Author: Dmedia

ISLAMABAD — Millions of people in Pakistan continue to live along the path of floodwaters, showing neither people nor the government have learned lessons from the 2022 devastating floods that killed 1,737 people, experts said Thursday, as an aid group said half of the 300 victims killed by rains since July are children. Heavy rainfall is drenching those areas that were badly hit by the deluges two years ago. The charity Save the Children said in a statement that floods and heavy rains have killed more than 150 children in Pakistan since the start of the monsoon season, making up more than half of all deaths in rain-affected areas. The group said that 200 children have also been injured in Pakistan because of rains, which have also displaced thousands of people.…

ABUJA, NIGERIA — Nigeria’s difficult victory over polio faces a challenge as the poliovirus type 2 variant reemerges and the nation considers new measures to tackle the outbreak. Nigeria eradicated wild polio in 2020, but more than 50 cases of the poliovirus type 2 variant were reported between January and May. Authorities and global partners met Wednesday in Abuja with northern traditional leaders to strengthen efforts against the disease, particularly in under-immunized areas. Bill Gates, a key global funder of Nigeria's polio fight, said eradicating this strain is a top priority for the Gates Foundation. "We do have this circulating variant, poliovirus type 2. The acronym is cVDPV2. ... Unfortunately, it's equally bad as the wild poliovirus,” Gates said. “It can paralyze or even kill children, and we still have work…

Zimbabwe’s heavy reliance on coal-based energy is hurting the health of people in mining regions who continue to be exposed to dirty air from coal burning. Columbus Mavhunga visited the Hwange thermal power station — about 700 kilometers from Harare — and the surrounding area, where residents have complained about the air pollution. ...

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For more than a century, dams have blocked fish migration on California’s second-largest river. VOA’s Matt Dibble takes us to the removal of the last of four dams, a victory for Native Americans who depend on the river. ...

A trip that should have lasted just over a week spirals into a roughly eight-month adventure. Plus, a pioneering teacher memorialized in bronze. And a robot proves its purpose by picking up pebbles. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space. ...

Despite global efforts to stop the practice of female genital mutilation, the harmful tradition continues to affect the lives and health of millions of women and girls in Somalia. Reporter Najib Ahmed has this story from the capital, Mogadishu, narrated by Anthony LaBruto. (Camera and Produced by: Abdulkadir Zuber) ...

Kinshasa, Congo — The first delivery of almost 100,000 doses of mpox vaccines will arrive in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Thursday, the African Union's health watchdog said. The vast central Africa country of around 100 million people is at the epicenter of the mpox outbreak, with cases and deaths rising. "We are very pleased with the arrival of this first batch of vaccines in the DRC," Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told AFP, adding that more than 99,000 doses were expected. More than 17,500 cases and 629 deaths have been reported in the country since the start of the year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The vaccine doses will be transported onboard an airplane leaving the Danish capital Copenhagen on…

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Boeing will attempt to return its problem-plagued capsule from the International Space Station later this week — with empty seats. NASA said Wednesday that everything is on track for the Starliner capsule to undock from the space station Friday evening. The fully automated capsule will aim for a touchdown in New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range six hours later. NASA's two stuck astronauts, who flew up on Starliner, will remain behind at the orbiting lab. They'll ride home with SpaceX in February, eight months after launching on what should have been a weeklong test flight. Thruster trouble and helium leaks kept delaying their return until NASA decided that it was too risky for them to accompany Starliner back as originally planned. "It's been a journey to get…

SYDNEY — Global concerns over plastic pollution and cuts to fossil fuel use are behind a new Australian-led initiative to develop a new generation of 100 percent compostable plastic. Experts estimate that more than 170 trillion pieces of plastic are floating in the world's oceans. There are growing concerns about the impact of micro-plastics on health and the environment.     The Bioplastics Innovation Hub aims to “revolutionize” plastic packaging by making biologically-made plastic that can break down in compost, land or water.   The aim is to produce water bottles, for example, using bioplastics derived from waste products from the food industry.  The green plastic scheme brings together the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, the CSIRO - Australia’s national science agency - and Murdoch University in Perth in a multi-million dollar collaboration…

LONDON — The growing mpox outbreaks in Africa that triggered the World Health Organization's emergency declaration are largely the result of decades of neglect and the global community's inability to stop sporadic epidemics among a population with little immunity against the smallpox-related disease, leading African scientists said Tuesday. According to Dr. Dimie Ogoina, who chaired WHO's mpox emergency committee, negligence has led to a new, more transmissible version of the virus emerging in countries with few resources to stop outbreaks. Mpox, also known as monkeypox, had been spreading mostly undetected for years in Africa before the disease prompted the 2022 outbreak in more than 70 countries, Ogoina said at a virtual news conference. "What we are witnessing in Africa now is different from the global outbreak in 2022," he said. While…

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DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Palestinian health authorities and United Nations agencies on Sunday began a large-scale campaign of vaccinations against polio in the Gaza Strip, hoping to prevent an outbreak in the territory that has been ravaged by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Authorities plan to vaccinate children in central Gaza until Wednesday before moving on to the more devastated northern and southern parts of the strip. The campaign began with a small number of vaccinations on Saturday and aims to reach about 640,000 children. The World Health Organization said Thursday that Israel has agreed to limited pauses in the fighting to facilitate the campaign. There were initial reports of Israeli strikes in central Gaza early Sunday, but it was not immediately known if anyone was killed or wounded. Hospitals in…

PATERZELL, Germany — How do you teach a bird how, and where, to fly? The distinctive northern bald ibis, hunted essentially to extinction by the 17th century, was revived by breeding and rewilding efforts over the last two decades. But the birds — known for their distinctive black-and-iridescent green plumage, bald red head and long curved beak — don't instinctively know which direction to fly to migrate without the guidance of wild-born elders. So a team of scientists and conservationists stepped in as foster parents and flight instructors. "We have to teach them the migration route," said biologist Johannes Fritz. The northern bald ibis once soared over North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and much of Europe, including southern Germany's Bavaria. The migratory birds were also considered a delicacy, and the bird,…

CHEYENNE, Wyoming — A "mega den" of hundreds of rattlesnakes in Colorado is getting even bigger now that late summer is here and babies are being born. Thanks to livestream video, scientists studying the den on a craggy hillside in Colorado are learning more about these enigmatic — and often misunderstood — reptiles. They're observing as the youngsters, called pups, slither over and between adult females on lichen-encrusted rocks. The public can watch too on the Project RattleCam website and help with important work including how to tell the snakes apart. Since researchers put their remote camera online in May, several snakes have become known in a chat room and to scientists by names including "Woodstock," "Thea" and "Agent 008." The live feed, which draws as many as 500 people at…

MANILA, Philippines — A Vietnamese doctor who has helped seek justice for victims of the powerful defoliant dioxin "Agent Orange" used by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War is among this year's winners of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards — regarded as Asia's version of the Nobel Prizes.  Other winners announced on Saturday were a group of doctors who struggled to secure adequate health care for Thailand's rural poor, an Indonesian environmental defender, a Japanese animator who tackles complex issues for children, and a Bhutanese academician promoting his country's cultural heritage to help current predicaments.  First given in 1958, the annual awards are named after a Philippine president who died in a 1957 plane crash, and honor "greatness of spirit" in selfless service to people across Asia.  "The award has celebrated those…

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ABUJA, Nigeria — Weeks of flooding have killed 185 people in Nigeria and washed away homes and farmlands, the country's disaster management agency said, further threatening food supplies, especially in the hard-hit northern region. The floods, blamed on poor infrastructure and badly maintained dams, have displaced 208,000 people in 28 of Nigeria’s 36 states, the National Emergency Management Agency said in an update Friday, triggering frantic efforts to evacuate hundreds of thousands to makeshift shelters. Nigeria records flooding every year mostly as a result of failure to follow environmental guidelines and inadequate infrastructure. The worst floods the country has seen in a decade were in 2022, when more than 600 people were killed and more than 1 million people were displaced. However, unlike in 2022 when the floods were blamed on…

LONDON — Polio was eliminated from most parts of the world as part of a decadeslong effort by the World Health Organization and partners to wipe out the disease. But polio is one of the world's most infectious diseases and is still spreading in a small number of countries. The WHO and its partners want to eradicate polio in the next few years. Until it is gone from the planet, the virus will continue to trigger outbreaks anywhere children are not fully vaccinated. The recent polio infection in an unvaccinated baby in Gaza is the first time the disease has been reported in the territory in more than 25 years. What is polio? Polio is an infection caused by a virus that mostly affects children younger than 5. Most people infected…

geneva — The head of the World Health Organization believes mpox outbreaks in Africa might be stopped in the next six months, and he said Friday that the agency's first shipment of vaccines should arrive in Congo within days.  To date, Africa has received a small fraction of the vaccines needed to slow the spread of the virus, especially in Congo, which has the most cases — more than 18,000 suspected cases and 629 deaths.  "With the governments' leadership and close cooperation between partners, we believe we can stop these outbreaks in the next six months," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press briefing.  He said that while mpox infections have been rising quickly in the last few weeks, there have been relatively few deaths. Tedros also noted there…

China’s naval hospital ship, called the Peace Ark, is on a 13-nation tour of mostly African countries to provide free health care for locals. Over the past week, it was docked off the South African coast where the Western Cape province has a backlog of about 80,000 surgeries. Vicky Stark reports. ...

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Geneva — World Health Organization officials say Israel has given United Nations agencies the go-ahead to start inoculating hundreds of thousands of young Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip against polio. A mass polio vaccination campaign to immunize more than 640,000 children under the age 10 against the crippling disease is set to begin Sunday, according to Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, WHO representative for the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Speaking from Deir al Balah in central Gaza, Peeperkorn told journalists in Geneva Friday that Israel has agreed to a series of so-called humanitarian pauses. “We want to emphasize without humanitarian pauses, the campaign’s delivery, which is already being implemented under incredibly complex and challenging circumstances, will not be possible,” Peeperkorn said. “So, we welcome the preliminary commitment to these area-specific humanitarian pauses during…

United Nations — A senior World Health Organization official said Thursday that Israel has agreed to a series of daily nine-hour humanitarian pauses for the duration of a massive polio vaccination campaign in the Gaza Strip, where the first case of the disease was found in a baby earlier this month. "The campaign will start on the first of September in central Gaza for three days," Rik Peeperkorn, WHO's representative for the Palestinian Territory, told reporters in a video call from Gaza. "There will be a humanitarian pause during the vaccination for three days." He said they had agreed to a humanitarian pause from 6 a.m. until 3 p.m. daily during each vaccination day with COGAT, the Israeli agency that coordinates access for humanitarians in Gaza. Peeperkorn said their teams would…

Invasive plants and animals disrupt food supplies, carry diseases and cause an estimated $423 billion in damage every year around the world. When an Asian fish called the snakehead invaded waterways near Washington, experts warned it might devour the competition and upset of the ecosystem. But, as VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports, that’s not what ended up happening. VOA footage by Adam Greenbaum. ...

FRESNO, Calif. — The second elephant calf in two weeks has been born at a California zoo. African elephant Amahle gave birth early Monday morning, according to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo. The event came 10 days after Amahle's mother, Nolwazi, gave birth to another male calf. The new additions are the first elephants born at the zoo, about 240 kilometers southeast of San Francisco, which has embarked on a program to breed elephants in the hope that they can be seen by zoogoers in years to come. "To have two healthy calves is a historic milestone," Jon Forrest Dohlin, the zoo's chief executive, said in a statement Tuesday. "We cannot wait for the public to see the new additions to our herd and share in our excitement." The elephants and their…

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