Year: 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 …

A dazzling array of celestial events is in store for stargazers in August: two supermoons, a rare blue moon, and a once-in-a-year meteor shower. Those turning their eyes to the heavens will not have to wait long for the first nighttime showing. On August 1, the full moon will rise in the southeast.  When Tuesday’s moon is at its fullest, it will also be making its closest pass to Earth in its orbit, known as perigee. This will make the moon appear about 8% larger than a typical full moon and will earn it the label of a “supermoon.”  In North America, August’s full moon is often called the sturgeon moon because the freshwater fish are typically in high numbers during the month. It is also known as the grain moon, corn moon and harvest moon. The second full moon of the month will come on the night of August 30. Whenever there is an extra full moon during a month, it is called a blue moon. The next time there will be two full moons in one month will be in May 2026.  August’s blue moon will also be a supermoon, providing a rare occurrence of two such moons appearing in the same month. Stargazers will have to wait until 2037 before there are another two supermoons in a single month. Also gracing the sky in August is the annual Perseid meteor shower. It will reach its peak in the Northern Hemisphere on the nights of August 12-13. Stargazers …

President Joe Biden will travel to Arizona, New Mexico and Utah next week and is expected to talk about his administration’s efforts to combat climate change as the region endures a brutally hot summer with soaring temperatures, the White House said Monday. Biden is expected to discuss the Inflation Reduction Act, America’s most significant response to climate change, and the push toward more clean energy manufacturing. The act aims to spur clean energy on a scale that will bend the arc of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. July has been the hottest month ever recorded. Biden last week announced new steps to protect workers in extreme heat, including measures to improve weather forecasts and make drinking water more accessible. Members of Biden’s administration also are fanning out over the next few weeks around the anniversary of the landmark climate change and health care legislation to extol the administration’s successes as the Democratic president seeks reelection in 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris heads to Wisconsin this week with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to talk about broadband infrastructure investments. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack goes to Oregon to highlight wildfire defense grants, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will go to Illinois and Texas, and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona heads to Maryland to talk about career and technical education programs. The Inflation Reduction Act included roughly $375 billion over a decade to combat climate change and capped the cost of a month’s supply of insulin at $35 for older Americans and other Medicare beneficiaries. …

The National Institutes of Health is beginning a handful of studies to test possible treatments for long COVID, an anxiously awaited step in U.S. efforts against the mysterious condition that afflicts millions. Monday’s announcement from the NIH’s $1.15 billion RECOVER project comes amid frustration from patients who’ve struggled for months or even years with sometimes-disabling health problems — with no proven treatments and only a smattering of rigorous studies to test potential ones. “This is a year or two late and smaller in scope than one would hope but nevertheless it’s a step in the right direction,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University in St. Louis, who isn’t involved with NIH’s project but whose own research highlighted long COVID’s toll. Getting answers is critical, he added, because “there’s a lot of people out there exploiting patients’ vulnerability” with unproven therapies. Scientists don’t yet know what causes long COVID, the catchall term for about 200 widely varying symptoms. Between 10% and 30% of people are estimated to have experienced some form of long COVID after recovering from a coronavirus infection, a risk that has dropped somewhat since early in the pandemic. “If I get 10 people, I get 10 answers of what long COVID really is,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said. That’s why so far, the RECOVER initiative has tracked 24,000 patients in observational studies to help define the most common and burdensome symptoms –- findings that now are shaping multipronged treatment trials. The first two …

Smoking rates are falling, and lives are being saved as more countries implement policies and control measures to curb the global tobacco epidemic, according to a World Health Organization report issued Monday that rates country progress in tobacco control.  New data show that the adoption of the WHO’s package of six tobacco control measures 15 years ago has protected millions of people from the harmful effects of tobacco use. The measures, which were launched in 2008, call on governments to monitor tobacco use and prevention policies, protect people from tobacco smoke, offer help to quit tobacco use, warn people about the dangers of tobacco, enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, and to raise taxes on tobacco. “Without this decline, there would be an estimated 300 million more smokers in the world today,” said Ruediger Krech, WHO director for health promotion. He said more than 5.6 billion people, that is 71% of the world population, live in countries that have implemented at least one of these lifesaving protective measures.  “What an achievement,” he said.  “This policy package has literally changed our lives.  It means that families can go out to restaurants without worrying about their children breathing secondhand smoke. “It means that people that want help to quit smoking can get the support that they need.  More than that,” he said, “it means that we are protected from the many deadly diseases caused by secondhand smoke.” However, he noted that 2.3 billion people live in the 44 countries that …

Wildlife enthusiasts across Britain are being encouraged to log sightings of butterflies and some moths, as the world’s largest annual survey of the increasingly endangered pollinating insects returns. The U.K.-wide “Big Butterfly Count” — which this year runs from July 14 to August 6 — helps conservationists assess the health of the country’s natural environment, amid mounting evidence it is increasingly imperiled.  Volunteers download a chart helping them to identify different butterfly species and then record their sightings in gardens, parks and elsewhere using a smartphone app and other online tools. It comes as experts warn the often brightly colored winged insects are in rapid decline in Britain as they fail to cope with unprecedented environmental change.  “It’s a pretty worrying picture,” Richard Fox, head of science at the Butterfly Conservation charity, which runs the nationwide citizen-led survey, told AFP at Orley Common, a vast park in Devon, southwest England. “The major causes of the decline are what we humans have done to the landscape in the U.K. over the past 50, 60, 70 years,” he added from the site, which is seeing fewer butterflies despite offering an ideal habitat for them.  A report published this year that Fox co-authored, based on 23 million items of data, revealed that four in every five U.K. butterfly species have decreased since the 1970s.  Half of the country’s 58 species are listed as threatened, according to a conservation “red list.”  ‘Citizen scientists’ The UK, one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries, has lost …

As Denver neared triple-digit temperatures, Ben Gallegos sat shirtless on his porch swatting flies off his legs and spritzing himself with a misting fan to try to get through the heat. Gallegos, like many in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods, doesn’t have air conditioning.  The 68-year-old covers his windows with mattress foam to insulate against the heat and sleeps in the concrete basement. He knows high temperatures can cause heat stroke and death, and his lung condition makes him more susceptible. But the retired brick layer, who survives on about $1,000 a month, says air conditioning is out of reach.  “Take me about 12 years to save up for something like that,” he said. “If it’s hard to breath, I’ll get down to emergency.”  As climate change fans hotter and longer heat waves, breaking record temperatures across the U.S. and leaving dozens dead, the poorest Americans suffer the hottest days with the fewest defenses. Air conditioning, once a luxury, is now a matter of survival.  As Phoenix weathered its 27th consecutive day above 110 degrees (43 Celsius) Wednesday, the nine who died indoors didn’t have functioning air conditioning, or it was turned off. Last year, all 86 heat-related deaths indoors were in uncooled environments.  “To explain it fairly simply: Heat kills,” said Kristie Ebi, a University of Washington professor who researches heat and health. “Once the heat wave starts, mortality starts in about 24 hours.”  It’s the poorest and people of color, from Kansas City to Detroit to New York City …

It was once Latin America’s largest landfill. Now, a decade after Rio de Janeiro shut it down and redoubled efforts to recover the surrounding expanse of highly polluted swamp, crabs, snails, fish and birds are once again populating the mangrove forest. “If we didn’t say this used to be a landfill, people would think it’s a farm. The only thing missing is cattle,” jokes Elias Gouveia, an engineer with Comlurb, the city’s garbage collection agency that is shepherding the plantation project. “This is an environmental lesson that we must learn from: Nature is remarkable. If we don’t pollute nature, it heals itself.” Gouveia, who has worked with Comlurb for 38 years, witnessed the Gramacho landfill recovery project’s timid first steps in the late 1990s. The former landfill is located right by the 148 square miles (383 square kilometers) Guanabara Bay. Between the landfill’s inauguration in 1968 and 1996, some 80 million tons of garbage were dumped in the area, polluting the bay and surrounding rivers with trash and runoff. In 1996, the city began implementing measures to limit the levels of pollution in the landfill, starting with treating some of the leachate, the toxic byproduct of mountains of rotting trash. But garbage continued to pile up until 2012, when the city finally shut it down. “When I got there, the mangrove was almost completely devastated, due to the leachate, which had been released for a long time, and the garbage that arrived from Guanabara Bay,” recalled Mario Moscatelli, a biologist …

SEATTLE — In 2016, hospitals in New York state identified a rare and dangerous fungal infection never before found in the United States. Research laboratories quickly mobilized to review historical specimens and found the fungus had been present in the country since at least 2013. In the years since, New York City has emerged as ground zero for Candida auris infections. And until 2021, the state recorded the most confirmed cases in the country year after year, even as the illness has spread to other places, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data analyzed by The Associated Press. Candida auris is a globally emerging public health threat that can cause severe illness, including bloodstream, wound and respiratory infections. Its mortality rate has been estimated at 30% to 60%, and it’s a particular risk in health care settings for people with serious medical problems. Last year, the most cases were found in Nevada and California, but the fungus was identified clinically in patients in 29 states. New York state remains a major hot spot. A prominent theory for the sudden explosion of Candida auris, which was not found in humans anywhere until 2009, is climate change. Humans and other mammals have warmer body temperatures than most fungal pathogens can tolerate, so they have historically been protected from most infections. However, rising temperatures can allow fungi to develop tolerance to warmer environments, and over time humans may lose resistance. Some researchers think this is what is happening with Candida auris. …