Cameroon says a fresh wave of cholera outbreak provoked by ongoing floods in its northern border with Chad and Nigeria has killed at least 17 people and many more are feared dead in difficult-to-access villages within a week. An emergency meeting by government officials and relief agencies on Wednesday ordered the deployment of humanitarian workers to overcrowded hospitals, especially on the border with Nigeria. 

Cameroon’s Public Health Ministry officials say several hundred fresh cholera cases have been detected on the country’s northern border with Nigeria with at least 17 people dead and many other civilians in desperate conditions at hospitals.

The government of the central African state on Wednesday said the death toll and suspected infections may be higher as humanitarian workers are not able to travel to towns and villages that are difficult to access.

The government says insecurity from ongoing Boko Haram terrorist attacks prevents aid workers from providing assistance to suspected cholera patients in some localities on Cameroon’s northern border with Chad and Nigeria.

Midjiyawa Bakary, the governor of Cameroon’s Far North region on the border with Chad and Nigeria, says he presided at an emergency meeting ordered by Cameroon president Paul Biya on Wednesday.

Bakary says it was decided that all civilians on Cameroon’s northern border with Chad and Nigeria should immediately respect measures taken at the emergency meeting to reduce or stop the wave of cholera attacks. He says local councils must construct community toilets and latrines, civilians must use the toilets and people should stop drinking water from flooded streams that are likely contaminated. Bakary says Cameroon’s military will protect health workers dispatched to areas still suffering Boko Haram attacks.

Bakary said humanitarian workers in affected towns and villages are instructing civilians on consuming cooked food and boiling water to reduce cholera contamination and infections, especially among children.

Bakary called on civilians to stop the practice of defecating in streams, fields, forests, bushes, lakes and rivers and to wash their hands with soap and clean water regularly.

The government says Mayo-Sava, a department on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria, is hardest hit by the cholera outbreak.

Roger Saffo, the highest government official in Mayo-Sava, says international relief agencies are donating personal hygiene to children and medication for aid workers to take care of the needs of civilians in affected towns and villages.

“We have already received sanitary kits from the regional office of the World Health Organization based in Maroua and Doctors Without Borders which has permitted the medical personnel to take care of the suspected cases, disinfection of infected localities in collaboration with the community in Mayo-Sava division,” he said, speaking via the messaging app WhatsApp from Mora, the capital of Mayo-Sava.

The government says floods are triggering the spike in cholera cases.

Linda Esso, deputy director for the Fight against Epidemics and Pandemics at Cameroon’s Public Health Ministry, says Cameroonians should not think that the ongoing wave of infections originates in Nigeria, which reported a cholera outbreak after this month’s deadly floods on the border with Cameroon. She says there are possibilities that some civilians infected or affected by the outbreak are moving to access hospitals on both sides of the border to seek help.

The U.N. reports that up to this month, more than 1,000 cases of cholera were reported in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe — states in Nigeria that share a border with northern Cameroon and Chad.

Esso said the cholera outbreak is spreading rapidly in areas of the Lake Chad basin that are shared by Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, Niger and the Central African Republic.

Cameroon government officials say they have engaged in discussions with Nigeria and Chad to jointly combat the outbreak along their borders.

Cholera is a bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea and dehydration, usually spread over water. It can be fatal if not treated in hospitals.

Cameroonian health officials are asking people with confirmed and suspected cholera cases to refrain from seeking treatment from African traditional healers.
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A warming climate could bring viruses in the Arctic into contact with new environments and hosts, increasing the risk of “viral spillover,” according to research published Wednesday.

Viruses need hosts like humans, animals, plants or fungi to replicate and spread, and occasionally they can jump to a new one that lacks immunity, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scientists in Canada wanted to investigate how climate change might affect spillover risk by examining samples from the Arctic landscape of Lake Hazen.

It is the largest lake in the world entirely north of the Arctic Circle and “was truly unlike any other place I’ve been,” researcher Graham Colby, now a medical student at the University of Toronto, told AFP.

The team sampled soil that becomes a riverbed for melted glacier water in the summer, as well as the lakebed itself — which required clearing snow and drilling through 2 meters of ice, even in May when the research was carried out.

They used ropes and a snowmobile to lift the lake sediment through almost 300 meters of water, and samples were then sequenced for DNA and RNA, the genetic blueprints and messengers of life.

“This enabled us to know what viruses are in a given environment, and what potential hosts are also present,” said Stephane Aris-Brosou, an associate professor in the University of Ottawa’s biology department, who led the work.

But to find out how likely they were to jump hosts, the team needed to examine the equivalent of each virus and host’s family tree.

“Basically, what we tried to do is measure how similar these trees are,” said Audree Lemieux, first author of the research.

Similar genealogies suggest a virus has evolved along with its host, but differences suggest spillover. And if a virus has jumped hosts once, it is more likely to do so again.

‘Very unpredictable’

The analysis found pronounced differences between viruses and hosts in the lakebed, “which is directly correlated to the risk of spillover,” said Aris-Brosou.

The difference was less stark in the riverbeds, which the researchers theorize is because water erodes the topsoil, removing organisms and limiting interactions between viruses and potential new hosts.

Those, instead, wash into the lake, which has seen “dramatic change” in recent years, the study says, as increased water from melting glaciers deposits more sediment.

“That’s going to bring together hosts and viruses that would not normally encounter each other,” Lemieux said.

The authors of the research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal, caution they are neither forecasting an actual spillover nor a pandemic.

“The likelihood of dramatic events remains very low,” Lemieux said.

They also warn more work is needed to clarify how big the difference between viruses and hosts needs to be to create serious spillover risk.

But they argue that warming weather could increase risks further if new potential hosts move into previously inhospitable regions.

“It could be anything from ticks to mosquitoes to certain animals, to bacteria and viruses themselves,” said Lemieux.

“It’s really unpredictable … and the effect of spillover itself is very unpredictable. It can range from benign to an actual pandemic.”

The team wants more research and surveillance work in the region to understand the risks.

“Obviously, we’ve seen in the past two years what the effects of spillover can be,” said Lemieux.
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There are only about 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the wild and they live in only three countries — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. To encourage tourists and locals to help protect the endangered gorillas, Rwanda has turned to social media platform Instagram with a project they call GorillaGram. Senanu Tord reports from Kinigi, Rwanda. Videographer: Senanu Tord   
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Who said there is nothing new under the sun? 

One of the hottest innovations for the non-polluting generation of electricity is floating photo-voltaics, or FPV, which involves anchoring solar panels in bodies of water, especially lakes, reservoirs and seas. Some projects in Asia incorporate thousands of panels to generate hundreds of megawatts.

FPV got a head start in Asia and Europe where it makes a lot of economic sense with open land highly valued for agriculture.

The first modest systems were installed in Japan and at a California winery in 2007 and 2008.  

On land, a one-megawatt projects requires between one and 1.6 hectares.  

Floating solar projects are even more attractive when they can be built on bodies of water adjacent to hydropower plants with existing transmission lines. 

Most of the largest such projects are in China and India. There also are large-scale facilities in Brazil, Portugal and Singapore.

A proposed 2.1 gigawatt floating solar farm on a tidal flat on the coast of the Yellow Sea in South Korea, which would contain five million solar modules over an area covering 30 square kilometers with a $4 billion price tag, is facing an uncertain future with a new government in Seoul. President Yoon Suk-yeol has indicated he prefers to boost nuclear over solar power. 

Other gigawatt-scale projects are moving off the drawing board in India and Laos, as well as the North Sea, off the Dutch coast. 

The technology has also excited planners in sub-Saharan Africa with the lowest electricity access rate in the world and an abundance of sunshine. 

In countries that depend on a lot of hydropower, “there’s concerns around what does power generation look like during droughts, for example, and with climate change, we expect that we’ll see more extreme weather events. When we’re thinking about droughts, there is the opportunity to then have FPV as another renewable energy option in your toolkit essentially,” explained Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “So instead of depending so much on hydro, now you can use more FPV and reduce your dependence on hydro, during very dry seasons, to use your floating solar photovoltaics.”  

A one percent coverage of hydropower reservoirs with floating solar panels could provide an increase of 50 percent of the annual production of existing hydroelectric plants in Africa, according to a study funded by the European Commission.

Challenges

There are potential flotovoltaic hazards, however. A plant caught fire in Chiba prefecture in Japan in 2019. Officials blamed a typhoon for shifting panels one atop another, generating intense heat and possibly sparking the fire at the 18-hectare facility containing more than 50,000 floating solar panels at the Yamakura Dam.

The most significant barrier to wider adoption of the technology, at present, is the price. It is more expensive to construct a floating array than a similarly sized installation on land. But with the higher costs there are additional benefits: Due to passive cooling of water bodies, the floating panels can function more effectively than conventional solar panels. They also reduce light exposure and lower the water temperature, minimizing harmful algae growth.

That all sounded promising to officials in the town of Windsor in northern California’s wine country. Nearly 5,000 solar panels, each generating 360 watts of electricity, are now floating on one of Windsor’s wastewater ponds.

“They’re all interlinked. Each panel gets its own float. And they actually move quite well with wave action and wind action,” . You’d be surprised how they can kind of just suck up the waves and ride them out without breaking or coming apart,” said Garrett Broughton, the senior civil engineer for Windsor’s public works department.   

The floating panels are easy on the environment and Windsor’s budget, in which the wastewater plant’s electric bill was the town government’s largest

Town Council member Deborah Fudge pushed for the 1.78-megawatt project over an alternative of putting solar panels atop carports.

“They offset 350 metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly. And they also provide 90 percent of the power that we need for all of the operations for treating wastewater, for all the operations of our corporation yard and also for pumping our wastewater to the geysers, which, is a geothermal field, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north,” Fudge told VOA. 

The town leases the floating panels from the company that installed them, which gives it a set price for electricity on a long-term contract, meaning Windsor is paying about 30 percent of what it previously spent for the same amount of power.

“It’s not like we’ve invested in something where we’re not going to get a payback. We’re getting a payback as we speak. And we’ll get a payback for 25 years,” said Windsor’s mayor, Sam Salmon. 

The floating systems are not intended to fully blanket bodies of water, allowing for other activities to continue, such as boating and fishing. 

“We do not assume the floating structure will cover the whole water body, it’s often a very small percentage of that water body,” NREL’s Gadzanku told VOA. “Even just from a visual perspective you don’t want to maybe see PV panels covering an entire reservoir.”

NREL has identified 24,419 man-made bodies of water in the United States as suitable for FPV placement. Floating panels covering little more than one-fourth the area of each these sites would potentially generate nearly 10 percent of America’s energy needs, according to the lab.

Among the sites is the 119-hectare Smith Lake, a man-made reservoir managed by Stafford County in Virginia to produce drinking water. It is also a site for recreational fishing adjacent to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Quantico base.  

“Many of these eligible bodies of water are in water-stressed areas with high land acquisition costs and high electricity prices, suggesting multiple benefits of FP technologies,” wrote the study’s authors. 

“It really is an option with a lot of proven technology behind it,” said Gadzanku.
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Long distance runners rely on endurance, determination and the ability to see. Today, steps are being taken to help runners with disabilities, including those who are blind or partially sighted, to compete. Andri Tambunan reports for VOA in this report narrated by Zulfian Bakar. Videographer: Andri Tambunan, Maria Iman-Santoso
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Relentless drought in China, East Africa, the U.S. West and northern Mexico, devastating floods in Pakistan and Kentucky, scorching heat waves in Europe and the Pacific Northwest, destructive cyclones in southern Africa and intense hurricanes in the U.S. and Central America make up just some of the recent extreme weather events that scientists have long predicted would be more intense with a warming climate.

“With just over one degree of warming since pre-industrial times, we are already seeing more extreme weather patterns,” said Elizabeth Robinson, director of the Grantham Research Institute in London.

Scientists have been tracking precisely how much the climate has already changed due to human activity. Temperatures around the world have been inching upwards.

The average global temperature today, which tends to be compared to estimates for the pre-industrial era that kickstarted the mass burning of fossil fuels, has shot up between 0.9 and 1.2 degrees Celsius (1.6 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1850, in large part due to human activity, according to estimates in the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most of that warming has happened from 1975 onwards, at a rate of 0.15 Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) to 0.2 Celsius (0.36 Fahrenheit) per decade.

Most people are living in areas that have heated up more than the global average, “partly that is urbanization — people move into cities, which are urban heat islands — and partly populations growing,” Robinson said. Urban areas, packed with plenty of heat-absorbing infrastructure like roads and buildings and less cooling tree cover, become “islands” of warmer weather.

Sea levels, which have swelled due to both warming, expanding oceans and the melting of ice over land, have also been jumping up more rapidly. In the twentieth century, seas were rising by about 1.4 millimeters (0.06 inches) a year, but that’s doubled to 3.6 millimeters a year (0.14 inches) in the past fifteen years, data suggests. Seas have risen by about 21 to 24 centimeters (8 to 9 inches) so far since 1880 on average, according to estimates, with the IPCC suggesting this will likely be up to 43 to 84 centimeters (17 to 33 inches) by 2100.

While the climate and global temperatures have fluctuated throughout the Earth’s history, it is the rate of change that is most alarming to researchers. Fossil fuels — made up of ancient decomposing plants and animals deep in the earth — have been dug up at extraordinary rates. Scientists are now starting to pinpoint “details about rates and magnitudes and timing of changes” as well as the varying impact on regions, said Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb.

With the planet already facing the effects of climate change, adapting to hazards is one major way humans can limit the damage. Weather-related disaster deaths are generally trending lower globally as forecasts, preparedness and resilience improves, scientists say.

“The extent to which people are harmed by an extreme weather event is strongly influenced by government policies,” Robinson said, but added that “there are limits to adaptation.”
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says it will commit $1.2 billion to the effort to end polio worldwide.

The money will be used to help implement the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s strategy through 2026. The initiative is trying to end the polio virus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last two endemic countries, the foundation said in a statement Sunday.

The money also will be used to stop outbreaks of new variants of the virus. The announcement was made Sunday at the World Health Summit in Berlin.

The foundation says in a statement on its website that it has contributed nearly $5 billion to the polio eradication initiative. The initiative is trying to integrate polio campaigns into broader health services, while it scales up use of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2.

The group also is working to make national health systems stronger, so countries are better prepared for future health threats, the statement said.

“The last steps to eradication are by far the toughest. But our foundation remains dedicated to a polio-free future, and we’re optimistic that we will see it soon,” said foundation CEO Mark Suzman.

The eradication initiative is a public-private partnership led by a group of national governments that includes the Gates Foundation, Rotary International, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Sitting on a 7,000-hectare stretch of land in southwest Florida, Babcock Ranch has made a name for itself as the first solar-powered town in the United States. Its power comes from nearly 700,000 solar panels that supply energy to more than 2,000 homes and other buildings, including a health center and schools.

Syd Kitson, founder of the planned community, envisioned an environmentally friendly energy-efficient city. His dream became a reality in 2018.

“I believe deeply in respecting the environment and wanted to prove that you could build this new city and work hand-in-hand with the environment,” said Kitson, CEO of the real estate firm Kitson & Partners. “Our water management system is based around natural floodways. We also have 7,000 hectares we are preserving.”

The preserve protects natural habitats, scenic landscapes and water resources.

“It was just the kind of community my husband and I were looking for,” Shannon Treece told VOA. “We liked that the town was built for sustainability, including solar energy.”

Today, Babcock Ranch is also known as the town that came out practically unscathed Sept. 28, when Hurricane Ian came roaring through the area bringing record-breaking storm surges and winds over 160 kph.

Nearby Fort Myers by the Gulf of Mexico was devastated.

Babcock Ranch was built on a higher elevation to be above the storm surge. And the buildings were constructed to withstand hurricane-force winds.

Because of that, Shannon Treece and her family are among the 4,600 residents who decided to ride out the storm.

“It was a little scary,” she said of being in a hurricane for the first time. “We couldn’t see anything since we had blocked all the windows with storm shutters, but we could hear debris hitting the house. I am glad our house held up.”

Nancy Chorpenning and her husband also decided to stay put.

“The hurricane sounded like a locomotive coming through. But we never lost our electricity, access to the internet or our water,” she told VOA.

That’s because power lines from Babcock Ranch’s solar array and utility plants are underground, which shields them from high winds and bad weather, Kitson said.

Huge retaining ponds protect the homes from flooding, and the streets are designed to soak up floodwaters.

When building the town, “we spent a lot of time making sure Babcock Ranch was storm ready,” Kitson said. “We had minor damage from Hurricane Ian, like some downed small trees and torn roof shingles, but within a day, we were almost back to normal.”

Chorpenning thinks there are lessons to be learned from Babcock Ranch.

“We can be a model for other communities, showing the importance of water management and using solar energy,” she said. “We’re also showing how neighborhoods can live in concert with nature, partly by requiring that native plant species be planted in the community.”

The blueprint for the town is to grow into a much larger city. The developers have their sights set on constructing thousands more of the environmentally friendly homes, which would increase the population to 50,000 residents.

“I hope we are setting a good example for others to follow as we continue to protect the natural environment at the same time,” Kitson said.  
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Astronomers have observed the brightest flash of light ever seen, from an event that occurred 2.4 billion light-years from Earth and was likely triggered by the formation of a black hole. 

The burst of gamma rays — the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation — was first detected by orbiting telescopes Sunday, and its afterglow is still being watched by scientists across the world. 

Astrophysicist Brendan O’Connor told AFP that gamma ray bursts that last hundreds of seconds, as this one did, are thought to be caused by dying massive stars, greater than 30 times bigger than our sun. 

The star explodes in a supernova, collapses into a black hole, then matter forms in a disk around the black hole, falls inside, and is spewed out in a jet of energy that travels at 99.99% the speed of light. 

The flash released photons carrying a record 18 teraelectronvolts of energy — that’s 18 with 12 zeros behind it — and it has impacted longwave radio communications in Earth’s ionosphere. 

“It’s really breaking records, both in the amount of photons, and the energy of the photons that are reaching us,” said O’Connor, who used infrared instruments on the Gemini South telescope in Chile to take fresh observations early Friday. 

“Something this bright, this nearby, is really a once-in-a-century event,” he added. 

“Gamma ray bursts in general release the same amount of energy that our sun produces over its entire lifetime in the span of a few seconds — and this event is the brightest gamma ray burst.” 

The gamma ray burst, known as GRB 221009A, was first spotted by telescopes including NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and the Wind spacecraft Sunday morning Eastern time.  

1.9 billion-year-old movie

It originated from the direction of the constellation Sagitta and traveled an estimated 1.9 billion years to reach Earth — less than the current distance of its starting point, because the universe is expanding. 

Observing the event now is like watching a 1.9 billion-year-old recording of those events unfold before us, giving astronomers a rare opportunity to glean new insights into things like black hole formation. 

“That’s what makes this sort of science so addictive — you get this adrenaline rush when these things happen,” said O’Connor, who is affiliated with the University of Maryland and George Washington University. 

He added that though the initial burst may have been visible to lucky amateur astronomers, it has since faded out of their view. 

Over the coming weeks, he and others will continue watching for the signatures of supernovas at optical and infrared wavelengths, to confirm that their hypothesis about the origins of the flash are correct, and that the event conforms to known physics.

Supernova explosions are also predicted to be responsible for producing heavy elements — such as gold, platinum, uranium — and astronomers will also be on the hunt for their signatures. 

Astrophysicists have written in the past that the sheer power of gamma ray bursts could cause extinction-level events here on Earth. 

But O’Connor pointed out that because the jets of energy are very tightly focused, and aren’t likely to arise in our galaxy, this scenario is not something we should worry much about. 
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Young researchers and students are competing in a disaster challenge at a natural hazards forum in the Australian city of Brisbane.

The government-funded organization Natural Hazards Research Australia has said more Australians “than ever before are exposed to the damage and destruction of floods, bushfires, cyclones, heatwaves and storms.”

It reported that Australia has experienced 28 disasters that have cost more than $630 million, and 16 of these have occurred since 2000.

Experts have said that research is essential to improve Australia’s readiness for natural calamities.

At the inaugural Natural Hazards Research Forum in Brisbane, young researchers have been asked to solve a key conundrum in preparing communities for floods, fires and storms; how can disaster authorities get potentially life-saving advice to the “unengaged, the moving,” such as tourists or “the hard to reach”?

The winning entry aims to reach international tourists through Wi-Fi — essentially captive portals that compel visitors in flood or fires zones, for example, to watch a survival video before they can log onto the Internet at hotels, cafes or other destinations.

Mark Owens from the Country Fire Authority, an emergency service in the Australians state of Victoria, told VOA that the videos would be tailored for various locations and seasons.

“Making sure the message we actually get to them will actually change their behavior but also get them to do that for the future again and again, and that is why the videos will be tailored and changed seasonally, or, you know, if there is a La Niña coming through again,” he said. “So, you know, it might then really focus on floods for a big period of time instead of bushfire.”

Parts of Victoria state are currently facing one of the biggest floods in decades.

There have been rescues and evacuations along the Maribyrnong River in the city of Melbourne.

Thousands of people are also under evacuation orders for flooding in the states of New South Wales and Tasmania.

Two climatic phenomena — La Niña and the Indian Ocean Dipole — are fueling the flooding. Both occur naturally and are influenced by warmer ocean temperatures.  They are dumping above-average rainfall across much of Australia, and experts say they are being super-charged by climate change.

Sydney is having its wettest year on record. More than 2 meters of rain have fallen on Australia’s biggest city, breaking the previous record set in 1950.
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Europe faces a higher-than-usual chance of a cold blast of weather before the end of the year, but the winter overall is likely to be warmer than average, the continent’s long-range weather forecaster said Thursday.

Temperatures this winter will be crucial for homeowners worried about the record cost of heating their homes, and for European policymakers seeking to avoid energy rationing because of reductions in Russian gas supplies.

“We see the winter as being warmer than usual,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service that produces seasonal forecasts for the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

“Nevertheless, there is a still a significant chance of a block situation, which can lead to cold temperatures and low wind over Europe,” he told AFP as the service issued a monthly update to its forecasts.

A so-called block or blocking pattern in the winter can bring stable, often wind-free weather accompanied by freezing temperatures.

“This was looking more likely in November, but there now looks like a pronounced probability of a cold outbreak in December,” Buontempo added.

The ECMWF produces weather modelling with data from a range of national weather services around Europe.

Its forecasts are based on indicators such as ocean and atmospheric temperatures, as well as wind speeds in the stratosphere, but do not have the accuracy of short-range reports.

The models provide the “best information possible, to give a hint, to guide our decisions,” Buontempo said.

The European winter was expected to be warmer than usual because of the La Nina global weather phenomenon, which is related to cooling surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.

“We know that in a La Nina year, the latter part of the European winter tends to favor westerly winds, so warm and wet,” Buontempo said.

The agency will update its winter season forecast next month when it will have greater confidence because “all the drivers for the winter will be more active,” he said.

Independent energy experts expect Europe to be able to withstand Russia’s gas cuts this winter, providing temperatures stay in line with or above the long-term average.

Governments have almost filled their strategic gas reserves and consumers are being urged to reduce their consumption.

The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based energy consultancy, believes that temperatures about 10% below average over the winter would put strain on the European gas system.

It has also said a late cold spell, when gas stocks are expected to be low, could be the “Achilles heel of European gas supply security.” 
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Still, just 6.9% of those eligible have gotten the omicron-tailored vaccine
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A monkeypox outbreak has been confirmed in the town of Mbonge, health authorities in Cameroon say, but armed separatists are preventing workers from investigating suspected cases.

Cameroon government officials say health workers have been deployed to the districts of Kumba and Mbonge to communicate to hundreds of civilians with suspected monkeypox infections to immediately isolate and avoid contact with other people and animals, including pets. 

Kumba and Mbonge are districts located in Cameroon’s English-speaking southwest region near the border with Nigeria. 

Emmanuel Lenya Nefenda, the highest ranking Cameroon public health official in Kumba, said civilians are being educated after a suspected monkeypox infection was confirmed in Kumba. He said the case was reported after the confirmation by Cameroon public health officials of a monkeypox outbreak in Bole Bakundu, a village in Mbonge. 

In order to prevent the spread of the highly contagious monkeypox, Nefenda said people should avoid contact with wild animals, avoid eating wild animals, and wear clean clothes, as opposed to “bush clothes” that may have had contact with rats or other animals.

Nefenda spoke from Kumba via the messaging app WhatsApp. 

The government says one case of monkeypox was confirmed in Kumba, and the patient is receiving treatment in a hospital isolation ward. Several dozen specimens have been collected from suspected patients and sent to specialized laboratories in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, for laboratory examinations. 

Health officials are warning civilians to take suspected patients to hospitals, and not to herbalists or African traditional healers in villages. But villagers say ongoing battles between separatists and government troops make it impossible for suspected patients to be transported to hospitals, which are far from towns. 

Separatists on social media platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp, say any health worker sent by Cameroon’s central government in Yaounde should obtain an authorization from fighters. 

But the government says only Cameroon state officials can assure the safety of health workers assisting people suspected of monkeypox infections. 

Eko Eko Filbert, the highest government official in charge of public health in Cameroon’s English-speaking Southwest region where Kumba and Mbonge are located, said armed groups should allow medical staff members to render humanitarian services. 

Monkeypox is contagious, he said, but can be contained with the help of health workers.

Eko said no health official deployed to assist civilians suspected of monkeypox infection has been attacked, but that frightened health workers are scared of going out to search for patients and suspected patients. 

The government says it will protect both its citizens and health workers. 

The U.N. says Cameroon is a monkeypox endemic country but displacement away from established surveillance systems due to armed conflicts increase the risk of undetected transmission. 

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization said 21 countries in the past week reported an increase in monkeypox cases, mostly in the Americas, which accounted for almost 90% of all cases reported last week. 

The WHO says cases in the global monkeypox outbreak have topped 70,000 and warned that a decline in new cases does not mean people should drop their guard, as the slowdown in new cases worldwide could be the most dangerous time in the outbreak.

The U.N. says the disease causes fever, muscular aches and large boil-like skin lesions.  

 
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Taiwan lifted all its COVID-19 entry restrictions Thursday, allowing tourists unfettered access to the self-ruled island after more than 2 1/2 years of border controls.

Hong Kong and Taiwan, together with mainland China, required most visitors to complete a mandatory quarantine period throughout the pandemic, even as most countries reopened their borders to tourists.

Visitors are no longer required to quarantine upon entry, or take any PCR tests. Instead, they will need to monitor their health for a week after arriving, and obtain a negative result on a rapid antigen test the day they arrive. If people want to go out during the weeklong monitoring period, they need a negative test from either that day or the day before.

There are also no longer any restrictions on certain nationalities being allowed to enter Taiwan.

Dozens of visitors from Thailand were among the first to arrive under the new rules at Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport, which serves the capital Taipei, on a Tiger Air flight that landed shortly after midnight.

Tourists like 32-year-old Mac Chientachakul and his parents were excited to visit the island.

“Hot pot is my favorite dish in Taiwan,” Chientachakul said. “It’s my first thing to do … I miss it so much.”

Sonia Chang, a travel agent, said the changes are good for both the tourism industry and Taiwanese residents, who can now travel abroad without having to quarantine when they get home.

Valaisurang Bhaedhayajibh, a 53-year-old business development director of a design firm, called the new rules convenient.

“We don’t have to do the test before coming here, and also after arriving,” he said. “We are still required to do the self-test every two days, and everything has been provided” by Taiwanese authorities, including the rapid testing kits.

At a welcome ceremony in the Taoyuan airport’s arrival hall, the travelers from Thailand were met by the Taiwan Tourism Bureau’s director, Chang Shi-chung, who handed out gifts.

Taiwan’s tourism bureau estimated that a total of 244 tourists from some 20 tour groups will arrive Thursday.

With both Hong Kong and Taiwan getting rid of restrictions and welcoming back tourists, mainland China remains one of the few places in the world adamant in keeping borders closed and sticking to a “zero-COVID” strategy to stamp out the virus. Hong Kong ended its mandatory quarantine policy for inbound travelers late last month, requiring just a three-day self-monitoring period.
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As Australia prepares to end mandatory coronavirus isolation rules Friday, new research shows that almost a third of adults have had symptoms of long COVID. In Canberra, a parliamentary health committee has heard clinics are being contacted by more patients struggling with ongoing ailments.

COVID-19 cases reported in Australia continue to fall, but the consequences of infection are still being felt.

A study published Wednesday by the Australian National University said that about one in three adults who have had the virus had symptoms that lasted for longer than four weeks, a common indicator of so-called “long COVID.”

Symptoms include extreme fatigue, heart palpitations, joint and muscle pain as well as insomnia and a cough. The study also stated that many patients with long COVID also experienced “low mood.”

In parliament in Canberra, the House of Representatives Health Committee started Wednesday an inquiry into long COVID and repeated COVID infections.

Melissa McIntosh, a lawmaker and deputy chair of the committee, told reporters in Canberra that the investigation would be thorough.

“We are hearing so much anecdotal reporting when it comes to long COVID and I, myself, experienced some form of long COVID after contracting COVID and still have the effects today many months after COVID as do many other Australians,” she said. “So, we want to collect the evidence, speak to people who have experienced long COVID and also to speak to their families, to speak to researchers and to organizations. Even mental health organizations.”

The Australian National University study has shown that females, young Australians, and those living in middle-income households have the highest probability of contracting the virus.

Australia on Friday will end compulsory five-day isolation for people who test positive to COVID-19, removing one of the country’s last remaining disease-control restrictions.

Australia did have some of the world’s toughest coronavirus measures. It closed its borders to most foreign nationals for more than two years and had some of the world’s longest lockdowns.

Government data shows around 5,000 COVID infections are now being reported each week on average, compared to more than 110,000 in mid-January 2022.
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Early in World War II, the U.S. Navy battled Nazi U-boats off the East Coast of the United States in an area that came to be known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” For VOA, Genia Dulot takes us on an underwater tour of some of those wrecks, which are now artificial reefs popular with sharks and with scuba divers.
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Case numbers in the global monkeypox outbreak have now topped 70,000, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced Wednesday as it warned that a decline in new cases did not mean people should drop their guard. 

The WHO said that case numbers last week were on the rise in several countries in the Americas and it stressed that a slowdown worldwide in new cases could be the “most dangerous” time in the outbreak. 

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 70,000 cases have now been reported to the U.N. health agency this year, with 26 deaths. 

“Globally, cases are continuing to decline, but 21 countries in the past week reported an increase in cases, mostly in the Americas, which accounted for almost 90 percent of all cases reported last week,” he told a press conference in Geneva. 

“A declining outbreak can be the most dangerous outbreak, because it can tempt us to think that the crisis is over, and to let down our guard,” he said. 

He said the WHO was working with countries to increase their testing capacity and to monitor trends. 

“We are concerned about reports of cases in Sudan, including in refugee camps near the border with Ethiopia,” Tedros added. 

“Like COVID-19, monkeypox remains a public health emergency of international concern, and WHO will continue to treat it as such,” he said. 

A surge in monkeypox infections has been reported since early May among men who have sex with men, outside the African countries where it has long been endemic. 

More than 42,000 cases have now been reported from the Americas and nearly 25,000 from Europe. 

Cases have been reported from 107 WHO member states this year, though 39 have registered no new cases in the past 21 days. 

The 10 countries with the highest total number of cases are: the United States (26,723); Brazil (8,147); Spain (7,209); France (4,043); Britain (3,654); Germany (3,640); Peru (2,587); Colombia (2,453); Mexico (1,968); and Canada (1,400). 

These countries account for nearly 87% of global cases. 

Where the given data was known, 97% were men, with a median age of 35 years old; 90% identified as men who had sex with men; and 49% were HIV-positive, according to the WHO’s case dashboard. 

The disease causes fever, muscular aches and large boil-like skin lesions. 

 
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The U.S. on Wednesday authorized updated COVID-19 boosters for children as young as 5, seeking to expand protection ahead of an expected winter wave.

Tweaked boosters rolled out for Americans 12 and older last month, doses modified to target today’s most common and contagious omicron relative. While there wasn’t a big rush, federal health officials are urging that people seek the extra protection ahead of holiday gatherings.

Now the Food and Drug Administration has given a green light for elementary school-age kids to get the updated booster doses, too — one made by Pfizer for 5- to 11-year-olds, and a version from rival Moderna for those as young as 6.

There’s one more step before parents can bring their kids in for the new shot: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends how vaccines are used, must sign off.

Americans may be tired of repeated calls to get boosted against COVID-19 but experts say the updated shots have an advantage: They contain half the recipe that targeted the original coronavirus strain and half protection against the dominant BA.4 and BA.5 omicron versions.

These combination or “bivalent” boosters are designed to broaden immune defenses so that people are better protected against serious illness whether they encounter an omicron relative in the coming months — or a different mutant that’s more like the original virus.

“We want to have the best of both worlds,” Pfizer’s Dr. Bill Gruber, a pediatrician, told The Associated Press. He hopes the updated shots will “re-energize interest in protecting children for the winter.”

The updated boosters are “extremely important” for keeping kids healthy and in school, said Dr. Jason Newland, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Parents should know “there is no concern from the safety perspective with the bivalent vaccines, whether Moderna or Pfizer,” Newland added.

Only people who’ve gotten their initial vaccinations with any of the original-formula versions — qualify for an updated booster. That means about three-fourths of Americans 12 and older are eligible. As of last weekend, only at least 13 million had gotten an updated booster, White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha estimated Tuesday.

To pediatricians’ chagrin, getting children their first vaccinations has been tougher. Less than a third of 5- to 11-year-olds have had their two primary doses and thus would qualify for the new booster.

This age group will get kid-size doses of the updated booster — and they can receive it at least two months after their last dose, whether that was a primary vaccination or an earlier booster, the FDA said.

Pfizer said it could ship up to 6 million kid-sized doses within a week of authorization, in addition to ongoing adult-dose shipments.

Until now, Moderna’s updated booster was cleared only for adults. Wednesday’s FDA action authorized the booster for teens as well as children as young as age 6.

As for even younger tots, first vaccinations didn’t open for the under-5 age group until mid-June — and it will be several more months before regulators decide if they’ll also need a booster using the updated recipe.

Exactly how much protection does an updated COVID-19 booster shot offer? That’s hard to know. Pfizer and Moderna are starting studies in young children.

But the FDA cleared the COVID-19 booster tweaks without requiring human test results — just like it approves yearly changes to flu vaccines. That’s partly because both companies already had studied experimental shots tweaked to target prior COVID-19 variants, including an earlier omicron version, and found they safely revved up virus-fighting antibodies.

“It’s clearly a better vaccine, an important upgrade from what we had before,” Jha said earlier this week.

ha urged adults to get their updated shot in October — like they get flu vaccinations — or at least well before holiday gatherings with high-risk family and friends. People who’ve recently had COVID-19 still need the booster but can wait about three months, he added.
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Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.

It’s part of an effort to better study human brain development and diseases affecting this most complex of organs, which makes us who we are but has long been shrouded in mystery.

“Many disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are likely uniquely human” but “the human brain certainly has not been very accessible,” said said Dr. Sergiu Pasca, senior author of a study describing the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Approaches that don’t involve taking tissue out of the human brain are “promising avenues in trying to tackle these conditions.”

The research builds upon the team’s previous work creating brain “organoids,” tiny structures resembling human organs that have also been made to represent others such as livers, kidneys, prostates, or key parts of them.

To make the brain organoids, Stanford University scientists transformed human skin cells into stem cells and then coaxed them to become several types of brain cells. Those cells then multiplied to form organoids resembling the cerebral cortex, the human brain’s outermost layer, which plays a key role in things like memory, thinking, learning, reasoning and emotions.

Scientists transplanted those organoids into rat pups 2 to 3 days old, a stage when brain connections are still forming. The organoids grew so that they eventually occupied a third of the hemisphere of the rat’s brain where they were implanted. Neurons from the organoids formed working connections with circuits in the brain.

Human neurons have been transplanted in rodents before, but generally in adult animals, usually mice. Pasca, a psychiatry professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, said this is the first time these organoids have been placed into early rat brains, creating “the most advanced human brain circuitry ever built from human skin cells and a demonstration that implanted human neurons can influence an animal’s behavior.”

To examine a practical use of this approach, scientists transplanted organoids into both sides of a rat’s brain: one generated from a healthy person’s cells and another from the cells of a person with Timothy syndrome, a rare genetic condition associated with heart problems and autism spectrum disorder.

Five to six months later, they saw effects of the disease related to the activity of the neurons. There were differences in the two sides’ electrical activity, and the neurons from the person with Timothy syndrome were much smaller and didn’t sprout as many extensions that pick up input from nearby neurons.

Researchers, whose study was funded partly by the National Institutes of Health, said they could do the same sorts of experiments using organoids made from the cells of people with disorders such as autism or schizophrenia — and potentially learn new things about how these conditions affect the brain, too.

Dr. Flora Vaccarino of Yale University – who previously grew lumps containing cerebral cortex that were made with DNA from people with autism – said the study moves the field forward.

“It’s extremely impressive what they do here in terms of what these cells can actually show us in terms of their advanced development … in the rat,” said Vaccarino, who wasn’t involved with the study.

Such experiments in animals raise ethical concerns. For example, Pasca said he and his team are cognizant of the rats’ well-being and whether they still behave normally with the organoids inside them, which he says they do. Still, Pasca does not believe this should be tried in primates. Ethicists also wonder about the possibility of brain organoids in the future attaining something like human consciousness, which experts say is extremely unlikely now.

Some scientists are studying human brain organoids outside of animals. For example, researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland published a study in Nature earlier this month describing how they are growing brain-like tissue from stem cells in the lab and then mapping the cell types in various brain regions and genes regulating their development. Some are using these structures to study autism.

Pasca said brain organoids could also be used to test new treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders, the largest cause of disability worldwide. Such research, he said, should help scientists make strides that have been extremely difficult until now because it’s so hard to get at the human brain – which is “the reason why we’re so much more behind in psychiatry compared to any other branch of medicine in terms of therapeutics.”
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The White House on Tuesday said eligible Americans should get the updated COVID-19 boosters by Halloween to have maximum protection against the coronavirus by Thanksgiving and the holidays, as it warned of a “challenging” virus season ahead.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 coordinator, said the U.S. has the tools, both from vaccines and treatments, to largely eliminate serious illness and death from the virus, but he stressed that’s only the case if people do their part.

“We are not helpless against these challenges,” he said. “What happens this winter is up to us.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says only about 11.5 million Americans so far have received the updated shots, which are meant to provide a boost of protection against both the original strain of COVID-19 and the BA.5 variant that is dominant around the world. Jha said studies suggest that if more Americans get the updated vaccines, “we could save hundreds of lives each day this winter.”

More than 330 people die on average each day of COVID-19, according to CDC data, with the U.S. death toll standing at over 1.05 million.

Jha acknowledged the slower pace of vaccinations, saying, “We expected September to be a month where it would just start picking up.” He added that the White House expects more Americans to get the updated boosters this month, around the time when they get their annual flu shots. He also emphasized that they should look to get them soon to be protected when they gather with family and friends.

“I think people should get vaccinated before Halloween,” he said.

Jha criticized Congress, which has refused the White House’s $22 billion budget request for virus response, saying that has kept the U.S. from building a stockpile of tests to use in the event of a new winter surge.

“You can’t fight a deadly virus without resources,” he said, “and congressional inaction is really costly.”
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A spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, NASA said Tuesday in announcing the results of its save-the-world test.

The space agency attempted the first test of its kind two weeks ago to see if in the future a killer rock could be nudged out of Earth’s way.

The Dart spacecraft carved a crater into the asteroid Dimorphos on Sept. 26, hurling debris out into space and creating a cometlike trail of dust and rubble stretching several thousand kilometers. It took days of telescope observations to determine how much the impact altered the path of the 160-meter asteroid around its companion, a much bigger space rock.

Before the impact, the moonlet took 11 hours and 55 minutes to circle its parent asteroid. Scientists had hoped to shave off 10 minutes but NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the impact altered the asteroid’s orbit by about 32 minutes.

“This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” Nelson said during a briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington.

Neither asteroid posed a threat to Earth — and still don’t as they continue their journey around the sun. That’s why scientists picked the pair for the world’s first attempt to alter the position of a celestial body.

Launched last year, the vending machine-size Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — was destroyed when it slammed into the asteroid 11 million kilometers away at 22,500 kph.

The test cost $325 million.
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Energy infrastructure will become more vulnerable to extreme weather such as heatwaves and hurricanes, the World Meteorological Organization warned on Tuesday, with a senior official saying that climate change poses as big a threat to global energy security as the war in Ukraine.

This year was illustrative of what the WMO says are the challenges ahead, with hot weather and drought hampering power production in parts of Europe and China. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a “special military operation,” has led to deep cuts to European energy supplies, with possible power rationing and blackouts ahead.

“I think that if we don’t do anything, if we don’t make our energy system more resilient to climate change, there will be as big a disruption in the energy system as the war,” Roberta Boscolo, WMO climate and energy lead told Reuters as the U.N. agency launched a major report on energy.

To meet the challenges, she said “huge” investment was needed to prepare for and adapt to that scenario, such as retrofitting dams to match new rainfall patterns and shoring up plants against storm surge. A WMO document showed that more than a third of all nuclear plants are found at sea level and said some will be threatened as they rise.

Overall, the WMO said in its report that countries are behind in their renewable power pledges, saying they have so far committed to building less than half of the capacity needed by 2030 to reach the Paris accord goals.

However, the WMO secretary-general said that he expects the Ukraine war to accelerate the transition to renewables, despite greater short-term reliance on fossil fuels such as coal.

.”..It’s speeding up this green transition,” Petteri Taalas said at an earlier press conference. “From a climate perspective, the war in Ukraine may be seen as a blessing.”

Taalas said countries should also consider making “certain compromises” to meet global emissions targets such as embracing nuclear power despite misgivings about waste.
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