Month: April 2018

Britain plans to ban the sale of plastic straws and other single-use products and is pressing Commonwealth allies to also take action to tackle marine waste, the office of Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May said. It said drink stirrers and cotton buds would also be banned under the plans. May has pledged to eradicate avoidable plastic waste by 2042 as part of a “national plan of action.” “Plastic waste is one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the world, which is why protecting the marine environment is central to our agenda at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting,” May said in a statement ahead of a Commonwealth summit Thursday. Leaders from the Commonwealth — a network of 53 countries, mostly former British colonies — are meeting in London this week. May is looking to deepen ties to the Commonwealth as Britain seeks to boost trade and carve out a new role in the world ahead of the country’s departure from the European Union in March next year. Britain will commit 61.4 million pounds ($87.21 million) at the summit to develop new ways of tackling plastic waste and help Commonwealth countries limit how much plastic ends up in the ocean. “We are rallying Commonwealth countries to join us in the fight against marine plastic,” May said. “Together we can effect real change so that future generations can enjoy a natural environment that is healthier than we currently find it.” The statement said environment minister Michael Gove would launch a consultation later …

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has invested billions of dollars into tackling malaria. It has paid off. Deaths from the disease fell by more than 60 percent between 2000 and 2015, meaning 7 million lives were saved. In 2016, however, that trend was reversed. There were more than 216 million reported cases in 91 countries — an increase of 5 million from the previous year. On the sidelines of this week’s London Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Gates told delegates, including several African leaders, the fight against malaria must be stepped up. “If we do not keep innovating, we will go backwards,” he said. “If we do not maintain the commitments that we are making here today, malaria would go back up and kill over a million children a year, because the drugs and the insecticides are evaded by the mosquito and the parasite.”   WATCH: Fears Grow as Malaria Resurges; London Summit Urges Global Action Malaria is estimated to cost the African economy more than $12 billion per year and consumes up to 40 percent of national health care budgets on the continent. Children and pregnant women are most severely affected. Several factors The increase in cases is caused by a number of factors, professor Alister Craig of the University of Liverpool’s School of Tropical Medicine said via Skype. “We are seeing quite dramatic increases in the resistance to the insecticides that we use to control the insect vector populations, and that has been really the mainstay of the gains, and …

Malawi, which has one of the highest rates of the deadly HIV/AIDS infections, is on course to eradicate the virus, Jay Levy who co-discovered the AIDS virus 35 years ago said. Most of the AIDS cases globally are in poorer countries, where access to testing, prevention and treatment is limited. More than one million people in Malawi have the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, the U.N. AIDS agency (UNAIDS) says. However, according to official figures, Malawi’s national HIV/AIDS prevalence dropped to 8.8 percent in 2016 from 30 percent in 1985 when the first HIV/Aids case was registered in Malawi. Levy cited the Malawian government’s efforts in increasing access to treatment, mother to child transmission interventions, and awareness on prevention and treatment as some of the steps that are helping to fight the disease. “Malawi is not a rich country, but has done a remarkable job of reducing HIV infections and deaths from AIDS,” Levy, a University of California researcher and renowned virologist and infectious disease expert told Reuters on a visit to Malawi. “Malawi could be one of the countries in Africa on target to eradicating infection,” he added. Levy delivered a lecture at College of Medicine in Blantyre, the nerve center for HIV/AIDS research in Malawi, and is touring HIV testing centers in the countryside. Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries, and the country’s economy depends on substantial inflows of economic assistance from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and individual donor nations. In 2016, …

Since 2000, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave approval to the world’s first robotic surgical system, almost 4,000 of these sophisticated machines have been deployed in operating suites around the world. Recognizing that the proficiency of the surgeons who use them can be subjective, a group of surgeons at the University of Southern California, in cooperation with the manufacturer Intuitive Research, is developing a system for more objective evaluation. VOA’s George Putic reports. …

Renewed action and boosted funding to fight malaria could prevent 350 million cases of the disease in the next five years and save 650,000 lives across commonwealth countries, health experts said Wednesday. Seeking to reignite efforts to wipe out the deadly mosquito-borne disease, philanthropists, business leaders and ministers from donor and malaria-affected countries pledged 2.7 billion pounds ($3.8 billion) to drive research and innovation and improve access to malaria prevention and treatments. Spearheaded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, the leaders warned against complacency in fighting malaria — a disease that kills around half a million people, mainly babies and young children, each year. While enormous progress has been made over the past 20 years in reducing malaria cases and deaths, in 2016, for the first time in a decade, the number of malaria cases was on the rise and in some areas there was a resurgence, according to the World Health Organization. The disease’s stubbornness is partly due to the fact that the mosquito that transmits the disease and the parasite that causes it have developed resistance to the sprays and drugs used to fight them, health experts say. It is also partly due to stagnant global funding for fighting malaria since 2010. Climate change and conflict can also exacerbate malaria outbreaks. “History has shown that with malaria there is no standing still — we move forward or risk resurgence,” Gates said in a statement ahead of a “Malaria Summit” in London on Wednesday. ​$1 billion extra pledged His …

The U.S. government on Tuesday proposed tightening rules governing the amount of prescription opioid painkillers that drugmakers can manufacture in a given year, in hopes of reining in the deadly opioid epidemic. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Drug Enforcement Administration’s proposed changes to regulations covering addictive-drug manufacturing quotas. The plan could sharply reduce the annual production of painkillers. “Under this proposed new rule, if DEA believes that a company’s opioids are being diverted for misuse, then they will reduce the amount of opioids that company can make,” Sessions said in prepared remarks. The plan could affect opioid makers such as Purdue Pharma LP, Johnson & Johnson, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Mallinckrodt, as well as companies that distribute the drugs. Hours before the announcement, federal, state and local law enforcement officials in West Virginia announced a crackdown on an opioid trafficking ring in Huntington, known as “ground zero” for the epidemic. West Virginia sued the DEA in December over drug quota rules, arguing the agency’s policy wrongfully sets manufacturing quotas based on amounts of pills drugmakers expect to sell, not legitimate medical needs. That approach, the state argued, has contributed to the growing addiction problem and the illegal diversion of pain medication. “We must end senseless death in West Virginia,” said the state’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey. West Virginia is among the states that have suffered most from the crisis. ​National emergency declared The Trump administration has made combating the opioid epidemic a top priority. Last year, Trump declared it a national …

Wildlife managers in the American Southwest say a once-rare bat important to the pollination of plants used to produce tequila has made a comeback and is being removed from the U.S. endangered species list. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s announcement Tuesday made the lesser long-nosed bat, which ranges from Mexico to southern Arizona and New Mexico, the first bat ever removed from the nation’s list of threatened and endangered species. The decision comes a year after first being proposed and three years after Mexico delisted the animal, which depends on the nectar of agaves, cactuses and other flowering plants. It has taken 30 years of conservation efforts by biologists and volunteers in both countries as well as tequila producers and agave growers in Mexico to rebuild a healthy population. There were once thought to be fewer than 1,000 lesser long-nosed bats in 14 known roosts throughout the region. Now, there are about 200,000 of the nectar-feeding animals and dozens of roost sites. With the population trending upward, regional officials with the Fish and Wildlife Service say the science shows threats to the bat have been eliminated or reduced to the point where they can consider the species recovered. In Mexico, tequila producers who rely on agaves are integrating more harvest and cultivation practices in recognition of the bats being key pollinators. Some are marketing “bat-friendly tequila.” In southern Arizona, residents for a decade have monitored bats’ nighttime use of hummingbird feeders. It provided biologists with a clearer understanding of …

In a medical first, a French surgeon says he has performed a second face transplant on the same patient — who is now doing well and even spent a recent weekend in Brittany. Dr. Laurent Lantieri of the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris first transplanted a new face onto Jerome Hamon in 2010, when Hamon was in his mid-30s. But after getting ill in 2015, Hamon was given drugs that interfered with the anti-rejection medicines he was taking for his face transplant. Last November, the tissue in his transplanted face began to die, leading Lantieri to remove it. That left Hamon without a face, a condition that Lantieri described as “the walking dead.” Hamon had no eyelids, no ears, no skin and could not speak or eat. He had limited hearing and could express himself only by turning his head slightly, in addition to writing a little. “If you have no skin, you have infections,” Lantieri told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “We were very concerned about the possibility of a new rejection.” In January, when a second face donor for Hamon became available, Lantieri and his team performed a second face transplant. But before undergoing the second transplant, doctors had to replace all of the blood in Hamon’s body in a monthlong procedure to eliminate some potentially worrisome antibodies from previous treatments. “For a man who went through all this, which is like going through a nuclear war, he’s doing fine,” Lantieri said. He added that Hamon is now …

Fragments of a meteorite that fell to Earth about a decade ago provide compelling evidence of a lost planet that once roamed our solar system, according to a study published Tuesday. Researchers from Switzerland, France and Germany examined diamonds found inside the Almahata Sitta meteorite and concluded they were most likely formed by a proto-planet at least 4.55 billion years ago. The diamonds in the meteorite, which crashed in Sudan’s Nubian Desert in October 2008, have tiny crystals inside them that would have required great pressure to form, said one of the study’s co-authors, Philippe Gillet. “We demonstrate that these large diamonds cannot be the result of a shock but rather of growth that has taken place within a planet,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Switzerland. Gillet, a planetary scientist at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, said researchers calculated a pressure of 200,000 bar (2.9 million psi) would be needed to form such diamonds, suggesting the mystery planet was as least as big as Mercury, possibly even Mars. Scientists have long theorized that the early solar system once contained many more planets — some of which were likely little more than a mass of molten magma. One of these embryo planets — dubbed Theia — is believed to have slammed into a young Earth, ejecting a large amount of debris that later formed the moon. “What we’re claiming here,” said Gillet, “is that we have in our hands a remnant of this first …

More than 100 parts for U.S. space agency NASA’s deep-space capsule Orion will be made by 3-D printers, using technology that experts say will eventually become key to efforts to send humans to Mars. U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin, 3-D printing specialist Stratasys, and engineering firm PADT have developed the parts using new materials that can withstand the extreme temperatures and chemical exposure of deep-space missions, Stratasys said Tuesday. “In space, for instance, materials will build up a charge. If that was to shock the electronics on a space craft, there could be significant damage,” Scott Sevcik, Vice President Manufacturing Solutions at Stratasys told Reuters. 3-D printing, or additive manufacturing, has been used for making prototypes across a range of industries for many years, but is being increasingly eyed for scale production. The technology can help make light-weight parts made of plastics more quickly and cheaply than traditional assembly lines that require major investments into equipment. “But even more significant is that we have more freedom with the design … parts can look more organic, more skeletal,” Sevcik said. Stratasys’ partner Lockheed Martin said the use of 3-D printing on the Orion project would also pay off at other parts of its business. “We look to apply benefits across our programs — missile defense, satellites, planetary probes, especially as we create more and more common products,” said Brian Kaplun, additive manufacturing manager at Lockheed Martin Space. Orion is part of NASA’s follow-up program to the now-retired space shuttles that will …