Day: November 3, 2018

Four U.N. specialized agencies warn that many parts of Asia and the Pacific suffer from alarmingly high levels of malnutrition and hunger. This is the first time the Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.N. Children’s Fund, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization have issued a joint report, which calls for urgent action to reverse the situation.

The report finds efforts to reduce malnutrition and hunger have come to a virtual standstill in Asia and the Pacific. Unless greater effort is made to tackle this situation, it warns prospects for economic and social development in the region will be at serious risk.  

As of now, the U.N. agencies say many parts of Asia and the Pacific will not reach the U.N. sustainable goal of ending all forms of malnutrition and achieving zero hunger by 2030.  

The United Nations reports 821 million people globally suffer from hunger. World Food Program spokesman Herve Verhoosel said 62 percent of that number, or 509 million people, are in the Asia-Pacific region, with children, in particular, bearing the biggest burden.

Verhoosel said 79 million children, or one in every four under age five, suffer from stunting, and 34 million children are wasting. He says 12 million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition, which increases their risk of death.

The report notes climate-related disasters are rising in the region, having a detrimental impact on agriculture. Loss of crops, it says, results in more hunger, more loss of nutrition and loss of livelihood.

According to the report, climate-related losses in Asia between 2005 and 2015 amounted to a staggering $48 billion. Authors of the report say countries in the region must adapt agriculture so it’s more resilient to extreme climate events, and to mitigate the damage from climate change.

 
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For the first time an underwater robot is to be used to plant baby coral to parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef damaged by mass bleaching, as scientists plan to collect hundreds of millions of coral spawn off the Queensland city of Cairns in the coming weeks.

Most coral reproduce through spawning, where eggs and sperm are pushed into the water at the same time.  In northern Australia, researchers are preparing to harvest this mass release of coral spawn on the Great Barrier Reef.  They will be reared into baby corals in floating enclosures.  Then they will be delivered as so-called ‘larval clouds’ to Vlasoff Reef about an hour’s sailing from Cairns by a semi-autonomous robot.

Professor Peter Harrison, the director of the Marine Ecology Research Center at Southern Cross University, said science is giving a nature a helping hand.

“What we are trying to do now is compensate for the loss of corals that would normally provide enough larvae for the system to naturally heal,” Harrison said.

Large areas of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have been damaged by severe bleaching – or loss of the algae that gives coral its color.  The bleaching is caused by rising water temperatures and made worse by climate change.

The experiment on Vlasoff reef, which was badly affected by the mass bleaching, will be coordinated by divers, who will guide the spawn-spreading robot, known as the LarvalBot.   

Professor Matthew Dunbabin from the Queensland University of Technology says time is of essence.

“In future projects we are hoping that we can start to do that more autonomously, but this is very new and we are up against the clock in terms of trying to get this in the field as quick as possible to make sure that we can have a reef to preserve,” Dunbabin said.

A coral reef is made up of millions of tiny animals called coral polyps.  The reefs are critical ecosystems, and provide a home for at least a quarter of all marine species.

The Great Barrier Reef is about the same size as Italy or Japan.  Thirty species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises have been recorded along the reef.

It faces a range of threats, from climate change and overfishing, to the run-off of pollution from farms, to coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.

 
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Many people know that a woman’s health, including her diet and exercise habits, can impact the health of her baby even before she gets pregnant. But, until recently, little was known about a father’s diet and exercise choices.

Matthew Hurt is teaching his young sons how to hit a baseball. He wants them to enjoy sports and exercising.

“I want it to be just natural for them. I don’t want it to be a chore. I want them to just want to go outside, want to be active and enjoy life to its fullest.”

Impact of exercise

A study at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center looked at the impact of fathers’ exercise habits on their offspring.

Kristin Stanford is a member of Ohio State’s Diabetes and Metabolism Research Center. She co-led the study. The results showed that even moderate exercise before a baby was conceived “resulted in an improved metabolic health in their adult offspring. Essentially, it improved their glucose metabolism, decreased body weight and increased their insulin sensitivity.”

The World Health Organization says 1 in 4 adults worldwide are dangerously inactive. That increases the risk of obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.

Inactivity also has social and economic consequences.

The research at Ohio State was done in mice. More work needs to be done to see if it applies to people as well.

“The idea would be that if you have a dad who wants to have a child, if they would exercise maybe just a month prior to conception, that would have a really dramatic effect on their child’s life.” 

Poor diet? Just exercise

The researchers also found that exercise helped even with a poor diet. Sedentary mice fed a high fat diet passed along negative health issues like obesity and insulin resistance, but those effects were completely reversed by exercise.

“A high-fat diet, even mild high-fat diet, in this case it was only three weeks, changes the profile, but exercise kind of restored it back to normal.”

More work needs to be done to see if the same applies to humans. But in the animal studies, exercise for the male mouse was key to the health of his offspring. 
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Many people know that a woman’s health, including her diet and exercise habits, can impact the health of her baby even before she gets pregnant. Many women try to shed excess weight and check with their doctors to optimize their health. But, until recently, little was known about the role a father’s diet and exercise choices might play. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on a study that shows, just like for women, there is a link between the father’s health and that of his unborn children.
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Scientists across the world have set an ambitious goal for themselves: to sequence the genome of every known life form on Earth within the next decade.

The Earth BioGenome Project, launched this week in London, is attempting to map the entire DNA of every known animal, plant, fungus and protozoan on the planet, roughly 1.5 million species.

Scientists say the project rivals in importance the Human Genome Project, which took 13 years to map the human genetic code. That project was completed in 2003.

Contributions from around world

The new project will rely on scientists contributing data from around the world, with the largest pledge so far coming from Britain’s Wellcome Sanger Institute, which says it will map 66,000 species. The institute was also a large contributor to the Human Genome Project.

The cost of the massive project is estimated to be $4.7 billion, which will come from charities and governments around the world.

Scientists say the result of the grand-scale project would be a huge resource for researchers that could offer insights into a range of topics, including a better understanding of evolution, the development of diseases, and insight into the aging process.

Researchers also hope the information could help in efforts to conserve threatened species by better understanding how life forms can adapt to changes.

Why not sequence everything?

Project member and evolutionary geneticist Jenny Graves of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia told Nature, “Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge.”

“The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?” she said.

Supporters of the project say the initiative will help to coordinate the efforts of researchers from around the world and will ensure that all life forms are sequenced and not just those that have previously drawn interest.

They say the project will also set standards for the collection of samples, the sequencing of data and for sharing information. Proponents say such standards are essential for making sure the final data is useful to scientists everywhere.

Scientists say part of the appeal of the project is that they don’t fully know what the results will lead to.
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U.S. regulators have approved a powerful new opioid tablet to be used in hospitals over objections from critics who fear the pill will be abused.

The new drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday is five to 10 times more potent than pharmaceutical fentanyl and will be used as an alternative to intravenous (IV) painkillers in medical settings.

Approval for the drug, which will be manufactured by a California company called AcelRx and marketed under the name Dsuvia, was supported by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon wants to have a pill that it can give soldiers on the battlefield to relieve pain when using an IV is not possible.

Critics say the pill could be diverted to illicit use and could worsen the country’s opioid crisis.

One of the pill’s critics is the head of an FDA committee tasked with advising regulators about whether drugs should be approved. This month, in a rare dissent with his committee, Raeford Brown urged the FDA to reject the drug and predicted the medicine would be abused inside and outside medical settings.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement Friday that there would be “very tight restrictions” placed on the drug’s distribution and that the medicine was intended only for supervised settings like hospitals. The drug will not be available in retail pharmacies.

Gottlieb also said he would seek more authority for the FDA to consider whether there are too many similar drugs on the market, a move that could limit the number of new opioid drugs approved by the agency in the future.

“We won’t sidestep what I believe is the real underlying source of discontent among the critics of this approval — the question of whether or not America needs another powerful opioid while in the throes of a massive crisis of addiction,” Gottlieb wrote.

Preliminary figures from a report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration released Friday showed more than 49,000 opioid-related deaths in 2017. That was a rise from the reported 42,249 opioid overdose deaths in 2016.

The DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment report shows that heroin, fentanyl and other opioids continue to pose the highest drug threat in the nation.

Developers of the new opioid pill say the tablet is placed under the tongue and starts reducing pain in 15 to 30 minutes. It contains sufentanil, a chemical cousin of the fentanyl, which is commonly used after surgery and in emergency rooms. Each pill will come in a plastic applicator that looks like a syringe and will sell for $50 to $60.

The FDA says that because of the controls on drugs in medical facilities, medicines rarely get into the hands of general public through hospitals. However, the agency acknowledges that the greatest risk of misuse of such drugs is among medical personnel themselves.

Sidney Wolfe, founder of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, said in a statement: “It is certain that Dsuvia will worsen the opioid epidemic and kill people needlessly. It will be taken by medical personnel and others for whom it has not been prescribed. And many of those will overdose and die.” 
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