Month: May 2023

Funding for a global initiative aimed at creating more environmentally friendly and climate-resilient farming has grown to $13 billion, co-leaders the United States and the United Arab Emirates said Monday. That money means the Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate, launched in 2021, now exceeds its $10 billion target for the COP28 climate talks, to be hosted by the UAE in November and December. “Climate change continues to impact longstanding agricultural practices in every country and a strong global commitment is necessary to face the challenges of climate change head-on,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in a statement. Vilsack and his Emirati counterpart Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri, the UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment, are co-hosting an AIM for Climate Summit in Washington this week. “I think the beauty of this is that of the $13 billion, $10 billion comes from the government and three billion is coming from the private sector,” said Almheiri. Between a quarter and a third of global greenhouse emissions come from food systems, from factors like deforestation to make way for agricultural land, methane emissions from livestock, the energy costs associated with supply chains and energy used by consumers to store and prepare food. At the same time, the changing climate is threatening food security across the world, as global warming increases the frequency of punishing heat waves, droughts and extreme weather events. Projects underway include developing newer, greener fertilizers that use less fossil fuels to create, and returning to so-called “regenerative …

For the first time, the U.S. government will pay for a large study measuring whether overdoses can be prevented by so-called safe injection sites, places where people can use heroin and other illegal drugs and be revived if they take too much. The grant provides more than $5 million over four years to New York University and Brown University to study two sites in New York City and one opening next year in Providence, Rhode Island. Researchers hope to enroll 1,000 adult drug users to study the effectiveness of the sites to prevent overdoses, to estimate their costs and to gauge potential savings for the health care and criminal justice systems. The universities announced the grant Monday. The money will not be used to operate the sites, the universities said. With U.S. drug overdose deaths reaching nearly 107,000 in 2021, supporters contend safe injection sites, also called overdose preventions centers, can save lives and connect people with addiction treatment, mental health services and medical care. Opponents worry the sites encourage drug use and that they will lead to the deterioration of surrounding neighborhoods. “There is a lot of discussion about overdose prevention centers, but ultimately, we need data to see if they are working or not, and what impact they may have on the community,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which awarded the grant. Sites operate in 14 countries, including Canada, Australia and France, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, a group working …

Most Democrats and Republicans agree that the federal government should better regulate the biggest technology companies, particularly social media platforms. But there is little consensus on how it should be done.  Concerns have skyrocketed about China’s ownership of TikTok, and parents have grown increasingly worried about what their children are seeing online. Lawmakers have introduced a slew of bipartisan bills, boosting hopes of compromise. But any effort to regulate the mammoth industry would face major obstacles as technology companies have fought interference.  Noting that many young people are struggling, President Joe Biden said in his February State of the Union address that “it’s time” to pass bipartisan legislation to impose stricter limits on the collection of personal data and ban targeted advertising to children.  “We must finally hold social media companies accountable for the experiment they are running on our children for profit,” Biden said. A look at some of the areas of potential regulation:  Children’s safety Several House and Senate bills would try to make social media, and the internet in general, safer for children who will inevitably be online. Lawmakers cite numerous examples of teenagers who have taken their own lives after cyberbullying or have died engaging in dangerous behavior encouraged on social media.  In the Senate, at least two bills are focused on children’s online safety. Legislation by Senators Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, approved by the chamber’s Commerce Committee last year would require social media companies to be more transparent …

Immigrants in the western U.S. state of Colorado have a unique place to go when they are not feeling well: a health care clinic that serves newcomers from many countries. For VOA, Svitlana Prystynska has more about the facility, which was founded by a Ukrainian immigrant. Camera: Olena Andrushenko  …

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says America’s leading cause of overdose deaths is synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. U.S. law enforcement says illicit fentanyl is cheaply made from chemicals mostly coming from China, trafficked through Mexico, and then smuggled into the United States. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya looks at fentanyl in Washington state in a series that today explores how stigmas about fentanyl abuse complicate treatment for addicts. …

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says America’s leading cause of overdose deaths is synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. U.S. law enforcement says illicit fentanyl is cheaply made from chemicals mostly coming from China, trafficked through Mexico, and then smuggled into the United States, says U.S. law enforcement. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya looks at fentanyl in a series from the state of Washington that concludes by showing how breaking free from addiction can be a lifelong journey. …

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says America’s leading cause of overdose deaths is synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. U.S. law enforcement says illicit fentanyl is cheaply made from chemicals mostly coming from China, trafficked through Mexico, and then smuggled into the United States. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya looks at community efforts to tackle the challenges of fentanyl abuse and homelessness. …

“Being in hospitals during the early days of COVID-19 was terrifying, like I was going to war. But as far as I’m concerned, those days are done, Danielle King, a nurse working in Luling, Louisiana, told VOA. “I think it’s pretty obvious that the pandemic was over a year ago,” she added. “The government’s lagging behind that reality, so maybe they’ll finally catch up.” The U.S. government will take a big step in that direction Thursday as Washington officially declares an end to the coronavirus pandemic by allowing the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) to expire. The emergency was first instituted more than three years ago to provide funding and resources that would keep Americans safe during the then-growing global pandemic. While many health care officials agree the time is right to end the national emergency and let state and local governments allocate resources to the COVID-19 response, some worry the move will harm Americans — particularly the impoverished — who will be less likely to afford vaccinations and risk being dropped from government programs such as Medicaid. “It’s regrettable, but we have no certainty on what impact the PHE’s end will have on the public,” said Amy Pisani, CEO of Vaccinate Your Family, a national nonprofit organization. “Public health advocates haven’t had a seat at the table to discuss how the end of the PHE declaration will look,” she said. “We know, for example, that COVID-19 vaccinations have been essential in keeping us safe, but how will uninsured adults …

Mohammed Azhar holds his baby niece next to a storm drain full of plastic and stinking black sludge, testament to India’s failure to treat nearly two-thirds of its urban sewage. “We stay inside our homes. We fall sick if we go out,” the 21-year-old told AFP in the Delhi neighborhood of Seelampur, where open gutters packed with plastic and sickly greyish water flow alongside the narrow lanes. “It stinks. It attracts mosquitoes. We catch diseases and the kids keep falling sick,” he added. “There is no one to clean the filth.” India at the end of April was projected to have overtaken China as the world’s most populous country, according to the United Nations, with almost 1.43 billion people. Its urban population is predicted to explode in the coming decades, with over 270 million more people forecast to live in its cities by 2040. But of the 72 billion liters of sewage currently generated in urban centers every day, 45 billion liters — enough to fill 18,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — aren’t treated, according to government figures for 2020-21. India’s sewerage system does not connect to about two-thirds of its urban homes, according to the National Fecal Sludge and Septage Management Alliance (NFSSM). Many of the sewage treatment plants in operation don’t comply with standards, including 26 out of Delhi’s 35 facilities, according to media reports. Coupled with huge volumes of industrial effluent, the sewage is causing disease, polluting India’s waterways, killing wildlife and seeping into groundwater. Ecologically dead Although …

China has approved the safety of a gene-edited soybean, its first approval of the technology in a crop, as the country increasingly looks to science to boost food production. The soybean, developed by privately owned Shandong Shunfeng Biotechnology Co. Ltd., has two modified genes, significantly raising the level of healthy fat oleic acid in the plant. The safety certificate has been approved for five years from April 21, according to a document published last week by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Unlike genetic modification, which introduces foreign genes into a plant, gene editing alters existing genes. The technology is considered to be less risky than GMOs and is more lightly regulated in some countries, including China, which published rules on gene-editing last year. “The approval of the safety certificate is a shot in the arm for the Shunfeng team,” said the firm in a statement to Reuters on Thursday. Shunfeng claims to be the first company in China seeking to commercialize gene-edited crops. It is currently researching around 20 other gene-edited crops, including higher yield rice, wheat and corn, herbicide-resistant rice and soybeans and vitamin C-rich lettuce, said a company representative. United States-based company Calyxt also developed a high oleic soybean, producing a healthy oil that was the first gene-edited food to be approved in the U.S. in 2019. Several additional steps are needed before China’s farmers can plant the novel soybean, including approvals of seed varieties with the tweaked genes. The approval comes as trade tensions, erratic …

The World Health Organization has declared the COVID-19 pandemic to be over as a global health emergency.    “However, that does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said Friday. ‘This virus is here to stay. It is killing, and it is still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths.”    The first known outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in November 2019 in Wuhan, China. When the WHO declared COVID a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020, there were fewer than 100 reported cases, and no reported deaths outside China.    In the three years since then, the number of global COVID deaths reported to WHO has risen to nearly 7 million, though the true death toll, according to Tedros, is several times higher, reaching at least 20 million.    “COVID-19 has turned our world upside down,” he said, severely disrupting health systems, causing severe economic and social upheaval, and plunging millions into poverty.     But for more than a year now, he said, “the pandemic has been on a downward trend, with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing.”    He noted these were among the many reasons he decided to take the advice of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee to lower the level of alarm and declare an end to COVID-19 as a public health emergency of …

The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions of people worldwide. The announcement, made more than three years after WHO declared the coronavirus an international crisis, offers a coda to a pandemic that stirred fear and suspicion, hand-wringing and finger-pointing across the globe. The U.N. health agency’s officials said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn’t ended, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. WHO says thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week, and millions of others are suffering from debilitating, long-term effects. “It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, adding he wouldn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to assess the situation should a new variant “put our world in peril.” Tedros said the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year, acknowledging that most countries have already returned to life before COVID-19. He bemoaned the damage that COVID-19 had done to the global community, saying the pandemic had shattered businesses, exacerbated political divisions, led to the spread of misinformation and plunged millions into poverty. The political fallout in some countries was swift and unforgiving. Some pundits say missteps by President Donald …

Environmental groups sue the U.S. government over SpaceX’s launch license. Plus, a pair of spacewalks outside the International Space Station, and a glimpse at the destruction that scientists say awaits our home planet. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. …

Global temperatures are likely to reach new highs this year with the predicted onset of El Nino, a natural occurring phenomenon typically associated with the warming of the planet. “The development of an El Nino will most likely lead to a new spike in global heating and increase the chance of breaking temperature records,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization. That is bad news for global efforts to reduce climate change. Taalas noted that the onset of El Nino follows the eight warmest years on record “even though we had a cooling La Nina for the past three years and this acted as a temporary brake on global temperature increase.” El Nino is a naturally occurring climate pattern associated with the warming of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. On the other hand, La Nina refers to the periodic cooling of ocean surface temperatures. The recent unusually long running La Nina event, which began in 2020 now has ended. Wilfran Moufouma Okia, head of the WMO regional climate prediction services division, said scientific models show that La Nina currently is in a neutral state and moving toward a different phase. “The next few months from May to July, we have a 60% chance to enter into an El Nino phase. This likelihood will increase to 70% in the period of July to August, and even to 80% if we go past August,” he said. “But, of course, beyond that we cannot say …

A panel of global health experts will meet Thursday to decide if COVID-19 is still an emergency under the World Health Organization’s rules, a status that helps maintain international focus on the pandemic. The WHO first gave COVID its highest level of alert on Jan. 30, 2020, and the panel has continued to apply the label ever since, at meetings held every three months. However, several countries have recently begun lifting their domestic states of emergency, such as the United States. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said he hopes to end the international emergency this year. There is no consensus yet on which way the panel may rule, advisers to the WHO and external experts told Reuters. “It is possible that the emergency may end, but it is critical to communicate that COVID remains a complex public health challenge,” said professor Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who is on the WHO panel. She declined to speculate further ahead of the discussions, which are confidential. One source close to negotiations said lifting the “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, label could impact global funding or collaboration efforts. Another said that the unpredictability of the virus made it hard to call at this stage. “We are not out of the pandemic, but we have reached a different stage,” said professor Salim Abdool Karim, a leading COVID expert who previously advised the South African government on its response. Karim, who is not on the WHO panel, said if the …

Providing further proof that U.S. children suffered significant learning loss when schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Assessment Governing Board released a report Wednesday that showed test scores measuring achievement in U.S. history and civics fell significantly between 2018 and 2022. The tests, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the “nation’s report card,” were given to hundreds of eighth-grade students across the country. Scores on the U.S. history assessment were the lowest recorded since 1994, while the scores on the civics test fell for the first time ever. Only 13% of students tested in U.S. history were considered proficient, meaning that they had substantially mastered the material expected of them. That was 1 percentage point lower than in 2018. Another 46% tested at the NAEP “basic” level, meaning they had partial mastery of the material, down 4 percentage points. The remaining 40% of students tested did not meet the bar for basic knowledge, an increase of 6 percentage points. In civics, 20% of students tested qualified as proficient, and 48% had basic knowledge of the material — both down 1 percentage point from 2018. Another 31% failed to demonstrate even basic knowledge, an increase by 4 percentage points over 2018. In both cases, declines in proficiency were concentrated among lower-performing students, while achievement among the top 25% of students was little changed. Further breakdowns of the data indicated that declines were notably larger among racial minorities and lower-income students, indicating that …

The United States approved the first vaccine for RSV on Wednesday, shots to protect older adults against a respiratory virus that’s most notorious for attacking babies but endangers their grandparents, too. The Food and Drug Administration decision makes GSK’s shot, called Arexvy, the first of several potential vaccines in the pipeline for RSV to be licensed anywhere. The move sets the stage for adults 60 and older to get vaccinated this fall — but first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must decide if every senior really needs RSV protection or only those considered at high risk from the respiratory syncytial virus. CDC’s advisers will debate that question in June. After decades of failure in the quest for an RSV vaccine, doctors are eager to finally have something to offer — especially after a virus surge that strained hospitals last fall. “This is a great first step … to protect older persons from serious RSV disease,” said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, who wasn’t involved with its development. Next, “we’re going to be working our way down the age ladder” for what’s expected to be a string of new protections. The FDA is considering competitor Pfizer’s similar vaccine for older adults. Pfizer also is seeking approval to vaccinate pregnant women so their babies are born with some of their mothers’ protection. There isn’t a vaccine for kids yet, but high-risk infants often get monthly doses of a protective drug during RSV season …

Companies with Brazilian forest concessions would be allowed to generate carbon credits under a bill passed by its Congress this week that marks a first step in regulating the country’s voluntary carbon market. Private firms have shown little interest in a government program that leases publicly owned forests for sustainable logging, but the legislation could boost the concessions’ appeal with investors by generating an additional revenue stream. “This is an economic activity that will boost others that can be done in forestry concessions,” said Jacqueline Ferreira, a portfolio manager at Instituto Escolhas, an environmental nonprofit involved in consultations on the bill. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who now must sign or veto parts or all of the bill within 15 days, has made reining in deforestation a priority as he seeks to reverse the policies of his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. Forest leased to private firms in Brazil can only be used for logging under a sustainable system that allows the land to regenerate. Potential to generate millions Set up in 2006, the leasing program has had limited success, data shows, with only about 1 million hectares of Brazil’s 43 million hectares of eligible public forest leased. Studying a typical concession in the Amazon state of Rondonia, Escolhas estimated that carbon credit sales could boost its revenue by 43%. A wider study by the nonprofit of 37 areas that could be leased in the Amazon region estimated that they could generate about $24 million per year from carbon credits …