Month: February 2021

Crowds of seals lie on the sand, some wriggling towards the water, on the northern French coast where they are staging a comeback. Drone images show around 250 wild grey seals, adults and cubs, frolicking at low tide near the town of Marck. Seals started to disappear from the Cote d’Opale in the 1970s, under pressure from fishermen who saw them as rivals for their catch. Seals, which have no natural predators in the English Channel, have been a protected species in France since the 1980s and as a result they have begun to return to the coast. Rescued grey seal cubs wait for fish during their quarantine at LPA animal refuge in Calais, France, Feb. 13, 2021.”At low tide, they settle here to get fat, to rest and to prepare for their upcoming hunt at sea,” seal enthusiast Jerome Gressier told Reuters. According to a 2018 report of the Hauts-de-France region’s Eco-Phoques project, at least 1,100 seals now live in the area. In the region’s Baie de Somme, harbor seal numbers grew by 14.4% between 1990 and 2017, while grey seals rose by 20%, the study found. Gressier uses a long-focus lens to identify injured seals. “It allows us to see if there are any animals who are caught in nets,” he said. “It hurts them enormously if they are caught by the neck.” Injured seals are treated at a nearby animal rescue center in Calais. Center manager Christel Gressier says many of the animals they deal with are seals, some abandoned by their mothers. “At around three weeks, the …

After three Ebola cases were confirmed in Guinea, local health authorities declared an outbreak in the rural area of Gouéké in N’Zerekore on January 14.In response to the newly reported cases, Doctors Without Borders (MSF, for its French acronym) announced it is putting together a mission to address the outbreak in Guinea.“We know from past experience that the speed of the response is important, both in order to contain transmission and to provide treatment for people who have caught the disease,” said Frederik van der Schrieck, MSF’s head of mission in Guinea. “We also know that community engagement is vital.”“We will try to get the right balance between responding quickly and taking steps to make sure the community is a willing and active participant in both prevention and response,” Van der Schrieck added. “Alongside treatment for Ebola, contact tracing and other community-based activities will be absolutely vital.”This marks the first time Ebola has been reported in the country since the devastating 2014 outbreak in West Africa.  …

The World Health Organization announced Monday that it has approved two versions of the AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, a move that will boost global supplies in the coming weeks. AstraZeneca-SKBio in South Korea and the Serum Institute of India produce the vaccines, which the WHO says are safe for all persons above 18 years old. It took the global health body less than a month to assess data on the quality, safety and efficacy of the drugs and grant the emergency use approval. The World Health Organization will now distribute doses through its COVAX Facility to mid- and low-income countries. The approval also allows countries to speed up domestic regulatory approval to import and administer the vaccines. “Countries with no access to vaccines to date will finally be able to start vaccinating their health workers and populations at risk, contributing to the COVAX Facility’s goal of equitable vaccine distribution,” said Dr Mariângela Simão, WHO Assistant-Director General for Access to Medicines and Health Products. Britain implements ‘red list’ Also Monday, Britain launched its quarantine program for travelers arriving from 33 “red list” countries determined to be a high risk for COVID-19, as part of its effort to keep variant strains of the coronavirus out of the country. Zari Tadayon gestures from a window of the Radisson Blu Hotel at Heathrow Airport, as Britain introduces hotel quarantine programme for arrivals from a ‘red list’ of 30 countries, in London, Britain, Feb. 15, 2021.Under the program, anyone legally entering Britain is required to spend 10 days quarantined …

The government of Guinea has confirmed a new Ebola outbreak in the southeastern city of Nzerekore, near the border with Liberia. Nzerekore was ground zero of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa that killed more than 11,300 people.     Guinea’s information minister, Amara Sompare, tells VOA that three people have already died out of seven confirmed cases.  He says the Guinean government has moved to isolate all suspected cases so health officials can investigate the origin of the virus and prevent its spread.   Sompare says the government has already sent investigators to Nzerekore and the nearby town of Goueke, near Liberia’s northeastern border. He adds the government has also put together a coordination committee with its technical partners, including the World Health Organization.     The Reuters news agency reported Sunday that the patients fell ill with diarrhea, vomiting and bleeding after attending a burial in Goueke sub-prefecture. Sompare said it was too early to say what sparked the new outbreak.FILE – A medical staff member wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) tends to a COVID-19 coronavirus patient in the infectious diseases department at the Donka hospital in Conakry on May, 13 2020.Fighting Ebola again will place additional strain on health services as Guinea battles the coronavirus pandemic. Guinea, a country of about 12 million people, has so far recorded nearly 15,000 infections and 84 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking cases globally.   In neighboring Liberia, President George Weah has put doctors on heightened alert for the deadly virus. But …

Britain on Monday launched its quarantine program for travelers arriving from 33 “red list” countries determined to be a high risk for COVID-19, as part of its effort to keep variant strains of the coronavirus out of the country.     Under the program, anyone legally entering the United Kingdom is required to spend 10 days quarantined in a hotel room. Arrivals from countries not on the red list are required to quarantine at home for 10 days and take two COVID-19 tests.     Also Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would like to stick to his current plan to reopen schools in the country March 8, but said it will depend “on the data.” He noted infection rates were still very high in Britain, as is the death rate.       Johnson said he wants to proceed cautiously with easing COVID-19 restrictions, so that once they are lifted, it will be “irreversible.”     Meanwhile, Zimbabwe state media reported Monday the nation received its first doses of the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, donated from China. The report said Zimbabwe’s government has also purchased an additional 600,000 doses that are expected to arrive in the African nation next month. The amount is still far short of what it will need to inoculate the country’s population of 14 million.      Israel has made great strides in inoculating its population against the coronavirus, but now that progress is being dramatically slowed by what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says is …

As the Australian state of Victoria enters its third day of a snap COVID-19 lockdown, the national medical association is calling for urgent changes to infection control in hotel quarantine.  Australian travelers returning from overseas must go into isolation for at least 14 days on arrival, but doctors are worried that the airborne transmission of the virus is not being taken seriously enough.   Biosecurity is a growing concern for Australia’s hotel quarantine system after new and highly contagious variants of COVID-19 were detected among returned travelers.   A five-day lockdown imposed in Victoria state Friday was in response to a cluster of infections at a hotel at Melbourne airport.  Infections were passed from passengers to staff, allowing the virus to spread into the community.  The lockdown was ordered to give contact tracers enough time to track known associates of those who have tested positive to the virus.    Doctors, however, believe that ventilation and personal protective equipment for hotel workers needs to be urgently reviewed.   Chris Moy, the federal vice president of the Australian Medical Association, says bio-security controls need to be tightened.   “Quarantine is our first and most important line of defense.  There have been holes punched in it, particularly with these new strains.  It is not just droplets’ spread, which is the big droplets which, you know, you just cough out.  It just stays quite local, to this airborne spread where essentially COVID can be taken up as a mist and stay in the air, and therefore be far more infectious for a …

What happens after you received both doses of the COVID vaccine? Lesia Bakalets looked into how much life changes, if at all. Anna Rice narrates her story.  …

The World Health Organization says debilitating post-COVID-19 symptoms in patients will have an impact on global health because of the magnitude of the pandemic.   The World Health Organization is conducting research into  why many people who are infected with COVID-19 continue to suffer from various disabling conditions for up to six months after they have had the illness.    The team lead of WHO’s Health Care Readiness Division, Janet Diaz, says some people with post-COVID-19 conditions, also known as “long COVID” have not been able to go back to work.  She says their incapacitating symptoms prolong their recovery period.   “Some of the more common symptoms of the post-COVID-19 condition can be fatigue, exertional malaise, and cognitive dysfunction.  Sometimes you may be hearing patients describing that as ‘brain fog.’  These are real,”  she said.  Other complications include shortness of breath, cough, and mental health and neurological complications.  Diaz says it is not clear which patients are most at risk of long COVID.  She says they range from patients who have been hospitalized and required intensive care treatment to those with mild illnesses who were treated in ambulatory outpatient settings.   She says researchers do not know why this is happening and are working hard to get the answers to the many questions surrounding this disease, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.   FILE – Health care workers help a woman as she is discharged from the El Salvador Hospital after surviving the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in San Salvador, El Salvador, Jan. 19, 2021.“We are concerned, obviously, with the …

When NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance, a robotic astrobiology lab packed inside a space capsule, hits the final stretch of its seven-month journey from Earth this week, it is set to emit a radio alert as it streaks into the thin Martian atmosphere.   By the time that signal reaches mission managers some 204 million kilometers away at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, Perseverance will already have landed on the Red Planet — hopefully in one piece.   The six-wheeled rover is expected to take seven minutes to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the planet’s surface in less time than the 11-minute-plus radio transmission to Earth. Thus, Thursday’s final, self-guided descent of the rover spacecraft is set to occur during a white-knuckled interval that JPL engineers affectionately refer to as the “seven minutes of terror.”   Al Chen, head of the JPL descent and landing team, called it the most critical and most dangerous part of the $2.7 billion mission.   “Success is never assured,” Chen told a recent news briefing. “And that’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we’ve ever built to the most dangerous site we’ve ever attempted to land at.”   Much is riding on the outcome. Building on discoveries of nearly 20 U.S. outings to Mars dating back to Mariner 4’s 1965 flyby, Perseverance may set the stage for scientists to conclusively show whether life has existed beyond Earth, while paving the way for eventual human missions to the fourth planet from the …

There are 108.5 million global COVID-19 infections, Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday. The U.S. has the most cases at 27.5 million, followed by India with 10.9 million and Brazil with 9.8 million.The Telegraph newspaper reports British scientists are developing a universal vaccine that would combat all the variants of the coronavirus and could be available within a year.The British newspaper says scientists at the University of Nottingham are working on a vaccine that would target the core of virus instead of the spike protein that current vaccines focus on.Targeting the core alleviates the need to frequently adjust existing vaccines as the virus mutates.The Telegraph said proteins found in the core of the virus are far less likely to mutate, meaning the vaccine would protect against all current variants and would theoretically have greater longevity.A 58-year-old man in France is reported to be the first person infected for a second time with the highly contagious South African variant of the coronavirus.The man’s reinfection is “rare albeit probably underestimated,” according to the authors of an article in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal.New Zealand’s largest city in going into a three-day lockdown, the country’s first in six months. The shuttering of Auckland comes after the discovery of three family members – a father, mother and daughter – with COVID.The rest of the country will be on heightened restrictions.New Zealand is known for having have stamped out the local transmission of the coronavirus, but it regularly detects the virus in travelers …

Azhoni Marina had witnessed the havoc wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic up close as she nursed patients in a COVID ward for seven months at New Delhi’s Indraprastha Apollo Hospital. As she waited after her night shift to get her first shot of the COVID-19 vaccine, however, she was apprehensive.“I heard from so many people that there is lot of side effect, so actually I was a bit worried before I received the vaccine,” Marina said.However, a sense of relief washed over her when she did not suffer any aftereffects during the half-hour mandatory wait after she got the shot.“I am now waiting for my second dose,” she said, heading home.Unlike most countries, for India the challenge is not availability of vaccines as it rolls out a nationwide inoculation drive – there are millions of doses ready in the world’s largest vaccine-producing country.Since launching the program in mid-January, though, health officials have been battling to overcome “vaccine hesitancy” as people scheduled to take shots failed to show up at inoculation centers.The waning pandemic in India, health officials warn, has led to a sense of complacency about the need to get vaccines, while initial reports about possible side effects have raised doubts among some. That includes some of the country’s 30 million health and front-line workers, who are first in line to get the shots.At the Apollo Hospital, doctors ramped up the numbers of inoculations by stepping forward to take the vaccine to allay doubts — the daily numbers of inoculations …

What’s Valentine’s Day without flowers? This year, as Angelina Bagdasaryan reports, some California residents might just find out, in this story narrated by Anna Rice.  Camera: Vazgen Varzhabetian …

New research has shown that Australia is the “last stronghold on Earth” for four out of five threatened species of sawfish. With their serrated snouts, these predatory fish are one of the ocean’s most unusual and endangered animals.They have a snout, or rostrum, that looks like a hedge-trimmer or a chainsaw. Small electromagnetic sensors help the sawfish detect the heartbeat and movement of buried prey. They are generally unassuming creatures, but when threatened, the saw also serves as a weapon. They can grow up to 7 meters in length and move easily between fresh and salt water. In Australia, they’re found in Queensland, the Northern Territory and on the west coast.Around the world, they are hunted for their fins and other body parts, which are used in traditional medicines or sold as souvenirs. Habitat loss is a significant threat. So is entanglement in fishing nets as their serrated snout is easily caught up in the mesh.An international study published in the journal Science Advances, including research from Charles Darwin University in Australia’s Northern Territory, has found that sawfish are now extinct in more than 50 nations.Leonardo Guida is a shark scientist from the Australian Marine Conservation Society. He says sawfish have disappeared in many parts of the world.“Sawfish are facing the very real threat of global extinction because of overfishing and habitat destruction across the world,” he said. “So we know that in more than half of the countries that they live in, they are no longer found. That equates …

The top public health agency in the U.S. said Friday that in-person schooling could resume safely with masks, social distancing and other strategies but that vaccination of teachers, while important, was not a prerequisite for reopening.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its long-awaited road map for getting students back to classrooms in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. But its guidance is just that — the agency cannot force schools to reopen, and agency officials were careful to say they were not calling for a mandate that all U.S. schools be reopened.Officials said there was strong evidence now that schools could reopen, especially at lower grade levels.The new guidance included many of the same measures previously backed by the CDC, but it suggested them more forcefully. It emphasized that all of the recommendations must be implemented strictly and consistently to keep schools safe. It also provided more detailed suggestions about what type of schooling should be offered given different levels of virus transmission, with differing advice for elementary, middle and high schools.Recommended measures included handwashing, disinfection of school facilities, diagnostic testing, and contact tracing to find new infections and separate infected people from others in a school. It was also more emphatic than past guidance about the need to wear masks in school.”We know that most clusters in the school setting have occurred when there are breaches in mask wearing,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, said in a call with reporters.FILE – Pre-kindergarten teacher Sarah McCarthy works …

Health experts say allocating and delivering adequate supplies of COVID-19 vaccines to the developing world will continue to be a challenge. They add that collective and cooperative solutions will be needed — and failing to provide them will imperil human health worldwide. More with VOA’s Mariama Diallo. …

In Malawi, health care workers have come under attack several times recently while trying to bury victims of COVID-19 without spreading the coronavirus.Health care workers now want a review of guidelines that say they should handle the burials.The incident happened Tuesday in Mchinji district in central Malawi where villagers threw stones at an ambulance carrying the dead body, in an effort to force the heath care workers to release the body for viewing.The pandemonium forced the heath care workers to return the body to the mortuary.This came a week after villagers in Zomba district in southern Malawi chased away health care workers who had come to bury a COVID-19 victim.They too claimed that their loved one died of other illnesses, not COVID-19, and demanded to bury the body themselves.Shouts Simeza is chairperson for the Human Resources for Health Coalition.He says if the attacks continue, the health care workers will refuse to bury any more bodies.“Because of harassment and abuse, we always leave in fear,” Simeza said. “If the situation continues, all of us heath care workers, we will withdraw ourselves from the service of escorting the remains of our brothers and sisters in the communities.”Families have argued they see no reason they can’t bury COVID-19 victims after health care workers disinfect the bodies. They say they believe the body is safe from coronavirus after disinfection.But Simeza says the health care workers are only following guidelines on how to bury the victims of COVID-19.“The guidelines still demand that the health workers …

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is calling on the world community to make sure Africa gets a fair share of COVID-19 vaccines.     Ahead of a visit to the Central African Republic, one year after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was reported there, ICRC President Peter Maurer said in a statement Friday that “[i]t is a moral imperative that Africa’s access to needed vaccines is drastically improved, but also that COVID vaccination campaigns do not come at the cost of other key health concerns.”     He said as new COVID-19 variants start to spread, “[n]o one is safe until everyone is safe,” adding that “equitable access to its vaccine today is a critical step towards more equitable access to vaccines more generally.”   The World Health Organization said this week that the UN-led COVAX initiative aims to start shipping about 90 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Africa this month.  It said the immunization rollout will be the continent’s largest ever mass vaccination campaign.   Most of the doses will be of the AstraZeneca vaccine.   The ICRC said as more vaccines become available, it is of paramount importance that authorities give high priority to displaced people, migrants and refugees, people in detention, and to communities in areas under non-government control, the statement said.   “Vaccinating vulnerable groups across the globe makes economic sense,” Maurer said.   The ICRC, in close cooperation with Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies and other partners, is …

The Australian Open in Melbourne is underway, but without any spectators. Instead of enjoying the tournament, tennis fans and the millions of people who live in Victoria state are under a five-day snap shutdown, following a coronavirus outbreak at a quarantine hotel in Melbourne, Victoria’s capital. Tennis players have been classified as essential workers. Germany is banning travel from its Czech border regions and Austria’s Tyrol because of an alarming COVID surge in the two locations.  The restrictions go into effect Sunday.Missionaries in some remote areas of Brazil have convinced some Indigenous people that the COVID-19 vaccine is not good for them. The residents of one Amazon village picked up bows and arrows to fight off healthcare workers set on inoculating the region’s residents. Brazil has 9.7 million COVID-19 cases, coming in third place in the world’s infections, behind only India with 10. 8 million and the U.S. with 27.3 million cases. There are more than 107 million global infections. FILE – Packages of protective face masks are show after being donated to Miami-Dade Transit employees during a news conference April 24, 2020, in Miami.In US, N95 mask shortage In Washington, the White House is working with mask manufacturers and medical supply companies to ensure that frontline workers have the N95 masks they desperately need. U.S. President Joe Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator read in The New York Times about the disconnect between mask makers, supply companies and hospitals and has begun facilitating connections. Jeffrey D. Zients said in a statement, “We will do all we can to get frontline workers the personal protective equipment they need, including breaking down barriers for N95 manufacturers.”“The COVID-19 pandemic has been a stark reminder of the importance of integrating mental health into preparedness and response plans for public health emergencies,” said Dévora Kestel, the World Health Organization’s director of the Department …

A warning by the World Health Organization that the COVID-19 pandemic could harm efforts to eradicate malaria appears to be coming true in Nigeria. Nigerian officials say people are refusing to get treatment for fear of catching the virus at a clinic.Fatima Mohammed is in her home at a camp for displaced people in Abuja, tending to her two sons who are currently down with malaria.She says she’s can’t afford huge hospital bills and is afraid that taking them to the hospital could potentially expose them to COVID-19 or result in a misdiagnosis.”I don’t have money to take them to the hospital — and, again, at the hospital, they’ll easily call it coronavirus,” she said. “I don’t have money for that.”Malaria and COVID-19 present similar symptoms, but fear and stigma attached to the pandemic are reasons many like Fatima are seeking alternatives to hospital treatment.Health experts say in-hospital visits for malaria declined significantly in Nigeria since reporting the coronavirus in February 2020.The World Health Organization’s World malaria report 2020 suggested the pandemic is threatening years of progress made against malaria and warned that death rates from the mosquito-borne disease could double.WHO malaria consultant Lynda Ozor says disruption of preventive measures is to blame.”The use of long-lasting insecticidal nets, seasonal malaria chemo prevention and prevention of malaria in pregnancy were interrupted,” she said. “So, assuming all these preventive interventions were interrupted, then it was expected, and the model shows that there will be very negative effects.”Nigeria accounts for about a quarter …

Health experts say allocating and delivering adequate supplies of COVID-19 vaccines to the developing world will continue to be a challenge. They add that collective and cooperative solutions will be needed — and failing to provide them will imperil human health worldwide. More with VOA’s Mariama Diallo. …

U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday criticized his predecessor’s vaccination program and urged Americans to be patient as he fixed it.”My predecessor — I’ll be very blunt about it — did not do his job in getting ready for the massive challenge of vaccinating hundreds of millions,” Biden said at the National Institutes of Health.”We won’t have everything fixed for a while. But we’re going to fix it,” he added.Biden also announced that the United States had acquired enough vaccines to inoculate 300 million of the 328 million U.S. population by the end of July.President Joe Biden listens as Kizzmekia Corbett, an immunologist with the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, speaks during a visit at the NIH Feb. 11, 2021, in Bethesda, Md. NIH Director Francis Collins is at center.The country is on track to exceed Biden’s goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans within his first 100 days in office.According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 46 million doses of the vaccine have been administered.Earlier Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious-disease expert, said by April, anyone in the United States who wants a COVID-19 vaccination should be able to get one.The United States has recorded more cases and deaths from COVID-19 than any country in the world — over 27 million and over 470,000, respectively, according to Johns Hopkins University. …

It’s a busy time on the Red Planet as three Mars missions from three countries converge on their target.  Plus, there’s money to be made on what space drops on our planet.  VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has the Week in Space.Camera: NASA/Reuters/AP/CCTVProduced by: Arash Arabasadi   …

Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday that by April, anyone in the United States who wants a COVID-19 vaccination should be able to get one.   In an interview with the NBC morning television program “Today,” Fauci, who also is the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, said projections indicate top priority groups, such as U.S. frontline workers and the elderly, should have received their vaccinations by April.   Fauci said after that, it would be “open season, namely, virtually everybody and anybody, in any category, could start to get vaccinated.” From there, he said, given logistics, it likely would take several more months to get vaccines to all who want them.     Fauci was hopeful that by July or August, “the overwhelming majority of people in the country will have been vaccinated.” He credits new vaccines becoming available and an increased capacity to deliver them with speeding the process.     An Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs poll released late Wednesday indicate 67 percent of U.S. citizens plan to get vaccinated, and about one-third say probably or probably will not. Those who have doubts said vaccine safety was their number one concern.     …

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) European office announced Thursday it will partner with the European Union to deploy COVID-19 vaccines in six eastern European nations.Speaking at his headquarters in Copenhagan, WHO Europe Director Hans Kluge said the nearly $50 million program will target Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova.Kluge said the program is intended to ensure equitable access to vaccines throughout Europe. “Vaccines offer a way to emerge faster from this pandemic, but only if we ensure that all countries, irrespective of income level, have access to them,” he said.UK COVID Variant Will Likely ‘Sweep the World,’ British Scientist WarnsScientists will probably be tracking global spread of mutations for at least next decade, Sharon Peacock of COVID-19 Genomics UK consortium saysKluge said the program will focus on vaccine readiness, information campaigns, supplies and training of health workers in the countries. It will complement existing EU sharing programs and the WHO-supported vaccine cooperative COVAX facility designed to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines throughout the world.Kluge also noted, with cautious optimism, that overall case incidences of COVID-19 in the 53-country WHO Europe region has declined for four straight weeks and said COVID-19-related deaths have fallen in each of the last two weeks. He said hospitalization rates have also declined.But he cautioned that the decline in cases conceals increasing numbers of outbreaks and community spread involving COVID-19 variants of concern, “meaning that we need to watch overall trends in transmission carefully and avoid rash decisions.”Kluge said the vaccination news in Europe is …