Month: October 2021

A Russian film crew blasts into space on a moviemaking history mission, an American actor known for playing a space explorer gets the chance to see the real deal, and more. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has more on the Week in Space. ...

The announcement of the first-ever malaria vaccine not only inspires hope in the battle against one of the planet's most pernicious diseases but also underscores the need to attack this scourge on multiple fronts, says the head of the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative, which this week rolled out an ambitious five-year plan aimed at taming what he described as "the oldest pandemic." Malaria, a parasitic infection spread by mosquitoes, kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. Most of the victims are young children, and most malaria cases occur in sub-Saharan Africa. While malaria is not endemic to the United States, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden considers anti-malaria efforts a priority, said Dr. Raj Panjabi, who was appointed as PMI's global malaria coordinator in February. PMI is a…

U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Chicago on Thursday, making another push for companies to require their workers to get vaccinated, following the vaccine mandate for businesses he announced last month. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report. ...

German officials unveiled this week what they said is the world's first commercial plant for making synthetic kerosene. It’s seen as a climate-friendly way to produce jet fuel and could potentially be game-changing. More with VOA’s Mariama Diallo. ...

The U.N. secretary-general and the head of the World Health Organization launched an ambitious strategy Thursday to have 40% of the world’s population vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of this year, and 70% by mid-2022. “With vaccine production now at nearly 1.5 billion doses per month, we can reach 40% of people in all countries by year’s end — if we can mobilize some $8 billion to ensure that distribution is equitable,” U.N. chief Antonio Guterres told a news conference. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 6.5 billion doses have already been administered worldwide. Another 5 billion are needed to meet the 70% benchmark, which Tedros said current vaccine manufacturing rates can handle. “This is not a supply problem, it is an allocation problem,” he said, adding it is…

German Health Minister Jens Spahn said Thursday the nation has vaccinated millions more people than previously thought, thanks to some unreported vaccination numbers discovered by the Robert Koch Institute for Disease Control. The institute says nearly 80% of adults in Germany are fully vaccinated, and about 84% have received at least one shot. Previous official reports were about 5% lower — meaning there are about 3.5 million more people vaccinated than had been reported.  Speaking to reporters in Berlin, Spahn said the discrepancy was discovered in surveys conducted by the RKI that revealed additional vaccinations. He believes some big companies’ employee vaccination programs and mobile vaccination teams in nursing centers and elsewhere may account for those initially unreported. The new RKI figures are based on surveys and do not include…

More than 260,000 African children under the age of five die from malaria each year, including more than 10,000 in Kenya, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO’s backing of a malaria vaccine, Mosquirix, for children in sub-Saharan Africa has raised hopes of preventing those deaths. The vaccine proved effective in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization gave the green light for the use of the vaccine for children between five and 24 months of age in Africa and other regions prone to a high level of malaria transmission. This follows trials of the vaccine in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi. The four-dose shot was administered to 800,000 African children. Thirty-year-old Salome Awuor allowed her son, now three years old, to take…

Americans are being warned to beware of potentially deadly fake prescription pills that are laced with the powerful opioid fentanyl and the highly addictive stimulant methamphetamine. The counterfeit tablets are linked to a wave of drug overdoses killing unsuspecting users. In its first warning in six years, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said international and domestic criminal networks were mass-producing fake pills and falsely marketing them as legitimate prescription medication. “Counterfeit pills that contain these dangerous and extremely addictive drugs are more lethal and more accessible than ever before,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram at a news conference in Washington. The notification was issued last week after the DEA announced it had seized more than 1.8 million fake pills during a two-month undercover operation and had arrested more than 810 people.…

The World Health Organization recommended Wednesday that children in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions on the continent with moderate-to-high malaria transmission receive a malaria vaccine. The vaccine, known as Mosquirix, proved effective in a pilot program in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi that has reached more than 800,000 children since 2019.  The WHO said malaria is a top killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa, causing the deaths of more than 260,000 children under age 5 every year.  The vaccine, which requires four doses, counters P. falciparum, "the most deadly malaria parasite globally, and the most prevalent in Africa," WHO said in a press release.  "For centuries, malaria has stalked sub-Saharan Africa, causing immense personal suffering," Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said in a statement. "We have long hoped…

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Wednesday awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to two scientists for their work - independently – in developing a new way of building molecules, a process with applications throughout industry. Speaking in Stockholm, academy Secretary General Goran Hansson said chemists Benjamin List of Germany’s Max Planck Institute and David MacMillan of Princeton University will split this year’s prize. In presenting the award, the academy explained the two chemists developed new, organic catalysts to help build molecules. Catalysts are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product, and are essential to constructing molecules for research and industry. The academy said previously, it was believed there were just two types of catalysts available: metals and enzymes. But over the…

The crew of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft was welcomed aboard the International Space Station Tuesday, though a communications glitch during their final approach delayed their eventual boarding. The Soyuz spacecraft was launched Tuesday from the Russian spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The ship was carrying a history-making crew, as it included film director Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild, who will be filming a feature film during their stay at the station. After the spacecraft orbited the earth twice and made a final approach to the ISS, mission control reported the Soyuz craft experienced some communication issues. Those issues resulted in the crew abandoning automated docking procedures. Veteran Cosmonaut Shkaplerov, the other crew member on the Soyuz craft, manually guided the spacecraft into place without a problem. The manual docking set…

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Tuesday announced the Nobel prize in physics goes to three scientists for their work in helping to understand complex physical systems, work that has proved valuable in quantifying and predicting climate.   At a Stockholm news conference, the academy’s Secretary General Goran K. Hansson and a panel of Nobel jurors presented one half of the physics prize to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.” Hansson said the other half of the prize has been awarded to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales."  The panel said the work of Manabe and Hasselmann “laid the foundation of our knowledge of…

The pandemic is changing how many of us access health care. In the United States and elsewhere, studies show that virtual medical appointments are effective, help patients manage their care and keep people out of hospitals. More from VOA's Carol Pearson. ...

Researchers in Australia have shown a bacteria can sterilize and eradicate a disease-carrying mosquito that is responsible for spreading dengue, yellow fever and Zika. Three million male Aedes aegypti, or yellow fever mosquitoes, were released in the trial at three sites in Northern Queensland state. They were reared at James Cook University in Cairns and sterilized with a naturally-occurring bacteria called Wolbachia.  Researchers say the bacteria appears to have changed part of the male insects’ reproductive biology, so that female mosquitoes that mate with them lay eggs that do not hatch.  The flying insects were released over a 20-week period in 2018. Mosquito numbers subsequently fell by more than 80%. When scientists returned the following year, they found one of the trial areas had almost no mosquitoes. Nigel Beebe is…

A new study reveals the two-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is 90% effective at keeping someone from being hospitalized from the virus up to six months after receiving the second dose.    Researchers from Pfizer and U.S.-based health care consortium Kaiser Permanente observed the records of about 3.4 million people who were members of Kaiser’s Southern California health insurer and provider program between December 2020 and August of this year.    The study, published Monday in The Lancet medical journal, also revealed the vaccine was 93% effective against the highly contagious Delta variant for at least six months after the second shot.    But the researchers also found that the vaccine’s effectiveness against infection dropped from 88% one month after completing the regimen to 47% after six months.    The new study was…

Workers continue to clean up a massive oil spill off the coast of California as divers try to learn why an underwater pipeline started leaking late last week. Mike O'Sullivan reports from Los Angeles.  ...

The U.N. Children's Fund says children are likely to suffer most from the monthslong COVID-related restrictions, school closures, and separation from family and friends. The latest estimates show more than one in seven adolescents aged 10 to 19 suffer from mental health disorders globally, while nearly 46,000 adolescents commit suicide every year. UNICEF spokesman James Elder told VOA most of these conditions are not being addressed because of the stigma attached to mental illness and the lack of government investment. Only about two percent of government health budgets are allocated to mental health spending globally, he said.  "Twenty percent ... of young people are saying that they are feeling depressed and have very little interest in things," he said. "That again is a clear indication of the impact COVID's been…

Officials investigating one of California's biggest oil spills were trying to determine whether the undersea pipeline that spewed 572,807 liters (126,000 gallons) of heavy crude into the Pacific Ocean had been damaged by a ship's anchor.  The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the two busiest container ports in the United States, according to their websites. Together, they see more than 100 cargo ships a day, and those ships pass through and anchor in the area where the pipeline runs.  "We're looking into if it could have been an anchor from a ship, but that's in the assessment phase right now," said Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Jeannie Shaye. Meanwhile, residents of Huntington Beach, California, said authorities were slow to react to the large oil spill off the coast.…

The Biden administration on Monday reversed a ban on abortion referrals by family planning clinics, lifting a Trump-era restriction as political and legal battles over abortion grow sharper from Texas to the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Department of Health and Human Services said its new regulation will restore the federal family planning program to the way it ran under the Obama administration, when clinics were able to refer women seeking abortions to a provider.  Groups representing the clinics said they hope the Biden administration action will lead hundreds of service providers that left in protest over Trump's policies to return, helping to stabilize a longstanding program that has been shaken by the coronavirus pandemic on top of ideological battles. Known as Title X, the taxpayer-funded program makes available more than…