The world’s biggest and most powerful space telescope found a parking space. Plus, a lottery winner can’t claim his prize, and a volcanic eruption may offer clues on the formation of planets. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Day: January 27, 2022
Six people who were children living in Fukushima at the time of the 2011 nuclear disaster and have since developed thyroid cancer filed a lawsuit Thursday demanding a utility pay compensation for their illnesses, which they say were triggered by massive radiation spewed from the Fukushima nuclear plant.
The people, now aged 17-27 and living in and outside of Fukushima, demand the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings pay a total of 616 million yen ($5.4 million) in compensation.
One of the plaintiffs, identified only as a woman in her 20s, said she has had to prioritize her health over her career and has seen prejudice against thyroid cancer patients.
“But I decided to come forward and tell the truth in hopes of improving the situation for nearly 300 other people also suffering like us,” she said.
Their lawyers said it is the first group lawsuit in Japan filed by Fukushima residents over health problems linked to the nuclear disaster 11 years ago.
In a news conference after filing their lawsuit at the Tokyo District Court, a plaintiff and the mother of another plaintiff said they hoped the court would establish a correlation between the cancer and radiation leaked from the plant. An expert panel commissioned by the Fukushima prefectural government has so far ruled out the alleged cause.
The plaintiffs, who were 6 to 16 years old at the time of the meltdown, were diagnosed with thyroid cancer between 2012 and 2018, their lawyers said. Four of them had their thyroid fully removed and need to take lifetime hormonal treatment. One of them says the cancer has since spread elsewhere. The other two had part of their thyroid removed.
The plaintiffs are from different parts of Fukushima, including Aizu, about 120 kilometers (72 miles) west of the plant, and some of them have since moved to the Tokyo area.
More than 290 people have been diagnosed with or are suspected of having thyroid cancer, including 266 found as part of the Fukushima prefectural panel’s survey of some 380,000 residents aged 18 or younger at the time of the disaster.
The occurrence rate of 77 per 100,000 people is significantly higher than the usual 1-2 per million, their lawyers say.
Prefectural officials and experts have said the high detection rate in Fukushima is due to overdiagnosis in many cases, which might have led to unnecessary treatment or surgery. Some also call for an end to the blanket surveys.
Kenichi Ido, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said his client’s cancer has progressed, that none of the cases involve overdiagnosis and that TEPCO should be held accountable for radiation exposure unless the company can prove otherwise.
The government at the time of the accident was slow in its emergency response, and evacuation in many places was delayed due to a lack of disclosure about what was happening at the plant. Residents trying to flee in their cars clogged roads and were stranded for hours outside while radiation leaked from the damaged reactors. Some residents headed to evacuation centers in the direction of the radiation flow.
In a trial seeking criminal responsibility of former TEPCO executives, the Tokyo District Court in 2019 found three top officials not guilty, saying they could not have foreseen the disaster. The case has been appealed to a high court.
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Nigerian health authorities say the country’s life expectancy is among the worst in the world, with influenza and pneumonia leading causes of death. In southern Nigeria’s Cross River state, severe air pollution is increasing the cases of respiratory diseases.
Port Harcourt resident David Tolu-Adamu knows. Before leaving for work each day, he dons his face mask.
Tolu-Adamu says it’s a measure he has been taking since long before the coronavirus pandemic to filter out the sooty air.
“Constantly on a daily basis, year in year out, we have issues with black soot,” he says. “We breathe in this harmful substance in our day in, day out, in our sleep, while we work, when we exercise.”
Wearing a face mask is a common practice for many in the oil-rich city polluted by the activities of illegal oil refineries, flaring gas and the burning of garbage and tires. The pollution generated by soot escalated in 2016.
Health authorities say the soot is increasing respiratory ailments in the state and that some 23,000 people have been affected in the last five years.
This month, state authorities began addressing the problem in the affected areas by stopping and criminalizing the illegal refinery practices, says a local government head, Samuel Nwanosike.
“If the actions were not affecting our health, then we wouldn’t bother,” he says. “We are the ones here, we are the ones dying, we’re the ones feeling the pain. I am here every day in Ikwerre local government (area), sometimes I open my door, everywhere is turned dark; meanwhile there’s supposed to be sunshine.”
Health authorities say the country’s life expectancy of 54 years of age ranks among the five lowest in the world.
Respiratory illnesses such as influenza and pneumonia are leading causes of death. Globally, almost 300,000 people died from these ailments in 2018, according to World Health Organization estimates cited by the group World Life Expectancy.
Rivers State authorities blame soot pollution for making the problem worse. Since the start of this year, they have cracked down on illegal refinery operators, arresting more than 20 and shutting down many bases.
Critics accuse state authorities of not doing enough to curb pollution.
“The government is only interested in the proceeds of oil and gas, but they are not interested in the people; they’re not interested in the environment,” says Ibiosiya Sukubo, a local chief in Port Harcourt. “It has put our youths into the creeks, to the breaking of pipes and creating artisanal refineries, forgetting the additional health hazards and implications. We are just victims of circumstance.”
For now, Rivers State authorities say they will continue their crackdown on illegal refineries while looking for other ways to keep residents safe from the soot.
Bathed in crisp morning light, Sidra Hussain grips a cooler stacked with glistening vials of polio vaccine in northwest Pakistan.
Watching over Hussain and her partner, a policeman unslings his rifle and eyes the horizon.
In concert they begin their task — going door-to-door on the outskirts of Mardan city, dripping bitter doses of rose-colored medicine into infants’ mouths on the eve of a major milestone for the nation’s anti-polio drive.
The last infection of the wild poliovirus was recorded on January 27, 2021, according to officials, and Friday marks the first time in Pakistan’s history that a year has passed with no new cases.
To formally eradicate the disease, a nation must be polio-free for three consecutive years — but even 12 months is a long time in a country where vaccination teams are in the crosshairs of a simmering insurgency.
Since the Taliban takeover of neighboring Afghanistan, the Pakistan version of the movement has become emboldened and its fighters frequently target polio teams.
“Life or death is in God’s hands,” Hussain told AFP this week, amid a patchwork of high-walled compounds in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
“We have to come,” she said defiantly. “We can’t just turn back because it’s difficult.”
Thriving in uncertainty
Nigeria officially eradicated wild polio in 2020, leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan as the only countries where the disease — which causes crippling paralysis — is still endemic.
Spread through faeces and saliva, the virus has historically thrived in the blurred borderlands between the South Asian nations, where state infrastructure is weak, and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have carved out a home.
A separate group sharing common heritage with the Afghan Taliban, the TTP was founded in 2007 and once held sway over large swathes of the restive tribal tracts of Pakistan.
In 2014 it was largely ousted by an army offensive, its fighters retreating across the porous border with Afghanistan.
But last year overall militant attacks surged by 56 per cent according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, reversing a six-year downward trend.
The largest number of assaults came in August, coinciding with the Taliban takeover of Kabul.
Pakistan’s newspapers are regularly peppered with stories of police slain as they guard polio teams — and just this week a constable was gunned down in Kohat — 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of Mardan.
Pakistani media has reported as many as 70 polio workers killed in militant attacks since 2012 — mostly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Still, a TTP spokesman told AFP it “never attacked any polio workers,” and that security forces were their target.
“They will be targeted wherever they perform their duties,” he said Mardan deputy commissioner Habib Ullah Arif admits polio teams are “a very soft target” but says the fight to eradicate the disease is entwined with the security threat.
“There is only one concept: we are going to defeat polio, we are going to defeat militancy,” he pledged.
Vaccine skepticism
Pakistan anti-polio drives have been running since 1994, with up to 260,000 vaccinators staging regular waves of regional inoculation campaigns.
But on the fringes of the country, the teams often face skepticism.
“In certain areas of Pakistan, it was considered as a Western conspiracy,” explained Shahzad Baig — head of the national polio eradication program.
The theories ranged wildly: polio teams are spies, the vaccines cause infertility, or contain pig fat forbidden by Islam.
The spy theory gained currency with the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, whose hideaway in Abbottabad was revealed to the United States — unwittingly or otherwise — by a vaccine program run by a Pakistani doctor.
“It’s a complex situation,” said Baig. “It’s socio-economical, it’s political.”
The porous border with Afghanistan — a strategic crutch for the TTP — can also keep polio circulating.
“For the virus, Pakistan and Afghanistan were one country,” said Baig.
In Mardan, 10 teams — each comprising two women and an armed police guard — fan out across the city’s suburbs as morning turns to afternoon.
The teams chalk dates on the homes they visit and smear children’s fingers with indelible ink to mark those already inoculated.
On Monday they delivered dozens more doses to add to the nationwide tally.
“We have the fear in mind, but we have to be active to serve our nation,” said polio worker Zeb-un-Nissa.
“We have to eradicate this disease.”
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A chunk of a SpaceX rocket that blasted off seven years ago and was abandoned in space after completing its mission will crash into the moon in March, experts say.
The rocket was deployed in 2015 to put into orbit a NASA satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR).
Since then, the second stage of the rocket, or booster, has been floating in what mathematicians call a chaotic orbit, astronomer Bill Gray told AFP on Wednesday.
It was Gray who calculated the space junk’s new collision course with the moon.
The booster passed quite close to the moon in January in a rendezvous that altered its orbit, he said.
He is behind Project Pluto, software that allows for calculating the trajectory of asteroids and other objects in space and is used in NASA-financed space observation programs.
A week after the rocket stage whizzed close to the moon, Gray observed it again and concluded it would crash into the moon’s dark side on March 4 at more than 5,500 miles per hour (9,000 kilometers per hour).
Gray appealed to the amateur astronomer community to join him in observing the booster, and his conclusion was confirmed.
The exact time and spot of impact may change slightly from his forecast, but there is widespread agreement that there will be a collision on the moon that day.
“I’ve been tracking junk of this sort for about 15 years, and this is the first unintentional lunar impact that we’ve had,” Gray told Agence France-Presse.
Crater expected
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell told AFP it’s possible that similar impacts have taken place unnoticed.
“There’re at least 50 objects that were left in deep Earth orbit in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that were just abandoned there. We didn’t track them,” he said.
“Now, we’re picking up a couple of them … but a lot of them, we’re not finding, and so they’re not there anymore,” he added. “Probably at least a few of them hit the moon accidentally and we just didn’t notice.”
The impact of the SpaceX rocket chunk weighing 4 tons on the moon will not be visible from Earth in real time.
But it will leave a crater that scientists will be able to observe with spacecraft and satellites like NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or India’s Chandrayaan-2, and thus learn more about the geology of the moon.
Spacecraft have been intentionally crashed into the moon before for scientific purposes, such as during the Apollo missions to test seismometers.
In 2009, NASA sent a rocket stage hurling into the moon near its south pole to look for water.
But most rockets do not go so far from Earth. SpaceX brings its rocket boosters back through the Earth’s atmosphere so they disintegrate over the ocean. The first stage is recovered and reused.
‘Time to start regulating’
Gray said there could be more unintentional crashes into the moon in the future as the U.S. and Chinese space programs leave more junk in orbit.
McDowell noted these events “start to be problematic when there’s a lot more traffic.”
“It’s actually no one’s job to keep track of the junk that we leave out in deep Earth orbit,” he added. “I think now’s the time to start regulating it.”
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP.
Elon Musk’s company is currently developing a lunar lander that should allow NASA to send astronauts back to the moon by 2025 at the earliest.