Day: October 24, 2018

The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to ban single-use plastic products such as straws, eating utensils and coffee sticks across the European Union.

The measure passed 571 to 53, with 34 abstentions.

If approved by the European Commission — the EU executive — and individual states, the ban would become law in 2021.

Supporters say plastics are a major source of pollution that chokes oceans, litters cities, and can take decades to disintegrate.

Some U.S. cities have moved to ban plastic straws in restaurants after a heartbreaking video of a wildlife rescuer pulling a straw out of a turtle’s bloody nose was posted on the internet earlier this year.

A consortium of European plastics manufacturers called the EU bill “disproportionate” and said banning single-use plastics discourages investment into new ways to recycle.

The EU plastics bill also includes deadlines for reducing or recycling other plastics such as bottles, fishing lines, food wrappers, and cigarette filters.

 
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Four cost-effective methods are ready today to remove substantial amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, according to a new report from a panel of top scientists.

All four take advantage of nature’s ability to take carbon from the air and store it.

However, fully implementing all of them still would not be enough to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of global warming, according to the report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

Nearly all nations have signed on to the Paris climate agreement, which pledges to keep global warming to less than a global average of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and ideally below 1.5 degrees.

Emissions from burning fossil fuels and other sources have already warmed the planet about 1 degree. At the current pace, temperatures will likely top 1.5 degrees by mid-century, according to the latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Zero emissions technologies such as wind farms and solar panels will not be enough to stop global warming, the U.N. report says. Negative emissions technologies will be needed as well. 

Trees are tops

The National Academies panel looked at existing strategies for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and found four that are ready for widespread use. 

The first is among the most tried-and-true: planting trees.

“It’s even kind of a misnomer to call it a technology,” said Princeton University biologist Stephen Pacala, who chaired the panel.

Adding and restoring forests, plus better management of existing forests, are the two cheapest ways to get substantial amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, the report says. 

Farm and ranch lands offer the next biggest and cheapest CO2 removal strategies. 

Overused soils lose carbon, as well as nutrients. Rebuilding them increases their fertility and water-holding capacity. 

“And you get a negative emission because the carbon comes from the atmosphere,” Pacala said.

“We know how to do quite a bit of this,” he added, with soil conservation techniques that began after the 1930s Dust Bowl in the U.S. Great Plains.

The fourth ready-to-go approach, the report says, is known as biomass energy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. It generally involves burning or fermenting some kind of plant matter to produce electricity, fuel or heat, then capturing and storing the carbon emissions in underground sinks or elsewhere. 

The report says BECCS has the biggest CO2 removal potential of the four but is also the most costly.

Big gap

Applied worldwide, these techniques together have the potential to pull up to 10 gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere per year. 

The world emits about 50 gigatons per year.  

The authors note that devoting more land to CO2 removal would mean diverting land needed to produce food and clothing. 

For example, they say removing 10 gigatons of CO2 by BECCS alone would consume nearly 40 percent of the world’s cropland.  

Even 10 gigatons of CO2 removal is extremely optimistic, the authors note. It assumes all the strategies are used to their fullest extent everywhere.

The panel also considered emerging technology that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air. 

Currently, it is too expensive to be practical. But if the costs come down, Pacala said, it “would have essentially unlimited capacity to remove carbon.” 

Another promising approach would take advantage of the ability of certain naturally occurring minerals to react with CO2 and lock it up. But the authors say the fundamentals are poorly understood.

The report outlines a detailed research agenda to maximize all of the strategies. It notes that while the U.S. federal government may have other priorities, U.S. states, cities, corporations and other countries around the world are investing in fighting climate change. The country where the tools are developed stands to gain an economic boost, it says.
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Violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is hampering efforts to contain an Ebola outbreak that has already killed more than 150 people, according to the World Health Organization.

“It’s a very serious situation. This is something that we have been fearing from the beginning; that the security situation will influence the response to the level that we cannot really function fully,” says a WHO spokesman, Tarik Jasarevic.

The outbreak in Congo’s North Kivu province is in a conflict zone where dozens of armed groups operate.  Aid agencies have been forced to suspend or slow down their work on several occasions since the outbreak began in July.

Health workers killed

It happened again over the weekend, when two health agents with Congo’s military were killed by rebels.  The next day, residents in the city of Beni pelted aid groups’ vehicles with stones during a protest against a separate rebel attack that killed at least 13 people. 

Jasarevic tells VOA’s English-to-Africa service that the incidents have forced Ebola containment teams to severely curtail their operations. The result?  

“Contacts will not be followed; this is something that has to be done on a daily basis. People who may develop the disease will not go immediately to treatment centers and will present danger to their environment,” he says.

Containment delayed

That means health workers will have to essentially start over to locate contacts of Ebola victims and ensure they are vaccinated. 

“In case we are not able to access communities, if in case response measures are not being put in place  safe burials, contact tracing, vaccinations, provision of treatment to those who are sick — it is really difficult to hope that the Ebola outbreak can be contained on its own,” Jasarevic says.

Latest numbers

According to the WHO’s most recent report, released Tuesday, a total of 238 confirmed and probable Ebola Virus Disease cases have been reported in Congo’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces.  It said 155 people have died.

The WHO has warned the virus could spread to nearby countries, such as Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

“Neighboring countries need to be ready in case the outbreak spreads beyond the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” said the latest WHO report.
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An Ebola outbreak that ravaged Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia in 2014 cost economies an estimated $53 billion, according to a study in this month’s Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The study aimed to combine the direct economic burden and the indirect social impact to generate a comprehensive cost of the outbreak, which was the worst in the world.

The outbreak ran from 2013 to 2016 and killed at least 11,300 people, more than all other known Ebola outbreaks combined. The vast majority of cases were in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The report’s authors, Caroline Huber, Lyn Finelli and Warren Stevens, put the economic costs at $14 billion and said the human cost was even greater, based on the people affected and a dollar figure that reflects the value of each human life.

The total is far higher than previous estimates. In October 2014, the World Bank said the Ebola epidemic could cost $32.6 billion by the end of 2015 in a worst case scenario, but by November 2014 it dialled back that forecast to $3-4 billion. In 2016 the World Bank estimate of economic loss was $2.8 billion.

The 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) cost an estimated $40 billion, while the 2015-2016 Zika virus outbreak in the Americas was estimated to have caused $20 billion in social costs, the new study said.

But a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic could cost an annual 700,000 lives and $490 billion, the authors said, citing research published in 2016.

The new Ebola study factored in the impact on healthworkers, long-term conditions suffered by 17,000 Ebola survivors, and costs of treatment, infection control, screening and deployment of personnel beyond West Africa.

The biggest cost not previously accounted for was deaths from other diseases, as Ebola tied up healthcare resources and hospital admissions fell dramatically, adding $18.8 billion to the total bill.

During the outbreak there were 10,623 additional deaths from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, with 3.5 million additional untreated malaria cases.

Measles caused 2,000-16,000 extra deaths as 1 million children missed being vaccinated for measles, and 600,000-700,000 missed other vaccines.

But the authors added that they had limited information on the cost of deploying international health staff and military personnel, and they were obliged to place a value on human life, a widely accepted economic measurement.

Although the “value of a statistical life” (VSL) in North America and Europe is estimated at $7 million-9 million, the authors said, they took a figure from the only study in a West African context, with a VSL of $577,000 in Sierra Leone.
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Authorities in a North Sumatra village have banned three HIV+ orphans from elementary school, and threatened the children, who are from outside the area, with expulsion from Nainggolan due to community fears of transmission.

The children, a boy and two girls, aged 7 to 11 years, were infected by transmission from their mothers, Berlina Sibagariang, executive secretary of the Batak Protestant Christian Huria AIDS Committee (HKBP), told VOA Indonesia. The orphaned children attended preschool and the Nainggolan State Primary School in North Sumatra for one day before they were expelled, in response to outcry from students and parents who learned of their HIV status, according to Sibagariang.

“We want those three children to enjoy their rights to go to school and get an education,” Sibagariang said, adding “the community hopes that the children will no longer attend local schools. They are afraid that their children will be infected with HIV.”

The children were removed from classes on October 22, and Sibagariang said the local community set an October 25 deadline for the children to leave the village.

While an estimated five million people are infected with HIV in Asia, the rate of new infections has slowed in the last decade. But not in Indonesia, which now has an estimated 660,000 people living with HIV, according to the UNAIDS. According to the U.N. agency, Indonesia had 48,000 new HIV infections and 38,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2016, an increase in AIDS-related deaths of 68 percent from 2010. As of 2016, an estimated 3,200 Indonesian children were infected with HIV due to mother-to-child transmission.

There is, Indonesians activists note, ignorance of HIV and its transmission.

“Many people in our rural area still don’t really know what HIV/AIDS is, or the regulations covering it,” Puta Elvina, commissioner of Indonesia’s National Commission to Protect Children (KPAI) told VOA. In Nainggolan, “the school should educate the [Parent Teachers Association (PTA)] about HIV/AIDS so they know they don’t have to worry about it. [The PTA} should communicate to them how people become infected, how HIV is transmitted, etc. And the school has an obligation to those HIV-kids, to protect and support them. Actually not only the school, but also the local people (to support the kids) and the local government.”

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can only be transmitted from an infected person to another through direct contact of bodily fluids such as blood (including menstrual blood), semen, vaginal secretions and breast milk, according to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, a leading U.S. source of information on HIV and AIDS. “Blood contains the highest concentration of the virus, followed by semen, followed by vaginal fluids, followed by breast milk. … It is possible for an HIV-infected mother to transmit HIV before or during birth or through breast milk. Breast milk contains HIV, and while small amounts of breast milk do not pose significant threat of infection to adults, it is a risk for infants.”

The shunning behavior in Nainggolan is not unique. “HIV stigma is effectively universal, but its form varies from one country to another, and the specific groups targeted for AIDS stigma vary considerably,” says the University of California, Davis. “Whatever its form, HIV stigma inflicts suffering on people and interferes with attempts to fight the AIDS epidemic.”

Tiqoh, who has only one name, is an activist at Yayasan Pelita Ilmu (YPI), a non-governmental organization with a long track record on HIV/AIDS education in Indonesia, understands the difficulty of talking about HIV “with the local people, but perhaps the school could also involve doctors from the local clinic. Those parents and local people who refuse to take care these kids, or don’t want them to study in the same class as their children, they’re taking these actions because they don’t know much about HIV/AIDS. They’re just worry that their kids might be infected.”

HKBP is continuing talks with local government officials and the community as the Thursday deadline approaches in an attempt to stop expulsion of the children from Nainggolan.

“They said that we should remove those children because the local government hasn’t issued a permit to send children to those schools or even stay in that village,” said Sibagariang. “In fact, the home in that village – where we sent the children – is our home, an HKBP home. They have right to stay there.  It’s our home!”

Local leader, Samosir Regent Rapidin Simbolon, told VOA that the HKBP hospital in Nainggolan once “accommodated the elderly, but now they accommodate children who are exposed to HIV.”

So far, the talks have resulted in a suggestion to homeschool the children but the HKBP AIDS Committee rejected this option, saying it would isolate the children and paper over what they see as the real issue: misunderstanding of HIV-AIDS.

The committee criticized another local leader, Samosir Deputy Regent, Juang Sinaga, who called for the children to be expelled from the village, and sent to the jungle.

Rapidin told VOA “I am responsible,” he said. “I will not allow the public to directly shun them. … We will protect (the children) so no one will take advantage of the situation. Be assured we are protecting them, we will even involve the police, if necessary. I guarantee that the children are being monitored.”

But the regent said that there were different opinions about the orphans–parents don’t want their children in classes with the HIV+ orphans, “while HKBP who said that [separating these children] is discriminating against HIV-people.”

“The HKBP does not want to understand us,” Rapidin said. “The three children who are positive are not from our region. They come from outside. We are actually very tolerant, it’s OK here. But they (HKBP) are insistent. The HKBP cannot insist like that. Nainggolan residents also have rights.”

Anugerah Andriansyah reported from North Sumatra, Indonesia and Eva Mazrieva reported from Washington, D.C.

 
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A United Nations official is warning that Yemen is in imminent danger of being engulfed by unprecedented famine. Mark Lowcock, U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, advised the U.N. Security Council Tuesday that the war-torn Arab country is facing greater famine than any professional in the field has ever seen. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports the U.N. official called for efforts to stop violence and increase humanitarian aid.
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