Month: June 2023

Blood banks in Cameroon are usually close to empty due to widely held taboos against blood donation. Officials in the central African country are trying to convince people to move past those beliefs amid an increased demand for blood and blood products in hospitals and on the front lines where soldiers are fighting separatists and Islamist militants. The effort comes ahead of World Blood Donor Day, observed on June 14.  Illustrating the shortages is the story of a woman who told nurses at the Yaounde military hospital that she has not found anyone to donate blood to save the life of her two-year-old son.  Hospital workers said the 34-year-old fruit seller’s blood was infected and that it could not be transfused to her son. Medical staff members have requested blood from government hospitals to save the child’s life, the hospital said, adding that the blood bank at the military hospital is empty. Celestin Ayangma, head of the laboratory that is in charge of the hospital’s blood bank, said that since January of this year, the Yaounde military hospital had been able to provide only six of the 20 units of blood it needs every day. Ayangma added that patients eventually die if they do not have relatives, friends or other donors to give the blood that the patients need. By midday on Tuesday, the baby was still waiting for blood.  Cameroon’s public health ministry reported that in 2022, hospitals in the country were able to collect a little more than …

In the United States, women’s access to legal abortion depends on where they live. The Western U.S. state of Idaho has some of the toughest laws against abortion, and that may be having an impact on women who are trying to have babies. Deborah Bloom has our story.   …

Singapore was the first country in the world to greenlight the sale of lab-grown meat, but even after nearly 2½ years, the fledgling industry is still struggling with supply issues and hurdles such as public acceptance, experts say. Lab-grown or cultivated meat is meat grown in a lab by extracting cells from animals and growing the muscles to eventually have the texture, nutrition and taste of meat from real-life animals. The product has long been touted as a potential solution to multiple issues, including burgeoning food insecurity brought by human-caused climate change, degrading soil and biodiversity, and a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. Southeast Asia is at the forefront of the impact of climate change impacts, with recent heatwaves sweeping across the region and food security has become a priority in the region’s agenda. In land-scarce Singapore, the issue is even more acute where its citizens import 90% of the food they consume. Turning to more sustainable meat is one of the city-state’s food strategies. Its so-called “30 by 30” goal aims to produce 30% of Singapore’s nutritional needs locally by 2030, and COVID-19’s impacts on food exports was another wake-up call for the country. Chicken rice is Singapore’s de-facto national dish, but its neighbor, Malaysia, banned its exports of chicken to Singapore last year due to a global feed shortage. “We [Singapore] had to scramble to try and find chicken supplies from other countries,” Andre Huber, executive director of Huber’s Butchery and Bistro, the only restaurant …

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday that he will appoint a scientific advisory body in the coming days that will include outside experts on artificial intelligence, and said he is open to the idea of creating a new U.N. agency that would focus on AI. “I would be favorable to the idea that we could have an artificial intelligence agency, I would say, inspired by what the International Atomic Energy Agency is today,” Guterres said of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency. He said he does not have the authority to create an IAEA-like agency — that is up to the organization’s 193-member states. But he said it has been discussed and he would see it as a positive development. “What is the advantage of the IAEA — it is a very solid, knowledge-based institution,” Guterres told reporters. “And at the same time, even if limited, it has some regulatory functions. So, I believe this is a model that could be very interesting.” The Vienna-based IAEA is the focal point for international nuclear cooperation. It has developed international nuclear safety standards and is both watchdog and advisor on the peaceful use of nuclear energy. There are growing concerns about the power of artificial intelligence and how it can be abused for negative and even deadly purposes, including from Geoffrey Hinton, who is the scientist known as “the godfather of AI.” Top U.S. cybersecurity officials have also warned of the growing dangers of AI.  “I think ultimately there will have to be …

David Smith, a retired print technician from the north of England, was pursuing his hobby of looking for interesting shapes when he stumbled onto one unlike any other in November.   When Smith shared his shape with the world in March, excited fans printed it onto T-shirts, sewed it into quilts, crafted cookie cutters or used it to replace the hexagons on a soccer ball — some even made plans for tattoos. The 13-sided polygon, which 64-year-old Smith called “the hat,” is the first single shape ever found that can completely cover an infinitely large flat surface without ever repeating the same pattern. That makes it the first “einstein” — named after the German for “one stone” (ein stein), not the famed physicist — and solves a problem posed 60 years ago that some mathematicians had thought impossible. After stunning the mathematics world, Smith — a hobbyist with no training who told AFP that he wasn’t great at math in school — then did it again. While all agreed “the hat” was the first einstein, its mirror image was required one in seven times to ensure that a pattern never repeated. But in a preprint study published online late last month, Smith and the three mathematicians who helped him confirm the discovery revealed a new shape — “the specter.” It requires no mirror image, making it an even purer einstein. ‘It can be that easy’   Craig Kaplan, a computer scientist at Canada’s Waterloo University, told AFP that it was …

Huge strides in life expectancy worldwide are bringing new challenges that come with increased longevity, the Dutch health minister told VOA this week. “If you look at it from a global perspective, we’ve seen that over the past 25 years, on average we added more than five years of global life expectancy,” Ernst Kuipers, Dutch minister of health, welfare and sport, noted during a stop in Washington. Looking at it another way, the former internist continued, “It actually means that for more than 20 years in a row, every week we added more than a day to the life expectancy of our world population. That is huge!” Kuipers and a Dutch delegation co-led by the country’s minister of economy are in the U.S. to take part in a trade fair focused on international health and life sciences in Boston. The Dutch are known to be the tallest people in the world and rank high in the world longevity list. Kuipers looked at the global picture when discussing the worldwide jump in life expectancy in the past quarter century. While clean water supply, improved hygiene, sanitation conditions, access to vaccines, medicines and medical treatments have contributed to rising life expectancy in low-income countries, breakthroughs in many areas of life sciences have helped prolong life in higher-income countries, he pointed out. “For example, new drugs in cancer treatment, newly developed interventions to treat cardiovascular diseases, and also improvement in public health.” The good news about longevity aside, the former doctor pointed out …

El Nino has officially returned and is likely to yield extreme weather later this year, from tropical cyclones spinning toward vulnerable Pacific islands to heavy rainfall in South America to drought in Australia.  After three years of the La Nina climate pattern, which often lowers global temperatures slightly, the hotter El Nino is back in action, according to an advisory issued on Thursday by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.  El Nino is born out of unusually warm waters in the Eastern Pacific, near the coast of South America, and often accompanied by a slowing down or reversal of the easterly trade winds.  “In May, weak El Nino conditions emerged as above-average sea surface temperatures strengthened across the equatorial Pacific Ocean,” the advisory said.  The last time an El Nino was in place, in 2016, the world saw its hottest year on record. Coupled with warming from climate change, 2023 or 2024 could reach new highs.  Declaring El Nino  Most experts look to two agencies for confirmation that El Nino has kicked off — NOAA and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The two agencies use different metrics for declaring El Nino, with the Australian definition slightly stricter.  NOAA calls an El Nino when ocean temperatures in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific have been 0.5 Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit) higher than normal for the preceding month, and has lasted or is expected to continue for another five consecutive, overlapping three-month periods. The agency also looks at a …

Most transplanted hearts are from donors who are brain dead, but new research shows a different approach can be just as successful and boost the number of available organs. It’s called donation after circulatory death, a method long used to recover kidneys and other organs but not more fragile hearts. Duke Health researchers said Wednesday that using those long-shunned hearts could allow possibly thousands more patients a chance at a lifesaving transplant — expanding the number of donor hearts by 30%. “Honestly if we could snap our fingers and just get people to use this, I think it probably would go up even more than that,” said transplant surgeon Dr. Jacob Schroder of Duke University School of Medicine, who led the research. “This really should be standard of care.” The usual method of organ donation occurs when doctors, through careful testing, determine someone has no brain function after a catastrophic injury — meaning they’re brain dead. The body is left on a ventilator that keeps the heart beating and organs oxygenated until they’re recovered and put on ice. In contrast, donation after circulatory death occurs when someone has a nonsurvivable brain injury but, because all brain function hasn’t yet ceased, the family decides to withdraw life support and the heart stops. That means organs go without oxygen for a while before they can be recovered — and surgeons, worried the heart would be damaged, left it behind. What’s changed: Now doctors can remove those hearts and put them in a …

Schools across the U.S. East Coast canceled outdoor activities, airline traffic slowed, and millions of Americans were urged to stay indoors Wednesday as smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted south, blanketing cities in thick, yellow haze. The U.S. National Weather Service issued air quality alerts for virtually the entire Atlantic seaboard. Health officials from Vermont to South Carolina and as far west as Ohio and Kansas warned residents that spending time outdoors could cause respiratory problems due to high levels of fine particulates in the atmosphere. “It’s critical that Americans experiencing dangerous air pollution, especially those with health conditions, listen to local authorities to protect themselves and their families,” U.S. President Joe Biden said on Twitter. U.S. private forecasting service AccuWeather said thick haze and soot extending from high elevations to ground level marked the worst outbreak of wildfire smoke to blanket the Northeastern U.S. in more than 20 years. New York’s famous skyline, usually visible for miles, appeared to vanish in an otherworldly veil of smoke, which some residents said made them feel unwell. “It makes breathing difficult,” Mohammed Abass said as he walked down Broadway in Manhattan. “I’ve been scheduled for a road test for driving, for my driving license today, and it was canceled.” The smoky air was especially tough on people toiling outdoors, such as Chris Ricciardi, owner of Neighbor’s Envy Landscaping in Roxbury, New Jersey. He said he and his crew were curtailing work hours and wearing masks they used for heavy pollen. “We don’t have …

Months after a 6-year-old child was hospitalized in an attack by stray dogs in a housing complex near Mumbai, more than 80 dogs still roam the community’s compound, regularly attacking other residents. Yet community leaders say they are powerless to deal with the problem because of an animal welfare law, first enacted in 2001 and updated this year, which protects the right of the dogs to roam freely and even requires that they be fed on the streets where they live. It also prohibits euthanization. “Neither concerned agencies are doing anything, nor can we do anything because of the [Animal Birth Control] policy,” said Nagendra Rampuria, a member of the managing committee at the gated housing society in Pune, 110 kilometers southeast of Mumbai. “These dog bites are making a mark upon the collective consciousness of India,” he told VOA in an interview. Similar incidents take place regularly across India, where an average of 5,739 dog bites are reported every day. A group called End Pet Homelessness has calculated that India has more than 60 million stray dogs, with 77% of the population saying they see a stray dog at least once a week. According to estimates by the World Health Organization, India accounts for 36% of the world’s rabies deaths in humans, with 30% to 60% of the cases involving children under 15, who are less able to defend themselves against aggressive dogs. Abdul Hamid Dar, the in-charge medical officer at an anti-rabies clinic in Srinagar, told VOA that …

Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, began erupting Wednesday after a three-month pause, displaying spectacular fountains of mesmerizing, glowing lava that’s a safe distance from people and structures in a national park on the Big Island. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said in a statement that a glow was detected in webcam images from Kilauea’s summit early in the morning, indicating that an eruption was occurring within the Halemaumau crater in the summit caldera. The images show fissures at the base of the crater generating lava flows on the crater floor’s surface, the observatory said. Before issuing the eruption notice, the observatory said increased earthquake activity and changes in the patterns of ground deformation at the summit started Tuesday night, indicating the movement of magma in the subsurface. “We’re not seeing any signs of activity out on the rift zones right now,” said Mike Zoeller, a geologist with the observatory. “There’s no reason to expect this to transition into a rift eruption that would threaten any communities here on the island with lava flows or anything like that.” All activity was within a closed area of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. “The lava this morning is all confined within … the summit caldera. So plenty of room for it still to produce more without threatening any homes or infrastructure,” said park spokesperson Jessica Ferracane. “So that’s the way we like our eruptions here.” She said park officials are bracing for crowds to arrive because visitors …

As communities in countries rich and poor face soaring costs from extreme weather and rising seas, governments are grappling with how to set up a new fund to tackle “loss and damage” driven by global warming. The topic was for years controversial at U.N. climate talks, as wealthy nations rejected demands for “compensation” for the impacts of their high share of the planet-heating emissions that are turbo-charging floods, droughts and storms around the world. However, at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt last November, a group of 134 African, Asian and Latin American states and small island nations finally won agreement on a new fund that will pay to repair devastated property, or preserve cultural heritage before it disappears forever. But the details of where the money will come from and how it will be disbursed were left to be worked out by this December’s COP28 conference in Dubai. As mid-year U.N. climate talks got underway in Bonn in June, Saleemul Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development, called on the United Arab Emirates to declare its intention for COP28 — which it will host — to create the “Dubai Loss and Damage Fund.” Here’s why the issue of “loss and damage” has grown in importance this past decade — and where the sticking points in finding finance to address it could lie. What is climate change “loss and damage”? “Loss and damage” refers to the physical and mental harm that happens to people and places when they …

Moving around metropolitan areas can present challenges for individuals who are obese or have height limitations, as many public spaces are not designed to accommodate their needs. However, a new law adds weight and height to the list of characteristics that are protected from discrimination in New York City. Aron Ranen has the story. …

China, where COVID-19 was first identified in humans more than three years ago, expects its current wave of infection to hit as many as 65 million cases per week by late June, according to official accounts of models presented at a medical conference. While that may be an exhausting number to a post-pandemic world wearied by a still rising toll of 767 million confirmed cases and more than 6.9 million deaths, the predicted onslaught in China comes with less severe symptoms, Wang Guiqiang, director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Peking University First Hospital, told the official newspaper Beijing Daily. And, experts say, the outbreak is likely to be confined to China. Raj Rajnarayanan, assistant dean of research and associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology and a top COVID-variant tracker, told Fortune that when it comes to XBB variants, “the rest of the world has seen them all.” But up until recently, “China hasn’t.” Respiratory disease specialist Zhong Nanshan, who spoke on May 22 at a conference in the southern city of Guangzhou, said the current wave of infections that started in late April was “anticipated.” His modeling suggested that by the end of June, the weekly number of infections will peak at 65 million, according to the official Global Times. After Beijing relaxed the draconian lockdowns enforced under its “zero-COVID” policy, an omicron variant different from the current one ripped through China in December 2022 and January 2023. About 80% of China’s 1.4 billion people …

New advances in the fight against a range of cancers have been revealed at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), which wraps up in Chicago on Tuesday. Here are some of the announcements that have most excited experts. Lung cancer One of the trial results that caused a stir in Chicago has raised hopes for a new weapon against lung cancer, the deadliest of all cancers. The treatment osimertinib was shown to halve the risk of death from a certain type of lung cancer when taken daily after surgery to remove the tumor. Developed by the pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca, the daily pill targets patients with non-small cell cancer — by far the most common type — as well as a mutation of their epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR. Iris Pauporte, head of research at France’s League Against Cancer, told AFP the advance was a “big ray of hope” for this type of cancer, for which progress has been slow. Muriel Dahan, head of research at Unicancer, said that if the results are confirmed, it “should change” common practice in treating this kind of lung cancer. Systematic testing for the EGFR mutation would also become necessary for lung cancer patients, she added. Brain cancer Another treatment, called vorasidenib, was found to significantly prolong the progression-free survival of patients with brain tumor glioma, according to clinical trial results. The daily pill, developed by French pharma firm Servier, aims to block an enzyme responsible for the progression of some …