. Even main street brands like Coca-Cola said they are considering joining the party.

“I have been working on this for decades, and this was the year that the movement crested,” said U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat working to overturn the federal ban on pot. “It’s clear that this is all coming to a head.”

With buzz building across the globe, the momentum will continue into 2019.

Luxembourg is poised to become the first European country to legalize recreational marijuana, and South Africa is moving in that direction. Thailand legalized medicinal use of marijuana on Tuesday, and other Southeastern Asian countries may follow South Korea’s lead in legalizing cannabidiol, or CBD. It’s a non-psychoactive compound found in marijuana and hemp plants and used for treatment of certain medical problems.

“It’s not just the U.S. now. It’s spreading,” said Ben Curren, CEO of Green Bits, a San Jose, California, company that develops software for marijuana retailers and businesses.

Curren’s firm is one of many that blossomed as the industry grew. He started the company in 2014 with two friends. Now, he has 85 employees, and the company’s software processes $2.5 billion in sales transactions a year for more than 1,000 U.S. retail stores and dispensaries.

Green Bits raised $17 million in April, pulling in money from investment firms including Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Capital. Curren hopes to expand internationally by 2020.

“A lot of the problem is keeping up with growth,” he said.

Legal marijuana was a $10.4 billion industry in the U.S. in 2018 with a quarter-million jobs devoted just to the handling of marijuana plants, said Beau Whitney, vice president and senior economist at New Frontier Data, a leading cannabis market research and data analysis firm. There are many other jobs that don’t involve direct work with the plants but they are harder to quantify, Whitney said.

Investors poured $10 billion into cannabis in North America in 2018, twice what was invested in the last three years combined, he said, and the combined North American market is expected to reach more than $16 billion in 2019.

“Investors are getting much savvier when it comes to this space because even just a couple of years ago, you’d throw money at it and hope that something would stick,” he said. “But now investors are much more discerning.”

Increasingly, U.S. lawmakers see that success and want it for their states.

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. states now have legalized some form of medical marijuana.

Voters in November made Michigan the 10th state — and first in the Midwest — to legalize recreational marijuana. Governors in New York and New Jersey are pushing for a similar law in their states next year, and momentum for broad legalization is building in Pennsylvania and Illinois.

“Let’s legalize the adult use of recreational marijuana once and for all,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last week.

State lawmakers in Nebraska just formed a campaign committee to put a medical cannabis initiative to voters in 2020. Nebraska shares a border with Colorado, one of the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana, and Iowa, which recently started a limited medical marijuana program.

“Attitudes have been rapidly evolving and changing. I know that my attitude toward it has also changed,” said Nebraska state Sen. Adam Morfeld, a Democrat. “Seeing the medical benefits and seeing other states implement it … has convinced me that it’s not the dangerous drug it’s made out to be.”

With all its success, the U.S. marijuana industry continues to be undercut by a robust black market and federal law that treats marijuana as a controlled substance like heroin. Financial institutions are skittish about cannabis businesses, even in U.S. states where they are legal, and investors until recently have been reluctant to put their money behind pot.

Marijuana businesses can’t deduct their business expenses on their federal taxes and face huge challenges getting insurance and finding real estate for their brick-and-mortar operations.

“Until you have complete federal legalization, you’re going to be living with that structure,” said Marc Press, a New Jersey attorney who advises cannabis businesses.

At the start of the year, the industry was chilled when then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded a policy shielding state-licensed medical marijuana operators from federal drug prosecutions. Ultimately the move had minimal impact because federal prosecutors showed little interest in going after legal operators.

Sessions, a staunch marijuana opponent, later lost his job while President Donald Trump said he was inclined to support an effort by U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, to relax the federal prohibition.

In November, Democrats won control of the U.S. House and want to use it next year to pass legislation that eases federal restrictions on the legal marijuana industry without removing it from the controlled substances list.

Gardner and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren have proposed legislation allowing state-approved commercial cannabis activity under federal law. The bill also would let states and Indian tribes determine how best to regulate marijuana commerce within their boundaries without fear of federal intervention.

If those provisions become law, they could open up banking for the marijuana industry nationwide and make it easier for cannabis companies to secure capital.

Blumenauer’s “blueprint” to legalize marijuana also calls for the federal government to provide medical marijuana for veterans, more equitable taxation for marijuana businesses and rolling back federal prohibitions on marijuana research, among other things.

“We have elected the most pro-cannabis Congress in history and more important, some of the people who were roadblocks to our work … are gone,” Blumenauer said. “If we’re able to jump-start it in the House, I think there will be support in the Senate, particularly if we deal with things that are important, like veterans’ access and banking.”
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Japan will withdraw from the International Whaling Commission and resume commercial whaling in July. Wednesday’s announcement was met with opposition from animal rights groups, who say that Tokyo is violating international law. Japan says whaling will only be in its own waters and exclusive economic zone. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Female circumcision — a practice that opponents call female genital mutilation — has been a coming-of-age ritual among the Maasai tribe of Kenya for generations. But it is becoming less common, in part because of one man who is trying to persuade tribe members to abandon the practice. Douglas Meritei began his campaign about 10 years ago. He spoke to Rael Ombuor, who reports for VOA from the Kimana settlement in southern Kenya.
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Although space travel exposes astronauts to forms of radiation that are uncommon on Earth, and that are linked to cancers and heart problems, a U.S. study suggests this doesn’t significantly shorten their lives.

Researchers compared nearly 60 years of data on U.S. male astronauts and a group of men who are similarly extra-fit, affluent and receive elite health care: pro athletes. They found that neither group has higher rates than the other of death overall or of early deaths. Both groups do tend to outlast the 

rest of us, however. 

Astronauts are generally well-educated, more affluent and more physically fit than the typical American, and some previous research has linked this career to a lower risk of premature death, the study team notes in Occupational & Environmental Medicine. 

But much of the previous research on mortality rates in astronauts hasn’t accounted for the mental and physical demands of this career, or the so-called “healthy worker effect” that leads people with employment of any kind to typically have fewer medical issues than individuals who are unable to work, said study co-author Robert Reynolds of Mortality Research & 

Consulting Inc. in City of Industry, Calif. 

Comparable group needed

“The challenge has always been to understand if astronauts are as healthy as they would be had they been otherwise comparably employed but had never gone to space at all,” Reynolds said by email. “To do this, we needed to find a group that is comparable on several important factors, but has never 

been to space.” 

The researchers compared mortality rates for male U.S. astronauts to those of professional athletes from Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association between 1960 and mid-2018.

Both athletes and astronauts had a lower risk of premature death than the general population, the study found. And there was no meaningful mortality difference between NBA and MLB players.

Astronauts were more likely to die of accidents and other external causes, and less likely to die from heart disease and all other natural causes, the study also found. 

“We cannot be sure from the data we have, but we speculate that cardiovascular fitness in particular is the most important factor in astronaut longevity,” Reynolds said. 

The results suggest that radiation exposure in space might not lead to a premature death for astronauts due to heart problems or certain cancers, the study authors conclude. In fact, astronauts had a lower rate of death from heart disease than the NBA and MLB players, and had cancer mortality similar to the athletes’ rates.

The study wasn’t designed to prove whether or how space travel may directly impact human health. It also didn’t examine mortality among female astronauts or athletes. 

Lower radiation exposure

Radiation exposure may also have been much lower during early missions to the moon and not reflect what would happen with the current generation of astronauts, said Francis Cucinotta, a researcher at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“The missions in the past were low dose, while in the future the dose would be 50 to 100 times higher for a Mars mission,” Cucinotta said by email.

Astronauts have typically never smoked, leading to a lower risk of heart disease than the general population, Cucinotta added. 

Diet and exercise also set astronauts and professional athletes apart from the rest of the population, said Michael Delp, a researcher at Florida State University in Tallahassee who wasn’t involved in the study.

“When physical fitness is a requisite part of a job, such as with astronauts and professional athletes, this is a major determinant of the healthy worker effect,” Delp said by email. 

Even for the rest of us, “remaining or becoming physically active and maintaining a well-balanced diet greatly improves overall health and well-being, and can enhance successful aging,” Delp said.
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Israel’s Parliament has unanimously approved a law to permit exports of medical marijuana, allowing Israel to tap the lucrative global market.

Israel will become the third country, after the Netherlands and Canada, to take its medical cannabis global.

The Israeli medical cannabis company iCAN predicts the global industry will reach $33 billion in the next five years, as stigma fades and demand grows for the few countries certified to export.

The law was approved late Tuesday, sending cannabis company shares rising by about 10 percent.

The law was stalled for years over fears from security officials that medical marijuana would leak into the black market. To assuage concerns, the law empowers police to supervise licensing.

The Israeli Cabinet must give final approval — a step seen as a formality.

 
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A Russian cosmonaut who explored a mysterious hole in a capsule docked to the International Space Station says Russian law enforcement agencies are investigating what caused the opening.

Sergei Prokopyev said Monday investigators were looking at samples he and crewmate Oleg Kononenko collected during a December 12 spacewalk. Prokopyev and two other astronauts returned to Earth last week after 197-day space station mission.

The hole was spotted on August 30 in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft attached to the station. The crew located and sealed a tiny leak that was creating a slight loss of pressure.

Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said in September the hole could have been drilled when the capsule was built or in orbit. Rogozin stopped short of blaming crew members, but the statement has caused friction between Roscosmos and NASA.
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South Africa has the world’s largest antiretroviral therapy program with over 4 million people receiving treatment. But the ARV drug therapy, regarded by many as a panacea for HIV, is complicated and comes with its a number of side effects, both physical and mental. As VOA’s Zaheer Cassim explains from Johannesburg, perceptions of those side effects and the complex nature of the treatment has brought a new serious problem: many people just do not want to take the drugs anymore.
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One of the most common birth defects in the world is a cleft lip. It’s essentially a gap in the upper lip where the skin didn’t grow together. Babies with cleft lips may also have a cleft palates, where the roof of the mouth is split. Both can be repaired surgically. But unless that’s done, this birth defect can cause significant disability or even death. More from VOA’s Carol Pearson.
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Residents of a high-end neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro woke up to the unpleasant smell of 13 tons of rotting dead fish floating in the city’s Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon.

Biologists believe the extreme heat caused by El Nino killed the fish overnight and caused them to wash ashore Friday.

The lagoon played host to several events during the 2016 Olympic games and is a tourist attraction.

Rio’s environment ministry released a statement saying it has been on alert since Thursday morning when oxygen levels in the body of water began to fall sharply.

Biologist and ecosystem specialist Mario Moscatelli says that he inspects the lagoon every year and is convinced that climate change is causing temperature increases.
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The world’s only known albino orangutan climbed trees, foraged for food and began building a nest after being released into a remote Borneo jungle more than a year after conservation officials found her starving and dehydrated in an Indonesian village.

The Borneo Orangutan Survival foundation says the great ape, called Alba after thousands worldwide responded to an appeal for a name, has tripled in weight since being rescued in April last year. Her name means “white” in Latin and “dawn” in Spanish.

Alba and another rehabilitated orangutan, Kika, were released inside Bukit Baka Bukit Raya National Park on Wednesday after a more than 24-hour journey from their rehabilitation center by vehicle, boat and hiking.

The foundation originally planned to create a 5-hectare (12-acre) “forest island” for Alba rather than a release into truly natural habitat because of health issues related to her albinism including poor sight and hearing and the possibility of skin cancer.

But the government’s Natural Resources Conservation Agency and other agencies decided it was appropriate to release Alba into the wild because of her strong physical condition and intrinsically wild behavior.

She will be electronically tracked and regularly monitored by a medical team.

“Alba has no inferiority complex as we imagined before. She is very confident compared to other orangutans,” said veterinarian Agus Fathoni.

“I think the real threat actually comes from humans. What we’re worried about is poaching where this very special condition makes her a target,” he told The Associated Press.

Patrols of Alba’s new home by national park and conservation agency staff will aim to deter poachers, though they admit the number of personnel is limited.

“We don’t have enough to cover all the area of the national park but we’re confident of covering all the patrol lines that we have set,” said national park official Wirasadi Nursubhi

Orangutans, reddish-brown primates known for their gentle temperament and intelligence, are critically endangered and only found in the wild on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and on Borneo, which is divided among Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which declared Borneo’s orangutans critically endangered in 2016, says their numbers have dropped by nearly two-thirds since the early 1970s as plantation agriculture destroyed and fragmented their forest habitat.

The Sumatran orangutan is a separate species and has been critically endangered since 2008.

Alba, approximately five years old, was given final medical tests and anesthetized for the journey to Bukit Baka Bukit Raya.

Workers shouted “Alba’s going home” as her cage was lifted onto a truck at the Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Center in Central Kalimantan province on Borneo.

“It’s true this is a big gamble but we hope that with our collaboration we will win the big bet we have made today” said the orangutan foundation’s chief executive Jamartin Sihite after releasing Alba from her cage.
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Pregnant women have been systematically overlooked in the development and deployment of new vaccines, undermining their health and their communities’ safety, according to guidelines released this month by an international team of researchers, scientists and health care providers.

The report, developed by the Pregnancy Research Ethics for Vaccines, Epidemics and New Technologies (PREVENT) working group, identifies a cycle of exclusion that prevents pregnant women from accessing the benefits of vaccines.

“There’s a lot of reticence to include pregnant women in research,” said Carleigh Krubiner, the project director and a co-principal investigator for PREVENT.

And that’s led to a shortfall in data about how pregnant women respond to vaccines.

Krubiner, an associate faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, told VOA that researchers and health care providers tend to exclude pregnant women from trials, vaccinations and tracking because they lack evidence of the risks expectant mothers face.

“We continue to have this Catch-22 of not having enough evidence to feel like we can do the research. But if we don’t do the research, we don’t have the evidence,” Krubiner said.

‘There’s a lot of fear’

Concerns over “theoretical harm” drive decisions to exclude pregnant women from interventions, Krubiner said. But the data scientists do have, often from women not known to be pregnant when they received vaccinations, suggest those concerns are overblown.

In the case of rubella, for example, a contagious viral infection, researchers didn’t find a connection between congenital rubella syndrome and the vaccine when thousands of pregnant women were vaccinated before their pregnancy status was known.

“There’s a lot of fear,” Krubiner said. “And there are certainly biologically plausible risks associated with different types of live replicating viral vaccines.”

Live-virus vaccines contain a weakened version of the disease designed to stimulate an immune response in recipients.

“Very often, the benefits of vaccinating do still outweigh the theoretical, or even real harms that may be posed to the fetus,” Krubiner said.

One vaccine known to cause harm to pregnant women and their fetuses, Krubiner added, is for smallpox. But even in that case, she said, if a threat were imminent, pregnant women should get vaccinated, given the seriousness of the disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention support that guidance.

​‘Strongly recommended’

The advice pregnant women receive about vaccination should reflect what’s known about the particular vaccine and the specific circumstances of the outbreak, Krubiner said. 

Recommendations should follow current knowledge about the disease in question, the severity of the threat, and the likelihood of exposure, she added.

But the general guidance is unambiguous.

“At minimum, vaccines should be offered to women, and in many cases they should be strongly recommended,” Krubiner said.

Among those cases is the vaccine for seasonal and pandemic flu, which pregnant women should be urged to receive, in light of the severity of the risks tied to infection — not just for the expectant mother, but the future child as well.

Pregnant women should also be encouraged to receive vaccines for H1N1, also known as swine flu, and DPT, which protects against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus.

Institutional change

Involving pregnant women in the benefits of vaccines will require systemic shifts, the PREVENT group said in its report this month.

An important step is to become more proactive in bringing pregnant women into what Krubiner called the “development and research pipeline.” By involving pregnant women early, she said, health care providers aren’t left with the kinds of blind spots about how vaccines will affect expectant mothers and their fetuses that lead to their exclusion.

Even basic information, such as pregnancy status in case reports, sometimes goes untracked, despite being easy to collect and providing insight into the unique burden pregnant women face in disease outbreaks.

More complex data collection will paint a more complete picture. Specific studies could be designed to examine the safety and efficacy of vaccines for pregnant women, for example, or to track effects at different points in gestation.

“Starting anywhere at this point would be better than the dearth of data that we have right now to really try to address the needs of pregnant women and their babies,” Krubiner said.

Lessons learned

Disease outbreaks devastate communities. But they also provide opportunities to better prepare for, and respond to, the next epidemic.

In this year’s Ebola outbreaks in Congo, responders have applied lessons from West Africa’s 2014-16 epidemic to community engagement. And drug trials toward the end of the West Africa outbreak produced evidence about the vaccine that’s now being deployed.

But pregnant women weren’t included in those trials, and researchers collected little in the way of data about the burden pregnant women and their offspring face.

“Pregnant women are continuously getting left out of the benefits of scientific advancement in medicine,” Krubiner said.

“If we continue to fail to collect the kinds of data that we need, to generate the kind of evidence that we need and to also have interventions that meet the broader population’s needs,” Krubiner said, “then we’re just going to continue to perpetuate the cycle.”
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A congressional report on prescription pill dumping in West Virginia blames U.S. prescription drug distributors and the Drug Enforcement Administration for not doing enough to help mitigate the nation’s opioid addiction and overdose crisis.

The 324-page report released Wednesday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee followed an 18-month investigation and focused on the three largest U.S. wholesale drug companies, McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen, and regional distributors.

The report cited examples of massive pill shipments to West Virginia, which has a population of 1.8 million and has by far the nation’s highest death rate from prescription drugs. McKesson shipped an average of 9,650 hydrocodone pills per day in 2007 to a now-closed pharmacy in Kermit, which has a population of about 400. The shipments were 36 times above a monthly dosage shipment threshold the company had established that year.

Compliance questions

The Charleston Gazette-Mail previously cited federal records that showed drug wholesalers shipped 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to West Virginia from 2007 to 2012, a period when 1,728 people fatally overdosed on the painkillers. Gazette-Mail reporter Eric Eyre won a Pulitzer Prize last year for investigative reporting on the subject.

The committee report calls the shipments “troubling” and said it raises serious questions about compliance with the DEA-administered Controlled Substances Act. Until at least 2010, the DEA didn’t proactively review usage data to combat the diversion of drugs for illicit purposes, the report said.

Drug distributors are required to submit suspicious orders to the DEA, which “still does not have a centralized way to analyze suspicious order reports submitted by drug distributors,” the report said. Instead, suspicious orders are typically reported to local DEA offices, resulting in inconsistent handling under varying regulatory interpretations.

“As the country continues to feel the effects of the opioid crisis, neither distributors nor the DEA can shirk their oversight responsibilities,” the report said.

​Additional rules urged

The report suggests pharmacies with suspicious orders should be subjected to heightened monitoring, Congress should enact additional requirements on suspicious pill orders to clarify database registrant responsibilities, and the DEA should work to provide more real-time data to registrants.

Earlier this year the DEA approved a rule change requiring drugmakers to identify a legitimate need for opioids to justify their production in an attempt to rein in their diversion for abuse.

More than 351,000 people have died of opioid overdoses in the United States since 1999, and far more people die each year from opioid misuse than from traffic accidents or violence, the report said.

“This investigation is a start to establish some accountability and understanding about the epidemic, but this inquiry is only a look at a piece of the overall puzzle,” the report said. “There are other actors involved in the epidemic including manufacturers, pharmacies, physicians, and drug traffickers.”

Company statements

Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania-based AmerisourceBergen said in a statement it has proactively enacted many of the report’s recommendations but has “virtually no interaction with physicians and limited legal ability to gather information on their practices and prescribing behavior.”

Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health said it would “continue to implement rigorous anti-diversion controls.” A company statement said it is an intermediary in the pharmaceutical supply chain that “plays a limited but vital role.”

The DEA and San Francisco-based McKesson Corp. didn’t immediate respond to requests for comment.
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Motor vehicles and firearms kill young Americans more than any other cause, like disease, which has significantly declined, according to a new study. 

The New England Journal of Medicine reports that less than 2 percent (or 20,360) of all U.S. deaths — including adults — occur among children and adolescents 1 to 19 years old.

“By 2016,” the year for which the most recent data are available, “death among children and adolescents had become a rare event,” study authors Dr. Rebecca M. Cunningham, Maureen A. Walton and Dr. Patrick M. Carter of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor wrote in the Dec. 20 edition. 

But in the second largest cause of death among young people — death by firearms — the U.S. leads the world.

“The rate of firearm deaths among children and adolescents was higher in the United States than in all other high-income countries and low-to-middle-income countries with available 2016 data,” the authors wrote, or 36.5 times as high as 12 other “high-income” countries.

Data for 2017, which are not included in the NEJM article, show a continued increase in firearm deaths for children and adolescents, Cunningham said. 

“One in three U.S. homes with youth under 18 years of age has a firearm, with 43 percent of homes reporting that the firearm is kept unlocked and loaded, which increases the risk of firearm injuries,” the authors reported. “In addition to differences in availability between the United States and other countries, there is wide variability across countries in laws relating to the purchase of firearms, access to them and safe storage.”

At the same time, “early diagnosis, vaccinations, antibiotics, and medical and surgical treatment” resulted in “declines in deaths from infectious disease or cancer,” the report said. 

And while motor vehicle events were the leading cause of death for young people, that cause has declined 38 percent over the past decade, the authors wrote.

What caused the declines? 

“Seat belts and appropriate child safety seats, the production of cars with improved safety standards, better constructed roads, graduated driver licensing programs, and a focus on reducing teen drinking and driving,” the authors wrote, noting that the decline occurred at the same time as increases in the number of U.S. vehicles and annual vehicle-miles traveled.

But there’s a hitch: Between 2013 and 2016, research showed the decline leveling. And while researchers said they didn’t know for certain, they suspected that distracted driving by teenagers, by other teens in a car or by cellphone use, explained the leveling. The report also wondered about marijuana use and drugged driving leading to “decreased risk perceptions among adolescents.”

Among firearm deaths, 59 percent were homicides, 35 percent were suicides, and 4 percent were unintentional injuries such as accidental discharges of firearms, which aligns with incidents among Americans older than 20. 

Death by firearms 

Among the unintentional firearm deaths — less than 2 percent of all U.S. firearm deaths — 26 percent occurred among children and adolescents, the report said.

“Malignant neoplasms,” like cancer, were the third-leading cause of death, representing 9 percent of deaths among children and adolescents. That was followed by suffocation (7 percent) because of “bed linens, plastic bags, obstruction of the airway, hanging or strangulation.” 

Among the youngest children, 1 to 4 years-old, drowning in swimming pools, rivers and lakes was the most common cause of death, the report said. Death by drowning was more rare in older children, “which potentially reflects widespread swim training among school-aged children.”

Among youth 10 to 19 years of age, injury deaths from motor vehicle crashes, firearms and suffocation were the three leading causes. Researchers said these causes reflected “increased risk-taking behavior, differential peer and parental influence, and initiation of substance use.”

Drug overdoses or poisonings rose to the sixth-leading cause of death among children and adolescents in 2016, the report said, attributed to an increase in “opioid overdoses, which account for well over half of all drug overdoses among adolescents.”

Mortality was higher among blacks (38.2 per 100,000) and American Indians or Alaska Natives (28.0 per 100,000) than among whites (24.2 per 100,000) and Asians or Pacific Islanders (15.9 per 100,000), the authors wrote. Deaths related to firearms were the leading cause of death among black youth and occurred 3.7 times the rate of such deaths among white youth. 

Drowning deaths

Black youth also had higher rates of drowning deaths (1.6 times as high) and fire-related deaths (2.3 times as high) than white youth. Blacks had death rates from heart disease and chronic lower respiratory diseases such as asthma that were 2.1 and 6.3 times as high, respectively, as the rates among white youth.

“Such disparities probably reflect underlying socioeconomic issues, including poverty, environmental exposures and differential access to health care services,” the researchers wrote. 

“Progress toward further reducing deaths among children and adolescents will require a shift in public perceptions so that injury deaths are viewed not as ‘accidents,’ but rather as social ecologic phenomena that are amenable to prevention.” the authors concluded. 

Researchers compiled their report on data from the Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) system of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 57 vital-statistics jurisdictions.
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Attorneys general from nine U.S. states sued the Trump administration on Thursday to stop future seismic tests for oil and gas deposits off the East Coast, joining a lawsuit from environmentalists concerned that the tests harm whales and dolphins. 

Seismic testing uses air gun blasts to map out what resources lie beneath the ocean. Conservationists say the testing, a precursor to oil drilling, can disorient marine animals that rely on finely tuned hearing to navigate and find food. The tests lead to beachings of an endangered species, the North Atlantic right whale, they say. 

New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood said the tests would harm marine species, jeopardize coastal ecosystems and pose a “critical threat” to the natural resources, jobs and lives of New Yorkers. “The Trump administration has repeatedly put special interests before our environment and our communities,” Underwood said in a statement. 

The lawsuit, which names Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the National Marine Fisheries Service as defendants, says the prospect of seeing marine mammals is an important draw for tourists to the states and helps coastal economies. 

The Department of Commerce declined to comment. 

Permits to harass

Last month, the fisheries office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the Commerce Department, issued permits to WesternGeco LLC, a subsidiary of Schlumberger Ltd., and CGG to harass, but not kill, marine mammals with air gun blasts in a region of the Atlantic from Delaware to Cape Canaveral, Fla. 

Jennie Lyons, a spokeswoman at the fisheries office, declined to comment on the lawsuit but said the department only authorized harassment, not outright killing, of the marine animals in issuing the permits. A marine biologist at the office told reporters last month that no seismic tests have been known to cause whale beachings. 

The permits, part of President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda to boost oil output for U.S. consumption and for exports, also went to ION GeoVentures, Spectrum Geo Inc. and TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Co. 

The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

The other attorneys general are from Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina and Virginia. They joined a suit filed earlier this month by groups including the Coastal Conservation League, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Oceana. 
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Italian paleontologists say the largest and oldest meat-eating dinosaur ever to have been found was from what is now the northern area of Lombardy.

In the scientific journal PerrJ, the Italians recently published their study on the fossils discovered years ago in a large marble quarry in the Italian Alps.

The scientists said the dinosaur lived 200 years ago, and its skeleton was the first known to have been found in Italy from the Jurassic age.

They named the creature Saltriovenator zanellai, which means Zanella’s Saltrio hunter, in honor of Angelo Zanella, the amateur hunter who accidentally unearthed the bones, and for the area where the bones were found.

Zanella has said he will never forget that day. The bones appeared in large blocks of rock in a marble quarry near Saltrio in the summer of 1996. He reported his find to the Natural History Museum in Milan, which further scouted the area and found more fossils. Many of the bones bore the feeding marks of ancient marine invertebrates.

Cristiano dal Sasso of the Natural History Museum led the research. He said this dinosaur fossil was the first to be found in Lombardy and the oldest and largest dinosaur of the lower Jurassic in the world.

Dal Sasso said 132 bone pieces were recovered and that it was not easy to extract the bones from the hard rock. The team worked systematically, fragment by fragment, to recompose and position the bones. He said the discoveries were very exciting.

Measurements

In their study, the paleontologists outlined the characteristics of the dinosaur. They said the carnivore had estimated body length of 7.5 meters (24.6 feet), an 80-centimeter (31.4-inch) skull and weighed at least a ton.  It had very sharp teeth, and its lower limbs had four fingers, three of which had powerful claws.

Dal Sasso and his team said this dinosaur was a real war machine. He said it was one of the predators at the top of the food chain and therefore must have preyed on large herbivore dinosaurs.

The remains of ​Saltriovenator zanellai were the second set to have been found in Italy. The first were fossils of the tiny dinosaur Scipionyx, which were unearthed in southern Italy in 1980.
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