Month: February 2023

A new report by four leading United Nations agencies and the World Bank estimates every two minutes, one woman dies during pregnancy or childbirth, mostly from preventable causes. The report, “Trends in maternal mortality 2000 to 2020,” was produced by WHO, UNICEF, and the UNFPA, along with the World Bank Group and UNDESA/Population Division. Health officials say the data presented in the report should be a wakeup call for world leaders to take action to end maternal deaths by investing in health care systems and closing the widening social and economic inequities that contribute to these deaths. “While pregnancy should be a time of immense hope and a positive experience for all women, it is tragically still a shockingly dangerous experience for millions around the world,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general. “These new statistics reveal the urgent need to ensure every woman and girl has access to critical health services before, during and after childbirth,” he said, “And that they can fully exercise their reproductive rights.” The report finds an estimated 287,000 women around the world died from a maternal cause in 2020.  That is equivalent to 800 deaths a day, or one death every two minutes. “These numbers show persistent inequities between countries which are undermining women’s rights.,” said Anshu Banerjee, assistant director general for universal health coverage at WHO.  “There is over a hundred-fold risk of dying depending on where a woman delivers her baby, particularly in low-income countries compared to high income countries,” …

Zimbabweans living on the border with Zambia are increasingly taking advantage of their neighbor’s superior health care. But Zambian officials say they are also draining resources as nearly one-third of patients in some clinics and hospitals are Zimbabweans. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Lusaka, Zambia. VOA footage by Blessing Chigwenhembe. …

Overdose deaths from the drug fentanyl have communities across the United States scrambling to respond. In Washington state, librarians are becoming unlikely first responders in this latest wave of the US opioid crisis. Natasha Mozgovaya has our story …

To address the relatively high cost of health care in Africa, a Kenyan mobile application lets users pay for medical services by selling their personal data through blockchain technology. Officials say Snark Health’s Hippocratic Coins have attracted more than 300 doctors and 4,000 users.  Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Camera: Jimmy Makhulo. …

An organization that trains young people for conservation jobs is recycling dead trees and replacing them with new ones, salvaging valuable lumber in the process. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Long Beach, California. …

A controversial Chinese biophysicist, who had been imprisoned after creating the world’s first gene-edited babies, had his Hong Kong work visa revoked after immigration officials suspected he lied on an application form for a talent scheme. He Jiankui, who sparked an international scientific and ethical debate in 2018 when he revealed he had created the world’s first “gene-edited” babies resistant to HIV, said at the time at an international conference in Hong Kong that he had modified two embryos before they were placed in their mother’s womb. The scientist said he used a technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the embryonic genes of twin girls before birth. He said he had targeted a gene known as CCR5 and edited it in a way he believed would protect the girls from infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It later emerged that a third gene-edited baby had been born. The former associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology — who has since been fired — was later accused of having forged approval documents from ethics boards. He was sentenced by a Chinese court to three years in prison in late 2019 for illegally carrying out human embryo gene-editing intended for reproduction. He was released in April 2022. The scientist posted on the Chinese social media platform WeChat on Saturday that he had been granted the visa on February 11 under the talent scheme. It was aimed at attracting people with rich work experience and good academic qualifications …

Researchers in Kenya say they’ve detected an invasive mosquito that can transmit malaria in different climates, threatening progress to fight the parasitic disease. Kenya’s Medical Research Institute this week urged the public to use mosquito nets and clean up areas where mosquitos can breed. Kenya has detected the presence of a new malaria carrier, which was first discovered in the region in Djibouti in 2012. The new carrier, the Anopheles stephensi mosquito, transmits plasmodium vivax, the parasite the causes the deadliest type of malaria. Bernhards Ogutu is a chief researcher at Kenya Medical Research Institute. He says it was only a matter of time before the mosquito was discovered in the country after it appeared in Ethiopia and South Sudan. “We’ve not been able to pick plasmodium vivax which is found in Asia and Kenya. It’s there in Ethiopia and this vector can also transmit it,” said Ogutu. “So that will also look at whether we might have plasmodium vivax in coming up with this new vector showing in our place. Vivax is more difficult to treat in that you can get treated and real up because it keeps staying in the body and the liver.” Malaria affects over 229 million people each year and kills over 400,000 people, according to the World Health Organization. More than a quarter of a million children die in Africa each year as a result of the mosquito-borne disease, including over 10,000 in Kenya. Ogutu expresses concern for urban residents, saying that the new …

Decades of violence and humanitarian crises have left many Somali people traumatized, according to a health study by the U.N. and Somali organizations. Harun Maruf reported from Washington and Abdulkadir Zubeyr in Mogadishu spoke to mental health doctors and patients in the country. They have this report narrated by Salem Solomon. Camera: Abdulkadir Zubeyr. Video editor Betty Ayoub. …

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut will remain aboard the International Space Station for an extra six months because of damage to their Russian spacecraft. Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and Frank Rubio were set to end their six-month stay aboard the ISS in late March, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos said Tuesday the trio will have to remain on the orbital outpost until September. The Soyuz MS-22 capsule that carried the crew to the ISS last September has been leaking coolant since mid-December, which both Roscosmos and the U.S. space agency NASA have blamed on a micrometeoroid, or space rock, that struck the capsule. Russia had planned to send an unmanned Soyuz capsule to the ISS earlier this month to bring the crew home, but the launch of that spacecraft was postponed because a Russian Progress MS-21 cargo ship docked at the station was also leaking coolant. That leak has been blamed by officials on an “external impact.” Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio were joined on the ISS in October by four astronauts brought by a SpaceX capsule: two Americans, a Russian and a Japanese. The space station will become even more crowded next week when another four person crew, including an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, is set to arrive. Some information for this report came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse. …

The U.N. in Malawi has launched an urgent appeal for aid to deal with the impact of a record cholera outbreak that has so far killed nearly 1,450 people and infected 45,000.   Local health experts say if urgent action isn’t taken to scale up the response, the number of cases could double in the next few months. The U.N. says the flash appeal seeks to raise $45.3 million to provide life-saving aid to thousands of people in Malawi devastated by the outbreak. In a statement released Monday, the U.N. said the appeal aims to assist four million people in Malawi, including 56,000 refugees and asylum seekers who are at the highest risk in the outbreak. The current outbreak started in March last year and has spread to all 29 districts of Malawi. Rebecca Adda-Dontoh, the U.N. resident coordinator in Malawi, told reporters Monday that more assistance is needed to stop the outbreak. “So much work has been done but a lot more needs to be done,” she said. “We have focused on health, we have focused on WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene). The two are very important but there are also other sectors like nutrition, protection and even logistics because we need to be able to move supplies from one point to the other.” Adda-Dontoh said the needed assistance would complement what various donor partners have already contributed. “The U.N. itself has mobilized already close to $10 million,” she said. “You heard the EU; you heard the U.K. here saying …

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Ghenya Grondin of Waltham, Massachusetts, was a postpartum doula – a person charged with helping young couples navigate the first weeks of their newborn child’s life at home. Grondin, now aged 44, was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in mid-March of that year – before there were tests, before social distancing or masks, and many months before the medical community recognized long COVID as a complication of COVID-19. She is part of a community of first-wave long-haulers who faced a new disease without a roadmap or support from the medical establishment. Three years later, at least 65 million people worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, according to an evidence review published last month in Nature Reviews Microbiology. More than 200 symptoms have been linked to the syndrome – including extreme fatigue, difficulty thinking, headaches, dizziness when standing, sleep problems, chest pain, blood clots, immune dysregulation, and even diabetes. There are no proven treatments but research is underway. People infected later in the pandemic had the benefit of vaccination, which “protects at least to some degree” from long COVID, said Dr. Bruce Levy, a Harvard pulmonologist and a co-principal investigator of the National Institute of Health’s $1.15 billion U.S. RECOVER trial, which aims to characterize and find cures for the disease. “The initial variant of the virus caused a more severe illness than we’re seeing currently in most patients,” he said. According to the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, in the first two …

Two 16th-century sculptures, jewels of French Renaissance art, have been on display since 1908 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But thanks to modern technology and an unusual agreement, precise 3D copies will be made and installed in the French castle where the originals long resided. The facsimiles plan is the fruit of a rare partnership between the Met, as the New York museum is known, and the Dordogne department in southwestern France. The statues, both from the early 1500s and by an anonymous sculptor, represent Biblical scenes entitled “Entombment of Christ” and “Pieta With Donors.” A tourism promotion agency in the Dordogne, Semitour, will be working with the Atelier of Fac-Similes Perigord (AFSP) to make the replicas over the coming months. For nearly 400 years, the originals graced the chapel of the Biron chateau in the Dordogne. Built on a strategic promontory, the sprawling fortress comprises buildings from different eras, including a dungeon dating to the 12th century. Damaged and rebuilt repeatedly through the centuries, the chateau has belonged since 1978 to the Dordogne department, which declared it a historic monument, Dordogne president Germinal Peiro said during a visit to the Met. Digital copy The technology to be employed in copying the sculptures was described to AFP by Francis Rigenbach, who heads the Perigord atelier, and C. Griffith Mann, the Met’s medieval art curator. Using 3D scanners to make digital images of the sculptures, artisans will be able to create replicas without having to move or disturb the …

United Nations members gather Monday in New York to resume efforts to forge a long-awaited and elusive treaty to safeguard the world’s marine biodiversity.  Nearly two-thirds of the ocean lies outside national boundaries on the high seas where fragmented and unevenly enforced rules seek to minimize human impact.  The goal of the U.N. meetings, running through March 3, is to produce a unified agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of those vast marine ecosystems. The talks, formally called the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, resume negotiations suspended last fall without agreement on a final treaty.  “The ocean is the life support system of our planet,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University. “For the longest time, we did not feel we had a large impact on the high seas. But that notion has changed with expansion of deep-sea fishing, mining, plastic pollution, climate change,” and other human disturbances, he said.  The U.N. talks will focus on key questions, including: How should the boundaries of marine protected areas be drawn, and by whom? How should institutions assess the environmental impacts of commercial activities, such as shipping and mining? And who has the power to enforce rules?  “This is our largest global commons,” said Nichola Clark, an oceans expert who follows the negotiations for the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington. “We are optimistic that this upcoming round of negotiations will be the one to get a treaty over the finish line.”  The …

The prospect of large-scale mining to extract valuable minerals from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, once a distant vision, has grown more real, raising alarms among the oceans’ most fervent defenders. “I think this is a real and imminent risk,” Emma Wilson of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an umbrella organization of environmental groups and scientific bodies, told AFP. “There are plenty of stakeholders that are flagging the significant environmental risks.” And the long-awaited treaty to protect the high seas, even if it is adopted in negotiations resuming on Monday, is unlikely to alleviate risks anytime soon: it will not take effect immediately and will have to come to terms with the International Seabed Authority (ISA). That agency, established under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, has 167 member states. It has authority over the ocean floors outside of member states’ Exclusive Economic Zones (which extend up to 200 nautical miles, or 370 kilometers, from coastlines). But conservation groups say the ISA has two glaringly contradictory missions: protecting the sea floors under the high seas while organizing the activities of industries eager to mine untapped resources on the ocean floor. For now, some 30 research centers and enterprises have been approved to explore — but not exploit — limited areas. Mining activities are not supposed to begin before negotiators adopt a mining code, already under discussion for nearly a decade. Making waves But the small Pacific island nation of Nauru, impatient with the plodding pace of …

The little-noticed program that led to a Chinese spy balloon drifting across the United States this month has been discussed in China’s state-controlled media for more than a decade in articles extolling its potential military applications. The reports, dating back to at least 2011, focus on how best to exploit what is known as “near space” – that portion of the atmosphere that is too high for traditional aircraft to fly but too low for a satellite to remain in orbit. Those early articles may offer clues to the capabilities of the balloon shot down by a U.S. jet fighter on Feb. 4. “In recent years, ‘near space’ has been discussed often in foreign media, with many military commentators pointing out that this is a special sphere that had been neglected by militaries but now has risen to hotspot status,” reads a July 5, 2011, article in the People’s Liberation Army Daily titled Near Space – A Strategic Asset That Ought Not to be Neglected. The article quoted Zhang Dongjiang, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, discussing the potential applications of flying objects designed for near space. “This is an area sitting in between ‘air’ and ‘space’ where neither the theory of gravity nor Kepler’s Law is independently applicable, thus limiting the freedom of flight for both aircraft that are designed based on the theory of gravity and spacecraft that follow Kepler’s Law,” Zhang was quoted as saying. He noted that near space lacks the atmospheric …

World health officials warn the war in Ukraine is taking a heavy toll on the mental health condition of millions of people, requiring an urgent increase in mental health and psychological support. “An estimated almost 10 million people may currently have a mental health condition, of whom about 4 million may have conditions which are moderate or severe,” said Hans Kluge, World Health Organization regional director for Europe. Speaking in the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr, Kluge said he met Thursday with first lady Olena Zelenska, who summed up the prevailing situation in the country by telling him that “everyone in society has to become a psychologist.” Managing the critical situation, he said, “requires an all-government and all-society effort.” Data and evidence gathered by Ukraine’s Ministry of Health and WHO in recent months show the major priorities and challenges that need to be addressed are mental health, rehabilitation, and community access to health services. The latest estimate by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights finds more than 7,000 civilians have been killed and nearly 12,000 injured since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly one year ago. Kluge said rehabilitation of victims of the war must not be delayed but made available now. “We are doubling the support on rehabilitation,” he said, “including treatment for war-related injuries, which are often horrific for adults and children alike.” The latest WHO needs assessment survey finds that one in 10 people express difficulty in accessing medicine for various reasons, including damaged or destroyed …

Imagine if your dog or cat could use words to let you know when they’re angry, lonely or in pain. Well now they can, thanks to an innovative communication tool that’s helping them express themselves more effectively. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. Camera: Adam Greenbaum            Produced by: Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum   …