Month: February 2022

NASA says global temperatures are on the rise, and that could spell trouble for future Winter Games. Plus, Australian astronomers discover an unidentified space object, and a pair of satellites touch the sky. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us a Winter Olympics-edition of The Week in Space. ...

The World Health Organization’s European region director says that while COVID-19 cases on the continent continue to rise, he sees a plausible endgame for the pandemic in Europe in coming months. Speaking during his weekly virtual news briefing from his headquarters in Copenhagen, WHO Europe Region Director Hans Kluge told reporters the region recorded 12 million cases in the past week, the highest weekly case incidence since the start of the pandemic, largely driven by the omicron variant. But Kluge said, while hospitalizations continue to rise - mainly in countries with lower vaccination rates — they have not risen as fast as the rate of new infection, and admissions to intensive care units have not increased significantly. Meanwhile, deaths from COVID-19 have remained steady. Kluge said the pandemic is far from…

Crushing fatigue. Brain fog. Trouble breathing weeks after contracting COVID-19. Scientists call it post-acute sequelae of COVID-19. Most people just call it "long COVID." For millions of people, these and other symptoms are keeping them from getting back to their lives months after their last positive COVID-19 test. But what is long COVID, exactly? How common is it? Who gets it, and why? As with so many things over the past two pandemic years, the answer to the most basic questions is, "We don't know yet." Studies are starting to narrow things down. But a lot still is up in the air. "I would take everything we have so far with a grain of salt," Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, founding director of the Boston University Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy…

The police chief of Canada's capital said Wednesday there is likely no policing solution to end a protest against vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions that has snarled traffic around Parliament. He also said there is a "significant element" of the protest's funding and organization coming from the United States. Thousands of protesters descended on Ottawa over the weekend, deliberately blocking traffic around Parliament Hill. Police estimate the protest involved 8,000-15,000 people Saturday but has since dwindled to several hundred. But trucks were still blocking traffic. "We are now aware of a significant element from the United States that have been involved in the funding, the organizing and the demonstrating. They have converged on our city and there are plans for more to come," Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly said.…

The Biden administration launched a plan Wednesday to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50% over the next 25 years, a continuation of the 2016 “cancer moonshot” program that President Joe Biden led as vice president in the Obama administration. “It’s bold. It's ambitious, but it's completely doable,” Biden said at the White House launch event. He said his plan would turn cancer from a death sentence into a chronic disease that people can live with, and that it would create a more supportive experience for cancer patients and their families. Biden urged Americans to get screened, noting that 9 million cancer screenings were missed in the country during the pandemic. He established what he called a “cancer cabinet” — officials who will coordinate and harness the federal…

U.S. intelligence agencies may have ruled out the idea that a rash of mysterious illnesses plaguing American diplomats and other officials is part of a sustained campaign by one of Washington's adversaries, but they now say that in a small number of cases the only likely explanation is the use of some sort of weapon.  A report released Wednesday by a panel of experts assembled by U.S. intelligence officials finds that the core symptoms in these cases are "distinctly unusual and unreported elsewhere in the medical literature," making it highly unlikely the cause could be natural.  "Pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radiofrequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics," the report said.  "Sources exist that could generate the required stimulus, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements," the report added.…

As several European nations scale back or drop COVID-19 restrictions altogether, the World Health Organization (WHO) is urging caution as the coronavirus remains. Denmark lifted most of its COVID-19 restrictions Tuesday, including the use of masks in public places or requiring proof of vaccination to enter public venues, with government officials saying they no longer consider COVID-19 a “socially critical disease.” France, Britain and other European nations are following suit. At a briefing Tuesday at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it is premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory over the pandemic.   Tedros said because of the omicron variant of the virus that causes COVID-19, it remains highly transmissible and deadly. He said that in the 10 weeks since…

President Joe Biden is committing to reduce the cancer death rate by 50% — a new goal for the "moonshot" initiative against the disease that was announced in 2016 when he was vice president. Biden has set a 25-year timeline for achieving that goal, part of his broader effort to end cancer as we know it, according to senior administration officials who previewed Wednesday's announcement on the condition of anonymity. The issue is deeply personal for Biden: He lost his elder son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. Yet the rollout comes without any new funding elements at a time when the gains from new research can be uneven, such that Biden is setting an aspiration for the country more than 50 years after President Richard Nixon signed the National…

A study released Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows an extra shot of a COVID-19 vaccine provides solid protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death. The federal health agency followed more than 400,000 adults in Los Angeles who were infected with either the delta or omicron variants of the coronavirus between November and this past January. Researchers found that unvaccinated residents who were infected with the delta strain between November and December were 83 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who had been vaccinated and gotten the booster shot. Meanwhile, the study found that in January, when omicron overtook delta as the primary variant in Los Angeles, unvaccinated individuals were more than three times as likely to be infected and 23 times more…

Beijing has been exporting traditional Chinese medicine around the world, including to countries on the African continent. With claims of helping with COVID, these herbal clinics are welcomed by some while others are raising concerns about the effectiveness of such medicines, and the lack of regulation in the field. Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi. Camera: Robert Lutta ...

When it comes to measuring global warming, humidity, not just heat, matters in generating dangerous climate extremes, a new study finds.  Researchers say temperature by itself isn't the best way to measure climate change's weird weather and downplays impacts in the tropics. But factoring in air moisture along with heat shows that climate change since 1980 is nearly twice as bad as previously calculated, according to their study in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The energy generated in extreme weather, such as storms, floods and rainfall, is related to the amount of water in the air. So, a team of scientists in the United States and China decided to use an obscure weather measurement called equivalent potential temperature — or theta-e — that reflects "the moisture energy…

A group of pharmaceutical companies and distributors agreed to pay $590 million to settle lawsuits connected to opioid addiction among Native American tribes, according to a U.S. court filing released Tuesday.  The agreement is the latest amid a deluge of litigation spawned by the U.S. opioid crisis, which has claimed more than 500,000 lives over the past 20 years and ensnared some of the largest firms in American medicine.  The companies involved in the latest agreement include Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and McKesson, according to a filing in an Ohio federal court by a committee of plaintiffs in the case.  Native Americans have "suffered some of the worst consequences of the opioid epidemic of any population in the United States," including the highest per-capita rate of opioid overdoses compared with…

The World Health Organization warns of health care risks posed by discarded COVID-19 equipment and is calling on nations to better manage their systems for disposing of the used gear. Tackling the COVID-19 pandemic requires the use of huge quantities of personal protective equipment or PPE and the use of needles and syringes to administer vaccines, among other essential products. A new World Health Organization global analysis finds the quantities of health care waste generated by the goods are enormous and potentially dangerous. Maggie Montgomery is the technical officer for water, sanitation and health in the WHO Department of Environment. She says COVID-19 has increased health care risks in facilities at up to 10 times previous volumes. “If you consider that two in three health care facilities in the least…