Author: Sellheal

New harmful illicit drugs are inundating a flourishing market for traffickers amid violence and corruption hurting local communities across Europe, the EU’s agency monitoring drugs and addiction said Friday. The grim finding was part of the agency’s annual report. It also said that drug users in Europe are now exposed to a wider range of substances of high purity as drug trafficking and use across the region have quickly returned to pre-COVID 19 pandemic levels. Cannabis remains the most-used illicit substance in Europe, the agency found, with some 22.6 million Europeans over the age of 15 having used it in the last year. Cocaine seizures are “historically high” and new synthetic drugs whose effects on health are not well documented are worrying officials. In 2022, 41 new drugs were reported for the first time by the agency. “I summarize this with the phrase: ‘everywhere, everything, everyone,’” said European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction Director Alexis Goosdeel. “Established illicit drugs are now widely accessible and potent new substances continue to emerge,” Goosdeel added. “Almost everything with psychoactive properties can appear on the drug market.” Among the new popular substances, ketamine and nitrous oxide — so-called laughing gas — are raising concern over reported cases of bladder problems, nerve damage and lung injuries associated with users. Alongside the high availability of heroin on the continent, synthetic opioids are on the rise and have been linked to deaths by overdose in Baltic countries. The report said the opioids situation in Europe …

Researchers have been exploring the presence of cancer in animals from elephants to mollusks to learn about cancer in wild animals. They also hope their research will help with human cancers. “Studying wildlife cancer, and more generally the evolution of cancer across the tree of life, is extremely promising to develop innovative therapies to treat cancer in humans,” Mathieu Giraudeau, a researcher at France’s La Rochelle University who has been focusing on cancer in wild animals since 2018, told VOA. “The idea behind this is that some species have evolved some mechanisms to limit cancer initiation and progression,” he said. “If we identify and understand these mechanisms, then the goal is to use them as a source of inspiration to develop new therapies.” Cancer affects both humans and animals but its impact on wild animals has been difficult to uncover. “There are no basic blood tests to detect cancer in the wild animals,” Giraudeau told VOA, “so most of the studies have to use necropsies [post-mortem examinations of animals] to detect cancer cases in wild animals. That’s why using zoo animals is a fantastic opportunity, since a necropsy is performed for most of the animals dying in zoos.” Researchers say there are more questions than answers regarding cancer in wild animals, which are hard to study in their natural habitat because they move around and are therefore difficult to observe over time. “We don’t really know much about the different kinds of animals species that get cancer or how much,” …

Advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration met Thursday to discuss and vote on whether to recommend targeting one of the currently dominant XBB coronavirus variants in updated COVID-19 shots being developed for a fall vaccination campaign.  FDA staff reviewers in documents released this week said available evidence suggests this year’s shots should target an XBB variant. XBB and its offshoots, which now account for most U.S. infections, are descendants of the omicron variant that caused COVID cases to surge to record levels early last year.  U.S. regulators are looking to bring the next COVID shots more closely in line with the circulating virus.   The next-generation shots should select a single XBB-related target, the FDA’s staff reviewers suggested. A so-called monovalent vaccine would be a change from the most recent bivalent COVID boosters that targeted both the original strain of the coronavirus and omicron.  Top FDA official Peter Marks said there was concern about another COVID wave over the 2023-24 winter, when population immunity could wane further.   The expert panel meeting comes after an advisory group to the World Health Organization last month recommended the next wave of COVID booster shots be updated to target XBB subvariants. Europe’s medicine regulators backed that recommendation.  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended booster shots broadly last year. But panel member Dr. Paul Offit questioned whether the shots needed to be recommended for “everybody every season,” noting that the highest risk groups are those most likely to benefit …

The long hunt for extraterrestrials just got a big boost. Scientists have discovered that phosphorus, a key building block of life, lies in the ocean beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The finding was based on a review of data collected by NASA’s Cassini probe, and it was published Wednesday in the prestigious journal Nature. Cassini started exploring Saturn and its rings and moons in 2004, before burning up in the gas giant’s atmosphere when its mission ended in 2017. “This is a stunning discovery for astrobiology,” said Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute, one of the paper’s co-authors, noting: “We have found abundant phosphorus in plume ice samples spraying out of the subsurface ocean.” Geysers on Enceladus’ south pole spew icy particles through cracks on the surface out into space, feeding Saturn’s E ring — the faint ring outside the brighter main rings.  Scientists previously found other minerals and organic compounds in the ejected ice grains, but not phosphorus, which is an essential building block for DNA and RNA. It also is found in the bones and teeth of people, animals, and even ocean plankton. Simply put, life as we know it would not be possible without phosphorus. While geochemical modeling had previously found it was likely phosphorus would also be present, and this prediction was published in an earlier paper, it is one thing to forecast something and another to confirm, said Glein. “It’s the first time this essential element has been discovered in an …

Six percent of all maternal deaths around the world are caused by obstructed labor, according to the World Health Organization. That’s when a baby can’t move through the birth canal. It can also lead to obstetric fistula, a condition that can have a long-term impact on a woman’s health, especially in developing countries. Reporter Idd Uwesu has more from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in this report narrated by Omary Kaseko. Video: …

When peanuts are dropped into a pint of beer, they sink to the bottom before floating up and “dancing” in the glass.  Scientists have dug deep to investigate this phenomenon in a study published on Wednesday, saying it has implications for understanding mineral extraction or bubbling magma in the Earth’s crust.  Brazilian researcher Luiz Pereira, the study’s lead author, told AFP he first had the idea when passing through Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires to learn Spanish.   It was a “bartender thing” in the city to take a few peanuts and pop them into beers, Pereira said.  Because the peanuts are denser than the beer, they first sink down to the bottom of the glass.  Then each peanut becomes what is called a “nucleation site.” Hundreds of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide form on their surface, acting as buoys to drag them upward.  “The bubbles prefer to form on the peanuts rather than on the glass walls,” said Pereira, a researcher at Germany’s Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.  When the bubbles reach the surface, they burst.  The peanuts sink again before being propelled up anew by freshly formed bubbles, in a dance that continues until the carbon dioxide runs out, or someone interrupts it by drinking the beer.  In a series of experiments, the team of researchers in Germany, Britain and France examined how roasted, shelled peanuts fared in a lager-style beer.  ‘Beer-gas-peanut system’ The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, describes two key factors in what the …

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 …

Global leaders in the battle against global warming convened in Bonn, Germany, on Monday for the start of the final phase of a two-year long assessment of the progress being made to limit rising temperatures. The annual Bonn Climate Change Conference is part of the “global stocktake” — a process by which countries around the world assess how much progress has been made toward compliance with the 2015 Paris Agreement, a worldwide effort to prevent global temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era average. “The global stocktake is an ambition exercise. It’s an accountability exercise. It’s an acceleration exercise,” U.N. Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said in a statement. “It’s an exercise that is intended to make sure every Party is holding up their end of the bargain, knows where they need to go next and how rapidly they need to move to fulfill the goals of the Paris Agreement.” However, Stiell warned that the findings will only be meaningful if they are paired with action. “The global stocktake will end up being just another report unless governments and those that they represent can look at it and ultimately understand what it means for them and what they can and must do next. It’s the same for businesses, communities and other key stakeholders,” he said. The stocktake will conclude in November, when the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP28) is held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Stocktake process The global stocktake is a two-year process that …

The European Union is pushing online platforms like Google and Meta to step up the fight against false information by adding labels to text, photos and other content generated by artificial intelligence, a top official said Monday. EU Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said the ability of a new generation of AI chatbots to create complex content and visuals in seconds raises “fresh challenges for the fight against disinformation.” Jourova said she asked Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and other tech companies that have signed up to the 27-nation bloc’s voluntary agreement on combating disinformation to dedicate efforts to tackling the AI problem. Online platforms that have integrated generative AI into their services, such as Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Google’s Bard chatbot, should build safeguards to prevent “malicious actors” from generating disinformation, Jourova said at a briefing in Brussels. Companies offering services that have the potential to spread AI-generated disinformation should roll out technology to “recognize such content and clearly label this to users,” she said. Jourova said EU regulations are aimed at protecting free speech, but when it comes to AI, “I don’t see any right for the machines to have the freedom of speech.” The swift rise of generative AI technology, which has the capability to produce human-like text, images and video, has amazed many and alarmed others with its potential to transform many aspects of daily life. Europe has taken a lead role in the global movement to regulate artificial intelligence with its AI Act, but the …

A pill has been shown to halve the risk of death from a certain type of lung cancer when taken daily after surgery to remove the tumor, according to clinical trial results presented on Sunday. The results were unveiled in Chicago at the largest annual conference of cancer specialists, hosted by the American Society for Clinical Oncology. Lung cancer is the form of the disease that causes the most deaths, with approximately 1.8 million fatalities every year worldwide. The treatment developed by the pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca is called osimertinib and is marketed under the name Tagrisso. It targets a particular type of lung cancer in patients suffering from so-called non-small cell cancer, the most common type, and showing a particular type of mutation. These mutations, on what is called the epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR, affect 10% to 25% of lung cancer patients in the United States and Europe, and 30 to 40% in Asia. The clinical trial included some 680 participants at an early stage of the disease (stages 1b to 3a), in more than 20 countries. They had to have been operated on first to remove the tumor, then half of the patients took the treatment daily, and the other a placebo. The result showed that taking the tablet resulted in a 51% reduction in the risk of death for treated patients, compared to placebo. After five years, 88% of patients who took the treatment were still alive, compared to 78% of patients who took the placebo. …