Category: Silicon Valley

The World Health Organization says traditional medicine plays a pivotal role in the health and well-being of people and the planet and should be seen as complementary to modern medicine and be integrated into national health systems.

Traditional healers have used their knowledge of plants and potions for centuries to treat people with multiple ailments. Much traditional indigenous and ancestral knowledge of traditional medicine is frequently used in health care across the world.

“We are seeing a lot of increasing demand and increasing interest in traditional medicine at the moment,” said Rudi Eggers, WHO director for integrated health services. “Traditional medicine has become a global phenomenon.”

He said 170 out of 194 countries have reported to WHO “that they used traditional medicine in some form, such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, yoga, and indigenous medicine in their countries. In fact, for millions of people, of course, it is the first choice for health care. In some cases, the only choice for health care.”

The WHO says that around 40 percent of modern pharmaceutical products have roots in traditional medicine.

“Many traditional medicines were the basis for some of the classic scientific and medical technologies that have led to some of the major medical breakthroughs, including drugs like aspirin or artemisinin for malaria, and even smallpox inoculation,” said Shyama Kuruvilla, the WHO lead for the Global Center for Traditional Medicine.

Next week, WHO is convening the Traditional Medicine Global Summit in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. The two-day high-level meeting will explore the role of “traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine in addressing pressing global health challenges.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted the “important and catalytic role” traditional medicine can play in achieving the goal of universal health coverage and in meeting global health-related targets that were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said, “Bringing traditional medicine into the mainstream of health care…can help bridge access gaps for millions of people around the world” and would be an important step toward people-centered and holistic approaches to health and well-being.

Kuruvilla agreed that holistic well-being is at the core of all traditional medicine systems, adding that there are existing legal measures and commitments aimed at achieving this goal.

“For example, at the United Nations, the heads of states and governments in 2019 committed to looking at evidence-based ways to integrate traditional medicine into national health systems,” she said. “There are many existing commitments and frameworks that now needed to be implemented.”

Evidence essential, say experts

WHO officials say traditional medicine has contributed to breakthrough discoveries and continues to hold out great promise of other game-changing achievements.

They caution, however, that recommendations on any new therapy or treatment must be based on solid scientific evidence.

“Advancing science on traditional medicine should be held to the same rigorous standards as in other fields of health,” said John Reeder, WHO director of both the department of research for health and the special program for research and training in tropical diseases.

“We need to treat traditional interventions with the same respect we give to other more Western medical interventions and that means examining them closely and critically and scientifically in the same way,” he said.

Summit will highlight best practices

WHO reports next week’s summit will explore research and evaluation of traditional medicine. It also will be an opportunity to showcase countries’ experiences, explore regional trends and discuss best practices.

While traditional medicine has proven its value over many centuries, WHO officials say it cannot replace modern medical care.

Kim Sungchol, head of WHO’s traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine unit, observed that traditional and modern medicines have two different but complementary approaches to health.

“There is a certain advantage of each system,” he said. “For example, modern medicine is quite good and good in emergency care, in communicable disease management, and antibiotics.

“On traditional medicine, one of the unique characteristics that it has is the more holistic approach. It is much advanced in the promotion and prevention, particularly linked to non-communicable diseases,” he said. “So, we have to see the two things differently. We have to identify the strengths of each system to work together to best serve the well-being of the people and planet. That is our purpose.”
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Virgin Galactic rocketed to the edge of space with its first tourists Thursday, including a former British Olympian who bought his ticket 18 years ago and a mother-daughter duo from the Caribbean.

The space plane glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, after a brief flight that gave passengers a few minutes of weightlessness.

Cheers erupted from families and friends watching from below when the craft’s rocket motor fired after it was released from the plane that had carried it aloft. The rocket ship reached about 88 kilometers high.

Richard Branson’s company expects to begin offering monthly trips to customers on its winged space plane, joining Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the space tourism business.

Virgin Galactic passenger Jon Goodwin, who was among the first to buy a ticket in 2005, said he had faith that he would someday make the trip. The 80-year-old athlete — he competed in canoeing in the 1972 Olympics — has Parkinson’s disease and wants to be an inspiration to others.

“I hope it shows them that these obstacles can be the start rather than the end to new adventures,” he said in a statement.

Ticket prices were $200,000 when Goodwin signed up. The cost is now $450,000.

He was joined by sweepstakes winner Keisha Schahaff, 46, a health coach from Antigua, and her daughter, Anastatia Mayers, 18, a student at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen. Also on board: two pilots and the company’s astronaut trainer.

It was Virgin Galactic’s seventh trip to space since 2018, but the first with a ticket-holder. Branson, the company’s founder, hopped on board for the first full-size crew ride in 2021. Italian military and government researchers soared in June on the first commercial flight. About 800 people are currently on Virgin Galactic’s waiting list, according to the company.

Virgin Galactic’s rocket ship launches from the belly of an airplane, not from the ground, and requires two pilots in the cockpit. Once the mothership reaches a height of about 15 kilometers, the space plane is released and fires its rocket motor to make the final push to just over 80 kilometers up. Passengers can unstrap from their seats, float around the cabin for a few minutes and take in the sweeping views of Earth, before the space plane glides back home and lands on a runway.

In contrast, the capsules used by SpaceX and Blue Origin are fully automated and parachute back down.

Like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin aims for the fringes of space, quick ups-and-downs from West Texas. Blue Origin has launched 31 people so far, but flights are on hold following a rocket crash last fall. The capsule, carrying experiments but no passengers, landed intact.

SpaceX, is the only private company flying customers all the way to orbit, charging a much heftier price, too: tens of millions of dollars per seat. It’s already flown three private crews. NASA is its biggest customer, relying on SpaceX to ferry its astronauts to and from the International Space Station. since 2020.

People have been taking on adventure travel for decades, the risks underscored by the recent implosion of the Titan submersible that killed five passengers on their way down to view the Titanic wreckage. Virgin Galactic suffered its own casualty in 2014 when its rocket plane broke apart during a test flight, killing one pilot. Yet space tourists are still lining up, ever since the first one rocketed into orbit in 2001 with the Russians.

Branson, who lives in the British Virgin Islands, watched Thursday’s flight from a party in Antigua. He had held a virtual lottery to establish a pecking order for the company’s first 50 customers — dubbed the Founding Astronauts. Virgin Galactic said the group agreed Goodwin would go first, given his age and his Parkinson’s.
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Paris’ escape from record temperatures gripping parts of Europe this summer could be a short-term reprieve. A study finds the city could have the most heatwave-related deaths of any European capital by 2050 — when temperatures may soar to 50 C (122 F). For VOA, Lisa Bryant has more from Paris.
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China will require all mobile app providers in the country to file business details with the government, its information ministry said, marking Beijing’s latest effort to keep the industry on a tight leash. 

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said late on Tuesday that apps without proper filings will be punished after the grace period that will end in March next year, a move that experts say would potentially restrict the number of apps and hit small developers hard. 

You Yunting, a lawyer with Shanghai-based DeBund Law Offices, said the order is effectively requiring approvals from the ministry. The new rule is primarily aimed at combating online fraud but it will impact all apps in China, he said. 

Rich Bishop, co-founder of app publishing firm AppInChina, said the new rule is also likely to affect foreign-based developers which have been able to publish their apps easily through Apple’s App Store without showing any documentation to the Chinese government. 

Bishop said that in order to comply with the new rules, app developers now must either have a company in China or work with a local publisher.  

Apple did not immediately reply to a request for comment. 

The iPhone maker pulled over a hundred artificial intelligence (AI) apps from its App Store last week to comply with regulations after China introduced a new licensing regime for generative AI apps for the country.  

The ministry’s notice also said entities “engaged in internet information services through apps in such fields as news, publishing, education, film and television and religion should also submit relevant documents.” 

The requirement could affect the availability of popular social media apps such as X, Facebook and Instagram. Use of such apps are not allowed in China, but they can be still downloaded from app stores, enabling Chinese to use them when traveling overseas. 

China already requires mobile games to obtain licenses before they launch in the country, and it had purged tens of thousands of unlicensed games from various app stores in 2020. 

Tencent’s WeChat, China’s most popular online social platform, said on Wednesday that mini apps, apps that can be opened within WeChat, must also follow the new rules. 

The company said that new apps must complete the filing before launch starting from September, while exiting mini apps have until the end of March.  

 
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Currently spreading COVID-19 variants such as EG.5, or Eris, do not represent a major shift in COVID variants, and updated vaccines in September will offer protection, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. 

“Right now, what we’re seeing with the changes in the viruses, they’re still susceptible to our vaccine, they’re still susceptible to our medicines, they’re still picked up by the tests,” Dr. Mandy Cohen said in an interview on former Biden administration adviser Andy Slavitt’s “In the Bubble” podcast. “We’re seeing small changes that are what I would call subtypes of what we’ve seen before.” 

Updated vaccines should be available by mid- to late September, she said. 

COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers have created new versions of their vaccine, which were updated to target the so-called XBB.1.5 subvariant that was dominant earlier this year, in order to more closely resemble the circulating virus.  

“We anticipate that they are going to be available for most folks by the third or fourth week of September,” Cohen said. The vaccines still need to be authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the CDC needs to make its recommendations, she said.  

“We are likely to see this as a recommendation as an annual COVID shot just like we have an annual flu shot,” she said. 

Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax have all said they expect to have supplies of the updated vaccine ready for the rollout this autumn. 

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization classified the EG.5 coronavirus strain, circulating in the United States and China, as a “variant of interest” but said it did not seem to pose more of a threat to public health than other variants. Eris is the fasting-growing COVID-19 subvariant in the U.S., estimated to be responsible for around 17% of current COVID cases, according to the CDC. 
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The White House on Wednesday said it had launched a multimillion-dollar cyber contest to spur use of artificial intelligence to find and fix security flaws in U.S. government infrastructure, in the face of growing use of the technology by hackers for malicious purposes.  

“Cybersecurity is a race between offense and defense,” said Anne Neuberger, the U.S. government’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology.

“We know malicious actors are already using AI to accelerate identifying vulnerabilities or build malicious software,” she added in a statement to Reuters.

Numerous U.S. organizations, from health care groups to manufacturing firms and government institutions, have been the target of hacking in recent years, and officials have warned of future threats, especially from foreign adversaries.  

Neuberger’s comments about AI echo those Canada’s cybersecurity chief Samy Khoury made last month. He said his agency had seen AI being used for everything from creating phishing emails and writing malicious computer code to spreading disinformation.

The two-year contest includes around $20 million in rewards and will be led by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. government body in charge of creating technologies for national security, the White House said.

Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI — the U.S. technology firms at the forefront of the AI revolution — will make their systems available for the challenge, the government said.

The contest signals official attempts to tackle an emerging threat that experts are still trying to fully grasp. In the past year, U.S. firms have launched a range of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT that allow users to create convincing videos, images, texts, and computer code. Chinese companies have launched similar models to catch up.

Experts say such tools could make it far easier to, for instance, conduct mass hacking campaigns or create fake profiles on social media to spread false information and propaganda.  

“Our goal with the DARPA AI challenge is to catalyze a larger community of cyber defenders who use the participating AI models to race faster – using generative AI to bolster our cyber defenses,” Neuberger said.

The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a U.S. group of experts trying to improve open source software security, will be in charge of ensuring the “winning software code is put to use right away,” the U.S. government said. 
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U.S. President Joe Biden is planning Wednesday to impose restrictions on U.S. investments in some high-tech industries in China.

Biden’s expected executive order could again heighten tensions between the U.S., the world’s biggest economy, and No. 2 China after a period in which leaders of the two countries have held several discussions aimed at airing their differences and seeking common ground.

The new restrictions would limit U.S. investments in such high-tech sectors in China as quantum computing, artificial intelligence and advanced semi-conductors, but apparently not in the broader Chinese economy, which recently has been struggling to advance.

In a trip to China in July, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Chinese Premier Li Qiang, “The United States will, in certain circumstances, need to pursue targeted actions to protect its national security. And we may disagree in these instances.”

Trying to protect its own security interests in the Indo-Pacific region and across the globe, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in April that the U.S. has implemented “carefully tailored restrictions on the most advanced semiconductor technology exports” to China.

“Those restrictions are premised on straightforward national security concerns,” he said. “Key allies and partners have followed suit, consistent with their own security concerns.”

Sullivan said they are not, as Beijing has claimed, a ‘technology blockade.’”
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Indonesia’s capital Jakarta topped the list as the world’s most polluted city on Wednesday, having consistently ranked among the 10 most polluted cities globally since May, according to data by Swiss air quality technology company IQAir.  

Jakarta, which has a population of over 10 million, registers unhealthy air pollution levels nearly every day, according to IQAir.  

Resident Rizky Putra lamented that the worsening air quality was putting his children’s health at risk.  

“I think the situation is very worrying,” Rizky, 35, told Reuters TV by the side of a road in downtown Jakarta.  

“So many children are sick with the same complaints and symptoms such as coughs and cold,” he said.  

Jakarta residents have long complained of toxic air from chronic traffic, industrial smoke and coal-fired power plants. Some of them launched and won a civil lawsuit in 2021 demanding the government take action to control air pollution.  

The court at the time ruled President Joko Widodo must establish national air quality standards to protect human health, and the health minister and Jakarta governor must devise strategies to control air pollution.  

Still, Nathan Roestandy, co-founder of air quality app Nafas Indonesia, said the pollution level has continued to deteriorate.  

“We take more than 20,000 breaths a day. If we take in polluted air everyday, (it could lead to) respiratory and pulmonary diseases, even asthma. It can affect cognitive development of children or even mental health,” he said.  

Asked about Jakarta’s pollution problem on Tuesday, President Widodo told reporters the solution would be to move the country’s capital city from Jakarta to Nusantara, which his government is currently building from the ground up on Borneo island.  

Indonesia is set to name Nusantara as the new capital next year and at least 16,000 civil servants, military and police are due to move there.
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U.N. agencies warn health conditions are deteriorating in Sudan and neighboring countries as growing numbers of people flee escalating fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Before the conflict erupted on April 15, 4.5 million Sudanese already were displaced — more than 3.7 million inside Sudan and another 800,000 as refugees in Chad, South Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia.

Since the rival generals went to war, the U.N. refugee agency says nearly an equal number — more than four million people — have become newly displaced.

“The situation inside Sudan, where UNHCR teams are present, is untenable as needs far outweigh what is humanly possible to deliver with available resources,” said William Spindler, UNHCR spokesman.

He said a lack of medicine and a shortage of staff to care for the sick and wounded in White Nile State severely hampered health and nutrition services in all 10 refugee camps, “where over 144,000 newly displaced refugees from Khartoum have arrived since the conflict started.”

He said many families that have been on the move for weeks, with very little food and medicine, were arriving at border entry points and transit centers in neighboring countries in desperate condition.

As a result, he said malnutrition rates have been rising, as have disease outbreaks and related deaths.

“Between 15 May and 17 July, over 300 deaths, mainly among children under five years, were reported due to measles and malnutrition,” he said.

“In addition, severe cholera and malaria cases are expected in the coming months due to flooding from the continuing rains and inadequate sanitation facilities.”

Now in its fourth month of conflict, the World Health Organization says insecurity, as well as limited access to medicine, medical supplies, electricity and water pose a challenge to the delivery of health care.

WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said attacks on health facilities were increasing, preventing the sick and wounded from accessing medical treatment. He said the WHO has verified 53 attacks on health care, causing 11 deaths and 38 injuries, between April 15 and July 31.

“Attacks on health care are a gross violation of international humanitarian law and the right to health. They must stop. Humanitarian workers need assurances of safety and security in order to continue delivering critical humanitarian and health response,” he said.

Meanwhile, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warns Sudan is facing a deepening food crisis, noting that “20.3 million individuals in Sudan face severe hunger, a figure that has nearly doubled since last year.”

Maximo Torero, FAO chief economist, said a recent U.N. food assessment shows “the level of acute food insecurity in Sudan has increased substantially to more than 11 million people because of the conflict. So, the situation is deteriorating.”

Meanwhile, in a bit of welcome news, the U.N. Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, confirmed Tuesday that the first humanitarian convoy since the start of the conflict had arrived in the East Darfur state after nine days on the road and that “those supplies have been distributed to more than 15,000 people in remote villages in the state.”

Additionally, OCHA said that the FAO had provided 430 tons of agricultural seeds “to be distributed to farmers across the state by the Ministry of Agriculture.”

U.N. agencies agree that the competing generals’ power grab has deepened Sudan’s humanitarian crisis. They warn the lives of many people are hanging by a thread, lives that will be lost without more donor support.

The Federal Ministry of Health says 12,200 people have been injured and 1,205 killed since April 15, figures U.N. agencies believe are greatly underestimated.
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Darwin, the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory, can be brutally hot and humid.   Many of its 150,000 residents seek refuge from the tropical elements in air-conditioned homes, offices and cars.

But research from the Australian National University, the ANU, suggests that air-conditioning, which is often set at 21 degrees Celsius, is making people more vulnerable to heat-related death.

Heatwaves are Australia’s deadliest natural hazard.  They kill more people than bushfires, floods and storms put together.

The ANU asserts that “climate change is increasing heat-associated mortality particularly in hotter parts of the world.” 

Simon Quilty, the study’s lead author, is from the Australian National University’s National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health. He told VOA that avoiding the heat and humidity may prevent people from adapting to the climate.

“Being exposed regularly to the prevailing climate in which you live actually acclimatizes your body,” he said. “e know that acclimatization takes roughly 14-days to occur for a human body and that changes the way that we sweat, it changes the way that we breathe, it changes our kidneys and it even changes the way that our hearts pump.  What is happening now is that our entire lives are set at 21 degrees Celsius and so for people who are living in very hot climates like the Northern Territory that deacclimatization is actually probably increasing heat vulnerability.”

Quilty said the research also finds that First Nations communities in the Northern Territory are less vulnerable to heat because they are often less inclined or able to use air-conditioning.

“Yes, it is very, very uncomfortable in really hot weather in Darwin and other places in the Tropics around the world, but we do not all need to live at 21 degrees Celsius,” Quilty said.  “And certainly, my experience of Aboriginal people is they really do not like over air-conditioned environments.  They feel very uncomfortable in it.”       

Quilty says that First Nations people have shown “extraordinary resilience to extreme weather” over thousands of years.

The Australian National University study believes that “hot climate communities need to start considering socio-cultural means of adapting to hotter weather.”  

Indigenous Australians invariably stay out of the hot afternoon sun and reduce physical exertion in warmer parts of the day.  The study recommends that housing in hot climates should also be designed to ensure passive cooling to reduce energy costs.

The Australian research also asserts that a siesta – or an afternoon nap – during the warmest part of the day can help the body to acclimatize to the heat.    

The study is published in the journal, the Lancet Planetary Health.
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The World Meteorological Organization says the global average temperature for July 2023 is confirmed to be the highest on record for any month.

“The month is estimated to have been around 1.5 degrees warmer than the average for 1850 to 1900s. So, the average of pre-industrial times,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

Some measurements began in 1850, but it was not until 1880 that scientists started to estimate average temperatures for the entire planet.

Burgess said scientists who look at historical and paleoclimate and proxy records from cave deposits and other calcifying organisms, such as corals and shells, find that the observational records go back tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years.

“So, the longest records we have are ice core records that go back 800,000 years, which give us changes in concentrations of the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere.”

She noted that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report found it has not been this warm, combining observational records and paleo-climate records for the last 120,000 years.

The WMO says that heat waves were experienced throughout July in multiple regions of the Northern Hemisphere, including southern Europe, and that temperatures well above average occurred over several South American countries and around much of Antarctica.

“We know from our long-term monitoring of the climate that the Earth has been warming since pre-industrial times. And we are seeing this as a clear and dramatic warming, decade on decade, and has been since the 1970s,” said Chris Hewitt, director of climate services for the WMO.

He said 2015 to 2022 were the eight warmest years on record, going back 170 years. That, he said, happened despite persistent La Nina conditions, which cause cooler than normal waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

On the other hand, he said that El Nino conditions, which lead to warmer than average sea surface temperatures, were developing now in the tropical Pacific, with global temperatures likely to peak in 2024.

“It is very likely that one of the next five years will actually be the warmest on record and a 66 percent chance — and more likely than not — that we will temporarily exceed 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial value.

“So, the Paris agreement will temporarily exceed 1.5 degrees for at least one of the next five years,” he said.

More than 190 nations and the European Union who joined the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement committed to keeping global warming to well below the 2 degrees Celsius level, while pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“I know this is not good news,” said Hewitt. “This extreme heat should not come as a surprise, though really, it is consistent with what scientists have been predicting for years. Unless we decrease the greenhouse gases, we will continue to exceed that 1.5-degree limit.”

Burgess noted that there was a direct correlation between the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which leads to global warming, and the impacts on air temperature, sea surface temperature and land temperatures, as well.

She warned of dire consequences “for both people and the planet exposed to ever more frequent and intense extreme events.”

“The impact of deforestation means that we will have less biodiversity and less of the carbon sink in forests to draw down that carbon from the atmosphere,” she said.

“So, ultimately, the less trees and the less organisms that photosynthesize means the less ability the planet will have to have a natural way of removing greenhouse gas concentration from the atmosphere.”

Hewitt agreed that the warming temperatures “will cause problems for various habitats.”

He said it was important “to keep monitoring the climate system, increase the observations of the climate system … and provide early warnings” around the world.

But ultimately, “We need to reduce the greenhouse gases, and we need to be prepared for heat waves, droughts, whatever it might be,” to protect ourselves from “the impacts of the changing climate,” Hewitt said.
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The company whose name became synonymous with remote work is joining the growing return-to-office trend.

Zoom, the video conferencing pioneer, is asking employees who live within a 50-mile radius of its offices to work onsite two days a week, a company spokesperson confirmed in an email. The statement said the company has decided that “a structured hybrid approach – meaning employees that live near an office need to be onsite two days a week to interact with their teams – is most effective for Zoom.”

The new policy, which will be rolled out in August and September, was first reported by the New York Times, which said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan fielded questions from employees unhappy with the new policy during a Zoom meeting last week.

Zoom, based in San Jose, California, saw explosive growth during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic as companies scrambled to shift to remote work, and even families and friends turned to the platform for virtual gatherings. But that growth has stagnated as the pandemic threat has ebbed.

Shares of Zoom Video Communications Inc. have tumbled hard since peaking early in the pandemic, from $559 apiece in October 2020, to below $70 on Tuesday. Shares have slumped more than 10% to start the month of August. In February, Zoom laid off about 1,300 people, or about 15% of its workforce.

Google, Salesforce and Amazon are among major companies that have also stepped up their return-to-office policies despite a backlash from some employees.

Similarly to Zoom, many companies are asking their employees to show up to the office only part time, as hybrid work shapes up to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. Since January, the average weekly office occupancy rate in 10 major U.S. cities has hovered around 50%, dipping below that threshold during the summer months, according to Kastle Systems, which measures occupancy through entry swipes.
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Here we go again: COVID-19 hospital admissions have inched upward in the United States since early July in a small-scale echo of the three previous summers.

With an updated vaccine still months away, this summer bump in new hospitalizations might be concerning, but the number of patients is far lower than before. A look at what we know:

How bad is the spike?

For the week ending July 29, COVID-19 hospital admissions were at 9,056. That’s an increase of about 12% from the previous week.

But it’s a far cry from past peaks, like the 44,000 weekly hospital admissions in early January, the nearly 45,000 in late July 2022, or the 150,000 admissions during the omicron surge of January 2022.

“It is ticking up a little bit, but it’s not something that we need to raise any alarm bells over,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

It’s likely that infections are rising too, but the data is scant. Federal authorities ended the public health emergency in May, so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and many states no longer track the number of positive test results.

What about deaths?

Since early June, about 500 to 600 people have died each week. The number of deaths appears to be stable this summer, although past increases in deaths have lagged behind hospitalizations.

How are we tracking the virus?

The amount of the COVID-19 virus in sewage water has been rising since late June across the nation. In the coming weeks, health officials say they’ll keep a close eye on wastewater levels as people return from summer travel and students go back to school.

Higher levels of COVID-19 in wastewater concentrations are being found in the Northeast and South, said Cristin Young, an epidemiologist at Biobot Analytics, the CDC’s wastewater surveillance contractor.

“It’s important to remember right now the concentrations are still fairly low,” Young said, adding it’s about 2.5 times lower than last summer.

And while one version of omicron — EG.5 — is appearing more frequently, no particular variant of the virus is dominant. The variant has been dubbed “eris” but it’s an unofficial nickname and scientists aren’t using it.

“There are a couple that we’re watching, but we’re not seeing anything like delta or omicron,” Young said, referencing variants that fueled previous surges.

And mutations in the virus don’t necessarily make it more dangerous.

“Just because we have a new subvariant doesn’t mean that we are destined to have an increase in bad outcomes,” Dowdy said.

When is the new vaccine coming?

This fall, officials expect to see updated COVID-19 vaccines that contain one version of the omicron strain, called XBB.1.5. It’s an important change from today’s combination shots, which mix the original coronavirus strain with last year’s most common omicron variants.

It’s not clear exactly when people can start rolling up their sleeves for what officials hope is an annual fall COVID-19 shot. Pfizer, Moderna and smaller manufacturer Novavax all are brewing doses of the XBB update but the Food and Drug Administration will have to sign off on each, and the CDC must then issue recommendations for their use.

Dr. Mandy Cohen, the new CDC director, said she expects people will get their COVID-19 shots where they get their flu shots — at pharmacies and at work — rather than at dedicated locations that were set up early in the pandemic as part of the emergency response.

“This is going to be our first fall and winter season coming out of the public health emergency, and I think we are all recognizing that we are living with COVID, flu, and RSV,” Cohen told The Associated Press last week. “But the good news is we have more tools than ever before.”
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Botswana is aiming to recruit at least 1,000 pharmacists, some from abroad, after nurses said they would no longer dispense medications.

Nurses stopped filling prescriptions to patients last month, with the Botswana Nurse Union saying that doing so was outside their scope of work.

The situation has led to congestion at the country’s pharmacies and left some patients unable to get their medications at all.

Now the government is looking to bring in pharmacists from abroad to fill the void and avert a health crisis.

Speaking in parliament Monday, Botswana’s assistant health minister, Sethumo Lelatisitswe, said that despite recruiting about 100 pharmacists over the last month, the shortage is still severe.

“We only have a few pharmacists and pharmacy technicians in the market,” Lelatisitswe said. “In the coming weeks, we would have exhausted the Botswana market. However, we would still not have been able to replace all nurses and midwives that have been dispensing medications from as long ago as the birth of our health system. Our local tertiary institutions do not produce enough pharmacists and pharmacy technicians who can be engaged to serve our people.”

The Botswana Nurse Union vice president responsible for labor, Oreeditse Kelebakgosi, said that it was unlawful for nurses to be dispensing medication and that it is only proper for the government to recruit pharmacists.

Kelebakgosi applauded the government’s move to recruit from outside Botswana, saying the effort would bring relief to the nurses who have been dispensing medication outside their scope of work.

But assistant minister Lelatisitswe said it will not be an easy task to recruit the health-care professionals.

“We need close to a thousand pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to have all our clinics and health facilities adequately covered,” he said. “Given the shortage of these professionals in the market, including regionally … it may take up to five years to have these numbers.”

Lelatisitswe acknowledged that the nurses’ decision has led to a crisis.

HIV activist Bonosi Segadimo says the shortage of pharmacists will negatively impact the distribution of ARV drugs. Botswana has among the world’s highest HIV prevalence with nearly 21% of the adult population living with the virus.

“This issue of nurses stopping the dispensing of drugs is a very bad idea,” said Segadimo. “Most clients have to take public transport to go and get their medications from clinics, where there are no pharmacists.”

Botswana’s problem is not an isolated one in Southern Africa, where health-care delivery has been disrupted by professionals leaving for better pay in wealthier countries, particularly in the United Kingdom.
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Pope Francis on Tuesday called for a global reflection on the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), noting the new technology’s “disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects.”  

Francis, who is 86 and said in the past he does not know how to use a computer, issued the warning in a message for the next World Day of Peace of the Catholic Church, falling on New Year’s Day.  

The Vatican released the message well in advance, as it is customary.  

The pope “recalls the need to be vigilant and to work so that a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices, at the expense of the most fragile and excluded,” it reads.  

“The urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home, requires that ethical reflection be extended to the sphere of education and law,” it adds.  

Back in 2015, Francis acknowledged being “a disaster” with technology, but he has also called the internet, social networks and text messages “a gift of God,” provided that they are used wisely.  

In 2020, the Vatican joined forces with tech giants Microsoft MSFT.O and IBM IBM.N to promote the ethical development of AI and call for regulation of intrusive technologies such as facial recognition.
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U.S. police reform advocates have long argued that police-worn body cameras will help reduce officers’ excessive use of force and work to build public trust. But the millions of hours of footage that so-called “body cams” generate are difficult for police supervisors to monitor. As Shelley Schlender explains, artificial intelligence may help.
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Leaders of eight South American nations that share the Amazon rainforest convene a two-day summit in Brazil Tuesday to reach a broad agreement on preserving the critical region.

The meeting of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization in Belem, capital of the Amazon state of Para, takes place as more than ten percent of the rainforest has been lost in recent decades due to unregulated cattle ranching and farming, illegal mining and logging and oil drilling.  Much of the loss is in Brazil, which is home to two-thirds of the rainforest.  

The Amazon region has been described as a “carbon sink” that can easily absorb pollution from emissions, making it a vital resource in reducing the effects of climate change. Scientists say the loss of between 20% and 25% of the Amazon region would be a “tipping point” that would transform it into a source of carbon emissions.  

The ACTO member nations, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Venezuela and host, Brazil, are expected to announce a pledge Tuesday  

to end deforestation by 2030 and a joint effort to crack down on illegal mining and logging.

The summit – the first since 2009 for the 28-year-old organization – was part of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s campaign platform last year in which he pledged that “Brazil is back” in the fight against climate change after a period of surging destruction in the Amazon under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. 

The meeting will also serve as something of a dress rehearsal for the COP30 U.N. climate talks, which will be held in Belem in 2025. 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse.
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Now that July’s sizzling numbers are all in, the European climate monitoring organization made it official: July 2023 was Earth’s hottest month on record by a wide margin.  

July’s global average temperature of 16.95 degrees Celsius (62.51 degrees Fahrenheit) was a third of a degree Celsius (six tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) higher than the previous record set in 2019, Copernicus Climate Change Service, a division of the European Union’s space program, announced Tuesday. Normally global temperature records are broken by hundredths or a tenth of a degree, so this margin is unusual.  

“These records have dire consequences for both people and the planet exposed to ever more frequent and intense extreme events,” said Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess. There have been deadly heat waves in the Southwestern United States and Mexico, Europe and Asia. Scientific quick studies put the blame on human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.  

Days in July have been hotter than previously recorded from July 2 on. It’s been so extra warm that Copernicus and the World Meteorological Organization made the unusual early announcement that it was likely the hottest month days before it ended. Tuesday’s calculations made it official.  

The month was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times. In 2015, the nations of the world agreed to try to prevent long-term warming — not individual months or even years, but decades — that is 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times.  

Last month was so hot, it was .7 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the average July from 1991 to 2020, Copernicus said. The worlds oceans were half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the previous 30 years and the North Atlantic was 1.05 degrees Celsius (1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than average. Antarctica set record lows for sea ice, 15% below average for this time of year.  

Copernicus’ records go back to 1940. That temperature would be hotter than any month the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recorded and their records go back to 1850. But scientists say it’s actually the hottest in a far longer time period.  

“It’s a stunning record and makes it quite clearly the warmest month on Earth in ten thousand years,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany. He wasn’t part of the Copernicus team.  

Rahmstorf cited studies that use tree rings and other proxies that show present times are the warmest since the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, about 10,000 years ago. And before the Holocene started there was an ice age, so it would be logical to even say this is the warmest record for 120,000 years, he said.  

“We should not care about July because it’s a record, but because it won’t be a record for long,” said Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto. “It’s an indicator of how much we have changed the climate. We are living in a very different world, one that our societies are not adapted to live in very well.”
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