Month: October 2018

Pancreatic cancer treatment could become more advanced with help from 13-year-old Rishab Jain. He’s created a tool for doctors to locate the hard-to-find pancreas more quickly and precisely during cancer treatment. The teen recently won a prestigious young scientist award for his potentially game-changing idea. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. …

The Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo has led to 164 deaths, health authorities said.  In mid-October, Congolese authorities said they were facing a “second wave” of the outbreak centered on Beni, a town in North Kivu near the border with Uganda.  The epicenter had earlier been focused on Mangina, a town about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Beni.  In total, 257 cases had been recorded in the region, of which 222 were confirmed and 35 were probable, since the start of the outbreak at the beginning of August, the Congolese Health Ministry said in a bulletin dated Friday.  On Oct. 17, the World Health Organization said the death toll was 139, although it said the outbreak did not yet merit being labeled a global health emergency.  The second wave of the deadly virus has been attributed to community resistance to measures already taken to tackle the disease.  On Thursday, about 1,000 students marched through the streets of Beni to launch a campaign to fight Ebola.  Since a vaccination program began on Aug. 8, over 22,000 people have been inoculated, of whom about 11,000 were in Beni, the health ministry said.  An Ebola treatment center in the city now has more than 60 beds, it added.  The latest outbreak is the 10th in DRC since Ebola was first detected there in 1976.  …

When she was a young girl, Edna Adan Ismail’s mother and grandmother circumcised her in a traditional ceremony while her father, a doctor, was away. That evening, he returned home, enraged at what had happened. “What have you done?” he asked Ismail’s mother and grandmother. Cutting the young girl, he said, was “haraam” — a sin. She was only seven or eight, but Ismail knew what had happened was wrong. The event, and her father’s reaction, would have a lasting impact. Medical trailblazer Years later, Ismail followed in her father’s footsteps, pursuing a career in medicine. She studied abroad and became a pioneer in health care in Somaliland, an autonomous region of Somalia.   In 1965, the World Health Organization made Ismail the first Somali appointed to a senior civil servant position. She spent decades with the organization working in Somalia, Somaliland and Djibouti, and caring for patients from across the Horn of Africa, many of whom were refugees.   In 1976, Ismail attended a health conference in Sudan that changed her next steps. Ismail, then a director in Somaliland’s Ministry of Health, had traveled with a team of doctors to learn about developments in the field.   At the conference, Ismail heard, for the first time, people in a Muslim country openly discuss the harm caused by female circumcision, also called female genital mutilation, or FGM. For Ismail, the discussions were a revelation. Back home, talking about FGM, let alone its harms, was taboo.   But Ismail knew there …

A group of Chilean youths with Down syndrome are gaining important life skills as they learn to plant, grow and sell their own fresh vegetables, and create delicious marmalades and preserves, which they sell for profit. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. …

It may surprise you that cement is responsible for 7 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. That’s because it takes a lot of heat to produce the basic powdery base of cement that eventually becomes concrete. But it turns out that simple fibers from carrots could not only reduce that carbon footprint but also make concrete stronger. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

Less than two weeks before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a plan to lower prices for some prescription drugs, saying it would stop unfair practices that force Americans to pay much more than people in other countries for the same medications.  “We are taking aim at the global freeloading that forces American consumers to subsidize lower prices in foreign countries through higher prices in our country,” Trump said in a speech at the Department of Health and Human Services.  “Same company. Same box. Same pill. Made in the exact same location, and you would go to some countries and it would be 20 percent of the cost of what we pay,” said Trump, who predicted the plan would save Americans billions. “We’re fixing it.”  But consumers take note:  — The plan would not apply to medicines people buy at the pharmacy, just ones administered in a doctor’s office, as are many cancer medications and drugs for immune system problems. Physician-administered drugs can be very expensive, but pharmacy drugs account for the vast majority of what consumers buy.  — Don’t expect immediate rollbacks. Officials said the complex proposal could take more than a year to be put into effect.  In another twist, the plan is structured as an experiment through a Medicare innovation center empowered to seek savings by the Affordable Care Act. That’s the law also known as “Obamacare,” which Trump is committed to repealing.  Trump has long promised sweeping action to attack drug prices, both as president and when he was …

It started out modestly enough: David Hertz, having learned that under the right conditions you really can make your own water out of thin air, put a little contraption on the roof of his California office and began cranking out free bottles of H2O for anyone who wanted one. Soon he and his wife, Laura Doss-Hertz, were thinking bigger — so much so that this week the couple won the $1.5 million XPrize For Water Abundance. They prevailed by developing a system that uses shipping containers, wood chips and other detritus to produce as much as 528 gallons (2,000 liters) of water a day at a cost of no more than 2 cents a quart (1 liter). The XPrize competition, created by a group of philanthropists, entrepreneurs and others, has awarded more than $140 million over the years for what it calls audacious, futuristic ideas aimed at protecting and improving the planet. The first XPrize, for $10 million, went to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aviation pioneer Burt Rutan in 2004 for SpaceShipOne, the first privately financed manned space flight. When Hertz learned a couple of years ago that a prize was about to be offered to whoever could come up with a cheap, innovative way to produce clean freshwater for a world that doesn’t have enough of it, he decided to go all in. At the time, his little water-making machine was cranking out 150 gallons a day, much of which was being given to homeless people living in …

Doctors at Nairobi’s Kenyatta National Hospital have told Robert Wanyonyi there’s nothing more they can do for him. Yet more than a year after he first arrived, shot and paralyzed in a robbery, the ex-shopkeeper remains trapped in the hospital. Because Wanyonyi cannot pay his bill of nearly 4 million Kenyan shillings ($39,570), administrators are refusing to let him leave his fourth-floor bed. At Kenyatta National Hospital and at an astonishing number of hospitals around the world, if you don’t pay up, you don’t go home. The hospitals often illegally detain patients long after they should be medically discharged, using armed guards, locked doors and even chains to hold those who have not settled their accounts. Even death does not guarantee release: Kenyan hospitals and morgues are holding hundreds of bodies until families can pay their loved ones’ bills, government officials say. An Associated Press investigation has found evidence of hospital imprisonments in more than 30 countries worldwide, according to hospital records, patient lists and interviews with dozens of doctors, nurses, health academics, patients and administrators. The detentions were found in countries including the Philippines, India, China, Thailand, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Bolivia and Iran. Of more than 20 hospitals visited by the AP in Congo, only one did not detain patients. Millions possibly affected “What’s striking about this issue is that the more we look for this, the more we find it,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “It’s probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions …

The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to ban single-use plastic products such as straws, eating utensils and coffee sticks across the European Union. The measure passed 571 to 53, with 34 abstentions. If approved by the European Commission — the EU executive — and individual states, the ban would become law in 2021. Supporters say plastics are a major source of pollution that chokes oceans, litters cities, and can take decades to disintegrate. Some U.S. cities have moved to ban plastic straws in restaurants after a heartbreaking video of a wildlife rescuer pulling a straw out of a turtle’s bloody nose was posted on the internet earlier this year. A consortium of European plastics manufacturers called the EU bill “disproportionate” and said banning single-use plastics discourages investment into new ways to recycle. The EU plastics bill also includes deadlines for reducing or recycling other plastics such as bottles, fishing lines, food wrappers, and cigarette filters.   …

Four cost-effective methods are ready today to remove substantial amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, according to a new report from a panel of top scientists. All four take advantage of nature’s ability to take carbon from the air and store it. However, fully implementing all of them still would not be enough to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of global warming, according to the report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  Nearly all nations have signed on to the Paris climate agreement, which pledges to keep global warming to less than a global average of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and ideally below 1.5 degrees. Emissions from burning fossil fuels and other sources have already warmed the planet about 1 degree. At the current pace, temperatures will likely top 1.5 degrees by mid-century, according to the latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Zero emissions technologies such as wind farms and solar panels will not be enough to stop global warming, the U.N. report says. Negative emissions technologies will be needed as well.  Trees are tops The National Academies panel looked at existing strategies for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and found four that are ready for widespread use.  The first is among the most tried-and-true: planting trees. “It’s even kind of a misnomer to call it a technology,” said Princeton University biologist Stephen Pacala, who chaired the panel. Adding and restoring forests, plus better management of existing forests, are …

Violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is hampering efforts to contain an Ebola outbreak that has already killed more than 150 people, according to the World Health Organization. “It’s a very serious situation. This is something that we have been fearing from the beginning; that the security situation will influence the response to the level that we cannot really function fully,” says a WHO spokesman, Tarik Jasarevic. The outbreak in Congo’s North Kivu province is in a conflict zone where dozens of armed groups operate.  Aid agencies have been forced to suspend or slow down their work on several occasions since the outbreak began in July. Health workers killed It happened again over the weekend, when two health agents with Congo’s military were killed by rebels.  The next day, residents in the city of Beni pelted aid groups’ vehicles with stones during a protest against a separate rebel attack that killed at least 13 people.  Jasarevic tells VOA’s English-to-Africa service that the incidents have forced Ebola containment teams to severely curtail their operations. The result?   “Contacts will not be followed; this is something that has to be done on a daily basis. People who may develop the disease will not go immediately to treatment centers and will present danger to their environment,” he says. Containment delayed That means health workers will have to essentially start over to locate contacts of Ebola victims and ensure they are vaccinated.  “In case we are not able to access communities, if …

An Ebola outbreak that ravaged Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia in 2014 cost economies an estimated $53 billion, according to a study in this month’s Journal of Infectious Diseases. The study aimed to combine the direct economic burden and the indirect social impact to generate a comprehensive cost of the outbreak, which was the worst in the world. The outbreak ran from 2013 to 2016 and killed at least 11,300 people, more than all other known Ebola outbreaks combined. The vast majority of cases were in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The report’s authors, Caroline Huber, Lyn Finelli and Warren Stevens, put the economic costs at $14 billion and said the human cost was even greater, based on the people affected and a dollar figure that reflects the value of each human life. The total is far higher than previous estimates. In October 2014, the World Bank said the Ebola epidemic could cost $32.6 billion by the end of 2015 in a worst case scenario, but by November 2014 it dialled back that forecast to $3-4 billion. In 2016 the World Bank estimate of economic loss was $2.8 billion. The 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) cost an estimated $40 billion, while the 2015-2016 Zika virus outbreak in the Americas was estimated to have caused $20 billion in social costs, the new study said. But a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic could cost an annual 700,000 lives and $490 billion, the authors said, citing research published in 2016. The …

Authorities in a North Sumatra village have banned three HIV+ orphans from elementary school, and threatened the children, who are from outside the area, with expulsion from Nainggolan due to community fears of transmission. The children, a boy and two girls, aged 7 to 11 years, were infected by transmission from their mothers, Berlina Sibagariang, executive secretary of the Batak Protestant Christian Huria AIDS Committee (HKBP), told VOA Indonesia. The orphaned children attended preschool and the Nainggolan State Primary School in North Sumatra for one day before they were expelled, in response to outcry from students and parents who learned of their HIV status, according to Sibagariang. “We want those three children to enjoy their rights to go to school and get an education,” Sibagariang said, adding “the community hopes that the children will no longer attend local schools. They are afraid that their children will be infected with HIV.” The children were removed from classes on October 22, and Sibagariang said the local community set an October 25 deadline for the children to leave the village. While an estimated five million people are infected with HIV in Asia, the rate of new infections has slowed in the last decade. But not in Indonesia, which now has an estimated 660,000 people living with HIV, according to the UNAIDS. According to the U.N. agency, Indonesia had 48,000 new HIV infections and 38,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2016, an increase in AIDS-related deaths of 68 percent from 2010. As of 2016, an estimated …