Month: August 2023

Mexican officials met Tuesday with U.S. and Canadian officials in Mexico to talk about combating the trafficking of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. To get a better understanding of the problem, VOA visited addicts and a counselor from a harm reduction center in Washington. Júlia Riera has the story. …

At least 108 people were treated for heat-related illnesses at the World Scout Jamboree being held in South Korea, which is having one of its hottest summers in years. Most of them have recovered but at least two remain in treatment at an on-site hospital as of Thursday morning, said Choi Chang-haeng, secretary-general of the Jamboree’s organizing committee. The committee, which plans to proceed with the event while adding dozens more medical staff to prepare for further emergencies, did not confirm the ages and other personal details of those who were injured. Wednesday night’s opening ceremony of the Jamboree brought more than 40,000 scouts, mostly teens, to a campsite built on land reclaimed from the sea in the southwestern town of Buan. The temperature there reached 35 degrees Celsius Wednesday. Lee Sang-min, South Korea’s Minister of the Interior and Safety, during an emergency meeting instructed officials to explore “all possible measures” to protect the participants, including adjusting the event’s outdoor activities, adding more emergency vehicles and medical posts, and also adding more shade structures and air-conditioning. He said the goal is to prevent “even one serious illness or death,” according to comments shared by the ministry. There had been concerns about holding the Jamboree in a vast, treeless area lacking refuge from the heat. Choi insisted that the event was safe enough to continue and similar situations could have occurred if the Jamboree was held elsewhere. “The participants came from afar and hadn’t yet adjusted (to the weather),” Choi said …

There could be a new contender for heaviest animal to ever live. While today’s blue whale has long held the title, scientists have dug up fossils from an ancient giant that could tip the scales. Researchers described the new species — named Perucetus colossus, or “the colossal whale from Peru” — in the journal Nature on Wednesday. Each vertebra weighs more than 100 kilograms, and its ribs measure nearly 1.4 meters long. “It’s just exciting to see such a giant animal that’s so different from anything we know,” said Hans Thewissen, a paleontologist at Northeast Ohio Medical University who had no role in the research. The bones were first discovered more than a decade ago by Mario Urbina from the University of San Marcos’ Natural History Museum in Lima. An international team spent years digging them out from the side of a steep, rocky slope in the Ica desert, a region in Peru that was once underwater and is known for its rich marine fossils. The results: 13 vertebrae from the whale’s backbone, four ribs and a hip bone. The massive fossils, which are 39 million years old, “are unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” said study author Alberto Collareta, a paleontologist at Italy’s University of Pisa. After the excavations, the researchers used 3D scanners to study the surface of the bones and drilled into them to peek inside. They used the huge — but incomplete — skeleton to estimate the whale’s size and weight, using modern marine mammals for comparison, …

Human-caused global warming made July hotter for four out of five people on Earth, with more than 2 billion people feeling climate change-boosted warmth daily, according to a flash study. More than 6.5 billion people, or 81% of the world’s population, sweated through at least one day where climate change had a significant effect on the average daily temperature, according to a new report issued Wednesday by Climate Central, a science nonprofit that has figured a way to calculate how much climate change has affected daily weather. “We really are experiencing climate change just about everywhere,” said Climate Central Vice President for Science Andrew Pershing. Researchers looked at 4,711 cities and found climate change fingerprints in 4,019 of them for July, which other scientists said is the hottest month on record. The new study calculated that the burning of coal, oil and natural gas had made it three times more likely to be hotter on at least one day in those cities. In the U.S., where the climate effect was largest in Florida, more than 244 million people felt greater heat due to climate change during July. For 2 billion people, in a mostly tropical belt across the globe, climate change made it three times more likely to be hotter every single day of July. Those include the million-person cities of Mecca, Saudi Arabia and San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The day with the most widespread climate-change effect was July 10, when 3.5 billion people experienced extreme heat that had global …

The State Department launched a new bureau Tuesday aimed at making the battle against global outbreaks a lasting priority of U.S. foreign policy, even as one of its key elements – a widely acclaimed HIV program – has become caught up in the political battle over abortion. The bureau is to include the 20-year-old initiative known as the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. The program is relatively unknown to Americans but has succeeded beyond most early expectations in addressing the AIDS crisis and is credited with saving up to 25 million lives worldwide. The bureau will be led by a public health official integral to PEPFAR, John Nkengasong. Born in Cameroon, Nkengasong was a founder of U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention operations in Africa. He helped set up some of the sub-Saharan’s first sophisticated labs for work with HIV and AIDS. President George W. Bush started PEPFAR in Africa in 2003. The program retains bipartisan support. But anti-abortion groups and some House Republicans, including Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, are pushing to attach abortion-related limits on U.S. health support overseas to the reauthorizing legislation They are also seeking yearly votes on PEPFAR’s continuance. While the Democratic-controlled Senate is expected to try to squash any such GOP conditions on the HIV program, the skirmish signals the PEPFAR program is now likely a captive of U.S. abortion politics going forward. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a ceremony for the new Bureau of Global Health Security …

A customer goes into a store in the United States that is popular for trendy and cheap clothes — known as “fast fashion” — for an impulsive wardrobe addition. The person buying those clothes may be planning to keep them for only a short time, and then throwing them out when a new fashion trend arrives. Fast fashion refers to the mass-produced and low-cost clothing items that manufacturers churn out by the millions each day, especially in China, but also in countries such as India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Turkey. But what most people don’t realize is that most of the clothes are made from materials that are bad for the environment and end up in landfills. “Fast fashion has huge implications for the environment,” said Eliot Metzger, director of sustainable business and innovation at the World Resources Institute in Washington. “Not many people realize how much water and energy it takes to create a T-shirt. And if that T-shirt is going to the landfill, replaced by another T-shirt, that is going to multiply what is already an unsustainable pattern.” Global issue Fast fashion is not only a problem in the United States but in poorer countries where donated clothes arrive and are then resold by vendors. “Kenya and Ghana import quite a lot of fast fashion clothing that is causing a huge amount of pollution,” explained Erica Cirino, communications manager for the Plastic Pollution Coalition in Washington. “The landfills are so overwhelmed by textile waste that they begin flowing …

Amazon is adding video telemedicine visits in all 50 states to a virtual clinic it launched last fall, as the e-commerce giant pushes deeper into care delivery. Amazon said Tuesday that customers can visit its virtual clinic around the clock through Amazon’s website or app. There, they can compare prices and response times before picking a telemedicine provider from several options. The clinic, which doesn’t accept insurance, launched last fall with a focus on text message-based consultations. Those remain available in 34 states. Virtual care, or telemedicine, exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has remained popular as a convenient way to check in with a doctor or deal with relatively minor health issues like pink eye. Amazon says its clinic offers care for more than 30 common health conditions. Those include sinus infections, acne, COVID-19 and acid reflux. The clinic also offers treatments for motion sickness, seasonal allergies and several sexual health conditions, including erectile dysfunction. It also provides birth control and emergency contraception. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Nworah Ayogu said in a blog post that the clinic aims to remove barriers to help people treat “everyday health concerns.” “As a doctor, I’ve seen firsthand that patients want to be healthy but lack the time, tools, or resources to effectively manage their care,” Ayogu wrote. Amazon said messaging-based consultations cost $35 on average while video visits cost $75. That’s cheaper than the cost of many in-person visits with a doctor, which can run over $100 for people without …

The tallest mountain in New England is known for its snow-capped peak, but it was heavy rainfall that had hikers talking in July. New Hampshire’s Mount Washington set a record for rainfall in July with 43.38 centimeters (17.1 inches) of precipitation for the month, the Mount Washington Observatory reported. Heavy rainfall was recorded across the region. Vermont, which dealt with serious flooding across the state, saw several records broken.   It was the wettest month on record in Montpelier, which recorded 30.63 centimeters (12.1 inches) of rain, and the wettest July on record in Rutland, which had 18.84 centimeters (7.4 inches) of rain, said Adriana Kremer, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Burlington. In Massachusetts, it was the second-wettest July on record in Boston and Worcester, officials said. There was heavier-than-normal rainfall in Maine and New Hampshire but no top 10 rain totals, officials said. …

As World Breastfeeding Week got underway Tuesday, child advocates called for the promotion of mothers’ milk as the best way to get babies off to a healthy start in life and save lives. The World Health Organization and UNICEF said exclusive breastfeeding could save the lives of more than 820,000 children under 5 years of age every year. The U.N. health agencies said they are making inroads in getting across their message about the benefits of breastfeeding, noting, “The prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding rates has increased by a remarkable 10 percentage points to 48% globally” over the last decade. They acknowledge, however, that the rate falls short of the 2030 breastfeeding target of 70% and are calling for greater family, communal and workplace support for nursing mothers. “Breastfeeding is as important as breathing fresh air and eating nutritious food,” said Nina Chad, infant and young child feeding consultant for the WHO. Protection from infectious diseases Speaking on Skype from Sydney, Australia, she told VOA that the way babies start eating in life is important for keeping them healthy throughout their lives. “Breastfeeding is important because it protects babies from infectious diseases in infancy, such as diarrhea and pneumonia, that can be life-threatening, and it protects mothers from noncommunicable diseases throughout their life course,” adding, “Women who breastfeed are less likely to get breast and ovarian cancers.” To achieve maximum benefit, the World Health Organization advises mothers to breastfeed babies exclusively for the first six months, then introduce nutritious solid foods …

The commission that enforces U.S. election rules will not be regulating AI-generated deepfakes in political advertising ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Deana Mitchell has our story. …

Unknown gunmen killed two police officers in southwestern Pakistan in an attack Tuesday on polio vaccinators. The deadly shooting occurred during a national immunization campaign in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province. Area police officer Asif Marwat said that health workers were administering polio doses to children in the Nawa Killi area when two men riding a motorcycle opened fire on them and fled the scene. The shooting left two police guards dead, but the polio vaccinators escaped unhurt, Marwat said. He added that the polio campaign in the area had been suspended. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the deadly shooting, but militant attacks against polio teams are not uncommon in Pakistan. The violence has killed scores of health workers and security forces escorting them. Pakistan launched the latest polio vaccination drive Tuesday to eradicate the highly contagious virus in the country. A polio program spokesperson told VOA the weeklong campaign aims to immunize nearly 8 million children under five across 61 districts, including those in Baluchistan. He said the government had deployed around 65,000 “front-line workers” to administer polio drops to the targeted population. In conservative Pakistani rural areas, hardline religious groups have long opposed and viewed polio inoculation campaigns as a ploy to leave Muslim children infertile. Anti-state militants operating in Baluchistan and elsewhere in the country view polio vaccinators as government spies. The propaganda against the vaccine and the deadly militant attacks have set back Pakistan’s efforts to eradicate the crippling disease. The South …