Month: April 2022

The World Health Organization says a variety of crises are adversely impacting the health of millions and blocking needed humanitarian aid in war-torn hotspots around the world.    War, climate disasters, and COVID-19 are threatening global health and undermining the capacity to build and maintain economically viable and stable societies.  These multiple crises are most pronounced in war-torn countries. Ukraine, a once thriving society, is now shattered. Since Russia invaded 51 days ago, thousands of civilians, including children, have been killed or injured. The WHO has confirmed 119 attacks on health care personnel and facilities since the start of the war there.  WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said health services are severely disrupted, particularly in the east of the country, now the epicenter of the fighting. “For the sake of humanity,…

The first all-private charter to the International Space Station. Plus, a look back in history at a moon mission gone wrong, and an auction offering some of the most-expensive dust on Earth. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. ...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion ban into law Thursday as the state joined a growing conservative push to restrict access ahead of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could limit the procedure nationwide. The new law marks a significant blow to abortion access in the South, where Florida has provided wider access to the procedure than its regional neighbors. The new law, which takes effect July 1, contains exceptions if the abortion is necessary to save a mother's life, prevent serious injury or if the fetus has a fatal abnormality. It does not allow for exemptions in cases where pregnancies were caused by rape, incest or human trafficking. Under current law, Florida allows abortions up to 24 weeks. "This will represent the most significant protections for life…

Climate change will accelerate at an unprecedented pace if governments don’t act soon, according to a recent report by the United Nations. For many people, such news can spur conflicting emotions. Hopelessness that it’s all too late? A sense of urgency to do something? VOA’s Julie Taboh spoke with a few young people about their concerns for the fate of the planet. ...

The pandemic plunged 77 million more people into extreme poverty last year and many developing countries can't recover because of the crippling cost of debt repayments -- and that was before the added impact of the war in Ukraine, a U.N. report said Tuesday. The report said rich countries could support their recovery from pandemic slumps with record amounts borrowed at ultra-low interest rates. But the poorest countries spent billions of dollars servicing their debts and faced much higher borrowing costs, preventing them from spending on improving education and health care, protecting the environment and reducing inequality. According to the U.N., 812 million people lived in extreme poverty — on $1.90 a day or less -- in 2019, and by 2021 amid the pandemic the number had risen to 889…

2021 was the deadliest year in U.S. history, and new data and research are offering more insights into how it got that bad.  The main reason for the increase in deaths? COVID-19, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's work on death statistics.  The agency this month quietly updated its provisional death tally. It showed there were 3.465 million deaths last year, or about 80,000 more than 2020's record-setting total.  Early last year, some experts were optimistic that 2021 would not be as bad as the first year of the pandemic — partly because effective COVID-19 vaccines had finally become available.  "We were wrong, unfortunately," said Noreen Goldman, a Princeton University researcher.  COVID-19 deaths rose in 2021 — to more than 415,000, up from 351,000…

The U.S. said on Tuesday it had seized RaidForums, a popular website used by hackers to buy and sell stolen data, and at the same time unsealed charges against the website's founder and chief administrator Diego Santos Coelho. Coelho, 21, of Portugal, was arrested in the United Kingdom on Jan. 31, and remains in custody while the United States seeks his extradition to stand trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Justice Department said. The department said it had obtained court approval to seize three different domain names that hosted the RaidForums website: raidforums.com, Rf.ws and Raid.lol. Among the types of data that were available for sale on the site included stolen bank routing and account numbers, credit cards information, log-in credentials and social…

The World Health Organization said on Monday it is tracking a few dozen cases of two new sub-variants of the highly transmissible omicron strain of the coronavirus to assess whether they are more infectious or dangerous. It has added BA.4 and BA.5, sister variants of the original BA.1 omicron variant, to its list for monitoring. It is already tracking BA.1 and BA.2 — now globally dominant — as well as BA.1.1 and BA.3. The WHO said it had begun tracking them because of their "additional mutations that need to be further studied to understand their impact on immune escape potential." Viruses mutate all the time but only some mutations affect their ability to spread or evade prior immunity from vaccination or infection, or the severity of disease they cause. For instance, BA.2…

Facing an existential threat from climate change, Mumbai, India’s financial hub has embarked an ambitious climate action plan that aims to make the city carbon-neutral by 2050. It is the first city to set a timeline to reach zero emissions in South Asia, one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to rising temperatures. In recent years, the coastal city has witnessed more bursts of torrential rain, storm surges and cyclones, in addition to rising sea levels. Built on a narrow strip along the Arabian Sea, the city’s low-lying areas where millions of poor people live in shanties, and the city’s southern tip, home to glitzy office towers, the stock exchange and legislature, are especially vulnerable, according to climate scientists. “Mumbai will become a climate-resilient metropolis,” Maharashtra state Chief Minister, Uddhav…

For many in the U.K., the pandemic may as well be over. Mask requirements have been dropped. Free mass testing is a thing of the past. And for the first time since spring 2020, people can go abroad for holidays without ordering tests or filling out lengthy forms. That sense of freedom is widespread even as infections soared in Britain in March, driven by the milder but more transmissible omicron BA.2 variant that’s rapidly spreading around Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere. The situation in the U.K. may portend what lies ahead for other countries as they ease coronavirus restrictions. France and Germany have seen similar spikes in infections in recent weeks, and the number of hospitalizations in the U.K. and France has again climbed — though the number of deaths…

In the days after a group of West Point cadets on spring break were sickened by fentanyl-laced cocaine at a South Florida house party, community activists sprang into action. They blitzed beaches, warned spring breakers of a surge in recreational drugs cut with the dangerous synthetic opioid and offered an antidote for overdoses, which have risen nationally during the COVID-19 pandemic. Street teams stood under the blistering sun, handing out beads, pamphlets and samples of naloxone, a drug known by the brand name Narcan, which can revive overdose victims. "We weren't sure how people would react," said Thomas Smith, director of behavioral health services for The Special Purpose Outreach Team, a local mobile medical program. "But the spring breakers have been great. Some say, 'I don't do drugs, but my…

The first all-private team of astronauts ever launched to the International Space Station (ISS) arrived safely at the orbiting research platform Saturday to begin a weeklong science mission hailed as a milestone in commercial spaceflight. The rendezvous came about 21 hours after the four-man team representing Houston-based startup company Axiom Space, Inc. lifted off Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, riding atop a SpaceX-launched Falcon 9 rocket. The Crew Dragon capsule lofted to orbit by the rocket docked with the ISS at about 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT) Saturday as the two space vehicles were flying roughly 250 miles (420 km) above the central Atlantic Ocean, a live NASA webcast of the coupling showed. The final approach was delayed by a technical glitch that disrupted a video feed used to…

Shanghai is China’s most populous city, a place marked by its expansive worldview and keen sense of its own identity. But now it is chafing at Beijing’s rigid containment methods designed in accordance with the national zero-COVID policy. Since a wave of infections struck the metropolis of some 25 million people last month, Shanghai officials have imposed a temporary lockdown (March 28), designed a policy separating infected children from their parents (April 2), extended the lockdown indefinitely (April 5), buckled before a public outcry to ease the child-parent separation policy and seen the daily count of new cases hit a record 22,000 (April 8). Viral videos appear to show residents tackling health workers in hazmat suits and charging through a barricaded street shouting “We want to eat cheap vegetables,” according…

Saudi Arabia said Saturday it will permit 1 million Muslims from inside and outside the country to participate in this year's hajj, a sharp uptick after pandemic restrictions forced two years of drastically pared-down pilgrimages. The hajj ministry "has authorized 1 million pilgrims, both foreign and domestic, to perform the hajj this year," it said in a statement. One of the five pillars of Islam, the hajj must be undertaken by all Muslims with the means at least once in their lives. Usually one of the world's largest religious gatherings, about 2.5 million people took part in 2019. But after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Saudi authorities allowed only 1,000 pilgrims to participate. The following year, they upped the total to 60,000 fully vaccinated citizens and residents…

The United Nations warned Friday that an old, neglected oil tanker carrying more than a million barrels of oil is a ticking "time bomb" at "imminent risk" of a major spill off the coast of Yemen that could cost $20 billion to clean up. "If it were to happen, the spill would unleash a massive ecological and humanitarian catastrophe centered on a country already decimated by more than seven years of war," U.N. Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen David Gressly told reporters. "The environmental damage could affect states across the Red Sea. The economic impact of disrupted shipping would be felt across the region." The FSO Safer is one more casualty in the war between the Saudi-backed government of Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and Iranian-supported Houthi rebels.…

An international donor conference on Friday raised $4.8 billion for the U.N.-backed COVAX plan to deliver coronavirus jabs to poorer countries, organizers said. "The pandemic is not over, far from it. Until we beat COVID-19 everywhere, we beat it nowhere. That is a fact, and a responsibility for all of us," said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, co-host of the online conference. Scholz, whose bid to make COVID jabs mandatory for over-60s in Germany failed in parliament this week, warned that the ongoing pandemic risked creating new variants that could be "more dangerous" than previous ones. The conference, hosted by Germany, Ghana, Senegal and Indonesia, sought to address a yawning gap in vaccination rates between the world's richest and poorest countries. The COVAX program, co-led by vaccine-sharing alliance Gavi, the World…

As the U.S. tries to emerge from the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic, health experts and law enforcement officials are concerned about another health crisis: a sharp rise in the number of drug related overdoses attributed to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a bulletin earlier this week to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies warning of a nationwide spike in fentanyl-related mass-overdose events. Already this year, numerous mass overdose events have resulted in dozens of overdoses and deaths,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram in an email statement to VOA. Fentanyl-related mass overdose events are characterized as three or more overdoses occurring close in time and at the same location. In February, five people died in an apartment outside Denver from overdoses of fentanyl…

Without a single dollar of the $5 billion it requested for its global COVID-19 response approved, the Biden administration's key program to help vaccinate the world is in danger of grinding to a halt. Even as the administration marked World Health Day on Thursday with a commitment to build a safer, healthier and more equitable future around the globe, without additional funding from Congress, by September the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will no longer be able to finance Global Vax. The U.S. launched the international initiative in December to deliver shots in arms in 11 countries: Angola, Ivory Coast, Eswatini, Ghana, Lesotho, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. "Without additional funding to support getting shots into arms, USAID will have to curtail our growing efforts…

Disease caused by the omicron variant is on average around two days shorter than the delta variant, a large study of vaccinated Britons who kept a smartphone log of their COVID-19 symptoms after breakthrough infections found. "The shorter presentation of symptoms suggests — pending confirmation from viral load studies — that the period of infectiousness might be shorter, which would in turn impact workplace health policies and public health guidance,” the study authors wrote. Based on the Zoe COVID app, which collects data on self-reported symptoms, the study also found that a symptomatic omicron infection was 25% less likely to result in hospital admission than in a case of delta. While omicron's lesser severity has been known, the study is unique in its detailed analysis and in that it corrected…

The grand explanation physicists use to describe how the universe works may have some major new flaws to patch after a fundamental particle was found to have more mass than scientists thought. "It's not just something is wrong," said Dave Toback, a particle physicist at Texas A&M University and a spokesperson for the U.S. government's Fermi National Accelerator Lab, which conducted the experiments. If replicated by other labs, "it literally means something fundamental in our understanding of nature is wrong." The physicists at the lab crashed particles together over 10 years and measured the mass of 4 million W bosons. These subatomic particles are responsible for a fundamental force at the center of atoms, and they exist for only a fraction of a second before they decay into other particles.…