After a century-long absence, gray wolves have returned to California forests. Though some wildlife experts are thrilled to see the their return, some farmers and ranchers worry the wolves present a threat to their animals. From Tulare County, California, VOA’s Robin Guess reports. Camera: Matt Dibble, Roy Kim.
…
Day: November 7, 2023
Alarmed by yet another jump in syphilis cases in newborns, U.S. health officials are calling for stepped-up prevention measures, including encouraging millions of women of childbearing age and their partners to get tested for the sexually transmitted disease.
More than 3,700 babies were born with congenital syphilis in 2022 — 10 times more than a decade before and a 32% increase from 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday. Syphilis caused 282 stillbirth and infant deaths, nearly 16 times more than the 2012 deaths.
The 2022 count was the most in more than 30 years, CDC officials said, and in more than half of the congenital syphilis cases, the mothers tested positive during pregnancy but did not get properly treated.
The rise in congenital syphilis comes despite repeated warnings by public health agencies, and it’s tied to the surge in primary and secondary cases of syphilis in adults, CDC officials said. It’s also been increasingly difficult for medical providers to get benzathine penicillin injections — the main medical weapon against congenital syphilis — because of supply shortages.
“It is clear that something is not working here, that something has to change,” the CDC’s Dr. Laura Bachmann said. “That’s why we’re calling for exceptional measures to address this heartbreaking epidemic.”
The federal agency wants medical providers to start syphilis treatment when a pregnant woman first tests positive, rather than waiting for confirmatory testing, and to expand access to transportation so the women can get treatment. The CDC also called for rapid tests to be made available beyond doctors’ offices and STD clinics to places such as emergency rooms, needle-exchange programs and prisons and jails.
Federal officials again advised sexually active women of childbearing age and their partners to get tested for syphilis at least once if they live in a county with high rates. According to a new CDC map and definition, 70% of U.S. adults live in a county with high rates. That’s likely tens of millions of people, according to an Associated Press estimate based on federal data.
The CDC’s recommendations are just that; there is no new federal money going out to state and local health departments to bolster testing or access. Some state health departments have already said they’re stretched thin when it comes to treatment and prevention, although Illinois announced last week it was starting a phone line for health care providers to help with record searching, consultation and assistance with mandatory reporting.
Syphilis is a bacterial infection that for centuries was a common but feared sexually transmitted disease. New infections plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when antibiotics became widely available and fell to their lowest mark in the late 1990s. By 2002, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected, although the STD is spreading among several demographics.
In congenital syphilis, mothers pass the disease on to their babies, potentially leading to the death of the child or health problems for the child such as deafness, blindness and malformed bones. Case rates have been rising across racial and ethnic groups.
Dr. Mike Saag, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said syphilis can be “a silent infection” in women because it’s tricky to diagnose without a blood test — not everyone gets painless sores, wart-like lesions or other visible symptoms.
The CDC has long recommended that all pregnant women should be tested for syphilis at their first prenatal visit, but poor access to prenatal care — largely in rural areas of the U.S. — can make that difficult. Nearly 40% of last year’s congenital syphilis cases involved mothers who didn’t have prenatal care, the CDC said.
If syphilis is diagnosed early in a pregnancy, the threat of passing it to the baby can be removed by a single penicillin shot. But experts say the later one gets into pregnancy, the more likely one will need multiple shots, and they have to be completed at least 30 days before delivery.
“I have had patients who have been on (a three-shot) regimen who then miss a shot,” said Dr. Nina Ragunanthan, an OB/GYN at the Delta Health Center in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. “So they are trying to get their shots, but if they don’t get the three in a row, because of transportation issues, because of job issues, child care issues, any number of reasons that prevent them from coming back, they don’t complete their treatment.”
Plus, the shortage of shots makes the task of getting syphilis numbers down difficult, health officials across the U.S. told the AP. Patients who are not pregnant can use the antibiotic doxycycline to treat syphilis, but health officials are concerned that the 14- to 28-day timeline of treatment is difficult to complete, leaving infected people uncured.
Pfizer is the nation’s sole supplier of penicillin shots. Earlier this year, company officials said penicillin was in short supply because of increased demand. Pfizer also said the shortage may not be resolved until next year.
The CDC said the shortage didn’t affect the 2022 congenital syphilis case numbers and that, despite the shortage, it isn’t aware of patients not getting their needed shots.
…
European astronomers on Tuesday released the first images from the newly launched Euclid space telescope, designed to unlock the secrets of dark matter and dark energy — hidden forces thought to make up 95% of the universe.
The European Space Agency, which leads the six-year mission with NASA as a partner, said the images were the sharpest of their kind, showcasing the telescope’s ability to monitor billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light years away.
The images spanned four areas of the relatively nearby universe, including 1,000 galaxies belonging to the massive Perseus cluster just 240 million light years away, and more than 100,000 galaxies spread out in the background, ESA said.
Scientists believe vast, seemingly organized structures such as Perseus could have formed only if dark matter exists.
“We think we understand only 5% of the universe. That’s the matter that we can see,” ESA’s science director Carole Mundell told Reuters.
“The rest of the universe we call dark because it doesn’t produce light in the normal electromagnetic spectrum,” she said. “But we know its effect because we see the effect on visible matter.”
Tell-tale signs of the hidden force exerted by dark matter include galaxies rotating more quickly than scientists would expect from the amount of visible matter that can be detected.
Its influence is also implicated in pulling together some of the most massive structures in the universe, such as clusters of galaxies, Mundell said.
Dark energy is even more enigmatic.
Its hypothetical existence was established only in the 1990s by studying exploding stars called supernovas, resulting in a 2011 Nobel prize shared between three U.S.-born scientists.
Thanks in part to observations from the earlier Hubble Space Telescope, they concluded that the universe was not only expanding but that the pace of expansion was accelerating — a stunning discovery attributed to the new concept of dark energy.
After initial commissioning and technical teething problems, including stray light and guidance issues, Euclid will now start piecing together a 3D map encompassing about a third of the sky to detect tiny variations attributable to the dark universe.
By gaining new insights into dark energy and matter, scientists hope to better grasp the formation and distribution of galaxies across the so-called cosmic web of the universe.
The release of the images in Darmstadt, Germany, coincided with the second of two days of European space talks in Spain dominated by Europe’s continued dependency on foreign launches.
…
Sweden is poised to become Europe’s first smoke-free country largely thanks to the popularity of snus, a kind of moist snuff which is placed under the upper lip.
But some are worried the tobacco industry is peddling a “fairytale” that is too good to be true.
Used by one in seven Swedes, snus has, according to the government, helped slash the number of smokers from 15% of the population in 2005 to 5.2% last year, a record low in Europe.
A country is considered smoke-free when less than 5% of its population are daily smokers.
Snus has been banned in the European Union since 1992. But Sweden negotiated an exemption when it joined the bloc three years later.
At the Swedish Match factory in the western city of Gothenburg, thousands of doses of snus wend their way through a complex web of machinery producing the sachets.
The company sold 277 million boxes of snus in Sweden and Norway in 2021.
“We have used it for 200 years in Sweden. [It’s] part of the Swedish culture, just like many other European countries have their wine culture,” Swedish Match spokesman Patrik Hildingsson told AFP.
Clad in a white lab coat, he described the manufacturing process.
“Tobacco comes from India or the United States. It goes through this silo and is then packed inside the pouches like tea bags and then into these boxes.”
There are two types: traditional brown snus, which contains tobacco, and white snus, which is made of synthetic nicotine and often flavored.
Conquering the young
Traditional snus is mostly sold in Sweden, Norway and the U.S.
White snus, introduced about 15 years ago, falls into a legal void in the EU since it doesn’t contain tobacco. It was banned this year in both Belgium and the Netherlands.
But it is hugely popular with young people in Sweden, with its use quadrupling among women aged 16 to 29 in four years.
Fifteen percent of people in Sweden say they use some form of snus daily, a figure that has risen slightly in recent years.
At the same time, the country has seen a sharp drop in smokers even though cigarettes are less than half the price they are in Ireland.
Just 5% of Swedes say they smoke regularly, according to 2022 data from the Public Health Agency, putting Sweden 27 years ahead of the EU’s 2050 smoke-free target.
“It’s very positive,” Swedish Health Minister Jakob Forssmed told AFP.
“A very important decision was the smoking ban in restaurants from 2005, and then at outdoor restaurants and public places in 2019,” he said.
“Many Swedes also say that switching to snus helped them stop smoking.”
The government has also backed the snus industry, hiking taxes recently on cigarettes by nine percent while cutting those on traditional snus by 20%.
“With all these regulations it’s almost impossible to smoke. Snus doesn’t smell, and the nicotine rush is much stronger than with a cigarette,” said Thorbjorn Thoors, a 67-year-old window repairman who has used snus since his teens and quit smoking decades ago.
Linked to cancer?
But the decision to lower taxes on snus does not sit well with Ulrika Arehed Kagstrom, head of the Swedish Cancer Society.
“It came as a complete surprise and I was really disappointed,” she said.
“It shows that they really completely bought the fairytale from the tobacco industry, [which is] trying to find a new market for these products and saying that these are harm reduction products.
“We don’t have enough research yet,” she insisted.
“We know that snus and these kinds of nicotine products cause changes in your blood pressure and there is a risk of long-term cardiovascular disease.”
Arehed Kagstrom fears that just like with smoking it will take years to show “to what extent these products were harmful.”
A June 2023 study by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health showed that the risk of throat and pancreatic cancer was three and two times greater, respectively, among frequent snus users.
However, in 2017, a study in the International Journal of Cancer concluded there was no link between cancer and snus.