Month: March 2022

Researchers have discovered the remarkably well-preserved wreck of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, in 10,000 feet of icy water, a century after it was swallowed up by Antarctic ice during what proved to be one of the most heroic expeditions in history. A team of marine archaeologists, engineers and other scientists used an icebreaker ship and underwater drones to locate the wreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, near the Antarctica Peninsula. The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust’s search expedition Endurance22 announced the discovery on Wednesday. Images and video of the wreck show the three-masted wooden ship in pristine condition, with gold-leaf letters reading “Endurance” still affixed to the stern and the ship’s lacquered wooden helm still standing upright, as if the captain may return to steer it at any time. “This is by far the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen,” said Mensun Bound, the director of the exploration. Bound noted the wreck is still upright, clear of the seabed “and in a brilliant state of preservation.” The discovery is “a titantic find” in “one of the world’s most challenging environments,” said maritime historian Steven Schwankert, who was not involved in the expedition. The combination of deep, dark waters — no sunlight penetrates to 10,000 feet — frigid temperatures and sea ice have frustrated past efforts to find Endurance, but also explain why the wreck is in such good condition. The bottom of the Weddell Sea is “a very inhospitable environment for just about everything — especially …

The World Health Organization expressed concern Wednesday that many countries are drastically reducing COVID-19 testing, inhibiting the ability of public health professionals to monitor where the coronavirus is, how it’s spreading and how it’s evolving. During a briefing at agency headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that while cases and deaths were declining globally and many countries had lifted restrictions, the pandemic was far from over, “and it will not be over anywhere until it’s over everywhere.” Tedros said the WHO on Wednesday published new guidelines on self-testing for COVID-19 and recommended that self-tests be offered in addition to professionally administered testing services. He said evidence showed that users can reliably and accurately self-test, and that self-testing may reduce inequalities in testing access. The WHO chief said he hoped the new guidance would also help increase access to testing, which is too expensive for many low-income countries, where those tools could play an important role in expanding testing. Tedros also said the agency and its partners in the ACT Accelerator grouping — part of the WHO’s COVAX initiative, which has focused on equitable access to vaccines globally — were seeking to raise funds “to ensure that all countries that need self-tests will be able to receive them as quickly as possible.” Regarding the situation in Ukraine, Tedros said the WHO had so far delivered 81 tons of supplies to the country and was establishing a pipeline of supplies for health facilities throughout Ukraine. He said Tuesday that …

A man who received the first heart transplant from a pig two months ago has died, the University of Maryland Medical Center said Wednesday.  Doctors did not say the specific reason David Bennett, 57, died Tuesday, only saying his condition had been worsening over the past several days.  “We are grateful for every innovative moment, every crazy dream, every sleepless night that went into this historic effort,” Bennett’s son, David Bennett Jr., said in a statement released by the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “We hope this story can be the beginning of hope and not the end.”  Prior to the January 7 transplant, Bennett had been in poor health and was ineligible for a human heart.  Organ transplants from animals — xenotransplantation — have largely failed because the human body rejects them almost immediately, but in this case, the pig had been genetically modified with human genes in the hope of delaying rejection.   At first, things seemed to be going well for Bennett, and last month, the hospital released a video of him watching the Super Bowl from his hospital bed.  “We are devastated by the loss of Mr. Bennett. He proved to be a brave and noble patient who fought all the way to the end,” Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the surgery at the Baltimore hospital, said in a statement.  Bennett lived longer than one notable case in 1984 when a baboon heart was transplanted to a baby. The baby lived 21 days.  “We have …

Ahead of World Tuberculosis Day (March 24), the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is calling for governments to renew the fight against the respiratory illness. In South Africa, a hotspot for TB, a mobile screening team is trying to make up for disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. Linda Givetash reports from Johannesburg. …

An expert group convened by the World Health Organization said Tuesday it “strongly supports urgent and broad access” to booster doses, in a reversal of the U.N. agency’s previous insistence that boosters weren’t necessary and contributed to vaccine inequity. In a statement, WHO said its expert group concluded that immunization with authorized COVID-19 vaccines provide high levels of protection against severe disease and death amid the global circulation of the hugely contagious omicron variant. It said vaccination, including the use of boosters, was especially important for people at risk of severe disease. Last year, WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for a moratorium on booster doses while dozens of countries embarked on administering the doses, saying rich countries should immediately donate those vaccines to poor countries instead. WHO scientists said at the time they would continue to evaluate incoming data. Numerous scientific studies have since proven that booster doses of authorized vaccines help restore waning immunity and protect against serious COVID-19. Booster programs in rich countries including Britain, Canada and the U.S. have been credited with preventing the surge in omicron infections from spilling over into hospitals and cemeteries. WHO said it is continuing to monitor the global spread of omicron, including a “stealth” version known as BA.2, which has been documented to have re-infected some people after an initial case of omicron. There’s mixed research on whether it causes more severe disease, but vaccines appear just as effective against it. WHO noted that the current authorized COVID-19 vaccines are …

COVID-19 can cause the brain to shrink, reduce grey matter in the regions that control emotion and memory, and damage areas that control the sense of smell, an Oxford University study has found. The scientists said that the effects were even seen in people who had not been hospitalized with COVID, and whether the impact could be partially reversed or if they would persist in the long term needed further investigation. “There is strong evidence for brain-related abnormalities in COVID-19,” the researchers said in their study, which was released on Monday. Even in mild cases, participants in the research showed “a worsening of executive function” responsible for focus and organizing, and on an average brain sizes shrank between 0.2% and 2%. The peer-reviewed study, published in the Nature journal, investigated brain changes in 785 participants aged 51–81 whose brains were scanned twice, including 401 people who caught COVID between their two scans. The second scan was done on average 141 days after the first scan. The study was conducted when the Alpha variant was dominant in Britain and is unlikely to include anyone infected with the Delta variant. Studies have found some people who had COVID suffered from “brain fog” or mental cloudiness that included impairment to attention, concentration, speed of information processing and memory. Read full story The researchers did not say if vaccination against COVID had any impact on the condition but the UK Health Security Agency said last month that a review of 15 studies found that …

Chocolate makers are expected to raise prices this year due to higher costs of cocoa from exporters like Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer. Hershey, the largest producer of chocolate products in the United States, said last month it will raise prices on its products across the board due to the rising cost of ingredients.    Meanwhile, chocolate makers like Dana Mroueh said they are seeing cocoa prices rise in Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa producer.   “We’ve noticed the price of cocoa is going up these few years, especially organic cocoa. So, from the beginning to today, those five years, we can say the price has risen 20 percent,” Mroueh said.   Demand for chocolate in America increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and cocoa producers in Ivory Coast are struggling to keep up with that demand.    Experts say one reason is the impact of climate change.   Harvard University says that by 2030, parts of West Africa will be too hot and dry to adequately produce cocoa. The West African countries of Ghana and Ivory Coast alone produce 70 percent of global supply.   Cocoa farmer Raphael Konan Kouassi took VOA to his plantation, a shady orchard where fat green and yellow cocoa pods hung from tree trunks. He said trees are yielding less due to rising temperatures and poor rains.   “Almost all of the young plants die in the high season. If you have not been able to get water to them, you have …

Hammered by climate change and relentless deforestation, the Amazon rainforest is losing its capacity to recover and could irretrievably transition into savannah, with dire consequences for the region and the world, according to a study published Monday.    Researchers warned that the findings mean the Amazon could be approaching a so-called tipping point faster than previously understood.     Analyzing 25 years of satellite data, researchers measured for the first time the Amazon’s resilience against shocks such as droughts and fires, a key indicator of overall health.  Resilience has declined across more than three-quarters of the Amazon basin, home to half the world’s rainforest, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.  In areas hit hardest by destruction or drought, the forest’s ability to bounce back was reduced by approximately half, co-author Tim Lenton, director of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, told AFP.  “Our resilience measure changed by more than a factor of two in the places nearer to human activity and in places that are driest,” he said in an interview.    Climate models have suggested that global heating – which has on average warmed Earth’s surface 1.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels – could by itself push the Amazon past a point of no return into a far drier savannah-like state.  If carbon pollution continues unabated, that scenario could be locked in by mid-century, according to some models.  “But, of course, it’s not just climate change – people are busy chopping or burning the forest …

Duke University doctors say a baby is thriving after a first-of-its-kind heart transplant — one that came with a bonus technique to try to help prevent rejection of the new organ. The thymus plays a critical role in building the immune system. Doctors have wondered if implanting some thymus tissue that matched a donated organ might help it survive without the recipient needing toxic anti-rejection medicines. Easton Sinnamon of Asheboro, North Carolina, received his unique transplant last summer when he was 6 months old. But Duke waited to announce it until Monday after doctors learned the specially processed thymus implants appear to be functioning like they’d hoped — producing immune cells that don’t treat the tot’s new heart like foreign tissue. Doctors eventually will try weaning Easton off the immune-suppressing drugs required after a transplant, said Dr. Joseph Turek, Duke’s chief of pediatric cardiac surgery. The research is in very early stages and just one possible method scientists are testing in hopes of inducing what’s called immune tolerance to a transplant. But Turek says if it works, it could be attempted with other organ transplants, not just the heart. Easton was a candidate for the experimental transplant because he had two separate health problems. He was born with some heart defects that surgeries right after birth failed to solve. And he suffered recurrent infections that doctors eventually realized meant his own thymus wasn’t working properly. Some babies are born without a thymus, which stimulates development of part of the immune system …

Afghanistan faces a serious risk of backtracking to its notoriously high maternal mortality rates because of sudden drops in foreign funding, a shortage of health care workers, mobility restrictions and worsening poverty, health professionals have told VOA.   More than 1,600 Afghan mothers were dying for every 100,000 live births in 2001. With strong technical and financial support from donors, the country reduced the rate to about 640 deaths by 2018.   Donors were spending about $1 billion annually on Afghanistan’s health sector, but all development funding ceased immediately when the Taliban returned to power in August.   The abrupt funding shortage crippled the country’s donor-dependent public health system amid a global pandemic and a nearly universal poverty rate in the country.   By September 2021, more than 80% of the country’s health care facilities were reported as dysfunctional because of a lack of funding and medical supplies and a shortage of personnel.   “After the change of the government in August, there was a significant drop [cumulative around 25%] in the availability and utilization of maternal health services,” Joy Rivaca Caminade, a communication specialist with the World Health Organization in Afghanistan, told VOA.   The United Nations’ children’s agency, UNICEF, gave a similar bleak assessment.  “Following the events of mid-August 2021, Afghanistan’s health sector was close to collapse, with coverage of many lifesaving interventions for women and children falling between 20 and 30% within days,” said Joe English, a UNICEF spokesperson.   Such setbacks have given rise to one …

Trafficking in pangolins continues to rise in Malawi as the country registers a drop in ordinary wildlife crime, such as trafficking in elephant tusks and rhino horns. Wildlife authorities say pangolin-related arrests in Malawi more than tripled between 2019 and 2020. Police in Malawi say a month rarely passes with no pangolin-related arrest. Authorities fear this may lead to extinction of the endangered mammals. The latest is the arrest last Thursday of five people in Mangochi district, in the south of Malawi after they were found selling a live pangolin. “The four suspects are Malawian while their accomplice is a well-known businessman from Pakistan,” said Ameena Tepani Daudi, who speaks for the police in the district. “The five were arrested at the Pakistan national’s house following a tip from members of the community. We found all of them in a bedroom while negotiating about selling price. And the pangolin was found hidden in a sack bag.” Daudi said via a messaging app that suspects are expected in court soon. “All suspects have been charged with illegal possession of specimens of listed species which contravenes section 110(b) of National Parks and Wildlife Act. And they will appear before court, possibly next week,” she added. Police say the incident is among many pangolin-trafficking arrests in recent years. Last year’s report by Lilongwe Wildlife Trust says Malawi is a range state for the Temminck’s ground pangolin, the only pangolin species found in southern Africa, now threatened with extinction. Brighton Kumchedwa, the director of …

A new variant of the coronavirus found in white-tailed deer in Canada was later discovered in a person who lived nearby and had contact with the deer population, according to a recent study. The researchers say it’s possible the deer transmitted the virus to the human. Emerging evidence that COVID-19 is gaining a foothold in wildlife could have negative long-term consequences for humans, according to Nükhet Varlik, associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. “Even if we managed to vaccinate the entire human population, the disease can still come back — from the animals back to us — which is, in fact, what happened with some of the other historical pandemics,” Varlik says. “So, in the long term, I don’t think COVID can be eradicated, to be honest.” Six out of every 10 infectious diseases in people are zoonotic, meaning they pass between species, from animals to humans. Examples of zoonotic viruses include the flu, West Nile virus, the plague, rabies and Lyme disease. The coronavirus outbreak has been linked to a market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were slaughtered on site. And although the virus is classified as zoonotic, no animal reservoir of the disease has been found. Any new COVID-19 variant that animals might pass back to humans has the potential to mutate into something totally new. “It’s definitely going to evolve differently in an animal than it will in a human,” says Cody Warren, a virologist and immunologist who is a postdoctoral fellow at the University …

The head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, is again threatening to end service to the International Space Station, saying Russia will stop supplying rocket engines to the United States and may curtail cooperation on the station in retaliation for Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. NASA says operations on the orbiting observatory are normal.   In an interview with Russian state television Thursday, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said, considering the situation, “We can’t supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what.” Rogozin said Russia has delivered 122 RD-180 engines to the U.S. since the 1990s, of which 98 have been used to power Atlas launch vehicles. The Washington Post said the engines are also used by United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing to launch national security missions for the Pentagon.  Russia said it would cut off the supply of the RD-181 engines used in Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, which is used to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station.  Projects with Germans scrapped Rogozin tweeted Thursday that Russian cosmonauts would not cooperate with Germany on joint experiments on the Russian segment of the ISS. Roscosmos will conduct them independently. He went on to say the “Russian space program will be adjusted against the backdrop of sanctions; the priority will be the creation of satellites in the interests of defense.”  Earlier in the week, in another interview …

The U.N. children’s agency says it is procuring nearly seven million doses of polio vaccine to inoculate children in Malawi. The action follows a confirmed polio case last month in Malawi’s capital, the first reported in Africa in five years and the first in Malawi in decades.   Malawi had last reported a polio case in 1992. The country was declared polio-free in 2005 — 15 years before the African continent as a whole was declared polio-free.   But health experts said the polio strain which paralyzed a three-year-old child last month is similar to one in Pakistan, and noted that the child was not fully vaccinated against polio.  UNICEF said the planned mass immunization will target the unvaccinated as well as children previously vaccinated, so all can have full protection from the polio virus.   Rudolf Schwenk, UNICEF’s representative in Malawi, said preparations are under way for the first round of vaccinations, expected to start March 21.  “We are installing new vaccine refrigerators, repairing vaccine refrigerators already in use or available at district level, and distributing vaccine carriers and cold boxes,” he said.  George Jobe, executive director for the Malawi Heath Equity Network, said the emphasis should be on convincing mothers to have trust in vaccines, which has eroded because of misconceptions associated with COVID-19 vaccines.    “There is need for more awareness raising by government of Malawi, different partners including UNICEF itself, and when doing that awareness raising, it should be made clear that vaccines for children have …

Even before Russian forces shelled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, sparking a fire in a nearby building early Friday, Ukraine’s main nuclear regulatory agency had sought “immediate assistance” from the international nuclear agency. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said Wednesday he had received a letter from the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine (SNRIU) asking for “immediate assistance to ensure the safety of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and other nuclear facilities in the country.” Grossi said the IAEA had begun consultations on the request. The letter submitted to IAEA by the Ukraine agency said the staff at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had been kept at the site since Russian military forces took control of it a week ago. The agency said the staff members were facing “psychological pressure and moral exhaustion,” Grossi said. He cautioned that the staff must be allowed to rest and rotate schedules “so that their crucial work can be carried out safely and securely.” Early Friday, Russian forces shelled Europe’s largest nuclear plant, Zaporizhzhia, sparking a fire in a building outside the plant, Ukraine’s state emergency service said on Friday. The plant produces about 25% of Ukraine’s power. Initially, the mayor of the nearby town of Enerhodar said the plant was on fire. But a short time later, the plant director told Ukraine 24 television that the fire had started outside the building perimeter and that security seemed to be restored to the facility, according to Reuters. IAEA Director …

As Russia continues to wage war on neighboring Ukraine, a former commander of the International Space Station is in disbelief over Russian threats to destroy the decades-long partnership aboard the ISS.  Plus, Elon Musk sends a communications lifeline to Ukrainians, and a joint mission to Mars is now in doubt. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us a special edition of The Week in Space.  …

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) marked its 50-year anniversary Thursday at its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. Activists have criticized the organization as being slow to address global threats to the environment, such as pollution and climate change. But at the U.N.’s Environment Assembly this week over 100 nations pledged to negotiate a binding treaty to reduce plastic pollution. UNEP’s chief, Inger Andersen, said Thursday the agency has contributed to saving the planet from harm and destruction. “We saved millions of lives and protected nature,” she said. “We showed environmental multilateralism does deliver. That is a lesson that should inspire us today. Friends, there are other major achievements, the launch of the scientific body, the IPCC, the phase-out of lead and petrol and just yesterday, the resolution starting the pathway to a global plastic pollution deal to end plastic pollution for good.” The resolution calls for two years of negotiations toward a comprehensive, international treaty on how to handle the growing problem of plastic waste. The UNEP was formed in Stockholm in 1972 and has been a key player in safeguarding the world’s plant species, wildlife, and climate. The organization says its mandate is to bring the world together in tackling environmental threats. Addressing leaders, delegates and environmental activists at the UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, praised its work. “Progressively, over the last 50 years, UNEP has led the world to understand the centrality of the environment in human existence to appreciate the increased threats to the …