Congo’s latest Ebola outbreak does not yet warrant being declared a global health emergency, the World Health Organization announced Friday, as health officials rushed to contain the often deadly virus that has spread to a city of more than 1 million.

The vast, impoverished country now has 14 confirmed Ebola cases, with dozens of others probable or suspected.

WHO officials, speaking after an experts’ meeting on the outbreak, said vaccinations could begin as early as Sunday in a key test of an experimental vaccine.

The health agency called the risk to the public in Congo “very high” and the regional risk high, with the global risk low. The Republic of Congo and Central African Republic are nearby and are among nine neighboring countries alerted. WHO said there should be no international travel or trade restrictions.

Dr. Robert Steffen, who chaired the expert meeting, said there was “strong reason to believe this situation can be brought under control.”

He noted the almost immediate response by WHO and partners after Ebola was announced in Congo last week. Without a vigorous response, “the situation is likely to deteriorate significantly,” he added. If the outbreak spreads internationally, the expert committee would reconvene to reconsider its assessment of the epidemic.

Congo has contained several past Ebola outbreaks but the spread of the hemorrhagic fever to an urban area poses a major challenge. The city of Mbandaka, which has one confirmed Ebola case, is an hour’s flight from the capital, Kinshasa, and is located on the Congo River, a busy travel corridor.

For a health crisis to constitute a global health emergency it must meet three criteria stipulated by WHO: It must threaten other countries via the international spread of disease, it must be a “serious, unusual or unexpected” situation, and it may require immediate international action for containment.

‘Major, major game-changer’

Ebola has twice made it to Congo’s capital in the past and was rapidly stopped. Congo has had the most Ebola outbreaks of any country, and Dr. David Heymann, a former WHO director who has led numerous responses to Ebola, said authorities there have considerable expertise in halting the lethal virus.

The Ebola vaccine proved highly effective in the West Africa outbreak a few years ago, although the vaccine was used long after the epidemic had peaked. More than 4,000 doses have arrived in Congo this week, with more on the way, and vaccinations are expected to start next week. One challenge will be keeping the vaccine cold in a region with poor infrastructure and patchy electricity.

Just one Ebola death in the current outbreak has been confirmed so far. Congo’s health ministry late Thursday said the total number of cases is 45, including 10 suspected and 21 probable ones.

The health ministry said two new deaths have been tied to the cases, including one in a suburb of Mbandaka. The other was in Bikoro, the rural area where the outbreak was announced last week. It is about 150 kilometers (93 miles) from Mbandaka.

“This is a major, major game-changer in the outbreak,” Dr. Peter Salama, WHO’s emergency response chief, warned Thursday after the first urban case was announced. “Urban Ebola can result in an exponential increase in cases in a way that rural Ebola struggles to do.”

Until now, the outbreak had been confined to remote rural areas, where Ebola, which is spread via contact with bodily fluids of those infected, travels more slowly.

Health teams

Doctors Without Borders said 514 people believed to have been in contact with infected people were being monitored. WHO said it was deploying about 30 more experts to Mbandaka.

Amid fears of the outbreak spreading to neighboring countries, the U.N. migration agency said Friday it would support the deployment of Congolese health teams to 16 entry points along the nearby border with the Republic of Congo for infection control and prevention.

The U.N. children’s agency said it was mobilizing hundreds of community workers to raise awareness on protection against the disease.

This is the ninth Ebola outbreak in Congo since 1976, when the disease was first identified. The virus is initially transmitted to people from wild animals, including bats and monkeys.

There is no specific treatment for Ebola. Symptoms include fever, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain and at times internal and external bleeding. The virus can be fatal in up to 90 percent of cases, depending on the strain.
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Researchers at New York University College of Dentistry are taking a new approach to quickly identifying Zika and other infections. As Faith Lapidus reports, unlike currently available tests, the approach does not involve drawing blood.
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Deteriorating security is forcing Afghanistan to spend more money on trauma care, rather than investing in women and children’s health, its health minister said Thursday.

The government has come under increasing pressure over rising violence, with a string of attacks this year causing hundreds of casualties in the capital, Kabul, alone.

“The concern is that nowadays, suicide bombings and armed conflict is the third (highest) cause of deaths and disability in Afghanistan,” Ferozuddin Feroz told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview in London. “Instead of focusing on maternal health, on nutritional status, we will spend it on trauma.”

Health care gains

Afghanistan’s health system is rudimentary, battered by decades of war and conflict. About 60 percent of the population has access to health services, defined as being within one hour’s walking distance, Feroz said.

Feroz, who is a trained doctor and has advised other countries on health system reform, aims to increase this to 75 percent by the end of 2018.

Afghanistan has made gains in maternal health, with 400 deaths per 100,000 live births, up from 1,600 per 100,000 in 2002, according to the United Nations Population Fund, but it is still one of the worst rates in the world.

“Maintaining these achievements during an increasing security situation is really a challenge,” Feroz said. “If we maintain the current rate of funding, that also would help us to maintain what we have achieved.”

Feroz was in London to meet with researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which is providing his ministry with technical support to develop a basic health care package with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Interstellar space is mostly a vacuum, so there is no medium that can carry sound. In other words, space is totally silent. But astronomers have often associated the movement of heavenly bodies with music. With the help of modern technology, one astronomer has turned the signals from the Milky Way into a funky tune.

“It was an idea that I had for a long time,” said University of Massachusetts Astronomy Research Professor Mark Heyer, “and only recently has some of the technology come about that somebody like me could access that.”

The visible light coming from distant worlds carries a lot of information that can be analyzed with a spectroscope. Heyer developed a computer program, or algorithm, to convert the movement of large clouds of atoms and molecules of different elements and compounds, into music.

“I take the spectrum and I, essentially, mathematically resample that to a musical scale and that gives that spectrum, which is inherently atonal, it gives it the tonality. And that is what really is the key stuff to make it sound nice,” he said.

Heyer randomly assigned different musical instruments to different gases, forming a combination consisting of a saxophone, a piano, an upright bass and some percussion woodblocks. For instance, a certain atomic gas, which fills much of the space between the stars, is represented by the upright bass.

“It gives you that driving pulse, I think, that drives the music forward. And the woodblocks sort of do that as well,” he said.

After some experimenting, Heyer decided to use the pentatonic minor blues scale.

“I was experimenting with the algorithm and I had major scales and simple minor scales, but when I first played the available segment of just one of the instruments, it sounded like that could be a very nice blues or jazzy sound to it,” he said. “So, I recrafted the algorithm so it could transform the data into a musical blues scale.”

Heyer says he was surprised when he realized for the first time that the rotation of our galaxy contains a rhythm — and that funky blues seemed to fit perfectly.
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The World Health Organization reports one confirmed case of the deadly Ebola virus in the city of Mbandaka, a city of more than one million 150 kilometers from Bikoro where the outbreak started.

WHO says as of May 15, 44 cases of Ebola have been reported in the DRC and more than 20 people have died. Except for the confirmed case in Mdbandaka, the other cases have been in Bikoro, a remote, northwestern area that is very hard to reach.

The Ebola virus is endemic in Congo, and despite Congo’s experience with the disease, the difference between this one and previous outbreaks is the location.

Bikoro lies near two major rivers that could transport infected people to urban areas including Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Mbandaka is also on the Congo River about 4,000 kilometers north of Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, whose population is roughly ten million.

Dr. Peter Salama, WHO deputy director-general for emergency preparedness and response, called this latest news “a game changer.”

WHO’s regional director for Africa said WHO and its partners, including Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, are working to rapidly scale up the search for all contacts of the confirmed case in Mbandaka as well as those in Bikoro. The WHO is holding an emergency meeting Friday to evaluate the situation.

The speed of the WHO’s involvement and those of its partners is one of the major differences between this Ebola outbreak and the one that ravaged West Africa between 2014 and 2016.

And, despite the arrival of Ebola in an urban area, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General said “we now have better tools than ever before to combat Ebola. WHO and our partners are taking decisive action to stop further spread of the virus.”

Tedros led a delegation to the DRC May 13 that included Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, and Salama. They met with Congolese President Joseph Kabila and the country’s minister of health to evaluate the response and determine the next steps in stopping the virus.

Stephen Morrison, Director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, conducted research on the West African outbreak that claimed more than 11,000 lives and is carefully watching the current outbreak in a rural area in the northeast of the DRC.

“I thought it was very commendable and a great sign of the change of outlook that Dr. Tedros was personally there on the ground, and that was very important,” Morrison said. “It rallies the troops, it shows determination and commitment and speed.”

One of the changes from the 2014 outbreak is that the WHO has an emergency fund to get experts and materials in place. The first batch of an experimental vaccine, which proved to be safe and effective at the end of the epidemic in West Africa, has already arrived in Congo. It will be administered to health care workers and those exposed to the virus in just days.

Merck, the pharmaceutical company that makes the vaccine, has promised to supply however much is needed for this outbreak. The vaccine is not licensed, and some argue that since it works, it is no longer experimental.

A multidisciplinary team has been in Bikoro, where the outbreak first occurred since May 10. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also has personnel in place. In addition, the World Food Program is providing an air bridge to get the vaccine and supplies to the affected region with several flights a day. Treatment centers that isolate the sick are operational, as are hand washing stations containing a solution of bleach and water to kill the virus.

Morrison said what is unfolding in Central Africa “shows a lot of learning and a different pattern of response.”

In 2014, it took more than six months for the international community to address that outbreak. By then, it was already spreading in the three impoverished West African countries.

Another difference: Ebola was unknown in West Africa in 2014. This is the ninth Ebola outbreak in the DRC since 1974, when the country was named Zaire and the virus was named after the Ebola River near the source of the outbreak.

Morrison says the response to this outbreak shows no complacency.

“We are very concerned,” added Salama. “And we are planning for all scenarios, including the worst case scenario.” In the massive Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa, the virus entered the capital cities in all three countries.

In Congo, the government, WHO and others are working to make sure, if at all possible, this doesn’t happen.
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A southern white rhino has become pregnant through artificial insemination at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park — giving hope for efforts to save a subspecies of one of the world’s most recognizable animals, researchers announced Thursday.

Scientists will be watching closely to see if the rhino named Victoria can carry her calf to term over 16 to 18 months of gestation.

If she does, researchers hope someday she could serve as a surrogate mother and could give birth to the related northern white rhino, whose population is down to two females after decades of decimation by poachers. The mother and daughter northern white rhinos live in a Kenya wildlife preserve but are not believed to be capable of bearing calves.

News of Victoria’s pregnancy was confirmed two months after the death of the last northern white male rhino named Sudan, who was also at the Kenya preserve and was euthanized because of ailing health in old age.

Victoria is the first of six female southern white rhinos the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research is testing to determine if they are fit to be surrogate mothers before using the limited sperm and eggs of the northern white rhino that are in storage to impregnate them.

The scientists want to use the frozen sperm and eggs that were taken from dead northern white rhinos to bring back a herd through artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer.

“The confirmation of this pregnancy through artificial insemination represents an historic event for our organization but also a critical step in our effort to save the northern white rhino,” said Barbara Durrant, director of reproductive Sciences at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research.

But more challenges lie ahead, with artificial insemination of rhinos in zoos rare so far and resulting in only a few births.

Victoria and the other five female rhinos were relocated to San Diego’s Safari Park in 2015 and scientists will soon start developing artificial insemination techniques and embryo transfer techniques for them in their effort to produce northern white rhino calves.

“We will know that they have proven themselves to be capable of carrying a fetus to term before we would risk putting a precious northern white rhino embryo into one of these southern white rhinos as a surrogate,” Durrant said.

Once that happens, there will be more work to develop techniques that include maturing eggs, fertilizing eggs and growing embryos to the stage where they can be transferred into the surrogate rhinos. While embryos have been created for southern white rhinos, they haven’t been for northern white rhinos — so there’s no guarantee that the process will work.

The San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research has the cell lines of 12 different northern white rhinos stored in freezing temperatures at its “Frozen Zoo.”

The ultimate goal is to create a herd of five to 15 northern white rhinos that would be returned to their natural habitat in Africa. That could take decades.

Some groups have said in vitro fertilization is being developed too late to save the northern white rhino, whose natural habitat in Chad, Sudan, Uganda, Congo and Central African Republic has been ravaged by conflicts in the region. They say the efforts should focus on other critically endangered species with a better chance at survival.

The southern white rhino and another species, the black rhino, are under heavy pressure from poachers who kill them for their horns to supply illegal markets in parts of Asia.

There are about 20,000 southern white rhinos in Africa.
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U.S. birth rates declined last year for women in their teens, 20s and — surprisingly — their 30s, leading to the fewest babies in 30 years, according to a government report released Thursday.

 

Experts said several factors may be combining to drive the declines, including shifting attitudes about motherhood and changing immigration patterns. 

 

The provisional report, based on a review of more than 99 percent of the birth certificates filed nationwide, counted 3.853 million births last year. That’s the lowest tally since 1987.

 

Births have been declining since 2014, but 2017 saw the greatest year-to-year drop, about 92,000 less than the previous year.

 

That was surprising, because baby booms often parallel economic booms, and last year was a period of low unemployment and a growing economy. 

What’s causing this?

But other factors are likely at play, experts said.

 

One may be shifting attitudes about motherhood among millennials, who are in their prime child-bearing years right now. They may be more inclined to put off child-bearing or have fewer children, researchers said.

 

Another may be changes in the immigrant population, who generate nearly a quarter of the babies born in the U.S. each year. For example, Asians are making up a larger proportion of immigrants, and they have typically had fewer children than other immigrant groups.

 

Also, use of IUDs and other long-acting forms of contraception has been increasing.

Other findings

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report also found: 

The rate of births to women ages 15 to 44, known as the general fertility rate, sank to a record low of about 60 per 1,000.  

 
Women in their early 40s were the only group with higher birth rates in 2017, up 2 percent from the year. The rate has been rising since the early 1980s. 

 
The cesarean section rate rose by a tiny amount after having decreased four years. Studies have shown C-sections are more common in first-time births involving older moms. 

 
Rates of preterm and low birth weight babies rose for the third straight year, possibly for the same reason. 

 
Birth rates for teens continued to nosedive, as they have since the early 1990s. In 2017, they dropped 7 percent from the year before. 

 
Rates for women in their 20s continued to fall and hit record lows. They fell 4 percent. 

 
Perhaps most surprising, birth rates for women in their 30s fell slightly, dipping 2 percent for women ages 30 to 34 and 1 percent for women 35 to 39.

 
Birth rates for women in their 30s had been rising steadily to the highest levels in at least half a century, and women in their early 30s recently became the age group that has the most babies. That decline caused some experts’ eyebrows to shoot up, but they also noted the dip was very small. 

“It’s difficult to say yet whether it marks a fundamental change or it’s just a blip,” said Hans-Peter Kohler, a University of Pennsylvania demographer who studies birth trends.

Generation can’t replace itself 

Another notable finding: The current generation is getting further away from having enough children to replace itself.

 

The U.S. once was among a handful of developed countries with a fertility rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace it.

 

The rate in the U.S. now stands less than the standard benchmark for replacement. It’s still above countries such as Spain, Greece, Japan and Italy, but the gap appears to be closing. 

 

A decade ago, the estimated rate was 2.1 kids per U.S. woman. In 2017, it fell below 1.8, hitting its lowest level since 1978. 

“That’s a pretty remarkable decline,” said Dr. John Santelli, a Columbia University professor of population and family health and pediatrics.
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Whenever the all-female Nigerian biker group D’Angels hits the streets, people would stare in amazement at the sight of women on motorbikes. So they made up their minds to use the attention for a good cause.

Enter the Female Bikers Initiative (FBI), which has provided free breast and cervical cancer screening to 500 women in Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos.

This August, D’Angels and another female biker group in Lagos, Amazon Motorcycle Club, plan to provide free screening to 5,000 women, a significant undertaking in a country where many lack access to proper health care.

“What touched us most was the women,” D’Angels co-founder Nnenna Samuila, 39, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Lagos.

“Some asked if the bikes really belonged to us. Some asked if they could sit on our bikes. We decided to use the opportunity to do something to touch women’s lives.”

Major killers

Breast and cervical cancer are huge killers in Nigeria, accounting for half the 100,000 cancer deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization. Screening and early detection can dramatically reduce the mortality rate for cervical cancer in particular.

But oncologist Omolola Salako, whose Lagos charity partnered with the FBI last year, says there is not enough awareness of the need for screening.

“Among the 600-plus women we have screened since October, about 60 percent were being screened for the first time,” said Salako, executive director of Sebeccly Cancer Care. “It was the first time they were hearing about it.”

Even if women do know they should be screened, affordability is a barrier, said Salako, whose charity provides the service for free and also raises funds to treat cancer patients.

Raising awareness

This year the bikers will put on a week of awareness-raising and mobile screening, after which free screenings will be available at Sebeccly every Thursday for the rest of the year.

Members of the two clubs and any other female bikers who want to join in will ride through the streets, to schools, malls and other public places, distributing fliers and talking to women about the importance of screening.

“All the bikers turn up,” said Samuila, one of five women on the FBI’s board of trustees. “We just need to tell them, this is the location for the activity, and this is what we need you to do.”

Last year their funds, from private and corporate donors, could only stretch to two mastectomies, and they hope they will be able to sponsor more treatments this year.

“We encourage this person to come, and then she finds out that something is wrong and you abandon her,” said Samuila, a former telecoms executive who now runs her own confectionery and coffee company. “We would love to be able to follow up with whatever comes out of the testing.”

This is just the latest in a number of projects the bikers have organized.

In 2016 they launched Beyond Limits, a scheme to encourage young girls to fulfill their potential beyond societal expectations of marriage and babies. They travel to schools to give talks and invite senior women working in science, technology and innovation to take part.

Turning point

Samuila formed D’Angels with 37-year-old Jeminat Olumegbon in 2009 after they were denied entry to the established, all-male bikers’ groups in Lagos.

“They didn’t want us. They were like, ‘No, women don’t do this. Women are used to being carried around. Why don’t you guys just be on the sidelines?’ That sort of pissed us off and we then went on to form our own club,” Samuila said.

In 2010, the pair rode from Lagos to the southern city of Port Harcourt to attend a bikers’ event, a 617-km (383-mile) trip that the men had told them was impossible for a woman.

“That was the turning point in our relationship with the male bikers,” Samuila said.

The two-day ride earned them a new respect from the male riders, some of whom now take part in the screening awareness programs themselves.

Bigger challenges

In 2015 Olumegbon, also an FBI board member, took on an even bigger challenge riding 20,000 km through eight West African countries in 30 days to raise funds for children in orphanages.

“I’ve been riding since 2007. At first, I was the only female riding, then I found Nnenna and the other girls,” she said. “Because we started riding, more females decided to look inwards, and decided that they could do so as well.”

The bikers plan to extend their initiative to other parts of Nigeria, and have also received invitations from women riders in other West African countries.

For now though, they want to focus on making sure their efforts reach every woman in Lagos.

“When we speak to people on the streets, many don’t even know of cervical cancer,” Samuila said. “It’s so painful to hear that so many people are dying from the disease when it can be prevented.”
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