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washington — Federal health advisers voted Tuesday against a first-of-a-kind proposal to begin using the mind-altering drug MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, handing a potentially major setback to advocates who had hoped to win a landmark federal approval and bring the banned drugs into the medical mainstream. 

The panel of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration sided 10-1 against the overall benefits of MDMA when used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. They cited flawed study data, questionable research conduct and significant drug risks, including the potential for heart problems, injury and abuse. 

“It seems like there are so many problems with the data — each one alone might be OK, but when you pile them on top of each other … there’s just a lot of questions I would have about how effective the treatment is,” said Dr. Melissa Decker Barone, a psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

The FDA is not required to follow the group’s advice and is expected to make its final decision by August, but the negative opinion could strengthen FDA’s rationale for rejecting the treatment. 

The vote followed hours of pointed questions and criticisms about the research submitted on MDMA — sometimes called ecstasy or molly. Panelists pointed to flawed studies that could have skewed the results, missing follow-up data on patient outcomes, and a lack of diversity among participants. The vast majority of patients studied were white, with only five Black patients receiving MDMA, raising questions about the generalizability of the results. 

“The fact that this study has so many white participants is problematic because I don’t want something to roll out that only helps this one group,” said Elizabeth Joniak-Grant, the group’s patient representative. 

The FDA advisers also drew attention to allegations of misconduct in the trials that have recently surfaced in news stories and a report by the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which evaluates experimental drug treatments. The incidents include a 2018 report of apparent sexual misconduct by a therapist interacting with a patient. 

Lykos Therapeutics, the company behind the study, said it previously reported the incident to the FDA and regulators in Canada, where the therapist is based. Lykos is essentially a corporate spinoff of the nation’s leading psychedelic advocacy group, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, which funded the studies. The group was founded in 1986 to promote the benefits of MDMA and other mind-altering substances. 

MDMA is the first in a series of psychedelics — including LSD and psilocybin — that are expected to come before the FDA in the next few years. The panel’s negative ruling could further derail financial investments in the fledgling industry, which has mainly been funded by a small number of wealthy backers. 

MDMA’s main effect is triggering feelings of intimacy, connection and euphoria. When used to enhance talk therapy, the drug appears to help patients process their trauma and let go of disturbing thoughts and memories. 

But the panel struggled with the reliability of those results, given the difficulties of objectively testing psychedelic drugs. 

Because MDMA causes intense, psychological experiences, almost all patients in two key studies of the drug were able to guess whether they had received the MDMA or a dummy pill. That’s the opposite of the approach generally required for high-quality drug research, in which bias is minimized by “blinding” patients and researchers to whether they received the drug under investigation. 

“I’m not convinced at all that this drug is effective based on the data I saw,” said Dr. Rajesh Narendran, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who chaired the panel. 

Panelists also noted the difficulty of knowing how much of patients’ improvement came from MDMA versus simply undergoing the extensive therapy, which totaled more than 80 hours for many patients. Results were further marred by other complicating factors, including a large number of patients who had previously used MDMA or other psychedelics drugs recreationally. 
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AKTUN TUYUL CAVE SYSTEM, Mexico — Rays of sunlight slice through pools of crystal water as clusters of fish cast shadows on the limestone below. Arching over the emerald basin are walls of stalactites dripping down the cavern ceiling, which opens to a dense jungle.

These glowing sinkhole lakes — known as cenotes — are a part of one of Mexico’s natural wonders: A fragile system of an estimated 10,000 subterranean caverns, rivers and lakes that wind almost surreptitiously beneath Mexico’s southern Yucatan peninsula.

Now, construction of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s crown jewel project — the Maya Train — is rapidly destroying part of that hidden underground world, already under threat by development and mass tourism. As the caverns are thrust into the spotlight in the lead-up to the country’s presidential elections, scientists and environmentalists warn that the train will mean long-term environmental ruin.

Deep in the jungle, the roar of heavy machinery cuts through the cave’s gentle “drip, drip, drip.” Just a few meters above, construction of the train line is in full swing. The caverns rumble as government workers use massive metal drills that bore into limestone, embedding an estimated 15,000 steel pillars into the caverns.

Engineer Guillermo D’Christy looks upon the once immaculate cave, now coated with a layer of concrete and broken stalactites, icicle-shaped rock formations normally hanging from the roof of the cave. A mix of grief and anger is painted upon the face of D’Christy, who has long studied the waters running through the caves.

“Pouring concrete into a cavern, directly into the aquifer, without any concern or care,” D’Christy said. “That’s total ecocide.”

A tourism boon, but at what cost?

For nearly 1,460 kilometers, (1,000 miles) the high-speed Maya Train will wind its way around Mexico’s southern Yucatan Peninsula. When it’s completed, it’ll connect tourist hubs like Cancun and Playa del Carmen to dense jungle, remote communities and archaeological sites, drawing development and money into long-neglected rural swathes of the country.

The more than $30 billion train is among the keystone projects of Mexico’s outgoing President López Obrador, who has spent his six years in office portraying himself as a champion of the country’s long-forgotten poor.

“The Maya Train will be our legacy of development for the southeast of Mexico,” the president wrote in a post on the social platform X last year.

With Mexico holding elections on Sunday, the future of the train, and López Obrador’s legacy, is uncertain. Both leading candidates to replace him have made promises for a green agenda, but also supported the economic promises the train brings.

At issue is the path the train takes.

It was originally planned to run along the region’s highway in more urban areas. But after waves of complaints by hotel owners, the government moved one of the final sections of the line deeper into the jungle, atop the most important cave system in the country. It’s plowed down millions of trees, a chunk of the largest tropical forest in the Americas after the Amazon.

The caves contain one of the biggest aquifers in Mexico and act as the region’s main water source, crucial at a time when the nation faces a deepening water crisis. In 2022, archaeologists also discovered some of the oldest human remains in North America within the caverns.

The area was once a reef nestled beneath the Caribbean Sea but changing sea levels pushed Mexico’s southern peninsula out of the ocean as a mass of limestone. Water sculpted the porous stone into caves over millions of years.

It produced the open-face freshwater caverns, “cenotes,” and underground rivers that are in equal parts awe-inspiring and delicate, explained Emiliano Monroy-Ríos, a geologist at Northwestern University studying the region.

“These ecosystems are very, very fragile,” Monroy-Ríos said. “They are building upon a land that is like Gruyere cheese, full of caves and cavities of different sizes and at different depths.”

López Obrador promised his government would prevent damage to the Great Mayan Aquifer by elevating the sections of the train on thousands of hefty steel pillars buried deep into the ground.

But the populist leader was met with an uproar in late January when environmentalists and scientists posted videos showing government drills carving tunnels into the tops of caverns, implanting rows of 2-meter-wide (6-foot-wide) steel pillars.

López Obrador responded angrily to the videos, calling them “staged” by his political enemies.

“These pseudo-environmentalists are liars,” López Obrador said in a news briefing. “Don’t watch those videos because they’re specialists in staging.”

Associated Press journalists traveled to construction sites along the Maya Train route where López Obrador denied causing any environmental damage. What they saw directly contradicted the president’s claims.

Documenting destruction

D’Christy treks through dense rainforest and clicks on his headlight as he climbs into a split in a rock.

The engineer and hydrological expert has spent 25 years roving the intricate cave system, tracking the quality of the waters. Like many of the people studying the mysteries of the ancient cave system, his once tame job was inadvertently turned turbulent with the rise of the train project.

Today, he wanders into a small section of the caverns known as Aktun Tuyul, less than an hour from the tourist city of Playa del Carmen. As the 58-year-old Mexican walks past layers of stalactites and steel pillars burrowing into the rock formations, the cave’s darkness is broken by wagon wheel-sized holes drilled into the roof of the cave, where even more pillars will be implanted.

D’Christy wades through waist-deep water, now turned a murky brown by corroded metal from the pillars and pushes his body through a narrow passage in the rock.

Sitting next to one of more than a dozen pillars embedded into this cavern, he pulls out a series of syringes and bottles, taking a sample of the water next to the metal.

“It clearly has a color characteristic of iron contamination,” he said, holding up a syringe of foggy yellow water. “We’re going to take a sample.”

D’Christy pours the water into a glass vial, mixing it with a chemical that turns it a deep blue, indicating the water contains traces of iron from the poles. Next to other pillars, he presses his ear to the metal, listening to globs of concrete pour into the hollow tube.

Across the cave system, stalactites broken off by vibrations from train construction litter the ground like rubble following an earthquake. In other caverns, the concrete filling the pillars has spilled out to coat the limestone ground.

While the long-term environmental consequences of the construction are unknown, what is certain is that it is transforming the entire ecosystem, said geologist Monroy-Ríos.

“Just by drilling, before you even put in the pillars, you are killing an entire ecosystem that was in those caves” he said. “Why? Because now light is coming in, the gases within have changed, and there are very sensitive species that live in total darkness. They have already killed hundreds of millions” of organisms.

But the geologist’s greatest concern continues to be that the morphing limestone upon which the train is built and caves underneath the pillars could cause a collapse of the line. Scientists have long warned of the risks of building on soluble rock like limestone.

Already, sections of highway in the Yucatan have warped or caved in, and the Maya Train has been marred by a series of accidents, including a March train derailment, which government officials blamed on a loose clamp set by contractors.

Further damage to the limestone could lead to another accident that could be deadly. If a cargo train derailed, it could cause an oil spill that could permanently devastate the aquifer, Monroy-Ríos said.

‘It will benefit us all’

Not everyone is opposed to the train running through the remote communities. Some see an unprecedented economic opportunity, a chance to help poor families earn money.

Maria Norma de los Angeles and her family have long lived off a modest flow of tourists in their community of Jacinto Pat, tucked in a stretch of jungle in the southern coastal state, Quintana Roo.

They offer temazcal baths, traditional Mayan steam rooms meant to purify and relax the body, and charge visiting foreigners to swim in a nearby cenote.

The family, like many along the train’s path, was originally opposed to the project because they worried it would destroy the cenotes drawing tourists.

But their feelings about the train began to change when government officials contracted local people to build the track, De los Angeles said. They also promised to bring communities electricity, a sewage system and running water, and agreed to pay more for the land the train would pass over.

“It has its pros and its cons,” De los Angeles said as her family gathered to kill a pig to eat for her father’s birthday. “But there will be a moment when we see an economic spillover … I know that it will benefit us all.”

That’s the mentality of many Mexicans toward both the train and López Obrador. Many are willing to overlook the controversies of the populist and his train, in favor of his charisma and the strong economy seen during his presidency.

The 70-year-old leader has connected with Mexico’s long-invisible working class in a way few leaders have in recent history. López Obrador’s government has raised the minimum wage and provided cash handouts to older Mexicans and students. The government says more than 5 million people have been pulled out of poverty while López Obrador was president.

Luruama de la Cruz, a California resident whose family comes from the local town of Leona Vicario, said she bought her father tickets to the train for his birthday because it was a dream of his.

“A dream made reality,” De la Cruz says as she rode the train and took a video on her phone, meandering past passengers wearing “Maya Train” T-shirts and watching an interview between López Obrador and Russian state media.

“Whenever you build something, something else is destroyed,” she said, adding that family members worked on train construction. “This is for the good of the people.”

A rush to build the track

López Obrador has fast-tracked construction of the train to try to keep promises to complete it before June elections, something that has appeared all but impossible. The moves he’s made have only deepened his ongoing clashes with the country’s judiciary, further fueling criticisms that his government is undermining democratic institutions.

In a violation of Mexican law, the government didn’t carry out a comprehensive study to assess the potential environmental impacts before starting construction. That’s led to blindly plowing into caverns with no clue what’s being damaged, scientists and independent lawyers say.

“Our president has little respect for the law. He’s in a sort of tug of war for power and he does what he wants,” said Claudia Aguilar, a lawyer at Mexico’s Free School of Law.

When a judge ordered construction of the line be suspended until an adequate report of how the train would affect the caves was carried out, López Obrador ignored the ruling, and the work continued.

At the same time, much of the project has been cloaked in secrecy as López Obrador has charged Mexico’s military with construction and blocked the release of information in the name of “national security.”

While Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional, López Obrador disregarded that ruling, too, saying it was to protect his project from “corrupt” critics.

When the AP requested an interview with leadership of the Maya Train project, spokesperson Mariana Galicia said they were “ordered that we cannot give interviews” but could respond to questions sent over email to “better control” the information shared. They did not respond to questions sent by email.

‘Swimming in poop’

Meanwhile, thousands of passengers are already riding sections of the train that have been built. The atmosphere above is far-removed from the conflicts playing out around the caverns.

Hotels and clubs host raves and even music festivals in some of the cenotes, with one club boasting it “takes the relaxation and wellness experience to another level. Let yourself be enveloped by this sacred, timeless place.”

Luxurious beach hotels and booming clubs packed with drunk, khaki-clad tourists dominate the coastal tourist city of Playa del Carmen. Once a Mayan settlement, the city is among many in the Yucatan Peninsula that in recent decades have been converted into a party hub for vacationing foreigners.

In the caves below, biologist Roberto Rojo paddles through a sea of trash.

Under the arching cavern roof, Rojo and a group of volunteers push a green kayak through a cenote, filling bulking bags of glass beer bottles, plastic tubes, metal grating, plastic Coca-Cola bottles, rotten wooden planks and even a printer.

“You don’t even want to know what many of those things are,” Rojo said.

It’s a fate Rojo and many others worry may await hundreds of cenotes, caves and underground lakes and rivers along the new Maya Train line.

“It’s not just the train, but everything the train brings with it – urban developments, hotel developments,” said water expert D’Christy. “Rather than solving a problem, they’re coming in and making a big problem worse.”

Millions of tourists a year flock to the region, affecting the entire underground as the industry guzzles water and sewage seeps through the earth and into the caves, killing fish and other wildlife. In 2022, authorities found that the water of more than a dozen of the caverns near the tourist city of Tulum was tainted with E. Coli bacteria.

Last year, the environmental organization Va Por La Tierra estimated that approximately 95% of the cenotes in Yucatan state — where the Maya Train cuts through — were already contaminated due to the lack of a sufficient sewage system. Scuba diving master Bernardette Carrión even told the AP that tourists admiring the splendor of the caves “are swimming in poop.”

The underground system is connected to the sea, so waste trickles out to the ocean, where scientists say it feeds seaweed-like algae piling up on Caribbean coastlines, spurring on a slate of other environmental and health hazards.

Rojo and other volunteers created the organization known as “Urban Cenotes” in Playa del Carmen to clean the water system, cave by cave.

“We’re trying to return the dignity that these spaces have had for thousands of years, that are now being turned into landfills, sewers and drains,” Rojo said.

But it’s an uphill battle for the hundreds of volunteers, and something they worry will become impossible as pollution expands into rural areas with the Maya Train, deepening ongoing pollution caused by pig farms and massive soy plantations.

Looking forward, they’re uncertain about what will come as June elections ended Sunday night, with López Obrador leaving office in the coming months. The leader will likely be replaced by either race front-runner and ally Claudia Sheinbaum or rival ex-Senator Xóchitl Gálvez.

Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist who leads the race by a comfortable margin, has portrayed herself as a champion for the environment, but has supported López Obrador’s fossil-fuel agenda and made few remarks about the environmental damage the train has wrought.

Little more than a week before Sunday’s presidential election, Sheinbaum said she was meeting with leaders of neighboring Guatemala and Belize in talks to extend the Maya Train to Central America.

Gálvez, a López Obrador opponent, has taken advantage of the controversy to tear into her adversaries, calling the train’s damage “irreversible” and a “consequence of the negligence of the government because they didn’t do any environmental impact studies.” Months earlier, though, she said she would also continue with plans to extend the train.

Meanwhile, groups like Rojo’s do everything they can to salvage an ecosystem that took millennia to form. They worry they might not have all that much time left.

“I’m not going to sit quietly and wait for the government to solve things,” Rojo said. “The people who live in the Yucatan peninsula are on the verge of a water crisis.”
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Geneva — Nearly 62,000 people died from heat-related stress in the summer of 2022 in Europe alone, and, according to a new study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, “With further global warming, we can expect an increase in the intensity, frequency, and duration of heatwaves.”

The report launched ahead of Heat Action Day on Sunday, June 2, looks at the role climate change is playing in increasing the number of extreme heat days around the world over the last 12 months.

“What we are now going through is a very silent but increasingly common killer — heat, that was particularly disastrous last year,” said climatologist Friederike Otto, co-lead of World Weather Attribution at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the report.

Speaking from London last Tuesday, she told journalists in Geneva that this May was hotter than any May ever experienced before, as were all months for the past 12 months.

“Every heat wave that is happening today is hotter and lasts longer than it would have without human-induced climate change. That is without the burning of coal, oil and gas and we also see many more heat waves than we have otherwise,” she said noting that temperatures right now were around 50° C (122° F) in India and Pakistan.

The World Meteorological Organization confirms that 2023 was the hottest year on record, reaching 1.45° C (2.6° F) above the pre-industrial average, almost reaching the Paris Climate Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5° C.

According to the report, the average inhabitant of the planet has experienced 26 more extremely hot days, “which probably would not have occurred without climate change.” Or put another way, 6.8 billion people —78 percent of world’s population — have experienced at least 31 days of extreme heat.

“But, of course, we are not average people. We live in a specific place, in a specific country,” said Otto. “So, for example if you lived in Ecuador, it was not 26 more days, but it was 170 more days. In other words, in the last 12 months, the people in Ecuador experienced 180 days of extreme heat. Without climate change, it would have been just 10. So, it is six months of extreme heat, instead of 10 days.”

She noted that extreme heat was dangerous and responsible for thousands of deaths every year. She said, “Heat harmed especially vulnerable people: the elderly, the very young, those with pre-existing health conditions” as well as healthy people exposed to extreme temperatures, “like outdoor workers in construction or agriculture and people living in refugee camps.”

The World Health Organization, previewing a new collection of papers to be published this week in the Journal of Global Health, says the studies show “climate-related health risks have been crucially underestimated” for younger and older people and during pregnancy, “with serious, often life-threatening implications.”

Taking extreme heat for example, WHO says the authors note that preterm births — the leading cause of childhood deaths, “spike during heatwaves, while older people are more likely to suffer heart attacks or respiratory distress.”

Heat Action Day, which is organized by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, aims to draw attention to the threat of extreme heat and to what can be done to mitigate it.

In a statement to mark Heat Action Day, Jagan Chapagain, secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said, “Flooding and hurricanes may capture the headlines, but the impacts of extreme heat are equally deadly.

“That is why Heat Action Day matters so much,” he said. “We need to focus attention on climate change’s silent killer. The IFRC is making heat and urban action to reduce its impacts a priority.”

Climatologist Otto said the burning of fossil fuels must stop to prevent the situation from becoming worse.

“Heat kills. But it does not have to kill. There are many solutions, some of which are low or no cost, ranging from individual action to population-scale interventions that reduce the urban heat island effect.

“At an individual level, people can cool their bodies by self-dousing with water, using cooling devices or modifying their built environment to increase shade” around their homes.

But she observed that individual action alone is not enough. She said action had to be taken at the community, city, regional and country levels as well.

“Cities can develop and implement heat action plans that outline how they will prepare for the heat season, respond to imminent heat waves, and plan for the future.

“And on a large scale, policies can be introduced to incorporate cooling needs into social protection programs, supplement energy costs for the most vulnerable and building codes can be updated to encourage better housing,” she said.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Last-minute computer trouble nixed Saturday’s launch attempt for Boeing’s first astronaut flight, the latest in a string of delays over the years.

Two NASA astronauts were strapped in the company’s Starliner capsule when the countdown automatically was halted at 3 minutes and 50 seconds by the computer system that controls the final minutes before liftoff.

With only a split second to take off, there was no time to work the latest problem and the launch was called off.

Technicians raced to the pad to help astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams out of the capsule atop the fully fueled Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Within an hour of the launch abort, the hatch was reopened.

The team can’t get to the computers to troubleshoot the problem until the rocket is drained of all its fuel, said Tory Bruno, CEO for the rocket maker, United Launch Alliance.

Bruno said one of the three redundant computers located near the rocket at the pad was sluggish. All three must work properly to proceed with a launch, he said.

Depending on what needs to be fixed, the next launch attempt could be as early as Wednesday. If it doesn’t blast off this coming week, then that would be it until mid-June in order to move the rocket off the pad and replace batteries.

“This is the business that we’re in,” Boeing’s Mark Nappi said. “Everything’s got to work perfectly.”

It was the second launch attempt. The first try on May 6 was delayed for leak checks and rocket repairs.

NASA wants a backup to SpaceX, which has been flying astronauts since 2020.

Boeing should have launched its first crew around the same time as SpaceX, but its first test flight with no one on board in 2019 was plagued by severe software issues and never made it to the space station.

A redo in 2022 fared better, but parachute problems and flammable later caused more delays. A small helium leak in the capsule’s propulsion system last month came on top of a rocket valve issue.

More valve trouble cropped up two hours before Saturday’s planned liftoff, but the team used a backup circuit to get the ground-equipment valves working to top off the fuel for the rocket’s upper stage. Launch controllers were relieved to keep pushing ahead, but the computer system known as the ground launch sequencer ended the effort.

“Of course, this is emotionally disappointing,” NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, the backup pilot, said from neighboring Kennedy Space Center shortly after the countdown was halted.

But he said delays are part of spaceflight. “We’re going to have a great launch in our future.”
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Beijing — China’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe successfully landed on the far side of the moon to collect samples, state news agency Xinhua reported Sunday, the latest leap for Beijing’s decades-old space program.

The Chang’e-6 set down in the immense South Pole-Aitken Basin, one of the largest known impact craters in the solar system, Xinhua said, citing the China National Space Administration.

It marks the first time that samples will be collected from the rarely explored area of the moon, according to the agency.

The Chang’e-6 is on a technically complex 53-day mission that began on May 3.

Now that the probe has landed, it will attempt to scoop up lunar soil and rocks and carry out experiments in the landing zone.

That process should be complete within two days, Xinhua said. The probe will use two methods of collection: a drill to collect samples under the surface and a robotic arm to grab specimens from the surface.

Then it must attempt an unprecedented launch from the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth.

Scientists say the moon’s dark side, so-called because it is invisible from Earth, not because it never catches the sun’s rays, holds great promise for research because its craters are less covered by ancient lava flows than the near side.

Material collected from the dark side may shed more light on how the moon formed in the first place.

Plans for China’s “space dream” have been put into overdrive under President Xi Jinping.

Beijing has poured huge resources into its space program over the past decade, targeting a string of ambitious undertakings in an effort to close the gap with the two traditional space powers: the United States and Russia.

It has notched several notable achievements, including building a space station called Tiangong, or “heavenly palace.”

Beijing has landed robotic rovers on Mars and the moon, and China is only the third country to independently put humans in orbit.

But Washington has warned that China’s space program is being used to mask military objectives and an effort to establish dominance in space.

China aims to send a crewed mission to the moon by 2030 and plans to build a base on the lunar surface.

The United States is also planning to put astronauts back on the moon by 2026 with its Artemis 3 mission. 
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Geneva, Switzerland — The World Health Organization annual assembly on Saturday gave member countries another year to agree on a landmark accord to combat future pandemics. 

Three years of effort to reach a deal ended last month in failure. But WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed what he called historic decisions taken to make a new bid for an accord. 

The WHO agreed in 2021 as the COVID-19 pandemic eased to launch talks on an accord to counter any new global health crisis. Millions died from COVID-19 which brought health systems in many countries to their knees. 

The talks hit multiple obstacles however with many developing countries accusing rich nations of monopolizing available COVID-19 vaccines. 

They have sought assurances that any new accord will make provision of medicines and the sharing of research more equitable.  

The WHO annual assembly “made concrete commitments to completing negotiations on a global pandemic agreement within a year, at the latest,” said a statement released at the end of the Geneva meeting. 

The assembly also agreed on amendments to an international framework of binding health rules. The changes introduce the notion of a “pandemic emergency,” which calls on member states to take rapid, coordinated action, the statement said. 

“The historic decisions taken today demonstrate a common desire by member states to protect their own people, and the world’s, from the shared risk of public health emergencies and future pandemics,” Tedros said. 

He said the change to health rules “will bolster countries’ ability to detect and respond to future outbreaks and pandemics by strengthening their own national capacities, and [through] coordination between fellow states, on disease surveillance, information sharing and response.” 

Tedros added: “The decision to conclude the pandemic agreement within the next year demonstrates how strongly and urgently countries want it, because the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if.” 
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GARDI SUGDUB, Panama — On a tiny island off Panama’s Caribbean coast, about 300 families are packing their belongings in preparation for a dramatic change. Generations of Gunas who have grown up on Gardi Sugdub in a life dedicated to the sea and tourism will trade that next week for the mainland’s solid ground.

They go voluntarily — sort of.

The Gunas of Gardi Sugdub are the first of 63 communities along Panama’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts that government officials and scientists expect to be forced to relocate by rising sea levels in the coming decades.

On a recent day, the island’s Indigenous residents rowed or sputtered off with outboard motors to fish. Children, some in uniforms and others in the colorful local textiles called “molas,” chattered as they hustled through the warren of narrow dirt streets on their way to school.

“We’re a little sad, because we’re going to leave behind the homes we’ve known all our lives, the relationship with the sea, where we fish, where we bathe and where the tourists come, but the sea is sinking the island little by little,” said Nadin Morales, 24, who prepared to move with her mother, uncle and boyfriend.

An official with Panama’s Ministry of Housing said that some people have decided to stay on the island until it’s no longer safe, without revealing a specific number.

Authorities won’t force them to leave, the official said on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue.

Gardi Sugdub is one of about 50 populated islands in the archipelago of the Guna Yala territory. It is only about 366 meters (1,200 feet) long and 137 meters (450 feet) wide. From above, it’s roughly a prickly oval surrounded by dozens of short docks where residents tie up their boats.

Every year, especially when the strong winds whip up the sea in November and December, water fills the streets and enters the homes. Climate change isn’t only leading to a rise in sea levels, but it’s also warming oceans and thereby powering stronger storms.

The Gunas have tried to reinforce the island’s edge with rocks, pilings and coral, but seawater keeps coming.

“Lately, I’ve seen that climate change has had a major impact,” Morales said. “Now the tide comes to a level it didn’t before, and the heat is unbearable.”

The Guna’s autonomous government decided two decades ago that they needed to think about leaving the island, but at that time it was because the island was getting too crowded. The effects of climate change accelerated that thinking, said Evelio Lopez, a 61-year-old teacher on the island.

He plans to move with relatives to the new site on the mainland that the government developed at a cost of $12 million. The concrete houses sit on a grid of paved streets carved out of the lush tropical jungle just over 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the port, where an eight-minute boat ride carries them to Gardi Sugdub.

Leaving the island is “a great challenge, because more than 200 years of our culture is from the sea, so leaving this island means a lot of things,” Lopez said. “Leaving the sea, the economic activities that we have there on the island, and now we’re going to be on solid ground, in the forest. We’re going to see what the result is in the long run.”

Steven Paton, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s physical monitoring program in Panama, said that the upcoming move “is a direct consequence of climate change through the increase in sea level.”

“The islands on average are only a half-meter above sea level, and as that level rises, sooner or later the Gunas are going to have to abandon all of the islands, almost surely by the end of the century or earlier,” he said.

“All of the world’s coasts are being affected by this at different speeds,” Paton said.

Residents of a small coastal community in Mexico moved inland last year after storms continued to take away their homes. Governments are being forced to take action, from the Italian lagoon city of Venice to the coastal communities of New Zealand.

A recent study by Panama’s Environmental Ministry’s Climate Change directorate, with support from universities in Panama and Spain, estimated that by 2050, Panama would lose about 2.01% of its coastal territory to increases in sea levels.

Panama estimates that it will cost about $1.2 billion to relocate the 38,000 or so inhabitants who will face rising sea levels in the short- and medium-term, said Ligia Castro, climate change director for the Environmental Ministry.

On Gardi Sugdub, women who make the elaborately embroidered molas worn by Guna women hang them outside their homes when finished, trying to catch the eye of visiting tourists.

The island and others along the coast have benefitted for years from year-round tourism.

Braucilio de la Ossa, the deputy secretary of Carti, the port facing Gardi Sugdub, said that he planned to move with his wife, daughter, sister-in-law and mother-in-law. Some of his wife’s relatives will stay on the island.

He said the biggest challenge for those moving would be the lifestyle change of moving from the sea inland, even though the distance is relatively small.

“Now that they will be in the forest, their way of living will be different,” he said.
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KAMPALA, Uganda — Uganda has rolled out a nationwide yellow fever vaccination campaign to help safeguard its population against the mosquito-borne disease that has long posed a threat.

By the end of April, Ugandan authorities had vaccinated 12.2 million of the 14 million people targeted, said Dr. Michael Baganizi, an official in charge of immunization at the health ministry.

Uganda will now require everyone traveling to and from the country to have a yellow fever vaccination card as an international health regulation, Baganizi said.

Ugandan authorities hope the requirement will compel more people to get the yellow fever shot amid a general atmosphere of vaccine hesitancy that worries health care providers in the East African nation.

The single-dose vaccine has been offered free of charge to Ugandans between the ages of 1 and 60. Vaccination centers in the capital, Kampala, and elsewhere included schools, universities, hospitals and local government units.

Before this, Ugandans usually paid to get the yellow fever shot at private clinics, for the equivalent of $27.

Uganda, with 45 million people, is one of 27 countries on the African continent classified as at high risk for yellow fever outbreaks. According to the World Health Organization, there are about 200,000 cases and 30,000 deaths globally each year from the disease.

Uganda’s most recent outbreak was reported earlier this year in the central districts of Buikwe and Buvuma.

Yellow fever is caused by a virus transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes. The majority of infections are asymptomatic. Symptoms can include fever, muscle pain, headache, loss of appetite and nausea or vomiting, according to the WHO.

Uganda’s vaccination initiative is part of a global strategy launched in 2017 by the WHO and partners such as the U.N. children’s agency to eliminate yellow fever by 2026. The goal is to protect almost 1  billion people in Africa and the Americas.

A midterm evaluation of that strategy, whose results were published last year, found that 185 million people in high-risk African countries had been vaccinated by August 2022.

In Uganda, most people get the yellow fever shot when they are traveling to countries such as South Africa that demand proof of vaccination on arrival.

James Odite, a nurse working at a private hospital which has been designated as a vaccination center in a suburb of the capital, Kampala, told the AP that hundreds of doses remained unused after the yellow fever vaccination campaign closed. They will be used in a future mass campaign.

Among the issues raised by vaccine-hesitant people was the question of whether “the government wants to give them expired vaccines,” Odite said.

Baganizi, the immunization official, said Uganda’s government has invested in community “sensitization” sessions during which officials tell people that vaccines save lives.
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SYDNEY — Australian researchers say a simpler and cheaper method to remove salt from seawater using heat could help combat what they call “unprecedented global water shortages.” The desalination of seawater is a process where salt and impurities are removed to produce drinking water.  

Most of the world’s desalination methods use a process called reverse osmosis. It uses pressure to force seawater through a membrane. The salt is retained on one side, and purified water is passed through on the other. 

Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) say that while widespread, the current processes need large amounts of electricity and other expensive materials that need to be serviced and maintained.  

Scientists at ANU say they developed the world’s first thermal desalination method. It is powered not by electricity, but by moderate heat generated directly from sunlight, or waste heat from machines such as air conditioners or other industrial processes. 

It uses a phenomenon called thermo diffusion, in which salt moves from hot temperatures to cold. The researchers pumped seawater through a narrow channel, which runs under a unit that was heated to greater than 60 degrees Celsius and over a bottom plate that was cooled to 20 degrees Celsius. Lower-salinity water comes from the water in the top section of the channel, closer to the heat. 

After repeated cycles through the channels, the ANU study asserts, the salinity of seawater can be reduced from 30,000 parts per million to less than 500 parts per million. 

Juan Felipe Torres, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the Australian National University and the project’s lead chief investigator, explained his pioneering work.  

“We use a phenomenon people have not used before,” he said. “We are exploring its applicability in this context but in essence (it) should be something super simple, something as simple as a channel where you have water flowing through it and you are going to produce some sort of separation, and this is what thermal desalination is doing.”  

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has stated that by 2025, 1.8 billion people around the world are likely to face “absolute water scarcity.”  

Torres said the ANU’s invention could help ensure water supplies to communities under threat because of climate change. 

“Our vision, let’s say, for the future to have a more equitable world in terms of water security and food security is a method that does not require expensive maintenance or to train personnel to continue running it. So, we think thermal desalination would enable that,” he said.  

The ANU team is building a multi-channel solar-powered device to desalinate seawater in the Pacific kingdom of Tonga, which is enduring a severe drought.  

The research is published in the journal Nature Communications. 
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It’s an emergence that’s been more than a decade in the making. Trillions of cicadas that have burrowed underground for 13 or 17 years are now emerging in parts of the Midwestern and Southern United States. And, VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports, they are ready to mate.
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GRINDAVIK, Iceland — Lava continued to spurt from a volcano in southwestern Iceland on Thursday but the activity had calmed significantly from when it erupted a day earlier.

The eruption Wednesday was the fifth and most powerful since the volcanic system near Grindavik reawakened in December after 800 years, gushing record levels of lava as its fissure grew to 3.5 kilometers in length.

Volcanologist Dave McGarvie calculated that the amount of lava initially flowing from the crater could have buried the soccer pitch at Wembley Stadium in London under 15 meters of lava every minute.

“These jets of magma are reaching like 50 meters, into the atmosphere,” said McGarvie, an honorary researcher at Lancaster University. “That just immediately strikes me as a powerful eruption. And that was my first impression … then some numbers came out, estimating how much was coming out per minute or per second and it was, ‘Wow.'”

The activity once again threatened Grindavik, a coastal town of 3,800 people, and led to the evacuation of the popular Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, one of Iceland’s biggest tourist attractions.

Grindavik, which is about 50 kilometers southwest of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, has been threatened since a swarm of earthquakes in November forced an evacuation in advance of the initial December 18 eruption. A subsequent eruption consumed several buildings.

Protective barriers outside Grindavik deflected the lava Wednesday but the evacuated town remained without electricity and two of the three roads into town were inundated with lava.

“I just like the situation quite well compared to how it looked at the beginning of the eruption yesterday,” Grindavik Mayor Fannar Jónasson told national broadcaster RUV.

McGarvie said the eruption was more powerful than the four that preceded it because the largest amount of magma had accumulated in a chamber underground before breaking the earth’s surface and shooting into the sky.

The rapid and powerful start of the eruption followed by it diminishing quickly several hours later is the pattern researchers have witnessed with this volcano, McGarvie said. It’s unknown when eruptions at this volcano will end.

“It could go on for quite some considerable time,” McGarvie said. “We’re really in new territory here because eruptions like this have never been witnessed, carefully, in this part of Iceland.”

Iceland, which sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic, sees regular eruptions. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere and led to widespread airspace closures over Europe.

None of the current cycle of eruptions have had an impact on aviation.
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May 31 is World No Tobacco Day, a day when many health advocacy groups raise awareness about the dangers of tobacco. These groups have reason to celebrate: In most countries, tobacco use is declining. But not in Indonesia, where smoking rates are rising, according to the World Health Organization. Dave Grunebaum has the story.
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Geneva — Despite the failure of negotiators to reach a pandemic accord ahead of this week’s World Health Assembly, a senior U.S. official remains optimistic that an agreement to lessen the threats of global killer disease outbreaks is in sight.

“We think the elements of a good deal are already on the table and that is why we feel optimistic because those are pretty good deals. It is just a matter now of fine-tuning it to make sure everybody says we are ready to sign on the dotted line,” Xavier Becerra, U.S. secretary of health and human services, told journalists at a briefing in Geneva Wednesday.

While disappointing, Becerra indicated that it was not surprising that an accord was not reached after two-and-a-half years of negotiations.

“Negotiations go on forever,” he said. “I think we have to put this in perspective. You do not build a nation overnight. You do not build an Empire State Building overnight. It takes a long time. Name me a major international achievement that came overnight.

“I think there is clear consensus that we cannot let the status quo be upon us if another pandemic comes,” he said.

His view reflects that of World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who, in his opening remarks at the World Health Assembly on Monday, assured delegates that the negotiations were on track and were not a failure.

“Of course, we all wish that we had been able to reach a consensus on the agreement in time for this health assembly and cross the finish line,” he said. “But I remain confident that you still will—because where there is a will, there is a way.”

WHO says 7,010,681 people have died from the COVID-19 outbreak as of April 13 and that a total of 704,753,890 cases have been confirmed in 229 countries and territories.

Becerra noted that threats against global health have an outsized influence on broader global political and economic interests.

“There is no stability without health. There is no security without health. Our nations cannot be strong unless they are healthy.

“Getting out of COVID is our main health priority,” Becerra said, noting that U.S. President Joe Biden was committed to achieving a pandemic treaty.

“When the president came in, we were experiencing two or three 9/11s every day in America in terms of loss of life. That is where we started. Today, we are walking around without masks. We are treating COVID the way we treat the flu,” he said, indicating that now is not the time to become complacent.

“I think we realize that another pandemic could be upon us. I mean, we are dealing with avian flu in the U.S. right now. We do not know how long it is going to be before we get another type of COVID kind of tragedy. We do not want to wait,” he said.

Sticking points to a pandemic treaty include disagreements over sharing information about pathogens that cause pandemics, a formula for global sharing of vaccines and medicine during international health emergencies, and financing to set up surveillance systems.

The WHO says that member states have agreed to continue to work during the World Health Assembly “to develop the world’s first pandemic accord” to prevent a repeat of the “global health, economic and social impacts” of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We really have an incredible opportunity this week,” Loyce Pace, assistant secretary for global affairs at HHS, said.

“We have spent so long trying to come together and finding compromise and consensus. I think we talk about what is left to do, but I do not know if we talk enough about what has been done toward reaching an agreement.”

“So, whatever happens this week, we need some deliverable, if only to keep this momentum on towards any other work that should continue. We shouldn’t be leaving Geneva and go home without an accord, not after all that has been done,” Pace said.

Secretary Becerra agrees, saying that he does not think there are substantive disagreements about the essential elements of a pandemic treaty.

“It is more how they are packaged, how they are defined. People generally agree with what we have to do in order to be ready to take on any pandemic that may come across our path,” Becerra said.

“I am the son of immigrants. Optimism is in my DNA and so, I believe we are going to get this done because it would be tragic, especially given how far we have come and not get it done.

“We have to be ready,” he said. “Who knows what is coming around the corner. Something is going to broadside us. We just have to be ready.”
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