Month: April 2018

The U.N. agency that fights AIDS says that it’s reopening a sexual harassment investigation against a top official, saying additional allegations have emerged against him. UNAIDS says it was reopening the investigation into a case against deputy executive director Luiz Loures that centers on a complaint from a lower-level employee during a stay at a Bangkok hotel in May 2015. Loures has denied the allegations.   A UNAIDS statement Monday said that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus requested that the U.N.’s internal oversight office conduct the new investigation. The WHO office of internal oversight services in September threw out the case, citing “insufficient evidence.” Critics say the review process was flawed.   UNAIDS didn’t immediately give specifics about the new allegations against Loures.   …

It’s another busy day for Tony Price, who has a list of around two dozen restaurants and other seafood businesses to visit, to pick up discarded oyster shells.  Fast and energetic, he moves barrels of smelly shells from restaurants’ back storage areas to his truck. “We do seven pickups a week, plus events on weekends. I’d say we’re getting somewhere between 500 and even 800 bushels a week,” he says. That’s the beginning of a recycling process, a journey for the oyster shell to return to the water.  Price is the operation manager with Shell Recycling Alliance, a program run by the Oyster Recovery Partnership. Last year, the program collected 33,400 bushels of oyster shells from restaurants all around the Chesapeake Bay area. Every half shell collected becomes a new home for around 10 baby oysters.  On the menu Oysters have been a popular item on the menu of Mike’s Crab House since 1958. The famous seafood restaurant, in Riva, Maryland, is one of more than 330 restaurants in Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C. that now recycle their oyster shells. Tony Piera says he and Mike’s other owners joined the program four years ago. “It’s a win-win for us. It’s a win-win for the environment,” he explains. “Before we did it, the trash would come and get them. Now, the Oyster Recovery comes two days a week, picks them up.” Mike’s Crab House is one of the top ten contributors to the program this year, with more 822 bushels of …

The future of parenting may see a big change as scientists and ethicists have a startling prediction about how children will be conceived in the future. Thanks to biomedical advances, parents may be able to choose a child from hundreds of embryos based on their DNA profile. Faith Lapidus reports. …

Facing a rising death toll from drug overdoses, state lawmakers across the United States are testing a strategy to boost treatment for opioid addicts: Force drug manufacturers and their distributors to pay for it. Bills introduced in at least 15 states would impose taxes or fees on prescription painkillers. Several of the measures have bipartisan support and would funnel millions of dollars toward treatment and prevention programs. In Montana, state Senator Roger Webb, a Republican, sees the approach as a way to hold drugmakers accountable for an overdose epidemic that in 2016 claimed 42,000 lives in the U.S., a record. “You’re creating the problem,” he said of drugmakers. “You’re going to fix it.” Opioids include prescription painkillers such as Vicodin and OxyContin as well as illegal drugs such as heroin and illicit versions of fentanyl. Public health experts say the crisis started because of overprescribing and aggressive marketing of the drugs that began in the 1990s. The death toll has continued to rise even as prescribing has started to drop. Pennsylvania bill A Pennsylvania opioid tax bill was introduced in 2015 and a federal version was introduced a year later, but most of the proposals arose during the past year. The majority of them have yet to get very far, with lawmakers facing intense pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to scuttle or soften the legislation. Drugmakers and distributors argue that it would be wrong to tax prescription drugs, that the cost increases would eventually be absorbed by patients or taxpayers, …

The 4-year-old Cote d’Ivoire boy couldn’t walk, speak or feed himself. He was so unlike most other kids that his grandparents hesitated to accept him. The slightly older Kenyan boy was so restless that his primary-school teachers beat him, until they discovered he was a star pupil. The two children reveal different faces of autism — and how society sometimes reacts to the condition. Videos of the boys appear in “Autism: Breaking the Silence,” a special edition of VOA’s weekly Straight Talk Africa TV program. It was recorded Wednesday before a small studio audience of people who live with the condition or deal with it professionally. About 45 minutes into the program, Benie Blandine Yao of Cote d’Ivoire holds her 4-year-old son, who has autism. The program’s goal: to help demystify and deepen understanding of autism spectrum disorder. It affects the brain’s normal development, often compromising an individual’s ability to communicate, interact socially or control behavior. The condition can range from mild to severe. New CDC findings New findings released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate an increase in autism’s prevalence in the United States. The agency estimates it affects 1 in 59 children, up from 1 in 68 several years ago and 1 in 150 almost two decades ago. The research is based on studies of more than 300,000 8-year-olds in 11 U.S. states. Globally, one out of every 160 children has an autism spectrum disorder, the World Health Organization reports. Rates of autism are harder …

Thousands of years of sediment carried by the Mississippi River created 25,000 square kilometers of land, marsh and wetlands along Louisiana’s coast. But engineering projects stopped the flow of sediment and rising seas thanks to climate change have made the Mississippi Delta the fastest-disappearing land on earth. Louisiana State University researchers created the river system in miniature to try to stop the erosion and rebuild the delta. Faith Lapidus narrates this report from Deborah Block. …

A new approach for detecting food poisoning is being used to investigate the recent outbreak of E.coli bacteria in romaine lettuce grown in the U.S. state of Arizona. The tainted produce has sickened at least 84 people in 19 states. The new method, used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, relies on genetic sequencing. And as Faiza Elmasry tells us, it has the potential to revolutionize the detection of food poisoning outbreaks. VOA’s Faith Lapidus narrates. …

U.S. officials will not restore federal protections for Yellowstone-area grizzly bears, despite a court ruling that called into question the government’s rationale for turning grizzly management over to states that are now planning public hunts for the animals, according to an announcement Friday in in the Federal Register. The disclosure from the Interior Department follows a months-long review of a decision last year to lift protections in place since 1975 for about 700 bears in and around Yellowstone National Park. That review was launched when a federal appeals court said in a case involving gray wolves in the Great Lakes that the Interior Department needed to give more consideration to how a species’ loss of historical habitat affects its recovery. Like wolves, grizzly bears in some parts of the U.S. have bounced back from widespread extermination, yet remain absent from most of their historical range. Public hunts proposed Interior officials said in Friday’s filing that they disagreed with the ruling in the wolf case.  They said Yellowstone’s grizzly bear population has recovered and noted that other populations of the animals living outside the three-state Yellowstone region remain protected as a threatened species. Wyoming and Idaho have proposed limited public hunts for grizzlies this fall. Hunters would be allowed to kill as many as ten male bears and two females in Wyoming and one male and no females in Idaho. Final decisions on the hunts are pending. Montana officials decided against a hunt this year. Tribes challenge move Legal hunting of …

Archaeologists in northern Peru say they have found evidence of what could be the world’s largest single case of child sacrifice. The pre-Columbian burial site, known as Las Llamas, contains the skeletons of 140 children who were between the ages of five and 14 when they were ritually sacrificed during a ceremony about 550 years ago, experts who led the excavation told The Associated Press on Friday.  The site, located near the modern day city of Trujillo, also contained the remains of 200 young llamas apparently sacrificed on the same day. The burial site was apparently built by the ancient Chimu empire. It is thought the children were sacrificed as floods caused by the El Nino weather pattern ravaged the Peruvian coastline. “They were possibly offering the gods the most important thing they had as a society, and the most important thing is children because they represent the future,” said Gabriel Prieto, an archaeology professor at Peru’s National University of Trujillo, who has led the excavation, along with John Verano of Tulane University. “Llamas were also very important because these people had no other beasts of burden, they were a fundamental part of the economy,” Prieto said, adding that the children were buried facing the sea, while the Llamas faced the Andes Mountains to the east. Excavation work at the burial site started in 2011, but news of the findings was first published on Thursday by National Geographic, which helped finance the investigation. Prieto said researchers did not find just …

European Union countries backed a proposal Friday to extend a partial ban on the use of insecticides known as neonicotinoids that studies have shown are harmful to bees. The full outdoor ban will be on the use of three active substances: imidacloprid, developed by Bayer CropScience; clothianidin, developed by Takeda Chemical Industries and Bayer CropScience; as well as Syngenta’s thiamethoxam. “All outdoor uses will be banned and the neonicotinoids in question will only be allowed in permanent greenhouses where exposure of bees is not expected,” the European Commission said in a statement.\ …

A prehistoric sloth hunt is frozen in time in footprints preserved in the New Mexico desert, according to new research. It’s an extremely rare find that authors say could revolutionize our understanding of how ancient humans interacted with large animals. It also may shed light on whether our ancestors drove the giant ground sloth to extinction. Footprints in footprints In the gypsum sediments of New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument, scientists found more than 100 prints dating back approximately 10,000 to 15,000 years. The footprints seem to show humans stalking giant ground sloths, animals that could reach the size of an elephant. The creatures went extinct around the end of the last Ice Age, at roughly the same time as humans arrived on the scene. In some of the prints, the humans walked in the sloth tracks, even though the stride of a giant sloth was longer than that of a human. One human appears to draw near a sloth on tip-toe. Where the human tracks approach the sloth tracks, the animal suddenly changes direction. The researchers found what they call “flailing circles,” rounded heel prints and knuckle and claw prints where it looks like the animal reared up on its hind legs to defend itself with its front limbs. Risky hunting Hunting an animal the size of a giant sloth, with long arms and sharp claws, “would have come with huge amounts of risk,” said Bournemouth University geology professor Matthew Bennett, senior author of the research, published in the …

International scientists have identified 44 genetic variants that can increase the risk of developing major depression and found that all humans carry at least some of them. The new findings could help explain why not everyone treated with antidepressants sees their condition improve, the scientists said, and point the way towards new medicines. In the largest study of its kind, scientists also found that the genetic basis for depression is shared with other psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and that a number of the variants are linked to the targets of antidepressant drugs. Major depression affects around 14 percent of people worldwide and is the biggest contributor to long-term disability in the general population. Yet only about half of patients respond well to existing treatments. “The new genetic variants discovered have the potential to revitalize depression treatment by opening up avenues for the discovery of new and improved therapies,” said Gerome Breen of King’s College London, who worked on the research team. The study was a global effort, with data covering more than 135,000 patients with major depression and around 344,000 controls as comparisons. “This study has shed a bright light on the genetic basis of depression, but it is only the first step,” said Cathryn Lewis, another King’s College London expert who worked on the study. “We need further research to uncover more of the genetic underpinnings, and to understand how genetics and environmental stressors work together to increase risk of depression.”   …

Scientists in Kenya believe they have discovered a new way to combat malaria. As Faith Lapidus reports, a common medication, already used to treat a host of illnesses, makes people’s blood poisonous to the anopheles mosquito, which spreads the deadly disease. …