Day: October 8, 2024

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Abuja, Nigeria — Cholera is surging in Nigeria, health officials said this week, with the number of cases and deaths increasing by more than 200% this year.

The Nigerian Center for Disease Control said in this week’s epidemiological report that the country has recorded nearly 11,000 cases of cholera this year — a 220% increase compared with the same point in 2023.

The report said fatalities over the same periods have increased from 106 to 359 — a rise of 239%.

The state of Lagos accounted for 43% of the nation’s cases, while Kano, Katsina, Jigawa and Borno also recorded significant numbers.

Last month, the worst flooding in 30 years ravaged conflict-ridden Borno state, worsening an already dire humanitarian situation there. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and moved to overcrowded camps.

“We’re now facing a significant public health challenge that demands urgent attention and action,” Borno Health Commissioner Baba Mallam Gana said. “This outbreak is concerning, especially in the aftermath of a flooding incident.

“The floods have created ideal conditions for the spread of waterborne diseases like cholera by contaminating water sources and disrupting sanitation systems,” he said.

Cholera is a bacterial disease, usually spread by contaminated food or water. It causes severe diarrhea and dehydration.

The Nigerian CDC launched a national emergency response along with state authorities to bring numbers down, but the number of cases is surging, Gana said.

“We must now act swiftly to prevent further spread of this disease,” he said.

As part of the flood intervention responses, Gana said, the Borno public health emergency center was converted into a control center to coordinate surveillance, risk communication and community engagement, as well as essential health services, infection prevention, water sanitation and hygiene.

Nigeria’s Health Ministry is sending hundreds of thousands of doses of cholera vaccine to the affected areas. Borno alone received 300,000 doses, and state authorities say the vaccine has been distributed to camps for those displaced by the floods.
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NEW YORK/WASHINGTON — TikTok faces new lawsuits filed by 13 U.S. states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday, accusing the popular social media platform of harming and failing to protect young people.

The lawsuits, filed separately in New York, California, the District of Columbia and 11 other states, expand Chinese-owned TikTok’s legal fight with U.S. regulators and seek new financial penalties against the company.

Washington is located in the District of Columbia.

The states accuse TikTok of using intentionally addictive software designed to keep children watching as long and often as possible and misrepresenting its content moderation effectiveness.

“TikTok cultivates social media addiction to boost corporate profits,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. “TikTok intentionally targets children because they know kids do not yet have the defenses or capacity to create healthy boundaries around addictive content.”

TikTok seeks to maximize the amount of time users spend on the app in order to target them with ads, the states said.

“Young people are struggling with their mental health because of addictive social media platforms like TikTok,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.

TikTok said on Tuesday that it strongly disagreed with the claims, “many of which we believe to be inaccurate and misleading,” and that it was disappointed the states chose to sue “rather than work with us on constructive solutions to industrywide challenges.”

TikTok provides safety features that include default screentime limits and privacy defaults for minors under 16, the company said.

Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb alleged that TikTok operates an unlicensed money transmission business through its livestreaming and virtual currency features.

“TikTok’s platform is dangerous by design. It’s an intentionally addictive product that is designed to get young people addicted to their screens,” Schwalb said in an interview.

Washington’s lawsuit accused TikTok of facilitating sexual exploitation of underage users, saying TikTok’s livestreaming and virtual currency “operate like a virtual strip club with no age restrictions.”

Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont and Washington state also sued on Tuesday.

In March 2022, eight states, including California and Massachusetts, said they launched a nationwide probe of TikTok impacts on young people.

The U.S. Justice Department sued TikTok in August for allegedly failing to protect children’s privacy on the app. Other states, including Utah and Texas, previously sued TikTok for failing to protect children from harm. TikTok on Monday rejected the allegations in a court filing.

TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is battling a U.S. law that could ban the app in the United States.
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STOCKHOLM — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said.

Hinton, who is known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto. Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the Nobel committee said in a press release.

Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”

She said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation.”

Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in the open call with reporters and the officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

The Nobel committee that honored the science behind machine learning and AI also mentioned fears about its possible flipside. Moon said that while it has “enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

On Tuesday, he said he was shocked at the honor.

“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone.

There was no immediate reaction from Hopfield.

Hinton, now 76, in the 1980s helped develop a technique known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn.”

His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats, giving birth to the rise of modern AI.

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.

Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.

The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry physics prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
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new york — Humanity is hitting the upper limit of life expectancy, according to a new study.

Advances in medical technology and genetic research — not to mention larger numbers of people making it to age 100 — are not translating into marked jumps in lifespan overall, according to researchers who found shrinking longevity increases in countries with the longest-living populations.

“We have to recognize there’s a limit” and perhaps reassess assumptions about when people should retire and how much money they’ll need to live out their lives, said S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois-Chicago researcher who was lead author of the study published Monday by the journal Nature Aging.

Mark Hayward, a University of Texas researcher not involved in the study, called it “a valuable addition to the mortality literature.”

“We are reaching a plateau” in life expectancy, he agreed. It’s always possible some breakthrough could push survival to greater heights, “but we don’t have that now,” Hayward said.

What is life expectancy?

Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live, assuming death rates at that time hold constant. It is one of the world’s most important health measures, but it is also imperfect: It is a snapshot estimate that cannot account for deadly pandemics, miracle cures or other unforeseen developments that might kill or save millions of people.

In the new research, Olshansky and his research partners tracked life expectancy estimates for the years 1990 to 2019, drawn from a database administered by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. The researchers focused on eight of the places in the world where people live the longest — Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland.

The U.S. doesn’t even rank in the top 40. But is also included “because we live here” and because of past, bold estimates that life expectancy in the U.S. might surge dramatically in this century, Olshansky said.

Who lives the longest?

Women continue to live longer than men and life expectancy improvements are still occurring — but at a slowing pace, the researchers found. In 1990, the average amount of improvement was about 2½ years per decade. In the 2010s, it was 1½ years — and almost zero in the U.S.

The U.S. is more problematic because it is harder hit by a range of issues that kill people even before they hit old age, including drug overdoses, shootings, obesity and inequities that make it hard for some people to get sufficient medical care.

But in one calculation, the researchers estimated what would happen in all nine places if all deaths before age 50 were eliminated. The increase at best was still only 1½ years, Olshansky said.

Eileen Crimmins, a University of Southern California gerontology expert, said in an email that she agrees with the study’s findings. She added, “For me personally, the most important issue is the dismal and declining relative position of the United States.”

Why life expectancy may not be able to rise forever

The study suggests that there’s a limit to how long most people live, and we’ve about hit it, Olshansky said.

“We’re squeezing less and less life out of these life-extending technologies. And the reason is, aging gets in the way,” he said.

It may seem common to hear of a person living to 100 — former U.S. President Jimmy Carter hit that milestone last week. In 2019, a little over 2% of Americans made it to 100, compared with about 5% in Japan and 9% in Hong Kong, Olshansky said.

It’s likely that the ranks of centenarians will grow in the decades ahead, experts say, but that’s because of population growth. The percentage of people hitting 100 will remain limited, likely with fewer than 15% of women and 5% of men making it that long in most countries, Olshansky said.
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