Year: 2023

After three nasty years, the La Nina weather phenomenon that increases Atlantic hurricane activity and worsens Western drought is gone, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Thursday. That’s usually good news for the United States and other parts of the world, including drought-stricken northeast Africa, scientists said. The globe is now in what’s considered a “neutral” condition and probably trending to an El Nino in late summer or fall, said climate scientist Michelle L’Heureux, head of NOAA’s El Nino/La Nina forecast office. “It’s over,” said research scientist Azhar Ehsan, who heads Columbia University’s El Nino/La Nina forecasting. “Mother Nature thought to get rid of this one because it’s enough.” Global impact La Nina is a natural and temporary cooling of parts of the Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide. In the United States, because La Nina is connected to more Atlantic storms and deeper droughts and wildfires in the West, La Ninas often are more damaging and expensive than their more famous flip side, El Nino, experts said, and studies show. Generally, American agriculture is more damaged by La Nina than El Nino. If the globe jumps into El Nino, it means more rain for the Midwestern corn belt and grains in general and could be beneficial, said Michael Ferrari, chief scientific officer of Climate Alpha, a firm that advises investors on financial decisions based on climate. When there’s a La Nina, there are more storms in the Atlantic during hurricane season because it removes conditions that suppress …

All U.S. women getting mammograms will soon receive information about their breast density, which can sometimes make cancer harder to spot. The new requirements, finalized Thursday by the Food and Drug Administration, are aimed at standardizing the information given to millions of women following scans to detect breast cancer. Regulators first proposed the changes in 2019; health care providers will have 18 months to comply with the policy. Some states already require that women receive information on breast density. About half of women over age 40 have dense breasts, with less fatty tissue and more connective and glandular tissue. That tissue appears white on X-rays, the same color as growths in the breast, making mammograms harder to read. Dense breast tissue is one of the factors that can increase a woman’s chances of developing cancer. Under the new rules, women with dense breasts will receive a written memo alerting them that their status “makes it harder to find breast cancer.” Those patients will also be directed to speak with their doctor about their results. Professional guidelines don’t specify next steps for women identified with dense breasts, but some physicians may recommend additional forms of scanning, including ultrasound or MRI. …

Sodium is essential for the smooth functioning of muscles and nerves and maintaining the proper balance of water and minerals. But too much sodium in the diet can kill. “Almost 2 million deaths each year are associated with excessive sodium intake,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization. “Too much sodium can lead to high blood pressure and increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases,” he said. “And yet globally, average sodium intake is more than double the WHO recommendation for adults of less than 2,000 milligrams per day, or 5 grams of salt.” That is equivalent to one teaspoon of salt a day. A WHO report launched Thursday explores for the first time the progress countries have made in implementing sodium intake reduction policies. A survey of WHO’s 194 member states showed “the world is off track to achieve its global target of reducing sodium intake by 30% by 2025.” The report finds that only 5% of WHO member states “are protected by mandatory and comprehensive sodium reduction policies,” and 73% of WHO member states “lack full range of implementation of such policies.” Francesco Branca, director of WHO’s Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, noted that reducing sodium intake is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve health and reduce the burden of non-communicable diseases “as it can avert a large number of cardiovascular events and deaths at very low program costs.” Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally, claiming an estimated 17.9 …

WeightWatchers, the 60-year-old diet firm, announced this week it would acquire a telehealth company whose providers prescribe anti-obesity drugs for growing numbers of eager online subscribers. The $132 million deal with Sequence is just the latest commercial push into the red-hot market for prescription drugs that promises significant weight loss. For months, the diabetes drug Ozempic has been touted on social media by celebrities, even though it’s not approved for weight loss. The demand for it sparked shortages. WeightWatchers will be introducing its roughly 3.5 million subscribers to a new generation of medications that go beyond behavioral changes like gym workouts and diet tracking. Obesity experts say the drugs may revolutionize treatment of the disease that affects 42% of American adults. Here’s a look at the promise of these new medications and cautions about their use. What are these new diet drugs? The drugs that have generated most buzz are from a class of medications called GLP-1 agonists. Two of the most popular, Ozempic and Wegovy, are different doses of the same drug, semaglutide. Ozempic has been used for six years to treat Type 2 diabetes and is not approved for weight loss. Wegovy was approved in 2021 to treat obesity in adults, and late last year to treat kids and teens 12 and older. Doctors prescribe the medications to people with diabetes alone, or to people who are obese or who are overweight with additional health problems. Most of these types of drugs are delivered through weekly injections. Supply …

Plastics entering the world’s oceans have surged by an unprecedented amount since 2005 and could nearly triple by 2040 if no further action is taken, according to research published on Wednesday. An estimated 171 trillion plastic particles were afloat in the oceans by 2019, according to peer-reviewed research led by the 5 Gyres Institute, a U.S. organization that campaigns to reduce plastic pollution. Marine plastic pollution could rise 2.6-fold by 2040 if legally binding global policies are not introduced, it predicted. The study looked at surface-level plastic pollution data from 11,777 ocean stations in six major marine regions covering the period from 1979 to 2019. “We’ve found an alarming trend of exponential growth in microplastics in the global ocean since the millennium,” Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of the 5 Gyres Group said in a statement. “We need a strong legally binding U.N. global treaty on plastic pollution that stops the problem at the source,” he added. Microplastics are particularly hazardous to the oceans, not only contaminating water but also damaging the internal organs of marine animals, which mistake plastic for food. Experts said the study showed that the level of marine plastic pollution in the oceans has been underestimated. “The numbers in this new research are staggeringly phenomenal and almost beyond comprehension,” said Paul Harvey, a scientist and plastics expert with Environmental Science Solutions, an Australian consultancy focused on pollution reduction. The United Nations kicked off negotiations on an agreement to tackle plastic pollution in Uruguay in November, with the aim …

France has reported an outbreak of highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu among red foxes northeast of Paris, the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) said on Tuesday, as the spread of the virus to mammals raised global concerns. After three foxes were found dead in a nature reserve in Meaux near where gulls had died, one of the foxes was collected and tested, WOAH said in a report, citing French authorities. The World Health Organization last month described the bird flu situation as “worrying” due to the recent rise in cases in birds and mammals and that it was reviewing its global risk assessment in light of recent developments including cases of human transmission in Cambodia. Avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has been spreading around the world in the past year, killing more than 200 million birds, sending egg prices rocketing and raising concern among governments about human transmission. The virus infected a cat in France in late December. It has also been detected in minks in Spain, foxes and otters in Britain, sea lions in Peru and grizzly bears in the United States. …

The U.S. space agency NASA says two U.S. astronauts, another from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a Russian cosmonaut are safely aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after their Space-X Dragon crew capsule docked Friday with the orbiting laboratory. Video from NASA showed U.S. astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev being greeted warmly by ISS crew members as they entered the space station about two hours after the docking. The 41-year-old Alneyadi is the second person from his country to fly to space and the first to launch from U.S. soil as part of a long-duration space station team. Space-X says the new crew members will spend six months on the station, where they will conduct more than 200 science experiments and technology demonstrations, NASA says the docking was delayed slightly as mission teams completed troubleshooting of a faulty docking hook sensor on the Dragon capsule. They verified all of the docking hooks were properly configured, and the docking process continued. The new crew members temporally expand the ISS crew to 11. They join the Expedition 68 crew, NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Nicole Mann, and Josh Cassada, Japanese space agency, JAXA, astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin, and Anna Kikina.  Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. …

One month after a freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, sending tons of toxic chemicals into the air and prompting a temporary evacuation of the town, the fallout from the accident continues, both on the ground where local residents complain of lingering effects, and in Washington, where the Biden administration is under assault from conservatives over the federal response. There were no injuries reported as a result of the accident, but residents of the area nearby are complaining of a mix of symptoms that may be related to chemical exposure, including headaches, breathing difficulties and skin rashes. This is despite assertions by state and federal environmental officials who say they have tested air and water samples and have found no evidence of harmful levels of dangerous chemicals. Contractors have removed millions of gallons of toxic liquids and hundreds of tons of contaminated solid waste from the crash site and affected areas. However, some experts have questioned the thoroughness of the testing being conducted, and have warned that a larger and more extensive effort is necessary. In Washington, Republicans have used the accident to lash out at the Biden administration and its officials, calling the federal response to the disaster insufficient, despite Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, saying publicly that he has “no complaints” about the federal response, and that his state is “getting the help we need.” In a more conspiratorial vein, members of conservative media organizations, including popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have worked to inject the …

Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power. Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9% to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.) Carbon dioxide is released when fossil fuels such as oil, coal or natural gas are burned to powers cars, planes, homes and factories. When the gas enters the atmosphere, it traps heat and contributes to the warming of the the climate. Extreme weather events intensified last year’s carbon dioxide emissions: Droughts reduced the amount of water available for hydropower, which increased the need to burn fossil fuels. And heat waves drove up demand for electricity. Thursday’s report was described as disconcerting by climate scientists, who warn that energy users around the world must cut emissions dramatically to slow the dire consequences of global warming. “Any emissions growth — even 1% — is a failure,” said Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University and chairman of the Global Carbon Project, an international group. “We can’t afford growth. We can’t afford stasis. It’s cuts or chaos for the planet. Any year with higher coal emissions is a bad year for our health and for the …

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX launched a four-person crew on a trip to the International Space Station early Thursday, with a Russian cosmonaut and United Arab Emirates astronaut joining two NASA crewmates on the flight. The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, lifted off at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. A live NASA webcast showed the 25-story-tall spacecraft ascending from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of vapor and a reddish fireball that lit up the predawn sky. The launch was expected to accelerate the Crew Dragon to an orbital velocity of 28,164 kph, more than 22 times the speed of sound. The flight came 72 hours after an initial launch attempt was scrubbed in the final minutes of countdown early on Monday due to a clog in the flow of engine-ignition fluid. NASA said the problem was fixed by replacing a clogged filter and purging the system. The trip to the International Space Station (ISS), a laboratory orbiting some 420 kilometers above Earth, was expected to take nearly 25 hours, with rendezvous planned for about 1:15 a.m. EST (0615 GMT) Friday as the crew begins a six-month science mission in microgravity. Designated Crew 6, the mission marks the sixth long-term ISS team that NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since the private rocket venture founded by Musk — billionaire CEO …

NASA’s DART spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at a spot between two boulders during last September’s first test of a planetary defense system, sending debris hurtling into space and changing the rocky, oblong-shaped object’s path a bit more than previously calculated.  Those were among the findings released by scientists on Wednesday in the most detailed account of the U.S. space agency’s proof-of-principle mission on using a spacecraft to change a celestial object’s trajectory — employing sheer kinetic force to nudge it off course just enough to keep Earth safe.  “The DART test was phenomenally successful. We now know that we have a viable technique for potentially preventing an asteroid impact if one day we had the need to,” said planetary scientist Terik Daly of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, lead author of one of the DART studies published in the journal Nature.   The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided on September 26, 2022, at 22,530 kilometers per hour with Dimorphos, an asteroid about 150 meters in diameter, roughly 11 million kilometers from Earth. Dimorphos is a moonlet of Didymos, which is defined as a near-Earth asteroid and has a shape like a top spinning in space with a diameter of about 780 meters. Neither object imperils Earth.   “We were trying to change the amount of time that it took for Dimorphos to orbit around Didymos by colliding head-on with Dimorphos,” said Northern Arizona University planetary scientist Cristina Thomas, lead author of another of the …

Eli Lilly will cut prices for some older insulins later this year and immediately give more patients access to a cap on the costs they pay to fill prescriptions.  The moves announced Wednesday promise critical relief to some people with diabetes who can face thousands of dollars in annual costs for insulin they need in order to live. Lilly’s changes also come as lawmakers and patient advocates pressure drugmakers to do something about soaring prices.  Lilly said it will cut the list prices for its most commonly prescribed insulin, Humalog, and for another insulin, Humulin, by 70% or more in the fourth quarter, which starts in October.  List prices are what a drugmaker initially sets for a product and what people who have no insurance or plans with high deductibles are sometimes stuck paying.  A Lilly spokeswoman said the current list price for a 10-milliliter vial of the fast-acting, mealtime insulin Humalog is $274.70. That will fall to $66.40.  Likewise, she said the same amount of Humulin currently lists at $148.70. That will change to $44.61.  Lilly CEO David Ricks said Wednesday that his company was making the changes to address issues that affect the price patients ultimately pay for its insulins.  He noted that discounts Lilly offers from its list prices often don’t reach patients through insurers or pharmacy benefit managers. High-deductible coverage can lead to big bills at the pharmacy counter, particularly at the start of the year when the deductibles renew.  “We know the current U.S. health …

The head of a U.S. government program to fight AIDS, Dr. John Nkengasong, says that in its 20 years of existence the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, has saved 25 million lives. PEPFAR, set up in 2003 under the administration of former U.S. president George W. Bush, has transformed the trajectory of HIV/AIDS, Nkengasong told reporters Tuesday while visiting South Africa. “Twenty-five million lives have been saved, 5.5 million children have been born free of HIV/AIDS, health systems have been strengthened in a remarkable way,” he said. Nkengasong, who comes from Cameroon, said there was once a “sense of hopelessness” in Africa, the continent worst-hit by HIV/AIDS, but since then countries’ economies have increased and life expectancy has improved. Some 95% of the total $110 billion spent through PEPFAR was spent on Africa as it bore the brunt of the disease, he said. “Before PEPFAR only 50,000 people, 50,000 people on the continent of Africa who were infected, were on treatment, 50,000. Today over 20 million people are receiving life-saving anti-retroviral therapy.” he said. Nkengasong said the infrastructure rolled out across Africa as part of the U.S. government program was also useful during the COVID-19 pandemic. The AIDS official said he was also “very positive” about the tools in the pipeline to combat HIV, including the roll out of pre-exposure prophylactics for HIV negative people that can be injected every three months and will stop the spread of new infections. …

Two more people in Equatorial Guinea have died of Marburg hemorrhagic fever, a cousin of the Ebola virus, bringing the toll of fatalities to 11, the authorities say. “Two days ago, the monitoring system recorded eight notifications, including the deaths of two people with symptoms of the disease,” Health Minister Mitoha Ondo’o Ayekaba said in a statement issued late Tuesday. Work is underway “to strengthen assessment of the spread of the epidemic,” said the statement, read on national television. “Forty-eight contact cases have been documented, four of whom have developed symptoms, and three who have been quarantined in hospital,” it added. The Marburg virus is a rare but highly dangerous pathogen that causes severe fever, often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure. It is part of the so-called filovirus family that also includes the Ebola virus, which has wreaked havoc in several previous outbreaks in Africa. The central African state announced on February 13 that nine people had died from Marburg between January 7 and February 7. The U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) held an emergency session the following day. The national authorities have declared a health alert in the remote northeastern province of Kie-Ntem province and in the neighboring district of Mongomo, which are located on the border with Cameroon and Gabon. Measures include a lockdown plan implemented in collaboration with the WHO. In their statement of February 13, the authorities had reported only three cases of infection in addition to the fatalities — individuals who were being isolated …

The U.S. ambassador to China says Beijing needs to be more forthcoming about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, a day after reports that the U.S. Energy Department concluded the outbreak likely began because of a Chinese laboratory leak. Nicholas Burns told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event by video link Monday that China needs to “be more honest about what happened three years ago in Wuhan with the origin of the COVID-19 crisis.” Wuhan is the Chinese city where the first cases of the novel coronavirus were reported in December 2019. His comments come a day after U.S. media reported that the Energy Department determined the pandemic likely arose from a laboratory leak in Wuhan. The department made its judgment in a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and key members of Congress, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the development, citing people who read the report. The WSJ said the Energy Department intelligence agency was now the second U.S. intelligence agency after the FBI to conclude a Chinese lab leak was the probable cause of the pandemic, although U.S. spy agencies remain divided over the origins of the virus. White House national security spokesman John Kirby echoed that sentiment. “There has not been a definitive conclusion and consensus in the U.S. government on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Kirby told reporters Monday when asked about the WSJ report. The Energy Department assessment was made with “low confidence,” while the FBI conclusion was …