The Biden administration is preparing for a worst-case scenario if a conservative federal judge rules in favor of a lawsuit seeking to restrict access to one of the two drugs typically used to induce a medicated abortion.

Two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, can be taken by women at home and are used for just over half of U.S. abortions. But that could be quickly changed by a lawsuit filed by an anti-abortion group in Texas that claims the Food and Drug Administration wrongly approved mifepristone for use more than 23 years ago.

The case is before a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump. A ruling in favor of the abortion opponents could immediately shut down the sale of the drug, but women would still have access to medicated abortions with a regimen of misoprostol.

Vice President Kamala Harris promised on Friday that the White House would push back on efforts to ban the drug, as she gathered a group of nearly a dozen doctors and abortion rights advocates to discuss a plan for responding to the looming threat to access to medical abortions.

“There are now partisan and political attacks attempting to question the legitimacy of a group of scientists and doctors who have studied the significance of this drug,” Harris said. “There is now an attempt by politicians to remove it from the ability of doctors to prescribe and the ability of people to receive.”

The lawsuit against mifepristone was filed by the Alliance for Defending Freedom, which was also involved in the Mississippi case that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned. It’s the latest fallout in the struggle over reproductive care that the Democratic administration must grapple with since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion last year.

Harris did not publicly lay out how the administration plans to respond if a ruling that halts the sale of the drug nationwide comes down on Friday.

‘Medication abortion is not going away’

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, meanwhile, was in California on Friday to meet leaders from Planned Parenthood to talk about access to the abortion drugs.

Dr. Kristyn Brandi said she told the vice president on Friday that the ruling could trigger widespread confusion over the accessibility of medicated abortion in the U.S. Brandi, who is chair of the Physicians for Reproductive Health, said she already fields calls at her New Jersey clinic from women asking if medicated abortion is legal in the state.

“It’s a really important thing to communicate with people: medication abortion is not going away,” Brandi said.

She added that Harris expressed support for immediately challenging the ruling if it shuts down access to mifepristone.

Clinics and telehealth providers have been preparing for a ruling that shuts down access to mifepristone, ordering more doses of misoprostol so they can offer medication abortions with just that one drug. They will have to change the way they counsel patients, telling them that misoprostol-only abortions are slightly less effective and sometimes more painful than abortions done with both drugs.

Abortions using both drugs “can be as effective as 98% or more,” while misoprostol-only abortions are up to about 95% effective, Melissa Grant, chief operating officer of the Carafem abortion clinic, told The Associated Press.

Mifepristone dilates the cervix and blocks the action of the hormone progesterone, which enables a pregnancy to continue. Misoprostol causes contractions that empty the uterus. Typically, mifepristone is taken by mouth first, followed by misoprostol a day or two later.

Studies show medication abortions are safe and effective, though with a slightly lower success rate than ones done by procedure in a clinic.

Another lawsuit filed

With the Texas decision pending, a dozen Democratic-controlled states filed their own lawsuit in federal court against the FDA on Thursday in Washington. The lawsuit seeks to make it easier for woman to access the drug and alleges that several FDA requirements for prescribing and dispensing it are “burdensome, harmful and unnecessary.”

When the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000 it placed several safety restrictions on its use, including limiting dispensing to specialty clinics and requiring women to pick up the drug in person. The Biden administration had sought to expand access to medicated abortions in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, with an FDA announcement this year that broadened the pill’s access through retail and mail-order pharmacies.

But several limitations remain, such as one that doctors must be specially certified to prescribe the drug.

Several medical groups have long opposed those requirements, pointing to the low rate of side effects seen with mifepristone compared with other medications that don’t carry any certification requirements.
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The trickle-down effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine are still being felt on food prices in vulnerable places, nearly one year after Moscow invaded the neighboring country.
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Federal wildlife officials on Wednesday announced a proposal to classify one of two dwindling California spotted owl populations as endangered after a lawsuit by conservation groups required the government to reassess a Trump administration decision not to protect the brown and white birds.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed that California spotted owls that have their habitats in coastal and Southern California be protected under the Endangered Species Act.

That population “does not have a strong ability to withstand normal variations in environmental conditions, persist through catastrophic events, or adapt to new environmental conditions throughout its range,” which led the agency to propose listing it as endangered, wildlife officials said.

The other California spotted owl population, which lives in Sierra Nevada forests in California and western Nevada, would be classified as threatened, the agency said.

The habitat of the medium-sized brown owl with white spots on its head and chest and a barred tail is under serious threat from current logging practices and climate change, including increased drought, disease and more extreme wildfires.

Most California spotted owls live on land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.

How much the population has declined since conservation groups started their effort to protect it more than 20 years ago is unclear.

The only available demographic data on spotted owls living in coastal and Southern California was collected in San Bernardino National Forest and shows a decline of 9%, the federal wildlife service said.

The Sierra Nevada population shows declines ranging from 50% to 31% percent in some areas, the agency said.

The federal agency’s decision follows an agreement reached in November between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and several conservation groups that sued the federal agency in 2020 over its decision not to protect the California spotted owl population.

Justin Augustine, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sued, applauded the agency’s decision and said he was happy to see the California spotted owls could finally get the safeguards they need.

Augustine said he planned to use the 60-day public comment period to push for more protections for the California spotted population in the Sierra Nevada.

“One of the things I’ll be addressing is the issue of how to make sure that (Sierra Nevada) spotted owls are actually protected under their threatened status rather than potentially allowing some logging to occur that would be harmful,” he said.

The California spotted owl is one of three spotted owl subspecies and the last to be protected under the Endangered Species Act, Augustine said.

The other two subspecies are the northern spotted owl and the Mexican spotted owl.

The northern spotted owl habitat is in Oregon, Washington state and Northern California. The tiny owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, sparking an intense battle over logging in the region. In 2020, the Trump Administration refused to upgrade it to endangered status despite losing nearly 4% of its population annually.

The Mexican spotted owl was first listed as threatened in the U.S. in 1993. It is found in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, parts of West Texas and Mexico.

The species is in danger of extinction due to lose of habitat to logging, development, mining and wildfires.
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A new report by four leading United Nations agencies and the World Bank estimates every two minutes, one woman dies during pregnancy or childbirth, mostly from preventable causes.

The report, “Trends in maternal mortality 2000 to 2020,” was produced by WHO, UNICEF, and the UNFPA, along with the World Bank Group and UNDESA/Population Division.

Health officials say the data presented in the report should be a wakeup call for world leaders to take action to end maternal deaths by investing in health care systems and closing the widening social and economic inequities that contribute to these deaths.

“While pregnancy should be a time of immense hope and a positive experience for all women, it is tragically still a shockingly dangerous experience for millions around the world,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general.

“These new statistics reveal the urgent need to ensure every woman and girl has access to critical health services before, during and after childbirth,” he said, “And that they can fully exercise their reproductive rights.”

The report finds an estimated 287,000 women around the world died from a maternal cause in 2020.  That is equivalent to 800 deaths a day, or one death every two minutes.

“These numbers show persistent inequities between countries which are undermining women’s rights.,” said Anshu Banerjee, assistant director general for universal health coverage at WHO. 

“There is over a hundred-fold risk of dying depending on where a woman delivers her baby, particularly in low-income countries compared to high income countries,” he said.

The statistics bear this out. While some significant progress in reducing maternal deaths was made between 2000 and 2015, the report notes this progress has largely stalled, and in some cases been reversed.

For example, between 2016 and 2020, it says the maternal mortality rate increased in Europe, Northern America, Latin America and the Caribbean.

While the number of deaths has gone up, the report says the regions have among the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world.

During this same period, the report says two regions, Australia and New Zealand, and Central and Southern Asia, reduced maternal deaths significantly. The picture is quite different in sub-Saharan Africa, which has the highest rate of maternal mortality, accounting for 70 percent of maternal deaths worldwide.

Jenny Cresswell, an epidemiologist at WHO and author of the report, said the maternal mortality ratio per 100,000 live births in sub-Saharan Africa in 2020 is estimated to be 545 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births.

“This number is 136 times bigger than MMR (maternal mortality ratio) in Australia and New Zealand, the lowest region,” Cresswell said.

She adds, “A 15-year-old girl in Chad in 2020 has a one in 15 chance of dying from a maternal cause during her lifetime, and that is 4,000 times greater than the probability in Belarus.”

In 2020, Belarus had one MMR per 100,000 live births compared to Chad, which had 1,063 MMRs per 100,000 live births.

Leading causes

The leading causes of maternal deaths include severe bleeding, high blood pressure, pregnancy-related infections, complications from unsafe abortions, and underlying conditions such as HIV/AIDS and malaria.

Banerjee said nearly all these maternal deaths are preventable.

“Nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended, which is highlighting the lack of access of some 270 million women globally to modern family planning methods —meaning they are unable to choose how and when to plan their families,” he says.” Many lack access to safe abortion, which increases risk of complications, including deaths associated with unsafe procedures,” said Banerjee.

Natalia Kanem, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund, said it is unacceptable that so many women continue to die needlessly during pregnancy and childbirth.

She said, “We can and must do better by urgently investing in family planning and filling the global shortage of 900,000 midwives so that every woman can get the lifesaving care she needs. 

“We have the tools, knowledge, and resources to end preventable maternal deaths,” she said. “What we need now is the political will.”
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Zimbabweans living on the border with Zambia are increasingly taking advantage of their neighbor’s superior health care. But Zambian officials say they are also draining resources as nearly one-third of patients in some clinics and hospitals are Zimbabweans. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Lusaka, Zambia. VOA footage by Blessing Chigwenhembe.
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To address the relatively high cost of health care in Africa, a Kenyan mobile application lets users pay for medical services by selling their personal data through blockchain technology. Officials say Snark Health’s Hippocratic Coins have attracted more than 300 doctors and 4,000 users.  Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Camera: Jimmy Makhulo.
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An organization that trains young people for conservation jobs is recycling dead trees and replacing them with new ones, salvaging valuable lumber in the process. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Long Beach, California.
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A controversial Chinese biophysicist, who had been imprisoned after creating the world’s first gene-edited babies, had his Hong Kong work visa revoked after immigration officials suspected he lied on an application form for a talent scheme.

He Jiankui, who sparked an international scientific and ethical debate in 2018 when he revealed he had created the world’s first “gene-edited” babies resistant to HIV, said at the time at an international conference in Hong Kong that he had modified two embryos before they were placed in their mother’s womb.

The scientist said he used a technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the embryonic genes of twin girls before birth. He said he had targeted a gene known as CCR5 and edited it in a way he believed would protect the girls from infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It later emerged that a third gene-edited baby had been born.

The former associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology — who has since been fired — was later accused of having forged approval documents from ethics boards. He was sentenced by a Chinese court to three years in prison in late 2019 for illegally carrying out human embryo gene-editing intended for reproduction. He was released in April 2022.

The scientist posted on the Chinese social media platform WeChat on Saturday that he had been granted the visa on February 11 under the talent scheme. It was aimed at attracting people with rich work experience and good academic qualifications from all over the world to explore opportunities in Hong Kong.

He said he would conduct gene-editing research using artificial intelligence and was “optimistic about [the future of] Hong Kong,” reported the South China Morning Post. His original post cannot be found.

“We plan to use artificial intelligence tools to evolve the adeno-associated virus (AAV) capsids to improve the efficiency of gene therapy and promote affordable gene therapy for rare diseases,” he was quoted by the paper as saying. AAV is a small virus that has emerged as the most promising platform for gene therapy.

Scientists engineer the outer protein shell of AAV, known as capsid, to improve targeting and efficacy.

In response to the furor, the Hong Kong government issued a late-night statement on Tuesday, saying the visa of an individual who “made false representation” has been rescinded and a criminal investigation launched. Officials did not name He but made reference to media reports regarding an applicant being granted a visa “despite having been imprisoned for illegal medical practice.”

“After reviewing the application, the Immigration Department suspected the visa/entry permit was obtained by false representation, and the Director of Immigration had declared the visa/entry permits invalid in accordance with the law, and would conduct a criminal investigation to follow up,” said the statement.

The statement also warned that applicants who give false information face a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison and a fine of $17,842 upon conviction. The government has also issued a new requirement that future applicants under the visa scheme must declare whether they have any criminal records.

Since his prison release 10 months ago, He has established a laboratory in Beijing dedicated to developing affordable drugs for rare genetic diseases. Although He insisted that his work was to help people, international medical experts have criticized his gene-editing procedure as risky, ethically contentious and medically unjustified with inadequate consent from the families involved.

In a study published in the journal Nature Medicine in June 2019, scientists found that people who have two copies of a so-called “Delta 32” mutation of CCR5 — which protects against HIV infection in some people — also have a significantly higher risk of premature death.

He told The Guardian newspaper early this month that he moved “too quickly” by pressing ahead with the gene-editing procedure but stopped short of apologizing. He declined to elaborate on what measures should have been taken but said he would give further details at a scheduled talk on the use of CRISPR gene-editing technology at the University of Oxford next month.

He then said in a Twitter message on February 10 that he was “not ready to talk about my experience in the past three years, so I decided that I will not visit Oxford in March.”
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Researchers in Kenya say they’ve detected an invasive mosquito that can transmit malaria in different climates, threatening progress to fight the parasitic disease. Kenya’s Medical Research Institute this week urged the public to use mosquito nets and clean up areas where mosquitos can breed.

Kenya has detected the presence of a new malaria carrier, which was first discovered in the region in Djibouti in 2012.

The new carrier, the Anopheles stephensi mosquito, transmits plasmodium vivax, the parasite the causes the deadliest type of malaria.

Bernhards Ogutu is a chief researcher at Kenya Medical Research Institute. He says it was only a matter of time before the mosquito was discovered in the country after it appeared in Ethiopia and South Sudan.

“We’ve not been able to pick plasmodium vivax which is found in Asia and Kenya. It’s there in Ethiopia and this vector can also transmit it,” said Ogutu. “So that will also look at whether we might have plasmodium vivax in coming up with this new vector showing in our place. Vivax is more difficult to treat in that you can get treated and real up because it keeps staying in the body and the liver.”

Malaria affects over 229 million people each year and kills over 400,000 people, according to the World Health Organization.

More than a quarter of a million children die in Africa each year as a result of the mosquito-borne disease, including over 10,000 in Kenya.

Ogutu expresses concern for urban residents, saying that the new carrier may feed on poor environmental management systems.

“So the fact that this can survive in urban areas where water is not clean and that can transmit, that’s the worry people are having. For the time being its to monitor and see to what extent we are going to have its spreading and what impact it will be having,” said Ogutu.

Redentho Dabelen is a public officer in the Marsabit County town of Laisamis, where the vector was discovered.

He says experts are going to communities to teach people how to protect themselves from the disease.

“To sensitize them and teach them how to prevent themselves from the vector bites. We are trying to spray the houses,” said Dabelen. “We are trying to tell them about the disease through the community health volunteers and if they get infected they go to the hospital.”

According to the researchers, the population should continue to use malaria control tools such as sleeping under mosquito nets and practicing good environmental management and sanitation.

In 2021, the WHO approved a malaria vaccine for children aged five months to two years that has been shown to reduce child deaths.
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Decades of violence and humanitarian crises have left many Somali people traumatized, according to a health study by the U.N. and Somali organizations. Harun Maruf reported from Washington and Abdulkadir Zubeyr in Mogadishu spoke to mental health doctors and patients in the country. They have this report narrated by Salem Solomon. Camera: Abdulkadir Zubeyr. Video editor Betty Ayoub.
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Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut will remain aboard the International Space Station for an extra six months because of damage to their Russian spacecraft.

Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and Frank Rubio were set to end their six-month stay aboard the ISS in late March, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos said Tuesday the trio will have to remain on the orbital outpost until September.

The Soyuz MS-22 capsule that carried the crew to the ISS last September has been leaking coolant since mid-December, which both Roscosmos and the U.S. space agency NASA have blamed on a micrometeoroid, or space rock, that struck the capsule.

Russia had planned to send an unmanned Soyuz capsule to the ISS earlier this month to bring the crew home, but the launch of that spacecraft was postponed because a Russian Progress MS-21 cargo ship docked at the station was also leaking coolant. That leak has been blamed by officials on an “external impact.”

Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio were joined on the ISS in October by four astronauts brought by a SpaceX capsule: two Americans, a Russian and a Japanese. The space station will become even more crowded next week when another four person crew, including an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, is set to arrive.

Some information for this report came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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The U.N. in Malawi has launched an urgent appeal for aid to deal with the impact of a record cholera outbreak that has so far killed nearly 1,450 people and infected 45,000.  

Local health experts say if urgent action isn’t taken to scale up the response, the number of cases could double in the next few months.

The U.N. says the flash appeal seeks to raise $45.3 million to provide life-saving aid to thousands of people in Malawi devastated by the outbreak.

In a statement released Monday, the U.N. said the appeal aims to assist four million people in Malawi, including 56,000 refugees and asylum seekers who are at the highest risk in the outbreak.

The current outbreak started in March last year and has spread to all 29 districts of Malawi.

Rebecca Adda-Dontoh, the U.N. resident coordinator in Malawi, told reporters Monday that more assistance is needed to stop the outbreak.

“So much work has been done but a lot more needs to be done,” she said. “We have focused on health, we have focused on WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene). The two are very important but there are also other sectors like nutrition, protection and even logistics because we need to be able to move supplies from one point to the other.”

Adda-Dontoh said the needed assistance would complement what various donor partners have already contributed.

“The U.N. itself has mobilized already close to $10 million,” she said. “You heard the EU; you heard the U.K. here saying they had already contributed over 500,000 euros for the EU and also over 500,000 pounds for the U.K. Even the government of Malawi is on the ground and already contributed.”   

Local media have reported that Malawi needs an additional $40 million for its national plan on cholera response.

Cases of cholera in Malawi have increased since the beginning of January, worsening the country’s largest outbreak in the past two decades.

Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera said last week, when he launched a national anti-cholera campaign, that the country’s health facilities were recording between 500 to 600 cholera cases every day.

The U.N. said that health experts have warned that Malawi could record between 64,000 and 100,000 more cases of cholera within the next three months unless urgent action is taken to scale up the response.
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When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Ghenya Grondin of Waltham, Massachusetts, was a postpartum doula – a person charged with helping young couples navigate the first weeks of their newborn child’s life at home.

Grondin, now aged 44, was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in mid-March of that year – before there were tests, before social distancing or masks, and many months before the medical community recognized long COVID as a complication of COVID-19.

She is part of a community of first-wave long-haulers who faced a new disease without a roadmap or support from the medical establishment.

Three years later, at least 65 million people worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, according to an evidence review published last month in Nature Reviews Microbiology. More than 200 symptoms have been linked to the syndrome – including extreme fatigue, difficulty thinking, headaches, dizziness when standing, sleep problems, chest pain, blood clots, immune dysregulation, and even diabetes.

There are no proven treatments but research is underway.

People infected later in the pandemic had the benefit of vaccination, which “protects at least to some degree” from long COVID, said Dr. Bruce Levy, a Harvard pulmonologist and a co-principal investigator of the National Institute of Health’s $1.15 billion U.S. RECOVER trial, which aims to characterize and find cures for the disease.

“The initial variant of the virus caused a more severe illness than we’re seeing currently in most patients,” he said.

According to the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, in the first two years of the pandemic women were twice as likely as men to develop long COVID, and 15% of all of those affected at three months continued to experience symptoms beyond 12 months.

An analysis of thousands of health records by the RECOVER trial found that non-Hispanic white women in wealthier areas were more likely than others to have a long COVID diagnosis. Researchers said that likely reflected disparities in access to health care, and suggests that many cases of long COVID among people of color are not being diagnosed.

Grondin grew concerned when she continued to have symptoms three months after her initial infection – but there was no name for it then.

“I just kept saying to my husband, something isn’t right,” she said.

Like her fellow long-haulers, she has experienced a host of symptoms, including fatigue, sleep apnea, pain, cognitive dysfunction, and in her case, a brain aneurysm. She described a frightening moment when she was driving a car with her toddler in the back and had a seizure that left her in the path of oncoming traffic.

She has since been diagnosed with long COVID and can no longer work.

“It just feels like a constant punch in the face,” said Grondin.

Scientists are still working out why some people infected with COVID develop long-term symptoms, but syndromes like this are not new. Other infections such as Lyme disease can result in long-term symptoms, many of which overlap with long COVID.

Leading theories of the root causes of long COVID include the virus or viral proteins remaining in the tissues of some individuals; the infection causing an autoimmune response; or the virus reactivating latent viruses, leading to inflammation that damages tissue.

Kate Porter, 38, of Beverly, Massachusetts, a project manager for a financial services company, believes she was infected on a flight back from Florida in late March of 2020.

She had daily fevers for seven months, muscle weakness, shortness of breath, and excruciating nerve pain.

“I don’t think people realize how brutal physically everything was,” she said. In one of her darker moments, Porter recalled, “I cried on the floor begging for something to take me peacefully. I’ve never been like that.”

Frustrated by the lack of answers from a list of 10 specialists she has seen, Porter has explored alternative medicine. “It has opened me up to other remedies,” she said.

Although her health is much improved now, she still suffers from near daily migraines and neck pain she fears may never go away.

Genie Stevens, 65, a director of climate education, got infected while traveling from her home in Santa Fe to Cape Cod in late March 2020 to visit her mother, and never left. “It completely upended my life,” she said.

She went to an emergency department seeking tests and was told there were none – the typical answer in the spring of 2020, when scientists were scrambling to understand the nature of the virus and tests were being rationed. She was sent home to manage on her own.

A lifelong practitioner of meditation, Stevens took solace there, finding it eased her symptoms.

Confined to her bed that spring, she focused on an ancient crabapple tree outside her room. “I watched every bud unfurl.”

Although largely recovered, Stevens still has flare-ups of brain fog, exhaustion and high-pitched ringing in her ears when she pushes too hard. “This is the astoundingly maddening part of the illness. I feel totally fine, and then bam.”
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United Nations members gather Monday in New York to resume efforts to forge a long-awaited and elusive treaty to safeguard the world’s marine biodiversity. 

Nearly two-thirds of the ocean lies outside national boundaries on the high seas where fragmented and unevenly enforced rules seek to minimize human impact. 

The goal of the U.N. meetings, running through March 3, is to produce a unified agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of those vast marine ecosystems. The talks, formally called the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, resume negotiations suspended last fall without agreement on a final treaty. 

“The ocean is the life support system of our planet,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University. “For the longest time, we did not feel we had a large impact on the high seas. But that notion has changed with expansion of deep-sea fishing, mining, plastic pollution, climate change,” and other human disturbances, he said. 

The U.N. talks will focus on key questions, including: How should the boundaries of marine protected areas be drawn, and by whom? How should institutions assess the environmental impacts of commercial activities, such as shipping and mining? And who has the power to enforce rules? 

“This is our largest global commons,” said Nichola Clark, an oceans expert who follows the negotiations for the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington. “We are optimistic that this upcoming round of negotiations will be the one to get a treaty over the finish line.” 

The aim of the talks is not to designate marine protected areas, but to establish a mechanism for doing so. 

“The goal is to set up a new body that would accept submissions for specific marine protected areas,” Clark said. 

Marine biologist Simon Ingram at the University of Plymouth in England says there’s an urgent need for an accord. 

“It’s a really pressing time for this — especially when you have things like deep-sea mining that could be a real threat to biodiversity before we’ve even been able to survey and understand what lives on the ocean floor,” Ingram said. 

Experts say that a global oceans treaty is needed to enforce the U.N. Biodiversity Conference’s recent pledge to protect 30% of the planet’s oceans, as well as its land, for conservation. 

“We need a legally binding framework that can enable countries to work together to actually achieve these goals they’ve agreed to,” said Jessica Battle, an expert on oceans governance at World Wide Fund for Nature 

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Monica Medina said the treaty is a priority. 

“This agreement seeks to create, for the first time, a coordinated approach to establishing marine protected areas on the high seas,” she said. “It’s time to finish the job.” 

Officials, environmentalists and representatives of global industries that depend on the sea are also watching negotiations closely. 

Gemma Nelson, a lawyer from Samoa and an Ocean Voices fellow at the University of Edinburgh, said that small Pacific and Caribbean island countries were “especially vulnerable to global ocean issues,” such as pollution and climate change, which generally they did not cause nor have the resources to easily address. 

“Getting the traditional knowledge of local people and communities recognized as valid” is also essential to protect both ecosystems and the ways of life of Indigenous groups, she said. 

With nearly half the planet’s surface covered by high seas, the talks are of great importance, said Gladys Martínez de Lemos, executive director of the nonprofit Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense focusing on environmental issues across Latin America. 

“The treaty should be strong and ambitious, having the authority to establish high and fully protected areas in the high seas,” she said. “Half of the world is at stake these weeks at the United Nations.” 
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The prospect of large-scale mining to extract valuable minerals from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, once a distant vision, has grown more real, raising alarms among the oceans’ most fervent defenders.

“I think this is a real and imminent risk,” Emma Wilson of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an umbrella organization of environmental groups and scientific bodies, told AFP.

“There are plenty of stakeholders that are flagging the significant environmental risks.”

And the long-awaited treaty to protect the high seas, even if it is adopted in negotiations resuming on Monday, is unlikely to alleviate risks anytime soon: it will not take effect immediately and will have to come to terms with the International Seabed Authority (ISA).

That agency, established under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, has 167 member states.

It has authority over the ocean floors outside of member states’ Exclusive Economic Zones (which extend up to 200 nautical miles, or 370 kilometers, from coastlines).

But conservation groups say the ISA has two glaringly contradictory missions: protecting the sea floors under the high seas while organizing the activities of industries eager to mine untapped resources on the ocean floor.

For now, some 30 research centers and enterprises have been approved to explore — but not exploit — limited areas.

Mining activities are not supposed to begin before negotiators adopt a mining code, already under discussion for nearly a decade.

Making waves

But the small Pacific island nation of Nauru, impatient with the plodding pace of progress, made waves in June 2021 by invoking a clause allowing it to demand relevant rules be adopted within two years.

Once that deadline is reached, the government could request a mining contract for Nori (Nauru Ocean Resources), a subsidiary of Canada’s The Metals Company.

Nauru has offered what it called a “good faith” promise to hold off until after an ISA assembly in July, in hopes it will adopt a mining code.

“The only thing we need is rules and regulations in place so that people are all responsible actors,” Nauru’s ambassador to the ISA Margo Deiye told AFP.

But it is “very unlikely” that a code will be agreed by July, said Pradeep Singh, a sea law expert at the Research Institute for Sustainability, in Potsdam, Germany.

“There’s just too many items on the list that still need to be resolved,” he told AFP. Those items, he said, include the highly contentious issue of how profits from undersea mining would be shared, and how environmental impacts should be measured.

NGOs thus fear that Nori could obtain a mining contract without the protections provided by a mining code.

Conservation groups complain that ISA procedures are “obscure” and its leadership is “pro-extraction.”

The agency’s secretary-general, Michael Lodge, insists that those accusations have “absolutely no substance whatsoever.”

He noted that contracts are awarded by the ISA’s Council, not its secretariat.

“This is the only industry…that has been fully regulated before it starts,” he said, adding that the reason there is no undersea mining “anywhere in the world right now is because of the existence of the ISA.”

Target: 2024

Regardless, The Metals Company is making preparations.

“We’ll be ready, and aim to be in production by the end of 2024,” chief executive Gerard Barron told AFP.

He said the company plans to collect 1.3 million tons of material in its first year and up to 12 million tons by 2028, all “with the lightest set of impacts.”

Barron said tons of polymetallic nodules (rich in minerals such as manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper and rare earths), which had settled to the ocean floor over the centuries, could easily be scraped up.

This would occur in the so-called Clipperton Fracture Zone, where Nori in late 2022 conducted “historic” tests at a depth of four kilometers (2.4 miles).

But Jessica Battle of the WWF conservation group said it is not that simple. Companies might, for example, suck up matter several yards (meters) down, not just from the seabed surface.

“It’s a real problem to open up a new extractive frontier in a place where you know so little, with no regulations,” she told AFP. “It will be a disaster.”

Scientists and advocacy groups say mining could destroy habitats and species, some of them still unknown but possibly crucial to food chains; could disturb the ocean’s capacity to absorb human-emitted carbon dioxide; and could generate noises that might disrupt whales’ ability to communicate.

Moratorium calls

“The deep ocean is the least known part of the ocean,” said deep-sea biologist Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “So change might take place without anybody ever seeing it.”

She has signed a petition calling for a moratorium on mining. Some companies and about a dozen countries support such a call, including France and Chile.

With its slogan, “A battery in a rock,” The Metals Company emphasizes the world’s need for metals used in electric-vehicle batteries; Nauru makes the same case.

But while island nations are among the first to feel the impact of global warming, Nauru says it can’t wait forever for the funds rich countries have promised to help it adapt to those impacts.

“We’re tired of waiting,” said Deiye, the Nauru ambassador.

And Lodge says people should keep the anti-extraction arguments in perspective.

Of the 54 percent of seabeds under ISA jurisdiction, he said, “less than half a percent is under exploration… and of that half a percent, less than one percent is likely ever to be exploited.”
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The little-noticed program that led to a Chinese spy balloon drifting across the United States this month has been discussed in China’s state-controlled media for more than a decade in articles extolling its potential military applications.

The reports, dating back to at least 2011, focus on how best to exploit what is known as “near space” – that portion of the atmosphere that is too high for traditional aircraft to fly but too low for a satellite to remain in orbit. Those early articles may offer clues to the capabilities of the balloon shot down by a U.S. jet fighter on Feb. 4.

“In recent years, ‘near space’ has been discussed often in foreign media, with many military commentators pointing out that this is a special sphere that had been neglected by militaries but now has risen to hotspot status,” reads a July 5, 2011, article in the People’s Liberation Army Daily titled Near Space – A Strategic Asset That Ought Not to be Neglected.

The article quoted Zhang Dongjiang, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, discussing the potential applications of flying objects designed for near space.

“This is an area sitting in between ‘air’ and ‘space’ where neither the theory of gravity nor Kepler’s Law is independently applicable, thus limiting the freedom of flight for both aircraft that are designed based on the theory of gravity and spacecraft that follow Kepler’s Law,” Zhang was quoted as saying.

He noted that near space lacks the atmospheric disturbances of aeronautical altitudes, such as turbulence, thunder and lightning, yet is cheaper and easier to reach than the altitudes where satellites can remain in orbit.

“At the same time,” he added, near space is “much higher than ‘sky,’ hence holding superb prospects and potential for intelligence collection, reconnaissance and surveillance, securing communication, as well as air and ground warfare.”

Zhang suggested that near space can be exploited with “high-dynamic” craft that travel faster than the speed of sound, such as hypersonic cruise vehicles and sub-orbital vehicles, which “can arrive at target with high speed, attack with both high speed and precision, [and] can be deployed repeatedly.”

But he said near space also can provide an environment for slower vehicles, which he called “low-dynamic” craft, such as stratospheric airships, high-altitude balloons and solar-powered unmanned vehicles.

These, he said, “are capable of carrying payloads capable of capturing light, infrared rays, multispectral, hyper-spectral, radar, and other info, which can then be used to increase battlefield sensory and knowledge capability, support military operations.”

They also “can carry various payloads aimed at electronic counter-battle, fulfilling the aim of electronic magnetic suppression and electronic magnetic attack on the battlefield, damage and destroy an adversary’s information systems.”

Four years after the PLA Daily article, images were published in the military pages of Global Times, a state-controlled outlet, of two small-scale stratospheric vehicles identified as KF13 and KF16.

The vehicles were developed by the Opto-Electronics Engineering Institute of Beijing Aeronautics and Aerospace University, China’s main aeronautical and aerospace research university, according to an explanatory note published alongside the model shown in the Global Times. The institution is now known as Beihang [Beijing-Aero] University.

The explanatory note said a key feature of the vehicles was their unmanned and remote-control dual capability. Work was being done in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as in Shanxi province, on seeing the vehicles evolve from concept to production, according to the October 2015 article.

Other images of near space objects that surfaced the same month featured variously shaped aircraft whose features and functions included high-functioning surface materials, emergency control mechanisms, precise flight control technology, high-efficiency propeller technology, high-efficiency solar technology and ground operation integration technology.

An image of a blimp-like near space flying object called the Yuan Meng, literally “fulfilling dream,” was also posted to the internet in October 2015. It was described as having a flying altitude of 20-24 kilometers, a flight duration of six months and a payload of 100-300 kilograms.

Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington, told VOA that China’s interest in the exploitation of near space actually began long before the PLA Daily article.

“Since the late 1990s, the PLA has been devoting resources for research and development for preparing for combat in ‘near space,’ the zone just below Low Earth Orbit (LEO) that is less expensive to reach than LEO [itself], and offers stealth advantages, especially for hypersonic platforms,” he said in an exchange of emails.

In addition to round balloons such as the one shot down by U.S. aircraft on Feb. 4, he said, “the PLA is also developing much larger blimp or airship stratospheric balloons that have solar powered engines driving large propellers that enable greater maneuverability.”

Fisher said Chinese state-owned conglomerates such as China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) “have full-fledged near space programs like their Tengyun to produce very high-altitude UAV and hypersonic vehicles” for the purpose of waging combat in near space.

Tengyun literally means “riding above clouds.”

In September 2016, Chinese official media reported that Project Tengyun, initiated by CASIC, was expected to be ready for a test flight in 2030. The so-called “air-spacecraft” is designed to serve as a “new-generation, repeat-use roundtrip flying object between air and space,” a deputy general manager of CASIC told the 2nd Commercial Aeronautical Summit Forum held in Wuhan that month.

Another four projects proposed by CASIC also bore the concept of “cloud” in their names: Feiyun, meaning “flying cloud,” focuses on communication relay; Xingyun, meaning “cloud on the move,” would enable users to send text or audio messages even “at the end of the earth or edge of the sky”; Hongyun, meaning rainbow cloud, would be able to launch 156 satellites in its first stage; and Kuaiyun, meaning “fast cloud,” would be tasked with formulating a near space spheric network.

While China’s openness about its near space ambitions may be debatable, the speed with which it has made advances in related R&D appears to be indisputable.

“Throughout my career that was focused on the PLA, I do not recall anything about the PLA having a balloon program, let alone to have balloons operating over U.S. territory,” U.S. Navy Captain (retired) James Fanell, who retired as [a former] director of intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 2015, told VOA in a written interview.

U.S. official now say they are aware of at least 40 incidents, however, in which Chinese surveillance balloons have passed over countries on as many as five continents. Those presumably included an incident last December in which a high-altitude airship was photographed near the northern Philippine Island of Luzon bordering the South China Sea.

“The object would look to be a teardrop-shaped airship with four tail fins. It’s not entirely clear from the images whether it might have a translucent exterior or a metallic-like one,” wrote Joseph Trevithick, deputy editor of The War Zone, a specialized website dedicated to developments in military technology and international security.

“Overall, the apparent airship’s general shape has broad similarities to a number of high-altitude, long-endurance types that Chinese companies are known to have been working on,” he wrote, including “at least two uncrewed solar-powered designs, the Tian Hang and Yuan Meng, with external propulsion and other systems intended primarily for operations at stratospheric altitudes, both of which have reportedly been test flown at least once.”

Fisher said the United States would be well advised to emulate China in enhancing its capabilities in near space.

The American aerospace company Lockheed Martin “tested a technology demonstrator in 2011 [but] there has been no further development of operational stratospheric airships for the U.S.” since then, Fisher said.

“The PLA is correct to invest in stratosphere balloons and airships; the U.S. must do more to develop these assets as well.”
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World health officials warn the war in Ukraine is taking a heavy toll on the mental health condition of millions of people, requiring an urgent increase in mental health and psychological support.

“An estimated almost 10 million people may currently have a mental health condition, of whom about 4 million may have conditions which are moderate or severe,” said Hans Kluge, World Health Organization regional director for Europe.

Speaking in the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr, Kluge said he met Thursday with first lady Olena Zelenska, who summed up the prevailing situation in the country by telling him that “everyone in society has to become a psychologist.”

Managing the critical situation, he said, “requires an all-government and all-society effort.”

Data and evidence gathered by Ukraine’s Ministry of Health and WHO in recent months show the major priorities and challenges that need to be addressed are mental health, rehabilitation, and community access to health services.

The latest estimate by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights finds more than 7,000 civilians have been killed and nearly 12,000 injured since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly one year ago.

Kluge said rehabilitation of victims of the war must not be delayed but made available now.

“We are doubling the support on rehabilitation,” he said, “including treatment for war-related injuries, which are often horrific for adults and children alike.”

The latest WHO needs assessment survey finds that one in 10 people express difficulty in accessing medicine for various reasons, including damaged or destroyed pharmacies and the unavailability of supplies. One-third of those surveyed said they could not afford to pay for the medicine they need.

The survey also highlighted the need to pay more attention to the treatment of people with non-communicable diseases. Kluge noted that 44% of those surveyed said they had difficulty receiving care for chronic conditions.

“The most common were cardiovascular diseases, notably hypertension, but also diabetes and kidney disease, and then, of course, there is routine immunization that is weak,” he said.

The carpet bombing of Ukrainian cities, missile strikes and artillery fire by Russian forces has put much of Ukraine’s health care system out of commission.

In a media interview a few days ago, Ukraine’s minister of health, Viktor Liashko, said 1,218 health care institutions have been damaged, including 540 hospitals, 173 of which were completely destroyed.

Kluge said the WHO has verified nearly 780 attacks on health care services, calling it “unforgivable.” He said, “Any attack on any health and health care is clearly a breach of international humanitarian law.”

Speaking from Poltava Oblast, Jarno Habicht, WHO representative for Ukraine, said the health system was functional depending on the region. For example, in areas regained from Russia, such as Bucha, Irpin and Kharkiv, “access to health care is more difficult.”

“Primary health care centers, which have been attacked — more than 780 attacks —need to be rebuilt. These centers need water, these centers need electricity, these centers need health care workers to come back,” he said.

There were, however, hopeful signs of recovery, Habicht added, noting that 20% of health facilities have been rebuilt by charities and private-sector investments.

“So, that means that the health system is also healing itself,” he said.

The U.N. refugee agency estimates more than 8 million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring European countries as refugees, and an estimated 7 million are displaced inside Ukraine.

Habicht also said the WHO’s latest “health survey shows that the internally displaced people have more barriers to access to care” than those who have left the country.

Overall, he said, Ukraine’s health system is under stress but working, and in regained areas, rebuilding infrastructure and attracting more health care workers is critical.

As the war enters its second year, he said, “We need new specialists, we need to do faster training for nurses as well for the doctors.

“We need more mental health specialists … and physiotherapists to ensure that children have enough support that they can move around, they can go to school, and their life can go on.”

Kluge, who is on his fifth visit to Ukraine within the past year, noted the need for continued international humanitarian support. “Unfortunately, after what I saw, I cannot tell that the impact of the war on the health of the people in this country is going to diminish.

“I am very concerned it will in the coming months actually increase,” he said.
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Imagine if your dog or cat could use words to let you know when they’re angry, lonely or in pain. Well now they can, thanks to an innovative communication tool that’s helping them express themselves more effectively. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.

Camera: Adam Greenbaum           

Produced by: Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum  
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Avian flu has reached new corners of the globe and become endemic for the first time in some wild birds that transmit the virus to poultry, according to veterinarians and disease experts, who warn it is now a year-round problem.

Reuters spoke to more than 20 experts and farmers on four continents who said the prevalence of the virus in the wild signals that record outbreaks will not abate soon on poultry farms, ramping up threats to the world’s food supply. They warned that farmers must view the disease as a serious risk all year, instead of focusing prevention efforts during spring migration seasons for wild birds.

Outbreaks of the virus have widened in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, undefeated by summer heat or winter cold snaps, since a strain arrived in the United States in early 2022 that was genetically similar to cases in Europe and Asia.

On Wednesday, Argentina and Uruguay each declared national sanitary emergencies after officials confirmed the countries’ first infections. Argentina found the virus in wild birds, while dead swans in Uruguay tested positive.

Egg prices set records after the disease last year wiped out tens of millions of laying hens, putting a staple source of cheap protein out of reach to some of the world’s poorest at a time the global economy is reeling from high inflation.

Wild birds are primarily responsible for spreading the virus, according to experts. Waterfowl like ducks can carry the disease without dying and introduce it to poultry through contaminated feces, saliva and other means.

Farmers’ best efforts to protect flocks are falling short.

In the United States, Rose Acre Farms, the country’s second-largest egg producer, lost about 1.5 million hens at a Guthrie County, Iowa, production site last year, even though anyone who entered barns was required to shower first to remove any trace of the virus, Chief Executive Marcus Rust said.

A company farm in Weld County, Colorado, was infected twice within about six months, killing more than 3 million chickens, Rust said. He thinks wind blew the virus in from nearby fields where geese defecated.

“We got nailed,” Rust said. “You just pull your hair out.”

The United States, Britain, France and Japan are among countries that have suffered record losses of poultry over the past year, leaving some farmers feeling helpless.

“Avian flu is occurring even in a new poultry farm with modern equipment and no windows, so all we could do now is ask God to avoid an outbreak,” said Shigeo Inaba, who raises chickens for meat in Ibaraki prefecture near Tokyo.

Poultry in the Northern Hemisphere were previously considered to be most at risk when wild birds are active during spring migration. Soaring levels of the virus in a broad range of waterfowl and other wild birds mean poultry now face high risks year round, experts said.

“It’s a new war,” said Bret Marsh, the state veterinarian in the U.S. state of Indiana. “It’s basically a 12-month vigil.”

In a sign the threat is expected to persist, Marsh is seeking funds from Indiana’s lawmakers to hire an additional poultry veterinarian and poultry health-specialist. Indiana lost more than 200,000 turkeys and other birds over the past year, while total U.S. deaths top 58 million birds, according to U.S. government data, surpassing the previous 2015 record.

The virus is usually deadly to poultry, and entire flocks are culled when even one bird tests positive.

Vaccinations are not a simple solution: they may reduce but not eliminate the threat from the virus, making it harder to detect its presence among a flock. Still, Mexico and the EU are among those vaccinating or considering shots.

Global problem

Wild birds have spread the disease farther and wider around the world than ever before, likely carrying record amounts of the virus, said Gregorio Torres, the head of the science department at the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health, an intergovernmental group and global authority on animal diseases. The virus changed from previous outbreaks to a form that is probably more transmissible, he told Reuters.

“The disease is here to stay at least in the short term,” Torres said.

Torres could not confirm the virus is endemic in wild birds worldwide, though other experts said it is endemic in certain birds in places like the United States.

While the virus can infect people, usually those who have contact with infected birds, the World Health Organization says the risk to humans is low.

The form of the virus circulating is infecting a broader range of wild birds than previous versions, including those that do not migrate long distances, said David Suarez, acting laboratory director of the U.S. government’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Georgia.

Such infections of “resident” birds are helping the virus to persist throughout the year when it didn’t previously, he said.

Black vultures, which inhabit the southern United States and previously avoided infections, are now among the species suffering, said David Stallknecht, director of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study at the University of Georgia.

The virus has also infected mammals like foxes, bears and seals.

“We all have to believe in miracles,” Stallknecht said, “but I really can’t see a scenario where it’s going to disappear.”

Crossing borders

High virus levels in birds like blue-winged teal, ducks that migrate long distances, helped spread the virus to new parts of South America, Stallknecht said.

Countries including Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia in recent months reported their first cases.

Ecuador imposed a three-month animal-health emergency on Nov. 29, two days after its first case was detected, the country’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock said. So far, more than 1.1 million birds have died, the ministry said.

Infections in Uruguay and Bolivia put the disease close to top global chicken exporter Brazil, which has never confirmed a case. Brazilian Agriculture Minister Carlos Favaro said on Wednesday the country investigated three suspected cases, but test results came back negative.

“Everyone is focused on preventing the flu from reaching our country,” said Gian Carlos Zacchi, who raises chickens for processor Aurora in Chapecó in Brazil’s Santa Catarina state.

Some experts suspect climate change may be contributing to the global spread by altering wild birds’ habitats and migratory paths.

“The wild bird dynamics have shifted, and that’s allowed the viruses that live in them to shift as well,” said Carol Cardona, an avian flu expert and professor at the University of Minnesota.

Farmers are trying unusual tactics to protect poultry, with some using machines that make loud noises to scare off wild birds, experts said.

In Rhode Island, Eli Berkowitz, an egg producer and chief executive of Little Rhody Foods, sprayed the disinfectant Lysol on goose poop on a walkway of his farm in case it contained the virus. He also limits visitors to the farm, a more traditional precaution.

Berkowitz said he is bracing for March and April when migration season will pose an even greater risk to poultry.

“You’d better buckle up and hold on for your dear life,” he said.

 
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The confirmation of more bird flu cases in South America raised alarm bells in Brazil, which remains free of contagion even after its close neighbors Argentina and Uruguay confirmed cases there on Wednesday. 

In a press conference to discuss the global sanitary hazard, Brazilian Agriculture Minister Carlos Favaro said Brazil, the world’s biggest chicken exporter, would bolster measures to prevent outbreaks as the virus continued to spread. 

Until now, bird flu cases had been detected in commercial farms in Bolivia, which borders Brazil, and in Peru and Ecuador, Favaro said. 

On Wednesday, cases in wild birds were confirmed in Uruguay and Argentina, sparking a health emergency in both. 

In recent days, Brazil also investigated suspected cases of the highly pathogenic bird flu. 

The suspect cases occurred in wild birds in Rio Grande do Sul state, where many Brazilian meatpackers operate, and in domestic birds, ducks and chickens with bird flu symptoms in Amazonas state, according to the minister. 

None of the suspect cases turned out to be avian influenza, he said. 

Avian flu, which has reached new corners of the globe, has become endemic for the first time in some wild birds that transmit the virus to poultry, experts said. 

The virus has spurred import bans in some countries and pushed egg prices to record highs in some parts of the world. 

Brazil is home to some of the world’s biggest meatpackers. It has never registered a bird flu case. 

But since late last year, the Brazilian meat industry has been on high alert. Most of Brazil’s chicken processors operate in southern states, making the discoveries in Uruguay and Argentina worrisome. 

“It should be remembered that the situation in Uruguay (affecting wild birds) is an example of a case that would not suspend trade and exports of poultry products, in accordance with recommendations established by the World Organization for Animal Health,” Brazil’s meat lobby ABPA said in a statement. 

The Uruguayan government declared a state of national sanitary emergency after detecting bird flu in five dead black neck swans between the departments of Maldonado and Rocha. 

“It’s very important to isolate wild birds from domestic birds, especially sources of food and water,” Virginia Russi, a technician from the agriculture ministry of Uruguay told a news conference. 

Argentina’s Agriculture Secretary Juan Jose Bahillo also confirmed its first cases of bird flu in wild birds, leading it to declare a sanitary emergency and reinforce measures against the disease. 
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Cameroon’s health ministry has dismissed a report of two suspected cases of Marburg virus in the country after a first deadly outbreak in neighboring Equatorial Guinea. Health officials along the border said Tuesday there were two suspected cases of the severe hemorrhagic fever in Cameroon after Malabo confirmed nine deaths and sixteen possible infections. Despite dismissing the reported cases, Cameroon’s health ministry says it is increasing surveillance and travel restrictions along the border.

Health Minister Manaouda Malachie says Cameroon does not yet have any suspected cases of the Marburg virus, despite reports of two possible infections.

Health officials in Cameroon’s South region on Tuesday said a teenage boy and girl suffering from high fever were rushed to a hospital Monday in Olamze, on the border with Equatorial Guinea.

The health officials said the children were suspected of being infected with the Marburg virus, are in isolation, and are responding to treatment.

But Malachie seemed to contradict those reports when he spoke Wednesday to state broadcaster Cameroon Radio Television.

Malachie says the decision by Cameroon to stop Marburg virus, an illness like Ebola, by restricting movement along the border with Equatorial Guinea is so far yielding fruit. He says as of Wednesday at midday central African time, Cameroon had not reported any deaths or suspected cases of Marburg virus.

Malachie says civilians should avoid contact with animals and people who have travelled to Equatorial Guinea and make sure people with fever, fatigue, and blood-stained vomit and diarrhea are isolated.

But Malachie warned its porous border with Equatorial Guinea, which confirmed Monday its first outbreak of the deadly virus, puts it at risk.

Cameroon last week said it restricted movement along the border after Equatorial Guinea quarantined hundreds of people in Kie-Ntem Province, where the hemorrhagic fever was first reported.

The World Health Organization says Equatorial Guinea sent samples to the Pasteur Institute in Senegal, after an alert by a health official on February 7, and one of them tested positive.

The WHO says Marburg was transmitted to people from fruit bats, spreads between people via bodily fluids, and has a fatality rate of up to 88%.

Marburg is in the same family as the Ebola virus but, unlike Ebola, there are no vaccines for Marburg — just treatments for the symptoms such as dehydration and fever.

Health officials from Cameroon and Gabon, which also shares borders with Equatorial Guinea, met Tuesday in Yaoundé and agreed to work together to prevent the virus from spreading.

University of Yaoundé sociology lecturer Francois Bingono Bingono was in the meeting.

He says the frequent movement of people across the borders will make stopping the virus a challenge.

Bingono says in 2020 Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea restricted movement along their border to protect their populations from COVID-19, but civilians on both sides did not respect the order. He says people living on both sides of the Cameroon-Equatorial Guinea border belong to the same ethnic groups, speak the same language, and celebrate happy events or mourn sad events together.

Bingono says health workers not known in border communities are struggling to educate locals that a deadly virus threatens their lives.

He says they will need traditional rulers to help convince their people.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the virus was first identified in 1967 in simultaneous outbreaks in laboratories in Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany, and in Belgrade.

Marburg is not new to Africa but is relatively new to West Africa.

An outbreak in Ghana in September last year killed two people, while Guinea recorded one death from the virus in 2021 — the first known case in West Africa.

The WHO reported previous outbreaks in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda.
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Plumes of smoke, questions about dead animals, worries about the drinking water. A train derailment in Ohio and subsequent burning of some of the hazardous chemicals has people asking: How worried should they be? 

It’s been more than a week since about 50 cars of a freight train derailed in a fiery, mangled mess on the outskirts of East Palestine near the Pennsylvania state line, apparently because of a mechanical issue with a rail car axle. No one was injured in that wreck. But concerns about air quality and the hazardous chemicals on board the train prompted some village residents to leave, and officials later ordered the evacuation of the immediate area as fears grew about a potential explosion of smoldering wreckage. 

Officials seeking to avoid the danger of an uncontrolled blast chose to intentionally release and burn toxic vinyl chloride from five rail cars, sending flames and black smoke again billowing high into the sky. The jarring scene left people questioning the potential health impacts for residents in the area and beyond, even as authorities maintained they were doing their best to protect people. 

In the days since, residents’ concerns and questions have only abounded — amplified, in part, by misinformation spreading online. 

More on what we know: 

Controlled burn  

Vinyl chloride is associated with increased risk of certain cancers, and officials at the time warned burning it would release two concerning gases — hydrogen chloride and phosgene, the latter of which was used as a weapon in World War I. 

Environmental officials say that monitors detected toxins in the air at the site during the controlled burn and that officials kept people away until that dissipated. They say continuing air monitoring done for the railroad and by government agencies — including testing inside nearly 400 homes — hasn’t detected dangerous levels in the area since residents were allowed to return. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has shared air monitoring results online. 

Continuing concerns 

Even in communities beyond East Palestine, some residents say they worry about long-term effects of even low-grade exposure to contaminants from the site. The village has scheduled a town hall at the local high school Wednesday evening to hear questions from residents, whose concerns have included lingering smells, how to ensure accountability for the cleanup, and what to make of pets and livestock that have appeared ill or died since the derailment. 

The risk to such animals is low, according to the Ohio Department of Agriculture, which recommended that people contact a local veterinarian for any concerns about their livestock or pets’ health. The department hasn’t received any official reports about livestock or pet illnesses or deaths directly related to the incident, though making such a determination would require a necropsy and lab work, the Agriculture Department said. 

Ohio Health Department Director Bruce Vanderhoff cautioned at a news conference Tuesday that residents who were worried about lingering odors or headaches since the derailment should know that those can be triggered by contaminant levels in the air that are well below what’s unsafe. 

The derailment also highlighted questions about railroad safety, though federal data show accidents involving hazardous materials at this scale are very rare. Trains were rolling past East Palestine again soon after the evacuation order was lifted. 

Ground and water 

Contaminants from derailed cars spilled into some waterways and were toxic to fish, but officials have said drinking water in the area has remained protected. 

In addition to vinyl chloride, at least three other substances — butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and ethylene glycol monobutyl — were released into the air, soil or water, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency letter putting rail operator Norfolk Southern on notice about its potential liability for cleanup costs. 

Norfolk Southern’s response has included efforts to remove spilled contaminants from the ground surface and nearby streams, as well as air quality monitoring, soil sampling and residential water well surveys, according to its preliminary remediation plan. 

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimates the spill affected more than 11.2 kilometers (7 miles) of streams and killed some 3,500 fish, mostly small ones such as minnows and darters. 

A plume of contaminants that includes butyl acrylate formed in the Ohio River in the first days after the derailment and on Tuesday was flowing slowly, nearing Huntington, West Virginia, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency officials said. 

The contaminant amounts found so far don’t pose a risk for cities that rely on the river for their drinking water, and the plume is continuing to be diluted as it moves farther along, the state EPA said. 

In response, some water companies have shut off their intakes or increased treatment processes as a precaution. 

Social media claims  

As with any developing situation, misinformation and hyperbole about the derailment have spread online in recent days. 

Social media users, for example, falsely claimed that drinking water is contaminated throughout the entire Ohio River basin, when many areas in the multistate region are not affected by the chemical release. 

Footage of dark, ominous clouds has also spread with claims it showed East Palestine post-burn, despite the fact that the footage appeared online as early as November 2022. 

As information continues to develop, disinformation experts emphasize that people should exercise caution before sharing unverified claims. 

Cause of accident 

Investigators examined the rail car that initiated the derailment and have surveillance video from a home showing “what appears to be a wheel bearing in the final stage of overheat failure moments before the derailment,” the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday. Its preliminary report is expected in two weeks. 

Rail operator Norfolk Southern and the NTSB haven’t publicly answered one of the big questions about the February 3 derailment, however: Exactly when was the crew alerted to a mechanical issue with a rail car axle — the suspected cause — and did they respond appropriately? 

A wayside defect detector alerted the crew to a mechanical issue “shortly before the derailment,” and emergency braking was initiated, a National Transportation Safety Board member said that weekend. 

Security video from two businesses in Salem, Ohio, shows the underside of one rail car glowing brightly from an apparent fiery axle, indicating the train might have traveled more than 32.1 kilometers (20 miles) with that malfunction before the derailment, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. The NTSB says it’s reviewing that video. 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said on Tuesday that Norfolk Southern had mismanaged the disaster from the outset and that its actions hampered the response from local and state agencies. He also said the company had been unwilling to look at alternatives to intentionally releasing and burning the five cars filled with vinyl chloride. 

“Prioritizing an accelerated and arbitrary timeline to reopen the rail line injected unnecessary risk and created confusion,” Shapiro said in a letter to Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw. A message seeking comment was left with the company. 
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