Month: February 2025

Measles is making a comeback in the United States.  Fifty-eight cases of the highly contagious disease were reported Tuesday by health officials in rural West Texas, while eight cases were confirmed in neighboring eastern New Mexico.   Texas officials say the outbreak there, the largest in almost 30 years, is mainly confined to Gaines County, with 45 infections, but four other counties account for an additional 13 cases.    The Texas measles cases, according to health officials, have occurred mainly among a "close-knit, undervaccinated" Mennonite community.  Authorities say at least three of the New Mexico cases are in counties that border Texas' Gaines County.  Earlier this month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 14 measles cases across the country.   Mayo Clinic describes measles as "a childhood…

WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA — U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to study how to expand access to in vitro fertilization and make it more affordable.  The order calls for policy recommendations to "protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments," according to the White House. On the campaign trail, Trump called for universal coverage of IVF treatment after his Supreme Court nominees helped to overturn Roe v. Wade, leading to a wave of restrictions in Republican-led states, including some that have threatened access to IVF by trying to define life as beginning at conception.  Trump, who was at his Florida residence and club Mar-a-Lago, also signed another executive order and a presidential memorandum. The second executive order outlined the oversight…

KAMPALA — Uganda discharged on Tuesday the last eight patients who recovered from Ebola, health authorities reported, and there were no other positive cases in the outbreak declared last month.  World Health Organization described the recoveries as a milestone that "reflects the power of Uganda's quick and coordinated response."  Most of the Ebola patients were treated at the main referral facility in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.  The lone Ebola victim was a male nurse who died the day before the outbreak was declared in Kampala on Jan. 30. His relatives are among those later hospitalized with Ebola.  Tracing contacts is key to stemming the spread of Ebola, which manifests as a viral hemorrhagic fever. Ugandan officials documented at least 265 contacts, and at least 90 of them have completed a period…

Los Angeles — On a recent Sunday, Tracy Quinn drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to assess damage wrought upon the coastline by the Palisades Fire. The water line was darkened by ash. Burnt remnants of washing machines and dryers and metal appliances were strewn about the shoreline. Sludge carpeted the water's edge. Waves during high tide lapped onto charred homes, pulling debris and potentially toxic ash into the ocean as they receded. “It was just heartbreaking,” said Quinn, president and CEO of the environmental group Heal the Bay, whose team has reported ash and debris some 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of the Palisades burn area west of Los Angeles. As crews work to remove potentially hundreds of thousands of tons of hazardous materials from the Los Angeles wildfires, researchers…

YAOUNDE, CAMEROON — Chad health officials have sealed several dozen schools, sent thousands of children and their teachers home, and restricted movements to and from the Bologo district — 400 kilometers south of the capital, N'djamena — to contain a measles epidemic. Officials blame vaccine hesitancy for the rapid measles spread within the past two weeks. State TV reports that thousands of children in Chad's Bologo district have been ordered to stay home for a week as their schools remain closed to prevent measles from spreading. Many churches and mosques in the district are closed too. About 50 cases of measles were confirmed within the past two weeks, said Oumar Mahamat Traore, chief health official in Bologo, appointed by Chad's central government in N'djamena. He said the situation is very concerning…

U.S. health officials have banned Red Dye No. 3 from American foods, decades after the synthetic coloring was banned in Europe. As VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports, studies have linked the bright red color additive to cancer in male laboratory rats. ...

BALTIMORE — A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump's recent executive order aimed at restricting gender-affirming health care for transgender people under age 19. The judge's ruling came after a lawsuit was filed earlier this month on behalf of families with transgender or nonbinary children who allege their health care has been compromised by the president's order. A national group for family of LGBTQ+ people and a doctors organization are also plaintiffs in the court challenge, one of many lawsuits opposing one of the many executive orders Trump has issued. Judge Brendan Hurson, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden, granted the plaintiffs' request for a temporary restraining order following a hearing in federal court in Baltimore. The ruling, in effect for 14 days, essentially puts Trump's…

NEW YORK — A new study shows that bird flu has silently spread from animals to some veterinarians. The study published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoes two smaller ones that detected evidence of infection in previously undiagnosed farmworkers. In those studies, several of the infected workers remembered having symptoms of H5N1 bird flu, while none of the veterinarians in the new paper recalled any such symptoms. The new study is more evidence that the official U.S. tally of confirmed human bird flu infections — 68 in the last year — is likely a significant undercount, said Dr. Gregory Gray, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. "This means that people are being infected, likely due to their occupational exposures, and not…

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as President Donald Trump's health secretary, putting the prominent vaccine skeptic in control of $1.7 trillion in federal spending, vaccine recommendations and food safety as well as health insurance programs for roughly half the country. Republicans fell in line behind Trump despite hesitancy over Kennedy’s views on vaccines, voting 52-48 to elevate the scion of one of America's most storied political — and Democratic — families to secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child, was the only "no" vote among Republicans, mirroring his stands against Trump's picks for the Pentagon chief and director of national intelligence. All Democrats opposed Kennedy. The GOP has largely embraced Kennedy's vision to…

LONDON — Work to give 21st-century London yet another skyscraper has uncovered traces — in fact chunks — of the city's origins almost 2,000 years ago.  Archaeologists exploring the site of a planned 32-story office tower announced Thursday that they have unearthed the remains of a Roman basilica that once stood at the heart of the city known as Londinium.  Excavations in the basement of a building slated to be demolished for the tower at 85 Gracechurch St. uncovered flint, brick and ragstone walls and foundations, up to 1 meter (over 3 feet) wide, 4 meters (13 feet) deep and two millennia old.  Sophie Jackson of Museum of London Archaeology called it "one of the most significant discoveries" in years in London's oldest quarter, the City – the square-mile financial district…

The New York State Department of Health on Tuesday confirmed its first case of the new mpox strain, adding to the global concerns over the spread of the little-known variant. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were three confirmed cases in the country — in California, Georgia and New Hampshire — caused by the clade Ib strain. The agency said the three cases were not linked. The World Health Organization declared mpox a global public health emergency for the second time in two years in August, following an outbreak of the viral infection in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has spread to neighboring countries. The New York State Department of Health declined to provide further information on the case. ...

FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA — Scientists have long suspected that Mexican long-nosed bats migrate through southeastern Arizona, but without capturing and measuring the night-flying creatures, proof has been elusive.  Researchers say they now have a way to tell the endangered species apart from other bats by analyzing saliva the nocturnal mammals leave behind when sipping nectar from plants and residential hummingbird feeders.  Bat Conservation International, a nonprofit group working to end the extinction of bat species worldwide, teamed up with residents from southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico and west Texas for the saliva-swabbing campaign.  The samples of saliva left along potential migration routes were sent to a lab at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where researchers looked for environmental DNA — or eDNA — to confirm that the bats cycle through Arizona and…

Fifteen measles cases — mostly in school-aged children — have been confirmed in a small county in West Texas with one of the highest rates of vaccine exemptions in the state. South Plains Public Health District Director Zach Holbrooks said Monday that his department was first notified in late January about the first two cases in Gaines County, which he said were “two children who had seen a physician in Lubbock.” Some of the cases appear to be connected to private religious schools in the district, said Holbrooks, who cautioned that the investigation is ongoing. “I wouldn’t say they’re all connected, but our teams are looking into exposure sites and the background of those cases," he said. Local health officials set up a drive-through vaccination clinic last week and are…

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — Europe's Euclid space telescope has detected a rare halo of bright light around a nearby galaxy, astronomers reported Monday. The halo, known as an Einstein ring, encircles a galaxy 590 million light-years away, considered close by cosmic standards.   A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. Astronomers have known about this galaxy for more than a century and so were surprised when Euclid revealed the bright glowing ring, reported in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.   An Einstein ring is light from a much more distant galaxy that bends in such a way as to perfectly encircle a closer object, in this case a well-known galaxy in the constellation Draco.   The faraway galaxy creating the ring is more than 4 billion light-years away. Gravity distorted the light from this more…