Month: February 2018

Yasmira Castano felt she had a fresh chance at life when she received a kidney transplant almost two decades ago. The young Venezuelan was able to finish high school and went on to work as a manicurist. But late last year, Castano, now 40, was unable to find the drugs needed to keep her body from rejecting the organ, as Venezuela’s health care system slid deeper into crisis following years of economic turmoil. On Christmas Eve, weak and frail, Castano was rushed to a crumbling state hospital in Venezuela’s teeming capital, Caracas. Her immune system had attacked the foreign organ and she lost her kidney shortly afterward. Now, Castano needs dialysis three times a week to filter her blood. But the hospital attached to Venezuela’s Central University, once one of South America’s top institutions, frequently suffers water outages and lacks materials for dialysis. “I spend nights not sleeping, just worrying,” said Castano, who weighs around 77 pounds (35 kg), as she lay on an old bed in a bleak hospital room, its bare walls unadorned by a television or pictures. Her roommate Lismar Castellanos, who just turned 21, put it more bluntly. “Unfortunately, I could die,” said Castellanos, who lost her transplanted kidney last year and is struggling to get the dialysis she needs to keep her body functioning. The women are among Venezuela’s roughly 3,500 transplant recipients. After years leading normal lives, they now live in fear as Venezuela’s economic collapse under President Nicolas Maduro has left the once-prosperous …

Sea levels will rise between 0.7 and 1.2 meters (27-47 inches) in the next two centuries even if governments end the fossil fuel era as promised under the Paris climate agreement, scientists said Tuesday. Early action to cut greenhouse gas emissions would limit the long-term rise, driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica that will re-draw global coastlines, a German-led team wrote in the journal Nature Communications. Sea-level rise is a threat to cities from Shanghai to London, to low-lying swaths of Florida or Bangladesh, and to entire nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean or Kiribati in the Pacific. By 2300, the report projected that sea levels would gain by 0.7-1.2 meters, even if almost 200 nations fully meet goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero in the second half of this century. Ocean levels will rise inexorably because heat-trapping industrial gases already emitted will linger in the atmosphere, melting more ice, it said. In addition, water naturally expands as it warms above four degrees Celsius (39.2°F). The report also found that every five years of delay beyond 2020 in peaking global emissions would mean an extra 20 centimeters (8 inches) of sea-level rise by 2300. “Sea level is often communicated as a really slow process that you can’t do much about … but the next 30 years really matter,” lead author Matthias Mengel, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Reuters. Governments are …

More than 100,000 malaria cases went untreated when Liberia’s health care system buckled under the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, according to a new study. The research, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, shows how the toll of the Ebola outbreak goes beyond the 11,000 killed in West Africa by the virus itself. Basic health care took a major hit as well. Ebola kills about half of the people it infects. It causes flu-like symptoms, followed by vomiting and diarrhea, and can lead to internal and external hemorrhaging. The disease spreads through contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids.  The countries of West Africa were ill-equipped to deal with the 2014-15 outbreak. Many clinics lacked the most basic tools for dealing with the disease, including latex gloves and face masks.  “Rightfully so, people were afraid to go to the clinic because they might get Ebola when they’re at the clinic,” said study lead author Brad Wagenaar at the University of Washington. Wagenaar and colleagues found that by four months into the epidemic, clinics were delivering one-third to two-thirds fewer basic services, which he described as a “huge, dramatic decrease.”  ‘Huge, dramatic decrease’ The researchers studied monthly data on health visits from 379 clinics outside the capital, Monrovia, from 2010 through 2016.  They found measles vaccinations dropped by 67 percent. Anti-malarial treatment fell by 61 percent. Thirty-five percent fewer pregnant women came in for their first pre-natal visits. It took more than a year-and-a-half for all services to return to pre-outbreak levels.  Lost opportunities In …

A precision nutrition approach to weight loss didn’t hold up in a study testing low fat versus low carb depending on dieters’ DNA profiles. Previous research has suggested that a person’s insulin levels or certain genes could interact with different types of diets to influence weight loss.   Stanford University researchers examined this idea with 600 overweight adults who underwent genetic and insulin testing before being randomly assigned to reduce fat or carbohydrate intake.   Gene analyses identified variations linked with how the body processes fats or carbohydrates, which the researchers thought would make them more likely to lose weight on a low-fat or low-carb diet.       But weight loss averaged about 13 pounds over a year, regardless of genes, insulin levels or diet type. Also, some people lost as much as 60 pounds and others gained 15 pounds – more evidence that genetic characteristics and diet type appeared to make no difference. What seemed to make a difference was healthful eating. Participants on both diets who consumed the fewest processed foods, sugary drinks, unhealthy fats and ate the most vegetables lost the most weight. The results suggest that “precision medicine is not as important as eating mindfully, getting rid of packaged, processed food” and avoiding unhealthy habits like eating while watching television, said lead author Christopher Gardner.   The study was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.   Participants had 22 health education classes during the study and were encouraged to be physically active, …

The first treatment to help prevent serious allergic reactions to peanuts may be on the way. A company said Tuesday that its daily capsules of peanut powder helped children build tolerance in a major study. Millions of children are allergic to peanuts, and some may have life-threatening reactions if accidentally exposed to them. Doctors have been testing daily doses of peanut, contained in a capsule and sprinkled over food, as a way to prevent that by gradually getting them used to very small amounts. California-based Aimmune Therapeutics said 67 percent of kids who had its experimental treatment were able to tolerate the equivalent of roughly two peanuts at the end of the study, compared to only 4 percent of others given a dummy powder. But a big warning: Don’t try this at home. “It’s potentially dangerous,” said Dr. Stacie Jones, a University of Arkansas allergy specialist. “This is investigational. It has to be done in a very safe setting” to make sure kids can be treated fast for any bad reactions that occur, she said. Jones helped lead the study, consults for the company, and will give the results at an allergy conference next month. The results have not yet been reviewed by independent experts. The study involved nearly 500 kids ages 4 to 17 with allergies so severe that they had reactions to as little as a tenth of a peanut. They were given either capsules of peanut or a dummy powder in gradually increasing amounts for six months, …

Pollution is threatening the recently mapped Sac Actun cave system in the Yucatan Peninsula, a vast underground network that experts in Mexico say could be the most important underwater archaeological site in the world.   Subaquatic archaeologist Guillermo de Anda said the cave system’s historical span is likely unrivaled. Some of the oldest human remains on the continent have been found there, dating back more than 12,000 years, and now-extinct animal remains push the horizon back to 15,000 years.   He said researchers found a human skull that was already covered in rainwater limestone deposits long before the cave system flooded around 9,000 years ago.   De Anda said over 120 sites with Maya-era pottery and bones in the caves suggest water levels may have briefly dropped in the 216-mile (347-kilometer) -long system during a drought about 1,000 A.D. And some artifacts have been found dating to the 1847-1901 Maya uprising known as the War of the Castes.   Humans there probably didn’t live in the caves, de Anda said, but rather went down to them “during periods of great climate stress, to look for water.”   Sac Actun is “probably the most important underwater archaeological site in the world,” he said.   But de Anda said pollution and development may threaten the caves’ crystalline water. Some of the sinkhole lakes that today serve as entrances to the cave system are used by tourists to snorkel and swim. And the main highway in the Caribbean coast state of Quintana Roo …

More babies are dying each year in West and Central Africa even as child health improves overall, aid agencies said on Tuesday, calling the region’s newborn death rate a “hidden tragedy.” Five of the 10 most dangerous countries to be born are in West and Central Africa, with infants there 50 times more likely to die within a month than if they were born in Japan or Iceland, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said in a report. One in 16 pregnancies in the region results in stillbirth or death within a month — mostly preventable deaths caused by premature birth, labor complications or infection, UNICEF said. “Neonatal health hasn’t really been addressed by governments or institutions,” UNICEF’s regional health specialist, Alain Prual, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. While the infant mortality rate is slowly declining, population growth means that the number of deaths is still increasing in West and Central Africa, Prual said. For years aid agencies have focused on reducing deaths of children under five, which have dropped sharply, said Laurent Hiffler of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). Yet babies are still dying at high rates in the first month after they are born, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Neonatal mortality reveals the weaknesses in the system,” said Hiffler, adding that it is difficult to address because it requires continuous care throughout pregnancy and birth. “It’s been a neglected tragedy … a hidden tragedy.” Only one in two women in the region gives birth in a health …

An African charity that improved access to drinking water and sanitation and reduced the chance of cholera deaths in a village in Togo was on Monday awarded the Kyoto World Water Grand Prize. The award is granted every three years for outstanding grassroots projects to solve water issues in developing nations. Judges said the project by the Christian Charity for People in Distress (CCPD), which helped 290 villagers, had cut the risk of disease and death in a community prone to cholera outbreaks. “The organization provided a serious and coherent project, with proper monitoring, and demonstrated above all an excellent efficiency,” said Jean Lapègue, a board member of the World Water Council, which adjudicates the award. Judges also praised the project’s use of ecological toilets as an alternative to pit latrines, Lapègue told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email. More than 60 percent of Togo’s population lives below the poverty line, and many people lack reliable access to drinking water, education, health and electricity, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). In addition, the UNDP said Togo’s natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce, particularly clean water. The CCPD will receive the award and the 2 million Japanese yen prize ($19,000) at a ceremony next month in the Brazilian capital Brasilia during the eighth World Water Forum.  Lapègue said the prize should help CCPD to extend its project in rural areas of Togo — a former French colony of 8 million people in West Africa — and would help connect …

If you want to know how vampire bats can survive on a diet that — as everyone knows — consists exclusively of blood, the answer is simple. It’s in their genes. Scientists on Monday said they have mapped for the first time the complete genome of a vampire bat, finding that this flying mammal boasts numerous genetic traits that help it thrive on an exotic food source that offers nutritional disadvantages and exposes it to blood-borne pathogens. The researchers compared the genome of the common vampire bat, scientific name Desmodus rotundus, to genomes of bat species that eat nectar, fruit, insects and meat. They also examined microbial DNA from its droppings. This bat and the world’s two other vampire bat species, the hairy-legged vampire bat and the white-winged vampire bat, are the only mammals that eat just blood. The common vampire bat, a nocturnal cave-dweller with a 7-inch (18-cm) wingspan, inhabits parts of Mexico, Central America and South America. It feeds on the blood of livestock such as cattle and horses. It lands near prey under cover of darkness, walks on the ground, then feeds on the sleeping animal using razor-sharp teeth to pierce the skin and a lengthy tongue to lap up flowing blood. “We decided to study this species because it has an ‘extreme’ diet, in the sense that it requires many adaptations in the organism to live on that,” said study lead author Lisandra Zepeda, a University of Copenhagen doctoral student while doing the research published in …

Frustration is mounting in the medical community as the Trump administration again points to mental illness in response to yet another mass shooting. “The concept that mental illness is a precursor to violent behavior is nonsense,” said Dr. Louis Kraus, forensic psychiatry chief at Chicago’s Rush University Medical College. “The vast majority of gun violence is not attributable to mental illness.” Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old charged with killing 17 people on Valentine’s Day at his former high school in Parkland, Florida has been described by students as a loner with troubling behavior who had been kicked out of school. His mother recently died and Cruz had been staying with family friends. Since the shooting, his mental health has been the focus of President Donald Trump’s comments. And on a Thursday call with reporters, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the administration is committed to addressing serious mental illness and that his agency “will be laser-focused on this issue in the days, weeks, and months to come.” Mental health professionals welcome more resources and attention, but they say the administration is ignoring the real problem – easy access to guns, particularly the kind of high-powered highly lethal assault weapons used in many of the most recent mass shootings. “Even for those who manage to survive gun violence involving these weapons, the severity and lasting impact of their wounds, disabilities and treatment leads to devastating consequences,” American Medical Association President David Barbe wrote in an online column after the shooting. …

Uranium glass occupies a little-known niche in the collectables world, whose members appreciate its soft color and distinctive glow, which comes from the uranium added as the glass was created. The pieces shown here come from the collection of Peter Marti and Markus Berner, who trade in antique glass at a small shop downstairs from their flat in Wangen an der Aare, a town in Switzerland. They discovered the glass about 15 years ago at a Swiss flea market and have been collecting ever since. Like many uranium glass collectors, they are especially drawn to pearline, which was created by several companies, mostly in Britain, from the end of the 19th century into the 20th. Yellow pearline is called vaseline, because the shade is similar to the color of petroleum jelly – until it’s exposed to ultraviolet light, when it glows a bright green. The glass is slightly radioactive, enough to register on Geiger counters. But the levels are about the same as electrical appliances like microwave ovens emit, so they represent no threat to health. …

Cholera cases in Malawi have tripled and four more people have died, the Ministry of Health said on Monday, a month after the spread of the disease from Zambia was thought to have been contained. Ministry of Health spokesman Joshua Malango said the number of cases had increased to 527 from 157 recorded in January, and that deaths had doubled from four to eight. He said new cases continued to emerge in Central and Northern Malawi districts, including the administrative capital, Lilongwe where 10 new cases were recorded at the weekend. “It’s mainly due to drinking of water from contaminated, shallow sources. We’ve intensified chlorine spraying in the localised infection centres,” he said. …

Some new, tiny pacemakers are making headway around the world. One type is keeping 15,000 people’s hearts beating in 40 countries, according to the manufacturer. Studies show these small pacemakers are safe. And, as VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, doctors expect the technology will help more heart patients over time. …