Month: February 2022

U.S. intelligence agencies may have ruled out the idea that a rash of mysterious illnesses plaguing American diplomats and other officials is part of a sustained campaign by one of Washington’s adversaries, but they now say that in a small number of cases the only likely explanation is the use of some sort of weapon.  A report released Wednesday by a panel of experts assembled by U.S. intelligence officials finds that the core symptoms in these cases are “distinctly unusual and unreported elsewhere in the medical literature,” making it highly unlikely the cause could be natural.  “Pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radiofrequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics,” the report said.  “Sources exist that could generate the required stimulus, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements,” the report added. “Using nonstandard … antennas and techniques, the signals could be propagated with low loss through air for tens to hundreds of meters, and with some loss, through most building materials.”  The mystery illness was first reported in 2016 among diplomats and other employees at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba.  Since then, hundreds of cases have been reported in Russia, China, Poland, Austria and elsewhere, with symptoms ranging from nausea and dizziness to debilitating headaches and memory problems.   The U.S. government has been engaged in a yearlong effort to find the source of the anomalous health incidents, or AHI, commonly called Havana Syndrome.  An interim report issued last month by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), concluded most of …

As several European nations scale back or drop COVID-19 restrictions altogether, the World Health Organization (WHO) is urging caution as the coronavirus remains. Denmark lifted most of its COVID-19 restrictions Tuesday, including the use of masks in public places or requiring proof of vaccination to enter public venues, with government officials saying they no longer consider COVID-19 a “socially critical disease.” France, Britain and other European nations are following suit. At a briefing Tuesday at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it is premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory over the pandemic.   Tedros said because of the omicron variant of the virus that causes COVID-19, it remains highly transmissible and deadly. He said that in the 10 weeks since the omicron variant was identified, almost 90 million cases have been reported, more than in all of 2020. And he said the WHO is now starting to see a very worrying increase in deaths, in most regions of the world. At same briefing, WHO COVID lead Maria Van Kerkhove urged nations to be cautious about lifting restrictions “all at once.” She suggested a more gradual process because many countries have not yet gone through the peak of their omicron surges, and others have low levels of vaccination coverage, especially among vulnerable populations.   WHO Emergencies Program chief Mike Ryan agreed with the call for a cautious approach, and noted all countries are not in the same place regarding the pandemic. …

President Joe Biden is committing to reduce the cancer death rate by 50% — a new goal for the “moonshot” initiative against the disease that was announced in 2016 when he was vice president. Biden has set a 25-year timeline for achieving that goal, part of his broader effort to end cancer as we know it, according to senior administration officials who previewed Wednesday’s announcement on the condition of anonymity. The issue is deeply personal for Biden: He lost his elder son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. Yet the rollout comes without any new funding elements at a time when the gains from new research can be uneven, such that Biden is setting an aspiration for the country more than 50 years after President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act and launched a war on the disease. The benefits of that act were seen recently in areas outside of cancer as well as vaccines that were developed for the coronavirus. The pain experienced by Biden is shared by many Americans. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 1,918,030 new cancer cases and 609,360 cancer deaths this year. What the president is aiming to do is essentially save more than 300,000 lives annually from the disease, something the administration believes is possible because the age-adjusted death rate has already fallen by roughly 25% over the past two decades. The cancer death rate is currently 146 per 100,000 people, down from nearly 200 in 2000. “The progress in …

A study released Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows an extra shot of a COVID-19 vaccine provides solid protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death. The federal health agency followed more than 400,000 adults in Los Angeles who were infected with either the delta or omicron variants of the coronavirus between November and this past January. Researchers found that unvaccinated residents who were infected with the delta strain between November and December were 83 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who had been vaccinated and gotten the booster shot. Meanwhile, the study found that in January, when omicron overtook delta as the primary variant in Los Angeles, unvaccinated individuals were more than three times as likely to be infected and 23 times more likely to be hospitalized than people who were fully vaccinated and received a booster. Elsewhere, France becomes the latest European country to relax its coronavirus restrictions. Effective Wednesday, mandatory outdoor mask-wearing will end, and audience capacity limits for concerts halls, sporting matches and other events are being phased out, according to a report Wednesday by Agence France-Presse. The relaxed mitigation standards are taking effect despite France reaching a record-setting number of new daily cases last month. France’s actions come a day after Denmark and Norway officially lifted most of their  pandemic restrictions. Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands also have dropped most of their restrictions and containment measures. Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse. …

Beijing has been exporting traditional Chinese medicine around the world, including to countries on the African continent. With claims of helping with COVID, these herbal clinics are welcomed by some while others are raising concerns about the effectiveness of such medicines, and the lack of regulation in the field. Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi. Camera: Robert Lutta …

When it comes to measuring global warming, humidity, not just heat, matters in generating dangerous climate extremes, a new study finds.  Researchers say temperature by itself isn’t the best way to measure climate change’s weird weather and downplays impacts in the tropics. But factoring in air moisture along with heat shows that climate change since 1980 is nearly twice as bad as previously calculated, according to their study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The energy generated in extreme weather, such as storms, floods and rainfall, is related to the amount of water in the air. So, a team of scientists in the United States and China decided to use an obscure weather measurement called equivalent potential temperature — or theta-e — that reflects “the moisture energy of the atmosphere,” said study co-author V. “Ram” Ramanathan, a climate scientist at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Cornell University. It’s expressed in degrees, like temperature.  “There are two drivers of climate change: temperature and humidity,” Ramanathan said. “And so far, we measured global warming just in terms of temperature.”  But by adding the energy from humidity, “the extremes — heat waves, rainfall and other measures of extremes — correlate much better,” he said.  That’s because as the world warms, the air holds more moisture, nearly 4% for every degree Fahrenheit (7% for every degree Celsius). When that moisture condenses, it releases heat or energy, “that’s why when it rains, now it pours,” Ramanathan …

A group of pharmaceutical companies and distributors agreed to pay $590 million to settle lawsuits connected to opioid addiction among Native American tribes, according to a U.S. court filing released Tuesday.  The agreement is the latest amid a deluge of litigation spawned by the U.S. opioid crisis, which has claimed more than 500,000 lives over the past 20 years and ensnared some of the largest firms in American medicine.  The companies involved in the latest agreement include Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and McKesson, according to a filing in an Ohio federal court by a committee of plaintiffs in the case.  Native Americans have “suffered some of the worst consequences of the opioid epidemic of any population in the United States,” including the highest per-capita rate of opioid overdoses compared with other racial groups, according to the filing from the tribal leadership committee.  “The burden of paying these increased costs has diverted scarce funds from other needs and has imposed severe financial burdens on the tribal plaintiffs.”  J&J, McKesson and the other two companies in the accord – AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health – previously agreed to a $26 billion global settlement on opioid cases.  J&J said Tuesday the $150 million it agreed to pay in the Native American case has been deducted from what it owes in the global settlement.  “This settlement is not an admission of any liability or wrongdoing and the company will continue to defend against any litigation that the final agreement does not resolve,” the company said. …

A single lightning bolt that leapt across three U.S. states has been identified as the longest ever, the U.N. weather agency said Tuesday. Dubbed a megaflash, the rare low-rate horizontal discharge covered 768 kilometers (477 miles) between clouds in Texas and Mississippi in April 2020. It was detected by scientists using satellite technology and its distance – beating the previous record by 60 kilometer – confirmed by a World Meteorological Organization committee. “That trip by air[plane] would take a couple of hours and in this case the distance was covered in a matter of seconds,” WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis said. Another megaflash that occurred above Uruguay and Argentina in June 2020 also set a record, as the longest-lasting at 17.1 seconds, the WMO said. While these two newly cataloged megaflashes never touched the ground, they serve as a reminder of the dangers of a weather phenomenon that kill hundreds of people a year. “We reiterate our message: when thunder roars, when you see lightning — go indoors. Don’t seek shelter in a beach hut, don’t stand under a tree,” Nullis said.  …

The World Health Organization warns of health care risks posed by discarded COVID-19 equipment and is calling on nations to better manage their systems for disposing of the used gear. Tackling the COVID-19 pandemic requires the use of huge quantities of personal protective equipment or PPE and the use of needles and syringes to administer vaccines, among other essential products. A new World Health Organization global analysis finds the quantities of health care waste generated by the goods are enormous and potentially dangerous. Maggie Montgomery is the technical officer for water, sanitation and health in the WHO Department of Environment. She says COVID-19 has increased health care risks in facilities at up to 10 times previous volumes. “If you consider that two in three health care facilities in the least developed countries did not have systems to segregate or safely treat waste before this pandemic, you can just imagine how much burden this extra waste load has put on health care workers, on communities, especially where waste is burned,” Montgomery said. The report finds the hazardous disposal of COVID-19 waste potentially exposes health workers to needle stick injuries, burns and pathogenic microorganisms, air pollution and many dangers associated with living near poorly managed landfills and waste disposal sites. WHO experts analyzed approximately 87,000 tons of PPE that were shipped to needy countries between March 2020 and November 2021 through a joint U.N. emergency initiative. Most of the equipment, they say, was expected to end up as waste. The report provides …