Year: 2018

Scientists across the world have set an ambitious goal for themselves: to sequence the genome of every known life form on Earth within the next decade. The Earth BioGenome Project, launched this week in London, is attempting to map the entire DNA of every known animal, plant, fungus and protozoan on the planet, roughly 1.5 million species. Scientists say the project rivals in importance the Human Genome Project, which took 13 years to map the human genetic code. That project was completed in 2003. Contributions from around world The new project will rely on scientists contributing data from around the world, with the largest pledge so far coming from Britain’s Wellcome Sanger Institute, which says it will map 66,000 species. The institute was also a large contributor to the Human Genome Project. The cost of the massive project is estimated to be $4.7 billion, which will come from charities and governments around the world. Scientists say the result of the grand-scale project would be a huge resource for researchers that could offer insights into a range of topics, including a better understanding of evolution, the development of diseases, and insight into the aging process. Researchers also hope the information could help in efforts to conserve threatened species by better understanding how life forms can adapt to changes. Why not sequence everything? Project member and evolutionary geneticist Jenny Graves of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia told Nature, “Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge.” “The more variation you have …

U.S. regulators have approved a powerful new opioid tablet to be used in hospitals over objections from critics who fear the pill will be abused. The new drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday is five to 10 times more potent than pharmaceutical fentanyl and will be used as an alternative to intravenous (IV) painkillers in medical settings. Approval for the drug, which will be manufactured by a California company called AcelRx and marketed under the name Dsuvia, was supported by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon wants to have a pill that it can give soldiers on the battlefield to relieve pain when using an IV is not possible. Critics say the pill could be diverted to illicit use and could worsen the country’s opioid crisis. One of the pill’s critics is the head of an FDA committee tasked with advising regulators about whether drugs should be approved. This month, in a rare dissent with his committee, Raeford Brown urged the FDA to reject the drug and predicted the medicine would be abused inside and outside medical settings. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement Friday that there would be “very tight restrictions” placed on the drug’s distribution and that the medicine was intended only for supervised settings like hospitals. The drug will not be available in retail pharmacies. Gottlieb also said he would seek more authority for the FDA to consider whether there are too many similar drugs on the market, a move …

Participants at the first ever WHO Global Conference on Air Pollution have adopted a plan for reducing air pollution, which every year prematurely kills an estimated seven million people.   The World Health Organization (WHO) has called the conference a resounding success, noting 900 people attended, twice as many as expected.  Furthermore, it says more than 70-member states, non-governmental organizations, and other participants have made voluntary commitments to take action to reduce air pollution. Director of the WHO’s Department of Public Health and Environment Maria Neira said the WHO is taking a leading role in setting forth action to tackle air pollution for a cleaner, healthier world.   “WHO, as the global health agency, made, as well, very strong commitments, starting by proposing an aspiration target of reducing by two-thirds the mortality caused by air pollution by the year 2030.  And, this is really a big challenge that we will mobilize and, we will call for everyone to contribute to that,” she said.   Neira said prompt action is needed to reach that goal.  For example, she says people need to stop burning solid waste and agricultural waste.  She said they have to move away from fossil fuels.  She said people in Africa and other areas with populations in great need must be helped to meet the goal. “We need to liberate those three billion people that today, they are still relying on fossil fuels at the household level to cook or heat or light their house.  We need to …

Uganda will begin administering the experimental Ebola vaccine to approximately 2,000 health care and front-line workers along its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday, the Ministry of Health said. Uganda has no confirmed cases of Ebola, but as the threat worsens in the DRC, the preventive measure is seen as necessary because of heavy border traffic. More than 20,000 people cross from the DRC into Uganda and back every week, the ministry says.    “The public high risk of cross-border transmission of Ebola to Uganda was assessed to be very high at national level,” said Jane Ruth Aceng, Uganda’s minister for health. “Hence, the need to protect our health workers with this vaccine. Currently in Uganda, we have 2,100 doses of the vaccine available at the National Medical Stores and preparations are in high gear, including training of the health workers that are to be targeted.” Many of those crossing the border are from the DRC’s North Kivu province, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Ugandan border, where armed conflict has made fighting the Ebola outbreak a challenge.  The vaccine, known as rVSV, has been used during recent outbreaks in Congo, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and is currently being dispensed in North Kivu. Uganda’s Health Ministry says the Ebola vaccine will be given with the consent of Uganda’s health workers, since it is being used outside of clinical trials. Despite being experimental, the vaccine is absolutely safe, Aceng says. “The vaccine is a recombinant vaccine genetically developed …

A paralyzed man you’re about to meet didn’t have much hope that one day he’d be able to walk again. But thanks to a new medical device, things are looking up for him. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports. …

Two U.S. government agencies are giving conflicting interpretations of a safety study on cellphone radiation: One says it causes cancer in rats. The other says there’s no reason for people to worry.  No new research was issued Thursday. Instead, the National Toxicology Program dialed up its concerns about a link to heart and brain cancer from a study of male rats that was made public last winter. The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees cellphone safety, disagreed with the upgraded warning. And “these findings should not be applied to human cellphone usage,” said Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, FDA’s chief of radiological health. What’s most important is what happens in humans, not rats, said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.  “The incidence of brain tumors in human beings has been flat for the last 40 years,” Brawley said. “That is the absolute most important scientific fact.”  The original study  In a $30 million study, scientists put rats and mice into special chambers and bombarded them with radiofrequency waves, like those emitted by older 2G and 3G phones, for nine hours a day for up to two years, most of their natural lives.  The levels the rodents experienced were far higher than people are typically exposed to.  The findings Last February, the National Toxicology Program said there was a small increase in an unusual type of heart tumor in male rats, but not in mice or female rats. The agency concluded there was “some evidence” of a link. …

Men with prostate cancer who get surgery or radiation are also more likely start taking antidepressants than their counterparts who don’t get aggressive treatment, a recent study suggests. Many men with early-stage prostate cancer may not need treatment right away, or ever, because these tumors often don’t grow fast enough to cause symptoms or prove fatal. In the absence of symptoms or tests that suggest tumors are growing quickly, doctors may advise men to put off immediate treatments like surgery or radiation and instead get regular screenings to reassess whether the cancer is dangerous enough to warrant intervention. For the current study, researchers examined data on men with early-stage prostate cancer, including 4,952 people who had surgery, 4,994 who got radiation and 2,136 who opted instead for surveillance, or “watchful waiting.” In the year before their cancer diagnosis, 7.7 percent of the men were prescribed antidepressants, and this climbed to 10.5 percent in the first year after diagnosis. Compared to a control group of men in the general population without a prostate cancer diagnosis, men with prostate cancer were 49 percent more likely to be taking antidepressants five years after surgery and 33 percent more likely to take antidepressants five years after radiation treatment, the study found. But watchful waiting wasn’t linked to any increase in the odds of men taking antidepressants. “Prostate cancer patients often fit the demographic profile (white, older age, and male) of someone at risk for depression,” said senior study author Dr. Robert Nam of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. “Once they receive treatment for prostate cancer, whether that is surgery or radiation, they may experience treatment-related side effects, such …

A 10th person died amid a viral outbreak at a pediatric care center while a different strain of the virus was found at another facility in the state, New Jersey health officials said Thursday.  The state Health Department confirmed in a statement that the “medically fragile child” at the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation had the adenovirus infection.  There have been 28 cases associated with the respiratory virus at the center, where the affected children had severely compromised immune systems. One of those who died was a young adult.  “The loss of these young lives is heartbreaking, and our thoughts are with the families who are affected,” Health Commissioner Dr. Shereef Elnahal said in a statement.  The state also said there were four confirmed adenovirus cases among pediatric patients at Voorhees Pediatric Facility, near Philadelphia, but preliminary tests have ruled out it’s the same strain affecting Wanaque.  The department said it’s working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor the illness and announced earlier this week that infection control teams were being sent to New Jersey’s four long-term pediatric centers to help with training.  Officials have said there is not a wider public health concern stemming from the outbreak.  New patients are not being admitted at Wanaque.  The department also said Thursday that the illness was last detected on Tuesday. The previous date had been Monday. But, the department said, that’s not a surprise since the disease has a long incubation period of up to two weeks.  The …

A new report recently published in the journal Nature suggests the Earth’s oceans are absorbing more of the planet’s excess heat than previously thought. Scientists have known for some time that oceans store excess heat energy, and this helps keep the planet in its balmy, just-right temperature for supporting the explosion of life on Earth. Knowing how hot the ocean is getting, and how fast that temperature is rising, helps scientists understand more about human-impacted climate change. It helps them know how much excess energy is being produced, and it helps them predict how much heat the ocean is capable of absorbing and how much warming will be felt on the Earth’s surface. Up until the report was issued this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thought it had a pretty good handle on how much excess energy the oceans were absorbing. Using those numbers, the panel set targets for the amount of carbon reduction necessary to slow, and ultimately reverse, potentially devastating planetary warming. But these new numbers suggest those targets may have to be revised upward by 25 percent. Research by the study’s lead author, Princeton professor Laure Resplandy, indicates our oceans are absorbing about 60 percent more heat energy than previously estimated. According to Resplandy, the world’s oceans have taken up more than 13 zettajoules of energy every year between 1991 and 2016. A joule is the standard unit of energy; a zettajoule is one joule, followed by 21 zeroes. “Imagine if the ocean was only …

An investigation has found that a failed Russian rocket launch three weeks ago that aborted after just two minutes was caused by a sensor that was damaged during assembly, a top Russian official said on Thursday. The Soyuz-FG rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin failed shortly into the October 11 flight, sending their emergency capsule into a sharp fall back to Earth. The two men landed on a steppe in Kazakhstan safely in the accident, the first of its kind for Russia’s manned program in over three decades. The head of the Russian space agency earlier blamed the failure on a malfunction of a sensor, but didn’t explain why it didn’t work. Oleg Skorobogatov, who led the probe into the accident, told reporters on Thursday that the investigation found that the sensor was damaged during the final assembly at the launch pad in Kazakhstan. Russian rockets are manufactured in Russia and then transported by rail to the Russia-leased Baikonur cosmodrome. The last time Russia saw an aborted manned launch was in 1983, when two Soviet cosmonauts jettisoned and landed safely after a launch pad explosion. More recently, Russia’s space program has been dogged by a string of failed satellite launches involving unmanned vehicles. Skorobogatov said officials are now taking steps, including putting all assembly staff through competence tests and additional training, to make sure such incidents will not happen again The rocket producer will also take apart two other rockets which have been recently assembled and …

Most people associate the flu with coldlike symptoms. They don’t realize the flu can lead to life-threatening complications. Last year was a particularly bad flu season in the Northern Hemisphere: Nearly 80,000 people died in the U.S., including 180 children. Already this year, a child in Florida died from the flu. A hospital there did some research and found a significant number of parents are concerned about the safety and effectiveness of the flu vaccine. VOA’s Carol Pearson has details. …