Month: April 2019

This year, during World Immunization Week, the World Health Organization launched the world’s first malaria vaccine. Scientists are also testing a vaccine for HIV, and they are working on vaccines against cancer.

“Vaccines are one of the greatest inventions of humankind,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Global vaccination programs have ended smallpox, and they are closing in on polio, a disease that used to paralyze 350,000 people each year. Because of a global immunization program, that number now stands at 20.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the last remaining countries where the polio virus is still spreading.

Break the chains

Diseases like smallpox, polio and measles can only be transmitted from one person to another. Dr. Walter Orenstein from the Emory Vaccine Center says that’s why they can be wiped off the face of the earth.

“If you can break the chains of human to human transmission, you can eradicate the disease,” he said. “That’s how smallpox was eradicated.”

WATCH: Vaccines Could Make World Free of Malaria, HIV, Cancer

Malaria vaccine

Most of the diseases that can be prevented through vaccines are caused by viruses — think measles, mumps or chickenpox. But the most exciting news during World Immunization Week is about a vaccine against the parasite that causes malaria.

Dr. Pedro Alonso of the World Health Organization said Malawi, Ghana and Kenya will begin giving malaria vaccines to children in the coming weeks.

“This is the first vaccine against the human malaria parasite. Parasites are really complex organisms, much more so than a virus or a bacteria. And that’s why it has taken 30 years to develop this first vaccine,” he said.

Cancer and HIV

Vaccines can already protect against two types of cancer: cervical and oral cancers caused by the human papilloma virus and liver cancer caused by the hepatitis B virus. Now scientists are working to develop vaccines against breast cancer and other deadly cancers.

And then there’s HIV. HIV vaccine trials are going on in South Africa, and research is being done to develop an antibody-based HIV vaccine.

Dr. Carl Dieffenbach is a specialist in HIV at the National Institutes of Health. He says anti-AIDS drugs have already made a huge difference in controlling the epidemic.

“We put a vaccine on top of that, too, it’s not just stopping the epidemic. It’s ending the epidemic,” he said.

A world free from these diseases will be a world where more people can raise healthy children, earn a living and get out of poverty. It would be a world where not only people, but countries could prosper.
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This year, during World Immunization Week, the World Health Organization launched the world’s first malaria vaccine. Scientists are also testing a vaccine for HIV, and they are working on vaccines against cancer. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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From grubby packaging engulfing small Southeast Asian communities to waste piling up in plants from the US to Australia, China’s ban on accepting the world’s used plastic has plunged global recycling into turmoil.

For many years, China received the bulk of scrap plastic from around the world, processing much of it into a higher quality material that could be used by manufacturers.

But at the start of 2018, it closed its doors to almost all foreign plastic waste, as well as many other recyclables, in a push to protect the local environment and air quality, leaving developed nations struggling to find places to send their waste.

“It was like an earthquake,” Arnaud Brunet, director general of Brussels-based industry group The Bureau of International Recycling, told AFP.

“China was the biggest market for recyclables. It created a major shock in the global market.”

Instead, plastic is being redirected in huge quantities to Southeast Asia, where Chinese recyclers have shifted en masse. 

With a large Chinese-speaking minority, Malaysia was a top choice for Chinese recyclers looking to relocate, and official data showed plastic imports tripled from 2016 levels to 870,000 tonnes last year.

In the small town of Jenjarom, not far from Kuala Lumpur, plastic processing plants suddenly appeared in large numbers, pumping out noxious fumes day and night.

Huge mounds of plastic waste, dumped in the open, piled up as recyclers struggled to cope with the influx of packaging from everyday goods, such as foods and laundry detergents, from as far afield as Germany, the United States, and Brazil.

Residents soon noticed the acrid stench over the town — the kind of odor that is usual in processing plastic, but environmental campaigners believe some of the fumes also come from the incineration of plastic waste that was too low quality to recycle.

“People were attacked by toxic fumes, waking them up at night. Many were coughing a lot,” local resident, Pua Lay Peng, told AFP. 

“I could not sleep, I could not rest, I always felt fatigued,” the 47-year-old added.

Toxic fumes

Pua and other community members began investigating and by mid-2018 had located about 40 suspected processing plants, many of which appeared to be operating secretly and without proper permits.

Initial complaints to authorities went nowhere but they kept up pressure, and eventually the government took action. Authorities started closing down illegal factories in Jenjarom, and announced a nationwide temporary freeze on plastic import permits.

Thirty-three factories were closed down, although activists believe many have quietly moved elsewhere in the country. Residents say air quality has improved but some plastic dumps remain.

In Australia, Europe and the US, many of those collecting plastic and other recyclables were left scrambling to find new places to send it. 

They face higher costs to get it processed by recyclers at home and in some cases have resorted to sending it to landfill sites as the scrap has piled up too quickly.

“Twelve months on, we are still feeling the effects but we have not moved to the solutions yet,” said Garth Lamb, president of industry body Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia.

Some have been quicker to adapt to the new environment, such as some local authority-run centers that collect recyclables in Adelaide, southern Australia.

The centers used to send nearly everything — ranging from plastic to paper and glass — to China but now 80 percent is processed by local companies, with most of the rest shipped to India.

“We moved quickly and looked to domestic markets,” Adam Faulkner, chief executive of the Northern Adelaide Waste Management Authority, told AFP. 

“We’ve found that by supporting local manufacturers, we’ve been able to get back to pre-China ban prices,” he added.

Consume less, produce less 

In mainland China, imports of plastic waste have dropped from 600,000 tonnes per month in 2016 to about 30,000 a month in 2018, according to data cited by a new report from Greenpeace and environmental NGO Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.

Once bustling centers of recycling have been abandoned as firms shifted to Southeast Asia. 

On a visit to the southern town of Xingtan last year, Chen Liwen, founder of environmental NGO China Zero Waste Alliance, found the once-booming recycling industry had disappeared.

“The plastic recyclers were gone — there were ‘for rent’ signs plastered on factory doors and even recruitment signs calling for experienced recyclers to move to Vietnam,” she told AFP.

Southeast Asian nations affected early by the China ban — as well as Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam were hit hard — have taken steps to limit plastic imports, but the waste has simply been redirected to other countries without restrictions, such as Indonesia and Turkey, according to the Greenpeace report.

With only an estimated nine percent of plastics ever produced recycled, campaigners say the only long-term solution to the plastic waste crisis is for companies to make less and consumers to use less. 

Greenpeace campaigner Kate Lin said: “The only solution to plastic pollution is producing less plastic.”
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Up to 1 million species face extinction because of human influence, according to a draft U.N. report obtained by AFP that painstakingly catalogues how humanity has undermined the natural resources upon which its very survival depends.

The accelerating loss of clean air, drinkable water, CO2-absorbing forests, pollinating insects, protein-rich fish and storm-blocking mangroves — to name but a few of the dwindling services rendered by nature — poses no less of a threat than climate change, says the report, set to be unveiled May 6.

Indeed, biodiversity loss and global warming are closely linked, according to the 44-page Summary for Policy Makers, which distills a 1,800-page U.N. assessment of scientific literature on the state of nature.

Delegates from 130 nations meeting in Paris from April 29 will vet the executive summary line-by-line. Wording may change, but figures lifted from the underlying report cannot be altered.

“We need to recognize that climate change and loss of nature are equally important, not just for the environment, but as development and economic issues as well,” Robert Watson, chair of the U.N.-mandated body that compiled the report, told AFP, without divulging its findings.

“The way we produce our food and energy is undermining the regulating services that we get from nature,” he said, adding that only “transformative change” can stem the damage.

Deforestation and agriculture, including livestock production, account for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, and have wreaked havoc on natural ecosystems as well.

​‘Mass extinction event’

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report warns of “an imminent rapid acceleration in the global rate of species extinction.”

The pace of loss “is already tens to hundreds of times higher than it has been, on average, over the last 10 million years,” it notes.

“Half-a-million to a million species are projected to be threatened with extinction, many within decades,” it continues.

Many experts think a so-called “mass extinction event” — only the sixth in the last half-billion years — is already under way.

The most recent saw the end of the Cretaceous period some 66 million years ago, when a 10-kilometerwide asteroid strike wiped out most life forms.

Scientists estimate that Earth is today home to about 8 million distinct species, a majority of them insects.

A quarter of catalogued animal and plant species are being crowded, eaten or poisoned out of existence.

The drop in sheer numbers is even more dramatic, with wild mammal biomass — their collective weight — down by 82 percent.

Humans and livestock account for more than 95 percent of mammal biomass.

​Population growth

“If we’re going to have a sustainable planet that provides services to communities around the world, we need to change this trajectory in the next 10 years, just as we need to do that with climate,” noted WWF chief scientist Rebecca Shaw, formerly a member of the U.N. scientific bodies for both climate and biodiversity.

The direct causes of species loss, in order of importance, are shrinking habitat and land-use change, hunting for food or illicit trade in body parts, climate change, pollution, and alien species such as rats, mosquitoes and snakes that hitch rides on ships or planes, the report finds.

“There are also two big indirect drivers of biodiversity loss and climate change: the number of people in the world and their growing ability to consume,” Watson said.

Once seen as primarily a future threat to animal and plant life, the disruptive impact of global warming has accelerated.

Shifts in the distribution of species, for example, will likely double if average temperature go up a notch from 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) to 2C.

So far, the global thermometer has risen 1C compared with mid-19th century levels.

The 2015 Paris Agreement enjoins nations to cap the rise to “well below” 2C. But a landmark U.N. climate report in October said that would still be enough to boost the intensity and frequency of deadly heat waves, droughts, floods and storms.

Global inequity

Other findings in the report include:

Three-quarters of land surfaces, 40 percent of the marine environment, and 50 percent of inland waterways across the globe have been “severely altered.”
Many of the areas where Nature’s contribution to human wellbeing will be most severely compromised are home to indigenous peoples and the world’s poorest communities that are also vulnerable to climate change.
More than 2 billion people rely on wood fuel for energy, 4 billion rely on natural medicines, and more than 75 percent of global food crops require animal pollination.
Nearly half of land and marine ecosystems have been profoundly compromised by human interference in the last 50 years.
Subsidies to fisheries, industrial agriculture, livestock raising, forestry, mining and the production of biofuel or fossil fuel energy encourage waste, inefficiency and overconsumption.

The report cautioned against climate change solutions that may inadvertently harm nature.

The use, for example, of biofuels combined with “carbon capture and storage” — the sequestration of CO2 released when biofuels are burned — is widely seen as key in the transition to green energy on a global scale.

But the land needed to grow all those biofuel crops may wind up cutting into food production, the expansion of protected areas or reforestation efforts.
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A quarantine order was issued Thursday for hundreds of students and staff at two Los Angeles universities who may have been exposed to measles and either have not been vaccinated or can’t verify that they have immunity. 

Measles in the United States has climbed to its highest level in 25 years, closing in on 700 cases this year in a resurgence largely attributed to misinformation that is turning parents against vaccines. Roughly three-quarters of this year’s illnesses in the U.S. have been in New York state.

The University of California, Los Angeles, said that as of Wednesday there were 119 students and 8 faculty members under quarantine. Seventy-one students and 127 staff members are quarantined at California State University, Los Angeles after a possible measles exposure at a campus library, school officials said. 

“The Department of Public Health has determined that there is no known current risk related to measles at the library at this time,” Cal State said in a statement. 

Quarantines vary

UCLA said some people could remain in quarantines for up to 48 hours before they prove immunity. A few may need to remain in quarantine for up to seven days, officials said.

Such an order mandates that the exposed people stay home and notify authorities “if they develop symptoms of measles, and to avoid contact with others until the end of their quarantine period or until they provide evidence of immunity,” the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said in a statement. 

The orders come as a small outbreak of measles is occurring in Los Angeles County involving five confirmed cases linked to overseas travel. The state recorded 38 measles cases as of Thursday, versus 11 around the same time last year, said Dr. Karen Smith, director of the California Department of Public Health.

The state typically sees fewer than two dozen cases a year, she said.

This year, California’s cases stretch across 11 counties and affect patients from 5 months to 55 years of age. 

More than 76% of patients were not vaccinated or didn’t receive the recommended two doses of vaccine, Smith said. Fourteen of those infected had traveled overseas to countries including Philippines, Thailand, India and Ukraine.

Vaccine considered safe

Measles in most people causes fever, runny nose, cough and a rash all over the body. However, a very small fraction of those infected can suffer complications such as pneumonia and a dangerous swelling of the brain.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the vaccine for everyone over a year old, except for people who had the disease as children. Those who have had measles are immune.

The vaccine, which became available in the 1960s, is considered safe and highly effective, and because of it, measles was declared all but eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.
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As recent illnesses tied to raw turkey, ground beef, cut melon and romaine lettuce suggest, U.S. food poisoning cases don’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report Thursday that the frequency of several types of food poisoning infections climbed last year, but that the increases could be the result of new diagnostic tools that help identify more cases. 

Overall, the agency believes food poisoning rates have remained largely unchanged. 

Dr. Robert Tauxe, director of the agency’s foodborne illness division, said the figures show more needs to be done to make food safer. He noted the two most common causes of infection have been longtime problems. 

One of the two, salmonella, can come from an array of foods including vegetables, chicken, eggs, beef and pork. The other germ, campylobacter, is commonly tied to chicken. People may not hear as much about it because health officials often can’t group cases into outbreaks. Both bacteria are spread through animal feces.

“For some reason, campylobacter is making people sick with lots of different fingerprints,” Tauxe said. 

Obstacles to better understanding

The report is based on monitoring in 10 states, but is seen as an indicator of national trends. It highlights the difficulty in understanding food poisoning when so many cases go unreported, diagnostic methods are inconsistent, and production practices and eating habits are constantly changing. 

With chicken, for instance, companies have brought down salmonella rates in raw whole carcasses since the government began publishing test results of individual plants. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture only recently began posting similar data for raw chicken parts like breasts and legs, which Americans have gravitated toward over the years.

Last year, the agency said 22 percent of production plants did not meet its standard for limiting salmonella in chicken parts. The USDA said in a statement that it’s working to improve its approach to fighting bacteria, including with the publication of such data.  

Despite such efforts, salmonella and campylobacter are allowed in raw poultry sold in supermarkets, noted Tony Corbo of Food and Water Watch, an advocacy group that supports stricter food safety regulations. It’s why health experts advise people to properly handle and cook poultry. 

“There is very little the USDA can do besides posting the report card on salmonella,” he said. 

The National Chicken Council says the industry has been working to bring down contamination rates, including through germ-killing solutions sprayed on raw chicken during processing, improved sanitation and increased use of vaccines. But the group says the bacteria are endemic in chickens and that eliminating them is difficult. 

The CDC report also notes produce is a major source of food poisoning, citing recent E. coli outbreaks tied to romaine lettuce. It said outbreaks tied to produce also contributed to a big jump in infections from a parasite called cyclospora.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of fruits and vegetables, said in a statement that a recently developed test is helping it detect the parasite in produce. The agency is also implementing new regulations for produce, though food safety experts note the inherent risk with fruits and vegetables that are grown in open fields and eaten raw. 

The CDC said is still working to confirm how much increases in food poisoning cases can be chalked up to new diagnostic methods. It noted some results of a newer, faster test could be false positives.
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Police in Pakistan say unknown gunmen shot dead a female polio vaccinator and wounded another Thursday, raising the number of deaths to three in attacks against this week’s national immunization campaign.

The latest shooting incident occurred in southwestern Baluchistan province where, police said, assailants on a motorbike opened fire at a polio team in a remote district on the Afghan border. They described the conditions of the injured female health worker as “critical.”

“The women were coming back from the field after administering polio drops to children when they were shot at by two unknown men riding a motorbike,” said Rashid Razzaq, a senior official at the polio emergency center in the provincial capital of Quetta. He told VOA that one victim died instantly while the other received “serious” bullet injuries and is undergoing treatment in a Quetta hospital.

Razzaq confirmed authorities have temporarily suspended the vaccination campaign in Chaman.

Other attacks took place in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, also bordering Afghanistan, where gunmen shot dead two police offices escorting polio vaccinators.

Additionally, authorities also arrested 10 men in the provincial capital Peshawar for spreading unfounded rumors through fake social media videos that a polio vaccine had led to fainting and vomiting.

One of the detainees, identified as school teacher Nazar Muhammad, could be seen in the scaremongering Twitter videos instructing his students to faint and pretend to be sick from the oral polio vaccine (OPV).

The videos quickly went viral, sparking widespread protests in parts of Peshawar, with angry mobs destroying a local health unit. Clerics in mosques used loudspeakers to warn parents against having their children vaccinated.

The scare prompted panicked families to rush their children to hospitals, where doctors examined more than 25,000 and concluded that none had suffered an adverse reaction after receiving the vaccine drops.

Islamic clerics and residents in parts of the religiously conservative Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan have long been suspicious of the polio vaccine, claiming it is a Western plot to harm or sterilize Muslim children.

Militants linked to outlawed extremist groups also have taken responsibility for attacks against anti-polio teams in Pakistan, accusing them of working as government spies. The suspicions and attacks have hampered Islamabad’s efforts to eradicate the crippling polio disease from the country, officials admit.

The violence against workers associated with polio immunization efforts have in recent years killed dozens of people in Pakistan, one of three countries in the world — along with Afghanistan and Nigeria — where wild polio virus is still endemic. Nigeria has not reported any new cases for two consecutive years.
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