Day: December 9, 2020

New global health estimates find people are living six years longer now than 20 years ago, but many more people are living with disabilities that affect their quality of life. The World Health Organization reports life expectancy has gone up from 67 years to 73 years since 2000. Over this period, it notes progress has been made in reducing deaths from a number of communicable diseases.For example, the WHO says HIV/AIDS has dropped from the 8th leading cause of death in 2000 to the 19th in 2019. And tuberculosis, it says, no longer figures among the global top 10 ranked diseases, falling from 7th place to 13th position over the past two decades.   Another big shift since 2000 is that non-communicable diseases have supplanted communicable diseases as the leading causes of death.    FILE – Doctors perform open-heart surgery at a hospital in Bamako, Mali, Sept. 10, 2018.Heart disease remains the world’s number one killer. Samira Asma of WHO’s Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact says deaths from heart disease have risen by more than two million since 2000, to nearly nine million last year.Neurodegenerative diseases are also taking a big toll.   Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia are ranking among the top 10 causes of death, with 65 percent of those deaths being women.   The report finds death from diabetes has increased by 70 percent, with men most at risk. It says the Eastern Mediterranean is the region most affected, with deaths from diabetes having more than doubled over the past 20 years. The director of WHO’s department of noncommunicable diseases, Bente Mikkelsen, says NCDs remain a huge problem in high-income countries. People there run the risk of illness from tobacco, overuse of alcohol and obesity. However, she says 80 percent of premature death from NCDs now occur in low- and middle-income countries. “When we are unprotected, meaning that we have not been able to modify the risk factors and also the health system is not prepared to respond to heart diseases, diabetes, cancer and lung diseases, we see a very high toll of deaths,” she said.   The report finds disabilities are on the rise, many due to diseases and health conditions.   But it notes injuries are another major cause of disability and death. It reports road traffic injuries have increased by nearly 50% in the African region since 2000 and around 40% in the Eastern Mediterranean. Most of the victims are male. FILE – A policeman passes out leaflets with road accident statistics, in front of a destroyed car which is put on display, during a campaign to promote safe driving in Beirut, April 25, 2007.Drug use in the Americas has emerged as a significant contributor to both disability and death.  Data show there has been a nearly threefold increase in deaths from drug use between 2000 and 2019 in that region. WHO plans to assess the direct and indirect impact of COVID-19 on death and disability in its next edition of Global Health Estimates. 
 
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and nearly every U.S. state sued Facebook Inc. Wednesday, saying it broke antitrust law and should potentially be broken up.With the filing of the twin lawsuits, Facebook becomes the second big tech company to face a major legal challenge this fall.The FTC said in a statement that it would seek an injunction that “could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp.”In its complaint, the coalition of 46 states, Washington, D.C., and Guam also asked for Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to be judged to be illegal.FILE – New York State Attorney General Letitia James listens to a question at a press conference in New York City, Aug. 6, 2020.”For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals, snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.James said the company used vast amounts of money to acquire such rivals before they could threaten the company’s dominance. Facebook said it is reviewing the FTC and state antitrust complaints.The company said the government “now wants a do-over with no regard for the impact that precedent would have on the broader business community or the people who choose our products every day.”The U.S. Justice Department sued Alphabet Inc.’s Google in October, accusing the $1 trillion company of using its market power to fend off rivals.The lawsuits are the biggest antitrust cases in a generation, comparable to the lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. in 1998. The federal government eventually settled that case, but the yearslong court fight and extended antitrust scrutiny prevented the company from thwarting competitors and is credited with clearing the way for the explosive growth of the internet.Facebook shares fell as much as 3% after the news before paring losses and were last down 1.7%. 
 
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British health officials are warning that people with a “significant history” of allergic reactions should not receive the new coronavirus vaccine that was rolled out in a mass vaccination program Tuesday, pending investigation of two adverse reactions. Britain is the first western country to begin the mass vaccinations, as Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
Camera: Henry Ridgwell   Produced by: Henry Hernandez 
 
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Canada’s national health agency, Health Canada, announced Wednesday it has approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, and Canadians will start receiving it as early as next week. In a statement, Health Canada said that it completed a full independent review of the data on the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, after receiving the company’s submission October 9. In its statement, the agency said, “Canadians can feel confident that the review process was rigorous and that we have strong monitoring systems in place.” On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the first doses of the Pfizer vaccine will arrive at 14 Canadian distribution centers next week, with more than 200,000 doses due before the end of the year. FILE – Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attends a news conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Dec. 7, 2020.Canada has ordered a total of 6 million doses from Pfizer. Canada becomes the third nation, after Britain and Bahrain, to approve the drug for use. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will consider the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for emergency use Thursday. One day after Britain became the first Western nation to begin mass COVID-19 vaccinations, the United Arab Emirates said a Chinese-made vaccine has proven to be 86% effective in preventing moderate and severe cases of the disease. The Emirates’ health ministry announced the news Wednesday about the vaccine developed by China’s state-owned pharmaceutical company Sinopharm. The Gulf Arab state participated in a late-stage clinical trial launched by Sinopharm in September involving 31,000 volunteers across 125 nations. The UAE had also granted emergency use approval for the Sinopharm vaccine back in September for health care workers deemed most at risk of infection. The ministry says the vaccine had no serious safety concerns, but the statement did not include any detailed data derived from the study, such as how many volunteers were given the vaccine or a placebo, or if it produced any kind of side effects. In spite of this omission, the health authority says the vaccine’s success paves the way for mass inoculations and a reopening of its economy. The Canadian, British and UAE announcements are the latest positive news about the global effort to develop and distribute a safe and effective vaccine against the novel coronavirus, which has killed 1.5 million people worldwide out of more than 68.2 million total infections. 
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YouTube said on Wednesday it would start removing content that falsely allege widespread fraud changed the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, in a change to its more hands-off stance on videos making similar claims.
The update, which applies to content uploaded from Wednesday, comes a day after “safe harbor,” a deadline set by U.S. law for states to certify the results of the presidential election.
YouTube said it would start enforcing the policy in line with its approach towards historical U.S. presidential elections.
Online platforms have been under pressure to police misinformation about the election on their sites.
YouTube, owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google, was widely seen as taking a more hands-off approach than Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc, which started labeling content with election misinformation. YouTube labels all election-related videos.
After the November election, Reuters identified several YouTube channels making money from ads and memberships that were amplifying debunked accusations about voting fraud.
Last month, a group of Democratic senators asked YouTube to commit to removing content containing false or misleading information about the 2020 election outcome and the upcoming Senate run-off elections in Georgia.
Asked about how the policy would apply to Georgia elections, a YouTube spokeswoman said this policy only applied to the presidential election.
YouTube said in a blog post on Wednesday that since September it had removed over 8,000 channels and thousands of misleading election-related videos for violating its existing policies.
The company said more than 70% of recommendations on election-related topics came from authoritative news sources.
YouTube also said that since Election Day, fact-check information panels had been triggered over 200,000 times on election-related search results
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British regulators warned Wednesday that people with a history of allergic reactions not to get inoculated with a coronavirus vaccine developed jointly by U.S. drug maker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech.The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency issued the warning after two people reported adverse reactions to the vaccine on Tuesday, the first day of the vaccine’s rollout in Britain.National Health Service medical director Stephen Powis said two employees reported severe allergic reactions linked with receiving the vaccination.  He said both are recovering.Experts: Vaccines Appear Safe, But Some Questions RemainWith the pandemic raging, regulators allow shorter safety testsPfizer and BioNTech did not immediately comment on the warning in Britain, the first country to administer a fully examined vaccine for emergency use.MHRA Chief Executive June Raine told a parliamentary committee in London Tuesday the reaction to the vaccine was not a side-effect seen in trials.Raine’s remarks were made during a broader discussion about how MHRA will continue to observe people who get the vaccine.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel Tuesday called for tougher COVID-19 restrictions as the nation set daily record for deaths from the virus and infection numbers continue to rise.Speaking in the Bundestag – the lower house of the German parliament – a sometimes-emotional Merkel told lawmakers the nation was in a decisive period of fighting the pandemic, with the second wave far more demanding than the first.  Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases reported Wednesday 590 deaths related to COVID-19 in the past 24 hours – more than 100 higher than the week-old previous record – and 20,815 new daily infections, compared with 17,270 a week earlier.United Arab Emirates Says Chinese-made COVID-19 Vaccine is Nearly 90% Effective Gulf Arab state participated in late-stage clinical trial of vaccine developed by state-owned pharmaceutical company Sinopharm Germany is gradually moving toward a tighter lockdown, at least for a limited period after Christmas, as new coronavirus cases remain high and continue climbing.  
This despite a partial shutdown that started in early November, in hopes of allowing a more normal Christmas holiday.While families will be allowed to gather for Christmas, Merkel is calling for all but the most essential shops to close from Christmas Eve until at least January 10, and for people to work from home and schools to remain closed during that time as well.The idea is to use the festive period to keep people at home and break the chain of infections. Merkel emphatically urged people to limit their social contacts whenever possible.  She said, “If we have too many contacts before Christmas and it ends up being the last Christmas with the grandparents, then we’d really have failed.”Merkel has consistently advocated decisive action but has often had to move more slowly because, in highly decentralized Germany, the country’s 16 state governments are responsible for imposing and lifting restrictions.Germany managed to avoid the high number of infections and grim death tolls seen in other large European nations early in the pandemic and continues to have a much lower overall fatality rate than countries such as Britain, France and Spain.
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Prominent U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye said Tuesday that foreign government hackers with “world-class capabilities” broke into its network and stole offensive tools it uses to probe the defenses of its thousands of customers, who include federal, state and local governments and top global corporations.The hackers “primarily sought information related to certain government customers,” FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said in a statement, without naming them. He said there was no indication they got customer information from the company’s consulting or breach-response businesses or threat-intelligence data it collects.FireEye is a major cybersecurity player — it responded to the Sony and Equifax data breaches and helped Saudi Arabia thwart an oil industry cyberattack — and has played a key role in identifying Russia as the protagonist in numerous aggressions in the burgeoning netherworld of global digital conflict.Neither Mandia nor a FireEye spokeswoman said when the company detected the hack or who might be responsible. But many in the cybersecurity community suspect Russia.“I do think what we know of the operation is consistent with a Russian state actor,” said former NSA hacker Jake Williams, president of Rendition Infosec. “Whether or not customer data was accessed, it’s still a big win for Russia.”FireEye’s Mandia said he had concluded that “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities” was behind the attack.The stolen “red team” tools — which amount to real-world malware — could be dangerous in the wrong hands. FireEye said there’s no indication they have been used maliciously. But cybersecurity experts say sophisticated nation-state hackers could modify them and wield them in the future against government or industry targets.The hack was the biggest blow to the U.S. cybersecurity community since a mysterious group known as the “Shadow Brokers” in 2016 released a trove of high-level hacking tools stolen from the National Security Agency. The U.S. believes North Korea and Russia capitalized on the stolen tools to unleash devastating global cyberattacks.The nation’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that “unauthorized third-party users” could similarly abuse FireEye’s stolen red-team tools.Milpitas, California-based FireEye, which is publicly traded, said in Tuesday’s statement that it had developed 300 countermeasures to protect customers and others from them and was making them immediately available.FireEye has been at the forefront of investigating state-backed hacking groups, including Russian groups trying to break into state and local governments in the U.S. that administer elections. It was credited with attributing to Russian military hackers mid-winter attacks in 2015 and 2016 on Ukraine’s energy grid. Its threat hunters also have helped social media companies including Facebook identify malicious actors.Thomas Rid, a Johns Hopkins cyberconflict scholar, said that if the Kremlin were behind the hack it could have been seeking to learn what FireEye knows about Russia’s global state-backed operations — doing counterintelligence. Or it might have seeking to retaliate against the U.S. government for measures including indicting Russian military hackers for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and other alleged crimes. FireEye is, after all, a close U.S. government partner that has “exposed many Russian operations,” he said.FireEye said it is investigating the attack in coordination with the FBI and partners including Microsoft, which has its own cybersecurity team. Mandia said the hackers used “a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past.”Matt Gorham, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said the hackers’ “high level of sophistication (was) consistent with a nation state.”The U.S. government is “focused on imposing risk and consequences on malicious cyber actors, so they think twice before attempting an intrusion in the first place,” Gorham said. That has included what U.S. Cyber Command terms “defending forward” operations such as penetrated the networks of Russia and other adversaries.U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat on the Senate’s intelligence committee, applauded FireEye for quickly disclosing the intrusion, saying the case “shows the difficulty of stopping determined nation-state hackers.”Cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch said security companies like FireEye are top targets, with big names in the field including Kaspersky and Symantec breached in the past.“Every security company is being targeted by nation-state actors. This has been going on got over a decade now,” said Alperovitch, the co-founder and former chief technical officer of Crowdstrike, which investigated the 2016 Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.He said the release of the “red-team” tools, while a serious concern, was “not the end of the world because threat actors always create new tools.”“This could have been much worse if their customer data had been hacked and exfiltrated. So far there is no evidence of that,” Alperovitch said, citing hacks of other cybersecurity companies — RSA Security in 2011 and Bit9 two years later — that contributed to the compromise of customer data.Founded in 2004, FireEye went public in 2013 and months later acquired Virginia-based Mandiant Corp., the firm that linked years of cyberattacks against U.S. companies to a secret Chinese military unit. It had about 3,400 employees and $889.2 million in revenue last year, though with a net loss of $257.4 million.The company’s 8,800 customers last year included more than half of the Forbes Global 2000, companies in telecommunications, technology, financial services, healthcare, electric grid operators, pharmaceutical companies and the oil-and-gas industry.Its stock fell more than 7% in after-hours trading Tuesday following news of the hack.
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Deforestation has wiped out 8% of the Amazon rainforest in just 18 years, according to a study released Tuesday. The swath of land destroyed between 2000 and 2018 is the size of Spain, according to a study by Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network (RAISG). “The Amazon is far more threatened than it was eight years ago,” RAISG said in a statement. The organization’s last map tracking deterioration of the forest was published in 2012. FILE – An employee uses heavy machinery to stack logs at the Serra Mansa logging and sawmill company, in Moraes Almeida district, Itaituba, Para state, Brazil, in the Amazon rainforest, Sept. 12, 2019.The current map, a collaboration between 10 organizations, shows 513,016 square kilometers of the rainforest have been lost since 2000. According to the report, the latest data shows a turn for the worse. While rates of deforestation declined between 2003 and 2010, logging, farming, ranching, mining and infrastructure projects in the past decade have negatively affected the Amazon.Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has encouraged development in the Amazon rainforest and loosened enforcement of environmental laws. “In 2018 alone, 31,269 square kilometers of forest were destroyed across the Amazon region, the worst annual deforestation since 2003,” the RAISG study says. The destruction of mature tropical forests is a massive hit to biodiversity and is responsible for about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the World Resources Institute, the research and advocacy group that oversees Global Forest Watch.  Because forests are massive sponges of carbon dioxide, reversing their loss would play an outsize role in fighting climate change.Forest Losses Increased in 2019 to Third-Largest This Century Indonesia, Columbia offer glimmers of hope in the bad news The RAISG study comes days before the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, in which 195 countries agreed to measures that would limit world production of CO2 emissions. In a controversial move, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in 2017. 
 
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