Month: March 2023

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a number of improvements in access to mental health care on Thursday to reduce suicides in the military but held off on endorsing more controversial recommendations to restrict gun and ammunition purchases by young troops, sending them to another panel for study. An independent committee in late February recommended that the Defense Department implement a series of gun safety measures, including waiting periods for the purchase of firearms and ammunition by service members on military property and raising the minimum age for service members to buy guns and ammunition to 25. In a memo released Thursday, Austin called for the establishment of a suicide prevention working group to “assess the advisability and feasibility” of recommendations made by the initial study committee — which would include the gun measures. He also asked for cost estimates and a description of any “barriers” to implementing other changes and set a deadline of June 2 for that report. At no point did he specifically refer to the gun proposals or mention gun safety. Growing concern  Austin’s orders reflect increasing concerns about suicides in the military despite more than a decade of programs and other efforts to prevent them and spur greater intervention by commanders, friends and family members. But his omission of any gun safety and control measures underscores the likelihood that they would face staunch resistance, particularly in Congress, where such legislation has struggled in recent years. The more immediate changes address broader access to care. To …

Deaths of pregnant women in the United States fell in 2022, dropping significantly from a six-decade high during the pandemic, new data suggests. More than 1,200 U.S. women died in 2021 during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth, according to a final tally released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2022, there were 733 maternal deaths, according to preliminary agency data, though the final number is likely to be higher. Officials say the 2022 maternal death rate is on track to get close to pre-pandemic levels. But that’s not great: The rate before COVID-19 was the highest it had been in decades. “From the worst to the near worst? I wouldn’t exactly call that an accomplishment,” said Omari Maynard, a New Yorker whose partner died after childbirth in 2019. Experts blame COVID-19  The CDC counts women who die while pregnant, during childbirth, and up to 42 days after birth. Excessive bleeding, blood vessel blockages, and infections are leading causes. COVID-19 can be particularly dangerous to pregnant women, and experts believe it was the main reason for the 2021 spike. Burned-out physicians could have added to the risk by ignoring pregnant women’s worries, some advocates said. In 2021, there were about 33 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births. The last time the government recorded a rate that high was 1964. What happened “isn’t that hard to explain,” said Eugene Declercq, a longtime maternal mortality researcher at Boston University. “The surge was COVID-related.” Previous government analyses concluded that …

Moonwalking astronauts will have sleeker, more flexible spacesuits that come in different sizes when they step onto the lunar surface later this decade.  Exactly what that looks like remained under wraps. The company designing the next-generation spacesuits, Axiom Space, said Wednesday that it plans to have new versions for training purposes for NASA later this summer.  The moonsuits will be white like they were during NASA’s Apollo program more than a half-century ago, according to the company. That’s so they can reflect heat and keep future moonwalkers cool.  The suits will provide greater flexibility and more protection from the moon’s harsh environment, and will come in a wider range of sizes, according to the Houston-based company.  NASA awarded Axiom Space a $228.5 million contract to provide the outfits for the first moon landing in more than 50 years. The space agency is targeting late 2025 at the earliest to land two astronauts on the moon’s south pole.  At Wednesday’s event in Houston, an Axiom employee modeled a dark spacesuit, doing squats and twisting at the waist to demonstrate its flexibility. The company said the final version will be different, including the color.  “I didn’t want anybody to get that mixed up,” said Axiom’s Russell Ralston.  …

For the first time, scientists have created baby mice from two males.  This raises the distant possibility of using the same technique for people — although experts caution that very few mouse embryos developed into live mouse pups, and no one knows whether it would work for humans.  Still, “It’s a very clever strategy,” said Diana Laird, a stem cell and reproductive expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research. “It’s an important step in both stem cell and reproductive biology.”  Scientists described their work in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.  First, they took skin cells from the tails of male mice and transformed them into “induced pluripotent stem cells,” which can develop into many different types of cells or tissues. Then, through a process that involved growing them and treating them with a drug, they converted male mouse stem cells into female cells and produced functional egg cells. Finally, they fertilized those eggs and implanted the embryos into female mice. About 1% of the embryos — 7 out of 630 — grew into live mouse pups.  The pups appeared to grow normally and were able to become parents themselves in the usual way, research leader Katsuhiko Hayashi of Kyushu University and Osaka University in Japan told fellow scientists at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing last week.  In a commentary published alongside the Nature study, Laird and her colleague, Jonathan Bayerl, said the work “opens up new …

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses, truck drivers, grocery clerks and other essential workers were hailed as heroes. “Now we are vilifying them … and this has long-term ramifications for our well-being,” said Manuela Tomei, International Labor Organization assistant director-general for governance, rights, and dialogue. “The work that these persons perform is absolutely essential for families and societies to function,” she said, speaking Wednesday in Geneva. “So, the non-availability of their services would really result into a loss of well-being and the impossibility of ensuring safe lives to society at large.” And yet a new study by the International Labor Organization (ILO) finds essential workers are undervalued, underpaid and laboring under poor working conditions, exposed to treatment that “exacerbates employee turnover and labor shortages, jeopardizing the provision of basic services.” The U.N. agency’s report classifies key workers into eight main occupation groups covering health, food systems, retail, security, cleaning and sanitation, transport, manual, and technical and clerical occupations. Data from 90 countries show that during the COVID-19 crisis key workers suffered higher mortality rates than non-key workers overall, with transport workers being at highest risk. The report found 29% of key workers globally are low paid, earning on average 26% less than other employees. It reports they tend to work long, unpredictable hours under poor conditions. Tomei said inaction in improving sub-standard conditions of work is having consequences today. “In a number of countries, these sectors are facing some labor shortages because people are increasingly reluctant to …

Every month, young girls in Ghana are forced to miss school days due to menstruation. But a schoolteacher is working to find a solution by providing reusable sanitary pads. Hamza Adams visited a school in Afari, Ghana, and has this story narrated by Salem Solomon. …

The Webb Space Telescope has captured the rare and fleeting phase of a star on the cusp of death. NASA released the picture Tuesday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. The observation was among the first made by Webb following its launch in late 2021. Its infrared eyes observed all the gas and dust flung into space by a huge, hot star 15,000 light years away. A light year is about 5.8 trillion miles. Shimmering in purple like a cherry blossom, the cast-off material once comprised the star’s outer layer. The Hubble Space Telescope snapped a shot of the same transitioning star a few decades ago, but it appeared more like a fireball without the delicate details. Such a transformation occurs only with some stars and normally is the last step before they explode, going supernova, according to scientists. “We’ve never seen it like that before. It’s really exciting,” said Macarena Garcia Marin, a European Space Agency scientist who is part of the project. This star in the constellation Sagittarius, officially known as WR 124, is 30 times as massive as our sun and already has shed enough material to account for 10 suns, according to NASA. …

Illegal fishing, a multibillion-dollar industry closely linked to organized crime, is set to pose a greater threat to global security as climate change warms the world’s oceans, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a research organization based in London, in partnership with The Pew Charitable Trust. Illegal, unreported and unregulated, or IUU, fishing is worth up to $36.4 billion annually, according to the report, representing up to a third of the total global catch. Fish stocks As climate change warms the world’s oceans, fish stocks are moving to cooler, deeper waters, and criminal operations are expected to follow. “IUU actors and fishers in general will be chasing those fish stocks as they move. And there’s predictions, or obviously concern, that they will move in across existing maritime boundaries and IUU actors will pursue them across those boundaries,” report co-author Lauren Young told VOA. RUSI said that global consumption of seafood has risen at more than twice the rate of population growth since the 1960s. At the same time, an increasing proportion of global fish stocks have been fished beyond biologically sustainable limits. The report also highlights that fish play a key role in capturing carbon through feeding, so a decline in fish stocks itself could accelerate warming temperatures. Crime nexus “Climate change will impact in other ways, with impacts on coastal erosion as well, and that will have impacts on local small-scale fisheries. As their livelihoods become more vulnerable, they may begin engaging more in IUU …

Poorer countries are increasingly losing health care workers to wealthier ones as the latter seek to shore up their own staff losses from the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes through active recruitment, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.  The trend for nurses and other staff to leave parts of Africa or Southeast Asia for better opportunities in wealthier countries in the Middle East or Europe was already under way before the pandemic but has accelerated since, the U.N. health agency said, as global competition heats up. “Health workers are the backbone of every health system, and yet 55 countries with some of the world’s most fragile health systems do not have enough and many are losing their health workers to international migration,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general. He was referring to a new WHO list of vulnerable countries which has added eight extra states since it was last published in 2020. They are: Comoros, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Laos, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Jim Campbell, director of the WHO’s health workforce department, told journalists safeguards for countries on the WHO list were important so they “can continue to rebuild and recover from the pandemic without an additional loss of workers to migration”. Some 115,000 health care workers died from COVID around the world during the pandemic but many more left their professions due to burnout and depression, he said. As a sign of the strain, protests and strikes have been organised in more than 100 countries since the pandemic …

Jiang Yanyong, a Chinese military doctor who revealed the full extent of the 2003 SARS outbreak and was later placed under house arrest for his political outspokenness, has died, a long-time acquaintance and a Hong Kong newspaper said Tuesday.   Jiang was 91 and died of pneumonia Saturday in Beijing, according to human rights activist Hu Jia and the South China Morning Post. News of Jiang’s death and even his name were censored within China, underscoring how he remained a politically sensitive figure even late in life. Jiang had been chief surgeon at the People’s Liberation Army’s main 301 hospital in Beijing when the army fought its way through the city to end weeks of student-led pro-democracy protests centered on Tiananmen Square, causing the deaths of hundreds — possibly thousands — of civilians. In April 2003, as the ruling Communist Party was suppressing news about the outbreak of the highly contagious Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Jiang wrote an 800-word letter stating there were many more SARS cases than were being officially reported by the country’s health minister. Jiang emailed the letter to state broadcaster CCTV and Hong Kong’s Beijing-friendly Phoenix Channel, both of which ignored it. The letter was then leaked to Western media outlets that published it in its entirety, along with reports on the true extent of the outbreak and official Chinese efforts to hide it. The letter, along with the death of a Finnish United Nations employee and statements by renowned physician Zhong Nanshan, forced the lifting …

Pfizer Inc PFE.N struck a $43 billion deal for Seagen Inc SGEN.O to add innovative targeted therapies to its portfolio of cancer treatments as it braces for a steep fall in COVID-19 product sales and stiff competition for some top sellers. Monday’s deal, Pfizer’s biggest in a string of acquisitions following a once-in-a-lifetime cash windfall from its COVID-19 vaccine and pill, will add four approved cancer therapies with combined sales of nearly $2 billion in 2022. Washington-based Seagen is a pioneer of antibody-drug conjugates, which work like “guided missiles” designed for a targeted destructive effect and spare healthy cells. The deal helps Pfizer move into an area “that it is more protected from regulators, patent perspectives and market dynamics,” Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said in a conference call.  Seagen, Bourla said, is set to benefit from out-of-pocket health care spending caps for older Americans under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), meaning more patients could have access to the company’s expensive treatments. A focus on complex biotech medicines also provides a longer exclusivity on the market versus pills before becoming subject to government price limits under the IRA, he said. Pfizer will pay $229 in cash per Seagen share, a 32.7% premium to Friday’s closing price. Seagen’s shares rose to $200 in early trading. The latest deal comes as Pfizer seeks to mitigate an anticipated $17 billion hit to revenue by 2030 from patent expirations for top drugs and decline in demand for its COVID products. The drugmaker …

Discovering the origins of COVID-19 is a moral imperative and all hypotheses must be explored, the head of the World Health Organization said, in the clearest indication yet that the U.N. body remains committed to finding how the virus arose. A U.S. agency was reported by The Wall Street Journal to have assessed the pandemic had likely been caused by an unintended Chinese laboratory leak, raising pressure on the WHO to come up with answers. Beijing denies the assessment which could soon become public after the U.S. House of Representatives voted this week to declassify it. “Understanding #COVID19’s origins and exploring all hypotheses remains: a scientific imperative, to help us prevent future outbreaks [and] a moral imperative, for the sake of the millions of people who died and those who live with #LongCOVID,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Twitter late on Saturday.   He was writing to mark three years since the WHO first used the word “pandemic” to describe the global outbreak of COVID-19. Activists, politicians and academics said in an open letter this weekend that the focus of the anniversary should be on preventing a repeat of the unequal COVID-19 vaccine rollout, saying this led to at least 1.3 million preventable deaths. In 2021, a WHO-led team spent weeks in and around Wuhan, China where the first human cases were reported and said in a joint report that the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, but further research was needed. China has …

Researchers have found long-term evidence that actively monitoring localized prostate cancer is a safe alternative to immediate surgery or radiation. The results, released Saturday, are encouraging for men who want to avoid treatment-related sexual and incontinence problems, said Dr. Stacy Loeb, a prostate cancer specialist at NYU Langone Health who was not involved in the research. The study directly compared the three approaches — surgery to remove tumors, radiation treatment and monitoring. Most prostate cancer grows slowly, so it takes many years to look at the disease’s outcomes. “There was no difference in prostate cancer mortality at 15 years between the groups,” Loeb said. And prostate cancer survival for all three groups was high — 97% regardless of treatment approach. “That’s also very good news.” The results were published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at a European Association of Urology conference in Milan, Italy. Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Research paid for the research. Men diagnosed with localized prostate cancer shouldn’t panic or rush treatment decisions, said lead author Dr. Freddie Hamdy of the University of Oxford. Instead, they should “consider carefully the possible benefits and harms caused by the treatment options.” A small number of men with high-risk or more advanced disease do need urgent treatments, he added. Researchers followed more than 1,600 U.K. men who agreed to be randomly assigned to get surgery, radiation or active monitoring. The patients’ cancer was confined to the prostate, a walnut-sized gland that’s part of …

On the third anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus is still spreading, and the death toll is nearing 7 million worldwide. Yet most people have resumed their normal lives, thanks to a wall of immunity built from infections and vaccines. The virus appears here to stay, along with the threat of a more dangerous version sweeping the planet. “New variants emerging anywhere threaten us everywhere,” said virus researcher Thomas Friedrich of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Maybe that will help people to understand how connected we are.” Saturday marks three years since the World Health Organization first called the outbreak a pandemic, March 11, 2020, and the United Nation’s health organization says it’s not yet ready to say the emergency has ended. The virus endures With the pandemic still killing 900 to 1,000 people a day worldwide, the stealthy virus behind COVID-19 hasn’t lost its punch. It spreads easily from person to person, riding respiratory droplets in the air, killing some victims but leaving most to bounce back without much harm. “Whatever the virus is doing today, it’s still working on finding another winning path,” said Dr. Eric Topol, head of Scripps Research Translational Institute in California. We’ve become numb to the daily death toll, Topol says, but we should view it as too high. Consider that in the United States, daily hospitalizations and deaths, while lower than at the worst peaks, have not yet dropped to the low levels reached during summer 2021 before the delta variant wave. At …

A requirement that travelers to the U.S. from China present a negative COVID-19 test before boarding their flights expired Friday after more than two months as cases in China have fallen. The restrictions were put in place December 28 and took effect January 5 amid a surge in infections in China after the nation sharply eased pandemic restrictions and as U.S. health officials expressed concerns that their Chinese counterparts were not being truthful to the world about the true number of infections and deaths. The requirement from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expired for flights leaving after 3 p.m. Eastern time Friday. When the restriction was imposed, U.S. officials also said it was necessary to protect U.S. citizens and communities because there was a lack of transparency from the Chinese government about the size of the surge or the variants that were circulating within China. The rules imposed in January require travelers to the U.S. from China, Hong Kong and Macau to take a COVID-19 test no more than two days before travel and provide a negative test before boarding their flight. The testing applies to anyone 2 years and older, including U.S. citizens. China saw infections and deaths surge after it eased back from its “zero COVID” strategy in early December after rare public protests of the policy that confined millions of people to their homes and sparked demands for President Xi Jinping to resign. But as China eased its strict rules, infections and deaths surged, …