Scientists in Florida are on the cusp of developing promising methods to control toxic algae blooms like the “red tide” that has been killing marine life along a 150 mile (240 km) stretch of the Gulf Coast, the head of a leading marine lab said Wednesday.

Michael Crosby, president and chief executive of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, welcomed a red tide emergency order issued this week by Governor Rick Scott, designating more state money for research, cleanup and wildlife rescues.

Scientists field-testing solutions

Interest in mitigation technologies has been heightened by a 10-month-long toxic algae bloom off Florida’s southwestern coast that has caused mounds of rotting fish to wash up on beaches from Tampa to Naples.

The red tide also has been implicated in at least 266 sea turtle strandings and is suspected or determined to have caused 68 manatee deaths so far this year, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission figures.

In hopes of combating future outbreaks, scientists are field testing a patented process that would pump red-algae-tainted seawater into an ozone-treatment system and then pump the purified water back into the affected canal, cove or inlet, Crosby said.

Experiments carried out in huge 25,000-gallon tanks succeeded in removing all traces of the algae and its toxins, with the water chemistry reverting to normal within 24 hours, he said.

Scientists also are studying the possible use of naturally produced compounds from seaweed, parasitic algae and filter-feeding organisms that could be introduced to fight red tides.

A ‘bad bloom’

Red tides occur on an almost yearly basis off Florida, starting out in the Gulf of Mexico where swarms of microscopic algae cells called Karenia brevis feed on deep-sea nutrients and are sometimes carried by currents close to shore, usually in the fall.

This year’s Gulf Coast Florida bloom is the worst in more than a decade, originating last October and persisting well into the summer tourist season while spreading across 150 miles of coastline spanning seven counties.

“It’s a bad bloom by any standard,” said Richard Stumpf, an oceanographer who studies red tides for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

For reasons not well understood, strong northerly winds that normally break up a red tide by December failed to materialize last winter, Stumpf said.

It remains to be seen whether a single year of altered wind patterns will turn out to be an isolated deviation or part of more long-term changes in climate, Stumpf said.

Natural phenomenon

But scientists say red tides in and of themselves are a natural phenomenon observed as far back as the 1600s.

For humans, exposure can cause respiratory difficulties, burning eyes and skin irritation. The toxins are often fatal to marine life.

The latest bloom coincided with the spawning season for snook, an ecologically important and popular game fish in Florida, Crosby said. A portion of emergency funding ordered by the governor is earmarked for assessing impacts on that fish.
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The dismissal of a lawsuit filed by young people claiming government climate policy falls short will be appealed and marks a minor setback in pursuing legal action on behalf of youth and their rights, experts said.

The legal complaint arguing that the state of Washington must do more to cut carbon emissions was dismissed Tuesday by a judge who said it was a matter for politicians, not courts.

The judge’s ruling marked the first time a court has dismissed a case filed by youth demanding authorities ramp up efforts to curb climate change by arguing their constitutional rights to due process are being violated, experts said.

A half-dozen similar cases have been filed in states including Florida and Alaska, said Our Children’s Trust, a youth advocacy group that provides legal assistance.

Tougher plan sought

The Washington complaint, filed in February, asked that a statewide target to emit 50 percent fewer greenhouse gases by 2050 be invalidated in favor of more ambitious goals, court documents said.

The dismissal will be appealed, lawyer Andrea Rodgers of Our Children’s Trust told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Scientific consensus holds that the emission of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming.

Washington Superior Court Judge Michael Scott wrote in his dismissal that he hoped the activists “will not be discouraged,” but Rodgers said they were “devastated” and wanted to “present their constitutional claims in a court of law.”

Several of the cases by young people base their arguments on their rights to fair treatment and due process under the U.S. Constitution.

The remaining cases could still be effective in forcing authorities to strengthen climate change regulations, said Katherine Trisolini, a professor of environmental law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

“I wouldn’t give up on the courts yet,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Climate activists are particularly optimistic about a federal case, Juliana v. United States, brought by 21 young activists who say officials violated their rights by failing to address carbon pollution adequately.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to halt the lawsuit, filed in 2015.
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U.S. health officials are eliminating special regulations for gene therapy experiments. They say that what was once exotic science is quickly becoming an established form of medical care with no extraordinary risks.

Gene therapy aims to get at the root cause of a disease by altering DNA rather than just treating symptoms of a genetic illness.

When it began decades ago, an oversight panel at the National Institutes of Health reviewed every proposal to evaluate risks to patients. Now federal officials say more is known about gene therapy’s safety and the panel can take on a broader role and let the Food and Drug Administration review studies and products.

They announced the change Wednesday in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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If you quit smoking and gain weight, it may seem like you’re trading one set of health problems for another. But a new U.S. study finds you’re still better off in the long run.

Compared with smokers, even the quitters who gained the most weight had at least a 50 percent lower risk of dying prematurely from heart disease and other causes, the Harvard-led study found.

The study is impressive in its size and scope and should put to rest any myth that there are prohibitive weight-related health consequences to quitting cigarettes, said Dr. William Dietz, a public health expert at George Washington University.

“The paper makes pretty clear that your health improves, even if you gain weight,” said Dietz, who was not involved in the research. “I don’t think we knew that with the assurance that this paper provides.”

The New England Journal of Medicine published the study Wednesday. The journal also published a Swedish study that found quitting smoking seems to be the best thing diabetics can do to cut their risk of dying prematurely.

10 pounds or more

The nicotine in cigarettes can suppress appetite and boost metabolism. Many smokers who quit and don’t step up their exercise find they eat more and gain weight — typically less than 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms), but in some cases three times that much.

A lot of weight gain is a cause of the most common form of diabetes, a disease in which blood sugar levels are higher than normal. Diabetes can lead to problems including blindness, nerve damage, heart and kidney disease, and poor blood flow to the legs and feet.

In the U.S. study, researchers tracked more than 170,000 men and women over roughly 20 years, looking at what they said in health questionnaires given every two years.

The people enrolled in the studies were all health professionals, and did not mirror current smokers in the general population, who are disproportionately low-income, less educated and more likely to smoke heavily.

The researchers checked which study participants quit smoking and followed whether they gained weight and developed diabetes, heart disease or other conditions.

Quitters saw their risk of diabetes increase by 22 percent in the six years after they kicked the habit. An editorial in the journal characterized it as “a mild elevation” in the diabetes risk.

Studies previously showed that people who quit have an elevated risk of developing diabetes, said Dr. Qi Sun, one the study’s authors. He is a researcher at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

But that risk doesn’t endure, and it never leads to a higher premature death rate than what smokers face, he said.

“Regardless of the amount of weight gain, quitters always have a lower risk of dying” prematurely, Sun said.
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Even the oceans are breaking temperature records in this summer of heat waves.

Off the San Diego coast, scientists earlier this month recorded the highest seawater temperatures since daily measurements began in 1916.

“Just like we have heat waves on land, we also have heat waves in the ocean,” said Art Miller of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Between 1982 and 2016, the number of “marine heat waves” roughly doubled, and most likely they will become more common and intense as the planet warms, a study released Wednesday found. Prolonged periods of extreme heat in the oceans can damage kelp forests and coral reefs, and harm fish and other marine life.

“This trend will only further accelerate with global warming,” said Thomas Frolicher, a climate scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, who led the research.

His team defined marine heat waves as extreme events in which sea-surface temperatures exceeded the 99th percentile of measurements for a given location. Because oceans both absorb and release heat more slowly than air, most marine heat waves last for at least several days — and some for several weeks, said Frolicher.

“We knew that average temperatures were rising. What we haven’t focused on before is that the rise in the average comes at you in clumps of very hot days — a shock of several days or weeks of very high temperatures,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University climate scientist who was not involved in the study.

A little is too much

Many sea critters have evolved to survive within a fairly narrow band of temperatures compared with creatures on land, and even incremental warming can be disruptive.

Some free-swimming sea animals like bat rays or lobsters may shift their routines. But stationary organisms like coral reefs and kelp forests “are in real peril,” said Michael Burrows, an ecologist at the Scottish Marine Institute, who was not part of the research.

In 2016 and 2017, persistent high ocean temperatures off eastern Australia killed off as much as half of the shallow water corals of the Great Barrier Reef — with significant consequences for other creatures dependent upon the reef.

“One in every four fish in the ocean lives in or around coral reefs,” said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland. “So much of the ocean’s biodiversity depends upon a fairly small amount of the ocean floor.”

The latest study in Nature relied on satellite data and other records of sea-surface temperatures, including from ships and buoys.

It didn’t include the recent record-breaking measurements off Scripps Pier in San Diego — which reached 79.5 degrees Fahrenheit on August 9 — but Frolicher and Miller said the event was an example of a marine heat wave.

Miller said he knew something was odd when he spotted a school of bat rays — which typically only congregate in pockets of warm water — swimming just off the pier earlier this month.

Changes in ocean circulation associated with warmer surface waters will most likely mean decreased production of phytoplankton — the tiny organisms that form the basis of the marine food web, he said.

Marine biologists nicknamed a patch of persistent high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean between 2013 and 2016 “the Blob.” During that period, decreased phytoplankton production led to a cascading lack of food for many species, causing thousands of California sea lion pups to starve, said Miller, who had no role in the Nature study.

“We’ve repeatedly set new heat records. It’s not surprising, but it is shocking,” he said.
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Russian cosmonauts took a spacewalk Wednesday to fling tiny satellites into orbit and install an antenna for tracking birds on Earth.

Soon after leaving the International Space Station, Sergey Prokopyev released all four research satellites by hand. 

“I’m ready for the launch,” Prokopyev told Russian flight controllers near Moscow.

The first satellite tumbled away as the space station soared 250 miles above Illinois. By the time the fourth one was on its way 14 minutes later, the station was almost to Spain. Two were the size of a tissue box, while the other two were longer.

Prokopyev and Oleg Artemyev then turned their attention to a German-led, animal-tracking project known as Icarus, short for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space.

The space station is an ideal perch for the antenna, compared with a satellite, said project director Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. That’s because spacewalkers could fix something if necessary and the computer is better protected from space radiation, he noted.

The project will start out tracking blackbirds and turtle doves with small GPS tags, then move on to other songbirds, fruit bats and bigger wildlife.

Wikelski said researchers have ear tags for big mammals like gazelle, jaguars, camels and elephants, as well as leg-band tags for larger birds such as storks. The tags are easy to wear and should not bother the animals, he noted.

Wikelski, who watched the spacewalk from Russian Mission Control outside Moscow, said researchers can better understand animal behavior through lifelong monitoring. Among the things to learn: where the animals migrate, and how they grow up and manage to survive.

“We also learn where, when and why they die,” he explained in an email, “so we can protect our wild pets.”

The space station is also home to three Americans and one German. They have two spacewalks next month.
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Hailstorms inflict billions of dollars’ worth of damage yearly in North America alone, and the cost will rise as the growing population builds more homes, offices and factories, climate and weather experts said Tuesday.

The role of climate change in hailstorms is harder to assess, the experts said at a conference at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Climate change will most likely make large hailstorms worse, but population growth is more of a certainty, said Andreas Prein, a climate modeling scientist at the atmospheric research center.

“We know pretty certain that we will have more people in the future, and they will have more stuff, and this stuff can be damaged,” Prein said. “I think this component is more certain than what we can say about climate change at the moment.”

This year is expected to be the 11th in a row in which the damage from severe storms exceeds $10 billion in the United States, and 70 percent of that cost comes from hail, said Ian Giammanco, a research meteorologist for the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.

“It’s such a huge driver of the dollar loss each year,” he said. 

Bigger homes, closer together

Costs are rising in the U.S. because homes are getting bigger, from about 1,700 square feet (139 square meters) in the early 1980s to 2,500 square feet (232 square meters) in 2015, he said. New subdivisions also pack homes in more tightly, Giammanco said.

“So it’s a bigger target for hailstorms to hit,” he said.

The effects of climate change on hail and the resulting damage are harder to calculate because hailstorms require distinct ingredients, and global warming affects them in different ways, Prein said.

To form, hailstorms require moisture, an updraft, variable winds and freezing temperatures at lower levels of the storm cloud, he said.

Updrafts lift water droplets into the clouds, where they attract other droplets and freeze together, scientists say. Winds of varying speed and direction keep the droplets suspended in the cloud long enough to grow into hailstones. When they eventually fall, freezing temperatures in the cloud keep them from melting before they hit warmer air closer to the ground.

Climate change will most likely increase updrafts, helping hailstones form, Prein said.

But it will inhibit two hail-producing conditions, he said. Warmer temperatures will expand higher into the atmosphere, so falling hailstones have more time to melt before hitting the ground. And differences in wind speed and direction will subside, he said.

Climate change will make the atmosphere more moist, but the effect that will have on hailstones isn’t clear, he said.

More storms that are severe

Kristen Rasmussen, an assistant professor at Colorado State University, said the combined effects of climate change will probably inhibit the number of weaker storms but increase the number of severe ones.

“So we actually think that’s why we’re seeing a decrease in the number of weak to moderate storms and an increase in the most severe storms,” she said. “If those storms are able to break through this inhibition, they … have the potential to be more severe, and they can tap into more energy when they do so.”

The researchers said they need more data to understand the relationship between climate change and hailstorms. Improved science could also help predict hailstorms and calculate risks better, they said.

The Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the Andes in South America and the Himalayas all have conditions that make them hot spots for hail, Rasmussen said.

A May 2017 hailstorm in the Denver area caused $2.3 billion in insurance losses. Last week, hail injured 14 people in Colorado Springs and killed at least five animals at the city zoo. Damage estimates were still being compiled.
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The Democratic Republic of the Congo has started using the experimental mAb114 Ebola treatment to counter the latest flare-up of the virus, health officials said Tuesday, the first time it has been deployed against an active outbreak.

Forty-two people are believed to have died from the hemorrhagic fever in Congo’s 10th Ebola outbreak since the disease was discovered in the 1970s.

In all, there have been 66 cases to date, including 39 confirmed and 27 probable, the health ministry said  Tuesday evening, an increase of nine confirmed cases since Monday.

The outbreak has spread from its epicenter in North Kivu province to neighboring Ituri province after an infected person returned home, Congo’s health ministry said, complicating containment in a region beset by militia violence.

Testing ground

Ebola, which causes fever, vomiting and diarrhea, finds a natural home in Congo’s vast equatorial forests. Continuing flare-ups have made the central African country a testing ground for new treatments against a virus that between 2013 and 2016 killed more than 11,300 people in a West African epidemic.

In an outbreak in western Congo that began in April and was declared over in July, an experimental vaccine manufactured by Merck & Co. Inc. was given to 3,300 people and was considered central in containing the virus when it reached a city.

The mAb114 treatment was developed in the United States by the National Institutes of Health using the antibodies of the survivor of an Ebola outbreak in the western Congolese city of Kikwit in 1995.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Geneva that medics were already treating five patients with mAb114 and that he had been informed they were doing well.

“We will use it as much as needed,” Tedros said. “But use of the molecules is decided by doctor and patient consent.”

Several other experimental treatments have arrived in the regional hub of Beni and are awaiting approval from an ethics committee, including Remdesivir, Favipiravir and REGN3450, REGN3471 and REGN3479, the health ministry said.

Low risk of global spread

Separately, authorities have vaccinated more than 200 health workers and contacts of Ebola patients. He said the risk of international spread was currently considered low even though it poses a high regional risk because of its proximity to the Ugandan border, which is only about 100 kilometers (60 miles) away.

The response is taking place against the backdrop of insecurity caused by dozens of militia groups who regularly kill and kidnap civilians in the region.

“Before I went there I was really worried because of the different nature of the Ebola outbreak in DRC,” Tedros said. “But after the visit I am actually more worried because of what we have observed there firsthand.”

Authorities are reaching out to militia to persuade them to allow access to zones they occupy, he said.
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World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the raging conflict in North Kivu makes the Ebola outbreak in eastern DR Congo more dangerous than the historic 2014-2015 epidemic in West Africa.  More than 11,000 people died from the Ebola virus by the time it was contained in 2016. 

WHO Director-General Tedros returned Sunday from a visit to Beni and Mangina, the epicenters of the Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.  He says he was worried before he went on this mission, but he is more worried now after having observed first-hand the dangers and difficulties posed by the active conflict in North Kivu.

He says more than 100 armed groups operate in the region.  He says there have been 120 violent incidents this year involving killings, kidnappings, rapes and other atrocities.

“That environment is really conducive for Ebola actually to transmit freely because in that area there are places called Red Zones, inaccessible areas because there are many armed groups that operate in that region … And, these Red Zones could be hiding places for Ebola,” said Tedros.

Tedros is calling on the warring parties for a cessation of hostilities, warning this extremely contagious virus is dangerous for everyone.  Despite the many concerns, he says WHO and partners are moving ahead aggressively with the operation to contain this deadly virus.  

He says more than 216 health workers and 20 people from the community have been vaccinated against Ebola.  He says more vaccinators have been deployed from Guinea to speed this process along, and DRC authorities have given the greenlight for the use of several experimental Ebola drugs.

Tedros says health workers have begun working on case identification and contact tracing, as well as community outreach and educational programs.  He says WHO is working with countries neighboring DRC, and is helping Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and South Sudan strengthen their surveillance and screening programs to try to prevent the deadly Ebola virus from crossing their borders.  

 

 
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Forty-one people have died in the latest outbreak of Ebola in DRC, health authorities said on Tuesday, adding that doctors were using a novel drug to treat patients.

Out of 57 recorded cases as of Monday, 41 were fatal, the Congolese Health Ministry and UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) said. Fourteen of the deaths had been confirmed by lab tests, the ministry said.

Last Friday, the ministry put the tally at 37 deaths, either confirmed or suspected.

The outbreak is the country’s 10th since 1976, when the disease was first identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) near the Ebola River, a tributary of the Congo.

Its epicenter is Mangina in the region of Beni, in the strife-torn eastern province of North Kivu.

For the first time since the outbreak was announced on August 1, one fatality was recorded outside of North Kivu — in the neighboring province of Ituri, the ministry’s directorate for disease control said.

It added that doctors in Beni had started to use a novel treatment called mAb114 to treat patients with Ebola.

The treatment is “the first therapeutic drug against the virus to be used in an active Ebola epidemic in the DRC,” it said.

Developed in the United States, the prototype drug is a so-called single monoclonal antibody — a protein that binds on to a specific target of the virus and triggers the body’s immune system to destroy the invader.

The antibody was isolated from a survivor of an Ebola outbreak in the western DRC city of Kikwit in 1995, it said.

In May, the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said it was carrying out the first human trials of mAb114 to test it for safety and tolerance.

Fighting could hamper treatment

Use of the experimental treatment in the field comes on the heels of deployment of an unlicensed vaccine in an earlier outbreak of Ebola in the DRC this year.

The decision to use the vaccine, called rVSV-ZEBOV, came after trials during a pandemic in West Africa showed it to be safe and effective, the WHO says.

Immunization with rVSV-ZEBOV was given to front-line health workers to provide them with additional protection — a tactic that has been repeated in the latest outbreak.

Ebola causes serious illness including vomiting, diarrhea and in some cases internal and external bleeding. It is often fatal if untreated.

The WHO has expressed concern that the violence in North Kivu — entailing militias who often fight for control of resources, including a notorious Ugandan rebel force called the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) — could hamper the fight against the new outbreak.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, visiting the area, on Sunday called for “free and secure access” for health workers, the agency said in a statement.

The outbreak in North Kivu was declared a week after WHO and the Kinshasa government hailed the end of a flareup in northwestern Equateur province which killed 33 people.

In the worst Ebola epidemic, the disease struck the West African states of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2013-15, killing more than 11,300 people.

 

 

 
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Animal-assisted therapy is a growing field that uses animals to help people recover from or better cope with health problems, such as heart disease, cancer and mental health disorders. While the most common therapy animal is dogs, the use of other creatures is on the rise. More from Faith Lapidus.
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You know your cholesterol, your blood pressure … your heart gene score? Researchers say a new way of analyzing genetic test data may one day help identify people at high risk of a youthful heart attack in time to help.

Today, gene testing mostly focuses on rare mutations in one or a few genes, like those that cause cystic fibrosis or sickle cell disease, or the BRCA gene responsible for a small fraction of breast cancer. It is less useful for some of the most common diseases, such as heart disease or diabetes, because they are influenced by vast numbers of genes-gone-wrong working together in complicated ways.

Monday, researchers reported a new way to measure millions of small genetic variations that add up to cause harm, letting them calculate someone’s inherited risk for the most common form of heart disease and four other serious disorders. The potential cardiac impact: They estimated that up to 25 million Americans may have triple the average person’s risk for coronary artery disease even if they haven’t yet developed warning signs like high cholesterol.

“What I foresee is in five years, each person will know this risk number, this ‘polygenic risk score,’ similar to the way each person knows his or her cholesterol,” said Dr. Sekar Kathiresan who led the research team from the Broad Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

If the approach pans out and doctors adopt it, a bad score wouldn’t mean you’d get a disease, just that your genetic makeup increases the chance — one more piece of information in deciding care. For example, when the researchers tested the system using a DNA database from Britain, less than 1 percent of people with the lowest risk scores were diagnosed with coronary artery disease, compared to 11 percent of people with the highest risk score.

“There are things you can do to lower the risk,” Kathiresan said — the usual advice about diet, exercise, cholesterol medication and not smoking helps.

On the flip side, a low-risk score “doesn’t give you a free pass,” he added. An unhealthy lifestyle could overwhelm the protection of good genes.

The scoring system also can predict an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, breast cancer and an irregular heartbeat called atrial fibrillation, the team reported in the journal Nature Genetics — noting that next steps include learning what might likewise lower those risks.

It doesn’t require the most sophisticated type of genetic testing. Instead, Kathiresan can calculate risk scores for those five diseases — eventually maybe more — simply by reanalyzing the kind of raw data people receive after sending a cheek swab to companies like 23andMe.

A geneticist who specializes in cardiovascular disease, he hopes to open a website where people can send in such data to learn their heart risk, as part of continuing research. Kathiresan and co-author Dr. Amit Khera, a Mass General cardiologist, are co-inventors on a patent application for the system.

Other scientists and companies have long sought ways to measure risk from multiple, additive gene effects — the “poly” in polygenic — and Myriad Genetics has begun selling a type of polygenic test for breast cancer risk.

But specialists in heart disease and genetics who weren’t involved with the research called the new findings exciting because of their scope.

“The results should be eye-opening for cardiologists,” said Dr. Charles C. Hong, director of cardiovascular research at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “The only disappointment is that this score applies only to those with European ancestry, so I wonder if similar scores are in the works for the large majority of the world population that is not white.”

Hong pointed to a friend who recently died of a massive heart attack despite being a super-fit marathon runner who’d never smoked, the kind of puzzling death that doctors have long hoped that a better understanding of genetics could help to prevent.

“Most of the variation in disease risk comes from an enormous number of very tiny effects” in genes, agreed Stanford University genetics professor Jonathan Pritchard. “This is the first time polygenic scores have really been shown to reach the level of precision where they can have an impact” on patient health.

First, the Boston-based team combed previous studies that mapped the DNA of large numbers of people, looking for links to the five diseases — not outright mutations but minor misspellings in the genetic code.

Each variation alone would have only a tiny effect on health. They developed a computerized system that analyzed how those effects add up, and tested it using DNA and medical records from 400,000 people stored in Britain’s UK Biobank. Scores more than three times the average person’s risk were deemed high.
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Lauren Woeher wonders if her 16-month-old daughter has been harmed by tap water contaminated with toxic industrial compounds used in products like nonstick cookware, carpets, firefighting foam and fast-food wrappers.

Henry Betz, at 76, rattles around his house alone at night, thinking about the water his family unknowingly drank for years that was tainted by the same contaminants, and the pancreatic cancers that killed wife Betty Jean and two others in his household.

Tim Hagey, manager of a local water utility, recalls how he used to assure people that the local public water was safe. That was before testing showed it had some of the highest levels of the toxic compounds of any public water system in the U.S.

 

“You all made me out to be a liar,” Hagey, general water and sewer manager in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Warminster, told Environmental Protection Agency officials at a hearing last month. The meeting drew residents and officials from Horsham and other affected towns in eastern Pennsylvania, and officials from some of the other dozens of states dealing with the same contaminants.

 

At “community engagement sessions” around the country this summer like the one in Horsham, residents and state, local and military officials are demanding that the EPA act quickly — and decisively — to clean up local water systems testing positive for dangerous levels of the chemicals, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

 

The Trump administration called the contamination “a potential public relations nightmare” earlier this year after federal toxicology studies found that some of the compounds are more hazardous than previously acknowledged.

 

PFAS have been in production since the 1940s, and there are about 3,500 different types. Dumped into water, the air or soil, some forms of the compounds are expected to remain intact for thousands of years; one public-health expert dubbed them “forever chemicals.”

 

EPA testing from 2013 to 2015 found significant amounts of PFAS in public water supplies in 33 U.S. states. The finding helped move PFAS up as a national priority.

 

So did scientific studies that firmed up the health risks. One, looking at a kind of PFAS once used in making Teflon, found a probable link with kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, hypertension in pregnant women and high cholesterol. Other recent studies point to immune problems in children, among other things.

 

In 2016, the EPA set advisory limits — without any direct enforcement — for two kinds of PFAS that had recently been phased out of production in the United States. But manufacturers are still producing, and releasing into the air and water, newer versions of the compounds.

 

Earlier this year, federal toxicologists decided that even the EPA’s 2016 advisory levels for the two phased-out versions of the compound were several times too high for safety.

 

EPA says it will prepare a national management plan for the compounds by the end of the year. But Peter Grevatt, director of the agency’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, told The Associated Press that there’s no deadline for a decision on possible regulatory actions.

 

Reviews of the data, and studies to gather more, are ongoing.

 

Even as the Trump administration says it advocates for clean air and water, it is ceding more regulation to the states and putting a hold on some regulations seen as burdensome to business.

 

In Horsham and surrounding towns in eastern Pennsylvania, and at other sites around the United States, the foams once used routinely in firefighting training at military bases contained PFAS.

 

“I know that you can’t bring back three people that I lost,” Betz, a retired airman, told the federal officials at the Horsham meeting. “But they’re gone.”

 

State lawmakers complained of “a lack of urgency and incompetency” on the part of EPA.

 

“It absolutely disgusts me that the federal government would put PR concerns ahead of public health concerns,” Republican state Rep. Todd Stephens declared.

 

After the meeting, Woeher questioned why it took so long to tell the public about the dangers of the compounds.

 

“They knew they had seeped into the water, and they didn’t tell anybody about it until it was revealed and they had to,” she said.

 

Speaking at her home with her toddler nearby, she asked, “Is this something that, you know, I have to worry? It’s in her.”

 

While contamination of drinking water around military bases and factories gets most of the attention, the EPA says 80 percent of human exposure comes from consumer products in the home.

 

The chemical industry says it believes the versions of the nonstick, stain-resistant compounds in use now are safe, in part because they don’t stay in the body as long as older versions.

 

“As an industry today… we’re very forthcoming meeting any kind of regulatory requirement to disclose any kind of adverse data,” said Jessica Bowman, a senior director at the American Chemistry Council trade group.

 

Independent academics and government regulators say they don’t fully share the industry’s expressed confidence about the safety of PFAS versions now in use.

 

“I don’t know that we’ve done the science yet to really provide any strong guidance” on risks of the kinds of PFAS that U.S. companies are using now, said Andrew Gillespie, associate director at the EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory.

 

While EPA considers its next step, states are taking action to tackle PFAS contamination on their own.

 

In Delaware, National Guard troops handed out water after high levels of PFAS were found in a town’s water supply. Michigan last month ordered residents of two towns to stop drinking or cooking with their water, after PFAS were found at 20 times the EPA’s 2016 advisory level. In New Jersey, officials urged fishermen to eat some kinds of fish no more than once a year because of PFAS contamination.

 

Washington became the first state to ban any firefighting foam with the compound.

 

Given the findings on the compounds, alarm bells “should be ringing four out of five” at the EPA, Kerrigan Clough, a former deputy regional EPA administrator, said in an interview with the AP as he waited for a test for PFAS in the water at his Michigan lake home, which is near a military base that used firefighting foam.

 

“If the risk appears to be high, and you’ve got it every place, then you’ve got a different level” of danger and urgency, Clough said. “It’s a serious problem.”

 

Problems with PFAS surfaced partly as a result of a 1999 lawsuit by a farmer who filmed his cattle staggering, frothing and dying in a field near a DuPont disposal site in Parkersburg, West Virginia, for PFAS then used in Teflon.

 

In 2005, under President George W. Bush, the EPA and DuPont settled an EPA complaint that the chemical company knew at least by the mid-1980s that the early PFAS compound posed a substantial risk to human health.

 

Congress has since boosted the agency’s authority to regulate problematic chemicals. That includes toughening up the federal Toxic Substances Control Act and regulatory mandates for the EPA itself in 2016.

 

For PFAS, that should include addressing the new versions of the compounds coming into production, not just tackling old forms that companies already agreed to take offline, Goldman said.

 

“Otherwise it’s the game of whack-a-mole,” she said. “That’s not what you want to do when you’re protecting the public health.”

 
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The U.N. refugee agency reports it is stepping up efforts to reduce the risk of the spread of the deadly Ebola virus as refugees flee DR Congo. Latest estimates put the number of confirmed and probable cases of Ebola in eastern DRC at 49, including 38 deaths.

The U.N. refugee agency is working closely with DRC authorities and other agencies on actions to contain Ebola on the national and regional level. But, its main focus is to monitor possible Ebola infections among refugees fleeing across the border, mainly to Uganda, from conflict ridden North Kivu and Ituri.

UNHCR spokesman, William Spindler says the number of newly arriving refugees into Uganda from these two Ebola affected provinces increased during July from 170 a day to 250 a day. He says the majority currently is crossing at the Kisoro border point.

“So UNHCR is working with WHO, UNICEF and other partners and with the Ministry of Health of Uganda to intensify screening for Ebola at all border entry points. And, additional health workers have been deployed in the border districts to improve response capacity,” he said.

Spindler notes the World Health Organization is not recommending any restriction on the movement of people. Therefore, he says UNHCR is urging countries neighboring DRC to allow refugees in need of protection to enter their territory and to include them into preparedness and response plans and activities.

The UNHCR says refugees are at the same risk of contracting and transmitting the Ebola virus disease as local farmers, merchants, business people and others moving through the area. Therefore, it urges governments and local communities not to adopt measures that single out refugees. Those measures may not be scientifically sound and will only serve to stigmatize and restrict refugees’ freedom of movement.

 

 

 
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Talk about going green. One British soccer team has made it its goal to become the first professional sports team in the world to be certified carbon neutral. It’s an official designation recently awarded to the team by the Secretary in charge of Climate Change at the United Nations. But that’s not all. The team may also be the world’s first 100 percent vegan football club. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo has more.
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There’s an abundance of seahorses in a remote gulf off the coast of northeastern Greece … and scientists are not exactly sure why. Although seahorses exist in Greece’s seas, scientists say it’s unusual to find a stable and continued presence for a protected species ravaged by overfishing throughout the Mediterranean Sea. Local divers are enthralled by the elegant creatures and are going to great lengths to document their presence and advocate for their protection. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Italians are divided between those who think parents should have the right to decide whether to vaccinate their children and those who feel immunization programs must be decided by the government, which they believe has better access to information. Vaccine regulations differ widely across Europe, and the current situation in Italy is in limbo.

Italians enrolling their children in state-run nursery schools currently are uncertain if they need to provide evidence their children have had 10 vaccinations required by a law that came into effect in March. A week ago, the upper house of parliament voted through an amendment to remove that obligation. But to become law, it must also be approved by the lower house.

Parents have been told that for the time being they can simply provide a self-signed declaration that their children have been vaccinated. Many remain unclear whether their children will be allowed to go to school if they fail to provide a declaration or other evidence of the vaccinations.

A surge of more than 5,000 measles cases last year – the second largest outbreak in Europe – led the government run then by the Democratic Party to pass a bill requiring mandatory vaccinations. However, in the run-up to general elections this year, the 5-Star Movement led by Luigi Di Maio and the League led by Matteo Salvini said they would do away with the law. Now in power, they appear to be keeping their promise

Speaking at a recent political rally near Florence, Salvini admitted he had vaccinated his own children and said that parents who have the best interests of their children at heart should be able to make that choice. He added that 10 vaccines are simply too many for some children and it is unthinkable that Italian children may not be able to enroll in school because they have not been vaccinated.

Salvini said a state that requires 10 vaccines must also give parents the certainty that nothing will happen to their children through pre-vaccine tests, which today do not exist. There are 15 European countries, he added, that do not even have a single mandatory vaccine. Noting that Italy now has the most compulsory vaccinations of any country in Europe, Salvini expressed the concern that some multinational or pharmaceutical company may have chosen Italian children as a testing ground.

Italy’s health minister, Giulia Grillo, a doctor and a member of the 5-Star Movement, has made clear the government believes the right balance must be struck between the right to education and the right to health.

Grillo said the 5-Star Movement is not opposed to vaccines and recognizes their importance and usefulness. She added that citizens need to be informed properly about vaccinations and that the National Health Service must provide support to parents and children before and after they are inoculated.

According to a 2010 survey of 27 EU states, plus Norway and Iceland, 15 countries do not have any mandatory vaccinations; the other 14 have at least one. The most common mandatory vaccine is against polio, followed by diphtheria and tetanus.
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Australian scientists have test driven two cars powered by a carbon-free fuel derived from ammonia.  A team from the Australian government’s research agency, the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization), says the pioneering technology will allow highly flammable hydrogen to be safely transported in the form of ammonia and used as a widely available fuel.  

Researchers have found a way to use a thin membrane to turn Australian-made hydrogen into ammonia.  This could be shipped safely to markets in Asia, as well as parts of Europe.  At its destination, the liquid ammonia would then be converted back into hydrogen, and used to power cars and buses,  as well as for electricity generation and industrial processes.

David Harris, CSIRO research director says “the special thing about the technology that we have is that it allows you to produce very pure hydrogen directly with a membrane system from ammonia.”

The technology has the support of Japanese car maker Toyota and South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Company.

‘Watershed moment’

Scientists say hydrogen, a highly-flammable gas that can be volatile and hard to transport safely, creates a low emission fuel for cars.  The Australian team describes the membrane technology that separates hydrogen from other gases as a “watershed moment for energy.”

Claire Johnson, the chief executive of Hydrogen Mobility Australia, an industry association, says the pioneering research could forever change the transport sector.

“We see that as a really exciting opportunity to decarbonize the transport sector, but also position Australia as one of the lead suppliers of hydrogen around the world.  There is some competition to play that role, however.  Norway, Brunei and Saudi Arabia have all flagged that they wish to be an exporter of hydrogen around the world.”

There are only a handful of hydrogen-powered cars in Australia, but there are tens of thousands across Japan, South Korea and Singapore.  The South Korean government has recently announced plans for 16,000 more hydrogen-fueled cars and 310 special refilling stations.  

 
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It might sound like science fiction, but the general in charge of the U.S. military’s air transports across the globe says refueling and resupplying the military may soon be a job that’s literally out of this world. VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb has more.
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Brazil cut its greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation in 2017 to levels below its internationally agreed 2020 climate change targets, the country’s Environment Ministry said Thursday.

Brazil reduced its emission from deforestation in the Amazon rainforest by 610 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), compared to its 2020 target of 564 million tons. In the Cerrado savanna, emissions were reduced 170 million tons of carbon dioxide versus a target of 104 million tons.

The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, and the Cerrado, South America’s biggest savanna, soak up vast amounts of carbon dioxide, and their preservation is seen as vital to the fight against climate change. 

But destruction of the forest releases large quantities of CO2, one of the main greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Large-scale Amazon deforestation has made Brazil one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters, because of fires and the spread of agriculture and cattle ranching.

The 2020 emission goals were set out in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord to combat climate change. Under the more ambitious Paris Agreement in 2015 on climate change, Brazil has set goals for further steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions for 2025 and 2030.

“The policy message is that we can and should remain in the Paris Agreement (because) it is possible to effectively implement the commitments that have been made,” said Thiago Mendes, secretary of climate change in the Environment Ministry.
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The head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is stepping down after a 14-month tenure in which the agency proposed broad changes to rules governing protections for thousands of species and pushed for more hunting and fishing on federal lands, officials said Thursday.

Greg Sheehan will leave the agency next week to return to his family and home in Utah, spokesman Gavin Shire said. He has led the wildlife service since last June as the senior political official appointed under President Donald Trump in a newly created deputy director position.

Under his tenure, the wildlife service moved recently to end a long-standing practice that automatically gave the same protections to threatened species as it gives more critically endangered species. The proposal also limits habitat safeguards meant to shield recovering species from harm and would require consideration of the economic impacts of protecting a species.

That’s alarmed wildlife advocates who fear a weakening of the Endangered Species Act, which has been used to save species as diverse as the bald eagle and the American alligator. The proposed changes were cheered by Republican lawmakers and others who say the endangered species law has been abused to block economic development and needs reform.

A request to interview Sheehan was declined.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had sought to make Sheehan acting director of the 9,000-employee wildlife service, which would have given him certain legal authorities. However, Sheehan was barred from that role because he did not have the science degree required for the position under federal law, Shire said.

Vacancies at Interior

His departure comes amid a spate of vacancies at the Interior Department more than a year and a half after Trump took office. Those include the heads of the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.

Before coming to the federal government, Sheehan worked for 25 years in Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources, including five years as its director.

National Wildlife Federation President Collin O’Mara — who considers Sheehan a friend — said during his watch the service had done good work collaborating with state officials and conservation groups. But O’Mara said there needed to be less emphasis on removing regulations and more on making sure wildlife issues are considered, such as during decisions on energy development.

“Given the magnitude of the wildlife crisis, there’s always more that can be done,” O’Mara said.

Another conservation group, the Center for Biological Diversity, had a more critical response, saying Sheehan’s departure was “welcome news for America’s wildlife.”

“In just one year in office, he inflicted incredible harm on imperiled animals by consistently putting special interests ahead of science and the environment,” said Brett Hartl, the group’s government affairs director.

The Interior Department issued a statement saying Sheehan was “an incredible asset to the Interior team and was tremendous in helping Secretary Zinke expand access for hunting and fishing on over a quarter-million acres of public lands across the country.”

Deputy Operations Director Jim Kurth will lead the agency pending another appointment, Shire said.
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A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration endangered public health when it overturned an Obama-era rule banning a dangerous pesticide.

In a 2-to-1 decision, the Seattle-based court gave the Environmental Protection Agency 60 days to pull chlorpyrifos from the market, one of the most widely used pesticides in the country.

The judges said the administration was unjustified in overturning the ban and ignored the science proving that residue of it on food is linked to brain damage in babies.

Former EPA chief Scott Pruitt reversed the Obama decision to extend an earlier ban on the product from general household use to its use on food.

Pruitt called it a return to “sound science” and a move away from “predetermined results.”

Dow Chemical, which manufactures chlorpyrifos, has in the past defended the pesticide as a product helping farmers feed the world while respecting “human health and the environment.”

“The court has made it clear that children’s health must come before powerful polluters,” the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Erik Olson said Thursday. “This is a victory for parents everywhere who want to feed their kids fruits and vegetables without fear it is harming their brains or poisoning communities.”
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