Day: January 16, 2025

People hospitalized for flu should be tested for bird flu within 24 hours, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday, in an expansion of the agency’s efforts to tackle increasing infections in humans. 

The advisory is intended to prevent delays in identifying human cases of avian influenza A (H5N1) viruses amid high levels of seasonal influenza. 

The risk to the general public from bird flu is low, and there has been no further evidence of person to person spread, the agency said. 

Still, influenza A-positive patients, particularly those in an intensive care unit, should be tested ideally within 24 hours of hospitalization to identify the viral subtype and determine whether they have bird flu, the agency said. 

Prior to Thursday’s guidance, hospitals generally sent batches of samples to labs for subtyping every few days. 

Faster testing also aims to help doctors identify how people became infected and provide their close contacts with testing and medicine more quickly, if needed, said Nirav Shah, the agency’s principal deputy director, on a call with reporters. 

The CDC does not believe it has been missing bird flu infections in people, Shah said. No surveillance system detects 100% of cases, he added later. 

“The system is working as it should,” said Shah, adding that health officials want results sooner in case any public health action is needed. “What we need is to shift to a system that tells us what’s happening in the moment.” 

Nearly 70 people in the United States, most of them farmworkers, have contracted bird flu since April, as the virus has circulated among poultry flocks and dairy herds. Three people have tested positive without a clear source of exposure to the virus, according to CDC. 

Most infections in humans have been mild, but one fatality was reported in Louisiana last week. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has more than 300 personnel working on its bird flu response and has spent $1.5 billion on its efforts to curb the spread among poultry and dairy cattle, said Eric Deeble, a deputy undersecretary at the agency. 

The USDA last week said it would rebuild a bird flu vaccine stockpile for poultry. 

USDA officials have met several times with the transition team of the incoming Donald Trump administration to try to ensure a smooth handoff on agency actions to curb the spread of the virus, including a tabletop exercise at the White House on Wednesday, Deeble said. 

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which encompasses CDC, also have repeatedly met with the transition team on Zoom calls and have shared their bird flu playbook, officials said on the press call.  

HHS said on Thursday it plans to put $211 million toward mRNA-based vaccine technology to better respond to emerging infectious diseases such as bird flu.  
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GENEVA — The World Health Organization appealed Thursday for $1.5 billion for emergency operations this year, warning that conflict, climate change, epidemics and displacement had converged to create an “unprecedented global health crisis.”

The U.N. health agency estimated that health crises would leave 305 million people in need of urgent humanitarian assistance this year.

“WHO is seeking $1.5 billion to support our lifesaving work for the emergencies we know about and to react swiftly to new crises,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said as he launched the appeal.

The agency’s emergency request, which was for the same amount as last year’s request, outlined the critical priorities and resources needed to address 42 ongoing health emergencies.

“Conflicts, outbreaks, climate-related disasters and other health emergencies are no longer isolated or occasional — they are relentless, overlapping and intensifying,” Tedros said in a statement.

He pointed to the emergency health assistance provided in conflict zones ranging from the occupied Palestinian territories to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Sudan, as well as its work conducting vaccination campaigns, treating malnutrition and helping control outbreaks of diseases like cholera.

“Without adequate and sustainable funding, we face the impossible task of deciding who will receive care and who will not this year,” Tedros said at Thursday’s event.

“Your support helps to ensure that WHO remains a lifeline, bridging the gap between sickness and health, despair and hope, life and death for millions of people worldwide.”
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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump says he wants the United States to be the world leader in artificial intelligence and crypto currency. To that end, he has tapped a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor to be the AI and crypto czar. Michelle Quinn has the story.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Blue Origin’s giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida early Thursday morning on its first mission to space, an inaugural step into Earth’s orbit for Jeff Bezos’ space company as it aims to rival SpaceX in the satellite launch business.

Thirty stories tall with a reusable first stage, New Glenn launched around 2 a.m. ET (0700 GMT) from Blue Origin’s launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, its seven engines thundering for miles under cloudy skies on its second liftoff attempt this week.

Hundreds of employees at the company’s Kent, Washington headquarters and its Cape Canaveral, Florida rocket factory roared in applause as Blue Origin VP Ariane Cornell announced the rocket’s second stage made it to orbit, achieving a long-awaited milestone.

“We hit our key, critical, number-one objective, we got to orbit safely,” Cornell said on a company live stream. “And y’all we did it on our first go.”

The rocket’s reusable first stage booster was due to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from its second stage, but failed to make that landing, Cornell confirmed. Telemetry from the booster blacked out minutes after liftoff.

“We did in fact lose the booster,” Cornell said.

The culmination of a decade-long, multi-billion-dollar development journey, the mission marks Blue Origin’s first trek to Earth’s orbit in the 25 years since Bezos founded the company.

Bezos told Reuters on Sunday, before Blue Origin’s first launch attempt, that he was most nervous about landing the booster.

But he added that sticking the landing would be the “icing on the cake” if they could achieve the milestone of getting the payload to its intended orbit.

Secured inside New Glenn’s payload bay for the mission is the first prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring vehicle, a maneuverable spacecraft the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.

The rocket’s first attempt to launch on Monday was scrubbed around 3 a.m. ET because ice had accumulated on a propellant line. On Thursday, the company cited no issues ahead of launch.

Bezos monitored the launch from a few miles away in Blue Origin’s mission control room, wearing a large headset and flanked by dozens of launch staff. The company’s CEO, Dave Limp, was next to him.

New Glenn is expected to press ahead with a backlog of dozens of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including up to 27 launches for Amazon’s Kuiper satellite internet network that will rival SpaceX’s Starlink service.

New Glenn is the latest U.S. rocket to debut in recent years as governments and private companies beef up their space programs and race to challenge Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its workhorse Falcon 9.

NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket had a successful debut in 2022, as did the Vulcan rocket last year from United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s joint launch venture.

New Glenn is roughly twice as powerful as Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket, with a payload bay diameter two times larger to fit bigger batches of satellites. Blue Origin has not disclosed the rocket’s launch pricing. Falcon 9 starts at around $62 million.

The development of New Glenn has spanned three Blue Origin CEOs and faced numerous delays as SpaceX grew into an industry juggernaut.

SpaceX’s giant, next-generation Starship rocket in development, which New Glenn will also compete with, is expected to further rattle the industry with cheap rides to space and full reusability.

Bezos in late 2023 moved to speed things up at Blue Origin, prioritizing the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines. He named Limp, an Amazon veteran, as CEO, who employees say introduced a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.
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BENGALURU — India became the world’s fourth nation on Thursday to achieve the feat of space docking, a technological milestone that underscores its ambitions to expand its share of a rapidly growing $400-billion global space market. 

Target and Chaser, two satellites of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) that are each roughly the size of a large refrigerator, successfully latched onto each other Thursday morning, an agency spokesperson said. 

The indigenous technology, crucial for satellite servicing, space station operations, and interplanetary missions, positions India for a key role in commercial and exploratory space efforts. 

“India has ambitious missions planned and to achieve those, this is an important technology,” astrophysicist Jayant Murthy said. 

“Various missions, like building a space station, need assembly in space, which is not possible without space docking.” 

ISRO said the two satellites participating in its Space Docking Experiment (SpaDeX), will now be controlled as a single object, with power transfer checks made in the next few days. 

The mission had been postponed twice, first because the docking process needed further validation through ground simulations, and then to resolve an issue stemming from excess drift between the satellites. 

SpaDeX, launched on Dec. 30 from India’s main spaceport, deployed the satellites in orbit with an Indian-made rocket. 

Among 24 payloads and experiments were eight cowpea seeds, sent to space to study plant growth in microgravity conditions, which germinated within four days of the mission’s launch. 

Scientists say this is a critical step demonstrating that food can eventually be grown in space during long missions. 

The mission also will demonstrate the transfer of electric power between docked spacecraft, key to applications such as in-space robotics, composite spacecraft control and payload operations after undocking. 

Such techniques are essential for missions requiring multiple rocket launches. 

Space exploration and commercialization is a key part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to position India as a global superpower. 

The successful SpaDeX mission “is a significant stepping stone for India’s ambitious space missions in the years to come,” Modi said on X. 

On Thursday, India approved the setting-up of a third launch pad in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, to be completed in four years at a cost of $461 million, giving a further boost to its space plans. 

ISRO is focused on deep-space exploration and enabling private companies to commercialize the sector, with projects ranging from solar studies to orbital astronaut missions and planetary defense, in collaboration with NASA. 

With the global commercial space market expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, India aims to grow its share to $44 billion by 2040, up from $8 billion, or a slice of just 2%, now. 
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