Malawi’s government says it will go ahead with plans to destroy thousands of expired COVID-19 vaccine doses, despite calls from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Africa Centre for Disease Control not to destroy them.The WHO and Africa CDC this week urged African countries not to destroy COVID-19 vaccines that may have passed their expiration dates, saying they are still safe to use. However, Malawi’s government says the appeals have come too late to prevent the destruction of thousands of doses of expired COVID vaccines.
 
Officials said the 16,440 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine that expired April 13 have already been removed from cold storage.
 
Thursday, the WHO and the Africa CDC had urged African countries not to destroy the vaccine that may have expired, saying it is still usable.  
 
“And it’s also a requirement that every vile manufactured, has an expiry date beyond which it cannot be used,” said Dr. Charles Mwansambo, Malawi’s secretary for health. “In this case, we cannot proceed to use these because the vile clearly states the expiry date. And any doctor, any physician would not be forgiven in the event of anything happening after knowingly used a vile that is clearly having labeled as having expired.”
 
The expired vaccine is part of the 102,000-dose donation the country received in March from the African Union.   
 
Malawi and South Sudan earlier announced plans to destroy about 70,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that expired last month.
 
Mwansambo also said using the expired vaccine would scare people from taking the jabs from the remaining stock.  
 
“If we leave or store these expired vaccines that will be big blow to our vaccination drive people will not come. Now even though we are not using them people have been hesitant to come because they feel that we might be given the expired vaccines,” he said.
 
Mwansambo said the country may be considering extending the shelf life of the remaining stock of vaccine received through the COVAX facility and from the Indian government that expires in June and July.
 
George Jobe, the executive director for the Malawi Health Equity Network, said using the expired COVID-19 vaccine would create a negative attitude in people.
   
“We can have phobia from Malawians which we should not. If the [expired] vaccines are safe, the CDC can take the expired vaccines, or WHO, and donate to the developed countries. But we have to witness the day the vaccines are leaving Malawi.”   
 
Mwansambo said destroying the expired vaccine is in line with Malawi government guidelines on expired pharmaceutical products.
 
He said the government will soon announce the date when it will publicly destroy the expired vaccine in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe.  
 
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When police respond to a person gripped by a mental health or drug crisis, the encounter can have tragic results. Now a government insurance program will help communities set up an alternative: mobile teams with mental health practitioners trained in de-escalating such potentially volatile situations.
 
The effort to reinvent policing after the death of George Floyd in police custody is getting an assist through Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income people and the largest payer for mental health treatment. President Joe Biden’s recent coronavirus relief bill calls for an estimated $1 billion over 10 years for states that set up mobile crisis teams, currently locally operated in a handful of places.
 
Many 911 calls are due to a person experiencing a mental health or substance abuse crisis. Sometimes, like with Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York, the consequences are shocking. The 41-year-old Black man died after police placed a spit hood over his head and held him to the pavement for about two minutes on a cold night in 2020 until he stopped breathing. He had run naked from his brother’s house after being released from a hospital following a mental health arrest. A grand jury voted down charges against the officers.
 
Dispatching teams of paramedics and behavioral health practitioners would take mental health crisis calls out of the hands of uniformed and armed officers, whose mere arrival may ratchet up tensions. In Eugene, Oregon, such a strategy has been in place more than 30 years, with solid backing from police.
 
The concept “fits nicely with what we are trying to do around police reform,” Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner said. The logic works “like a simple math problem,” he adds.
 
“If I can rely on a mechanism that matches the right response to the need, it means I don’t have to put my officers in these circumstances,” Skinner explained. “By sending the right resources I can make the assumption that there are going to be fewer times when officers are in situations that can turn violent. It actually de-conflicts, reducing the need for use of force.”
 
Eugene is a medium-size city about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Portland, known for its educational institutions. The program there is called Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, or CAHOOTS, and is run by the White Bird Clinic.
 
CAHOOTS is part of the local 911 emergency response system but operates independently of the police, although there’s coordination. Crisis teams are not sent on calls involving violent situations.
 
“We don’t look like law enforcement,” White Bird veteran Tim Black said. “We drive a big white cargo van. Our responders wear a T-shirt or a hoodie with a logo. We don’t have handcuffs or pepper spray, and the way we start to interact sends a message that we are not the police and this is going to be a far safer and voluntary interaction.”
 
CAHOOTS teams handled 24,000 calls in the local area in 2019, and Black said the vast majority would have otherwise fallen to police. Many involve homeless people. The teams work to resolve the situation that prompted the call and to connect the person involved to ongoing help and support.  
 
At least 14 cities around the country are interested in versions of that model, said Simone Brody, executive director of What Works Cities, a New York-based nonprofit that tries to promote change through effective use of data.
 
“It’s really exciting to see the federal government support this model,” Brody said. “I am hopeful that three years from now we will have multiple models and ideally some data that shows this has actually saved people’s lives.” Portland, Oregon, launched its own crisis teams in February and the program has already expanded to serve more areas of the community.
 
About 1,000 people a year are shot dead by police, according to an analysis by the Treatment Advocacy Center, which examined several publicly available estimates. Severe mental illness is a factor in at least 25% of such shootings, it estimated. The center advocates for improved mental health care.
 
Mobile crisis teams found their way into the COVID-19 relief bill through the efforts of Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who chairs the Finance Committee, which oversees Medicaid.
 
“Too often law enforcement is asked to respond to situations that they are not trained to handle,” Wyden said. “On the streets in challenging times, too often the result is violence, even fatal violence, particularly for Black Americans.”
 
Wyden’s legislation includes $15 million in planning grants to help states get going. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the program could take a couple of years to fully implement. The $1 billion will be available to states for five years, beginning next April. Wyden said it’s a “down payment” on what he hopes will become a permanent part of Medicaid.
 
The idea may be well-timed, said Medicaid expert MaryBeth Musumeci, of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. The coronavirus pandemic has worsened society’s pervasive mental health and substance abuse problems. At the same time, protests over police shootings of Black people have created an appetite for anything that could break the cycle.
 
“All of those things coming together are putting increased focus on the need for further developing effective behavioral health treatment models,” Musumeci said.  
 
In Rhode Island, nurse turned malpractice lawyer Laura Harrington is helping coordinate a grassroots campaign to incorporate crisis teams into the state’s 911 system. She said she’s been surprised at the level of interest.
 
“I don’t want to get into blaming,” Harrington said. “We could blame social services. We could blame people who don’t take their medications. We could blame the police. I want to move forward and solve problems.”
 
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A recycled SpaceX crew capsule has delivered four astronauts from three countries to the International Space Station.  
 
The SpaceX capsule docked with the orbiting outpost early Saturday, according to the U.S. space agency NASA, after launching Friday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.   
 
Friday’s lift-off was the first time a rocket and crew capsule have been reused in a human mission.  It is the third time SpaceX has sent humans to the space station under its multi-billion-dollar contract with NASA.
 
The deployment of a reusable rocket helps keep down the cost of the space program.
 
SpaceX is owned by entrepreneur Elon Musk.
 
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Kenyans living with HIV say their lives are in danger due to a shortage of anti-retroviral drugs donated by the United States amid a dispute between the U.S. aid agency and the Kenyan government.The delayed release of the drugs shipped to Kenya late last year is due to the government slapping a $847,902 tax on the donation, and the U.S. aid agency having “trust” issues with the graft-tainted Kenya Medical Supplies Authority, activists and officials said.Activists on Friday dismissed as “public relations” the government’s statement on Thursday that it had resolved the issue and distributed the drugs to 31 of Kenya’s 47, counties. The government said all counties within five days will have the drugs needed for 1.4 million people.”We are assuring the nation that no patient is going to miss drugs. We have adequate stocks,” Kenya Medical Supplies Authority customer service manager Geoffrey Mwagwi said as he flagged off a consignment. He said those drugs would cover two months.The U.S. is by far the largest donor for Kenya’s HIV response.Kenya’s health minister, Mutahi Kagwe, told the Senate’s health committee earlier this week that USAID had released the drug consignment that had been stuck in port. Patients are expected to receive them during the week.He said USAID had proposed using a company called Chemonics International to procure and supply the drugs to Kenyans due to “trust issues” with the national medical supplies body.Bernard Baridi, chief executive officer of Blast, a network of young people living with the disease, said the drugs would last for just a month.He said the delay in distributing the drugs, in addition to supply constraints caused by the coronavirus pandemic, meant that many people living with HIV were getting a week’s supply instead of three months.Many of those who depend on the drugs travel long distances to obtain them and may find it difficult to find transport every week, and if they fail to take them they will develop resistance, Baridi said.”Adherence to medication is going to be low because of access. … If we don’t get the medication, we are going to lose people,” he said.According to Baridi, children living with HIV are suffering the most due to the shortage of a drug known Kaletra, which comes in a syrup form that can be taken more easily. Parents are forced to look for the drug in tablet form, crush it and mix it with water, and it’s still bitter for children to ingest.Baridi urged Kenya’s government and USAID to find a solution on who should distribute the drugs quickly, for the sake of the children.On Thursday, about 200 people living with HIV in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city, held a peaceful protest wearing T-shirts reading “My ARV’s My Life” and carrying posters that read “A sick nation is a dead nation” and “A killer government.”Some 136,000 people live with HIV in Kisumu, or about 13% of the city’s population, said local rights activist Boniface Ogutu Akach.”We cannot keep quiet and watch this population languish just because they can’t get a medicine that is lying somewhere, and that is happening because the government wants to tax a donation,” he said.Erick Okioma, who has HIV, said the government’s attention has been diverted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected even community perception.”People fear even getting COVID than HIV,” Okioma said, asserting that local HIV testing and treatment centers were empty.
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The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Saturday that there are 145.2 million global COVID-19 infections. The U.S. remains at the top of the list as the country with the most infections at almost 32 million. India is second on the list with more than 16 million cases, followed by Brazil with 14.2 million.A U.S. health panel has recommended lifting a pause on the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, despite evidence that it is linked to rare cases of blood clots.The advisers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Friday that use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine should be resumed in the U.S. after regulators had paused it last week to review reports of rare but severe blood clots in a handful of Americans who had received the shot.The panel voted 10-4 for the resumption of the vaccine, arguing that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks.Seventy-seven inmates at an Iowa maximum security prison for men received overdoses of the Pfizer COVID vaccine earlier this week.The prisoners at the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison were reported to have received doses that were six times the amount normally used.“The large majority of inmates continue to have very minor symptoms consistent with those that receive the recommended dose of the vaccine,” Cord Overton, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Corrections told the Des Moines Register newspaper in an email.Two members of the prison’s nursing staff, who administered the vaccines, have been placed on leave as the incident is investigated.On Friday, India set a global record in daily infections for a second straight day as it struggles to provide oxygen and other emergency supplies to a growing number of COVID-19 patients who are struggling to breathe.The South Asian nation’s health ministry said it counted 332,730 new infections in the previous 24-hour period, surpassing Thursday’s record daily toll of 314,835.The Biden administration’s top medical adviser on the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Friday the U.S. is attempting to help India contain its coronavirus surge by providing technical support and assistance.“It is a dire situation that we’re trying to help in any way we can,” Fauci said at the regularly held White House coronavirus briefing. “They have a situation there where there are variants that have arisen. We have not yet fully characterized the variants and the relationship between the ability of the vaccines to protect. But we’re assuming, clearly, that they need vaccines.”Pope Francis met with a group of poor people Friday who were getting their coronavirus vaccinations, which had been donated by the Vatican.As the group gathered in the Paul VI audience hall at the Vatican to receive their second dose of the 600 available doses, the pope greeted them and volunteers helping with the vaccinations.
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President Joe Biden aimed to accentuate the positive as he wrapped up his Leaders Summit on Climate Change on Friday. Biden highlighted the economic benefits the fight against climate change offers. But his plans still face an uphill battle at home. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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A potential new malaria vaccine has shown a preliminary efficacy rate of 77% during a trial on infants, in what scientists hope is a breakthrough in developing a highly effective malaria inoculation.Scientists at England’s University of Oxford said that the yearlong trial involved 450 children in the African nation of Burkina Faso and that no serious events were reported during the trial.It is the first candidate vaccine for malaria to surpass a target set for researchers by the World Health Organization: to develop a shot with at least 75% efficacy.Researchers say they now plan to conduct a Stage 3 trial for the vaccine on 4,800 children between the ages of 5 months and 3 years in four African countries — Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali and Tanzania. Those trials will be conducted in collaboration with the Serum Institute of India and the U.S. biotechnology company Novavax.The research is led by Adrian Hill, director of Oxford’s Jenner Institute and one of the lead researchers behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Hill told VOA in an exclusive interview that the vaccine is showing game-changing results, noting that over many years,140 malaria vaccine candidates have been tried in clinical trials, and none of them has had an efficacy over 75%.“In our first attempt with this vaccine, we see 77%, and we think we can improve on that further. So, it’s real progress. It’s unprecedented,” he said.Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease, infects millions of people each year and kills more than 400,000 — most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa.If the next round of trials, called R21/Matrix-M, is successful, the vaccine could be widely available in as little as two years.Hill said the Jenner Institute was talking to regulators to see whether the vaccine could be fast-tracked for quicker use.“We’re making the point that more people died of malaria in Africa last year by a factor of maybe four than died of COVID. So why isn’t malaria a priority?” he said.The trial for the vaccine involved dividing the 450 child participants into three groups: one receiving a high dose of the vaccine, one receiving a low dose, and one receiving a control vaccine.Results showed an efficacy of 77% in the high-dose group and of 74% among the low-dose group.The results of the trial were reported in a preprint article on the website of the British medical journal The Lancet, with researchers saying the results will soon be published in the journal.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Immunization Committee is meeting Friday to consider lifting a pause on use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.
 
The pause was widely implemented last week following the discovery of six U.S. cases of a rare and severe type of blood clots in people who had received the shot.
 
On April 13, the CDC, in a joint statement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, recommended a pause on use of the vaccine, “out of an abundance of caution” and to give experts an opportunity to examine the blood clot cases and see if any additional cases were found.
 
CDC officials have said since that “a handful” of other cases were being investigated, but offered no details, except to say they were encouraged there was a relatively small number of them.
 
The six cases of blood clots previously identified – out of seven million doses of the vaccine delivered – occurred in women between the ages of 18 and 48. They developed symptoms, most often headaches, six to 13 days after vaccination. One vaccine recipient, a Virginia woman, died in March.
 
The Washington Post reports authorities are leaning toward lifting the pause. Earlier this week, Europe’s drug watchdog group, the European Medicines Agency, said that while it found a possible link between the vaccine and the rare blood clots, the vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks.  
 
It said it would recommend its use with an additional warning included in the information about the vaccine.
 
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting Friday follows an emergency meeting held last week, the day after the announcement of the pause. At that time, members of the panel said they had too little time to make a recommendation.
 
Advisors to the committee tell ABC News it is expected to make a final recommendation on the vaccine later Friday.
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The coronavirus has conquered the world’s highest mountain.  
A Norwegian climber became the first to be tested for COVID-19 in Mount Everest base camp and was flown by helicopter to Kathmandu, where he was hospitalized.
Erlend Ness told The Associated Press in a message Friday that he tested positive on April 15. He said another test on Thursday was negative and he was now staying with a local family in Nepal.
An ace mountain guide, Austrian Lukas Furtenbach, warned that the virus could spread among the hundreds of other climbers, guides and helpers who are now camped on the base of Everest if all of them are not checked immediately and safety measures are taken.
Any outbreak could prematurely end the climbing season, just ahead of a window of good weather in May, he said.  
“We would need now most urgently mass testing in base camp, with everyone tested and every team being isolated, no contact between teams,” said Furtenbach. “That needs to be done now, otherwise it is too late.”
Furtenbach, leading a team of 18 climbers to Mount Everest and its sister peak Mount Lhotse, said there could be more than just one case on the mountain as the Norwegian had lived with several others for weeks.  
A Nepalese mountaineering official denied there were any active cases on the mountains at the moment.  
Mira Acharya, director at the Department of Mountaineering, said she had no official information about the COVID-19 cases and only reports of illnesses like pneumonia and altitude sickness.  
Mountaineering was closed last year due to the pandemic and climbers returned to Everest this year for the first time since May 2019.  
The popular spring climbing season in Nepal, which has eight of the highest peaks in the world, began in March and ends in May.
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Old machines are transformed into new robots in an exhibition that makes viewers think twice about the machines they use. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details. 
Camera: Roy Kim  Producer: Elizabeth Lee 
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COVID-19 is surging at an astounding rate in India. The South Asian nation’s health ministry said Friday it had counted a record-breaking 332,730 new infections in the previous 24-hour period. The new tally surpasses Thursday’s record daily toll of 314,835 new infections.At least six hospitals in New Delhi, the capital, have run out of, or are on the verge of running out of, oxygen for their patients.The oxygen shortage is so acute that the high court in the capital ordered the national government to divert oxygen from industrial use to hospitals.In western India on Friday, a fire at the Vijay Vallabh Hospital killed at least 13 COVID patients.Prime Minister Narendra Modi is holding meetings with the country’s chief ministers Friday to determine how best to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reports that India has nearly 16 million COVID-19 cases. Only the U.S., with almost 32 million cases, has more infections than India.Agence France-Presse is reporting that Japan is set to declare a state of emergency because of a surge in COVID infections, just three months before the opening of the Olympic Games in Tokyo.“We have a strong sense of crisis,” Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japan’s minister for virus response, said Friday, according to AFP.Japan has more than 550,000 COVID-19 cases, according to Johns Hopkins.Syria’s government and the country’s last opposition-held enclave received their first doses of COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday.UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the GAVI vaccine alliance announced in a joint statement the delivery of 200,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to the Syrian government, and 53,800 doses to the rebel-controlled region in the northwest.While fighting has mostly subsided since a cease-fire was implemented a year ago, Syria’s civil war has complicated the delivery of the vaccines, forcing most of them to be transported through Damascus for government-controlled areas while the others are shipped through the border with Turkey.Western nongovernmental organizations have said that Syria’s logistical challenges in coordinating vaccinations in combat zones are worsened by the international financial sanctions that have been imposed on the country. Johns Hopkins reports there are nearly 145 million worldwide COVID-19 infections and more than 3 million people have died.
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Old machines are transformed into new robots in an exhibition that makes viewers think twice about the machines they use. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details. 
Camera: Roy Kim  Producer: Elizabeth Lee 
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Since coronavirus pandemic began many Americans have gotten more used to make their own meals at home. But that doesn’t mean people do not want a great restaurant meal from time to time. Karina Bafradzhian reports.
Camera: Andrey Degtyarev and Artyom Kokhan
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Cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half is doable but hard, experts say, and some of the biggest barriers are political, not technical.President Joe Biden on Thursday FILE – A wind turbine is pictured, Jan. 13, 2021, near Spearville, Kan.U.S. emissions are declining, but far too slowly to reach Biden’s target. They would have to fall on a scale that has happened only three times since 2005, Rossetti noted, and not for good reasons — during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2008-09 financial crisis and during an exceptionally mild winter in 2012.The Biden administration has proposed broad areas where it sees opportunities for cuts, without giving much detail. It says there are multiple pathways to get there.But each path faces opposition, experts note. Legislation may struggle to pass in a closely divided Congress. And a conservative Supreme Court may take a dim view of expanding regulations.Several research groups have mapped out ways that the United States could cut emissions in half.”We have the policies to do it, and we have the technologies to do it,” said Robbie Orvis, director of energy policy design at Energy Innovation, a policy research group.For starters, the amount of solar and wind power installed each year needs to be three to four times as much as last year’s record-setting pace.”It is a big leap to do that, but the technology exists,” Orvis said.And the technology is cheaper than ever, and getting cheaper.The FILE – New Lexus automobiles are shown for sale after California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the state would ban the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger cars and trucks starting in 2035.The next biggest cut would come from transportation, where the largest proportion of U.S. carbon emissions come from. A combination of incentives and regulations would take old, inefficient vehicles off the road and help increase sales of zero-emissions vehicles.Smaller shares would come from cutting industrial emissions by switching to electrification, where possible, or emerging sources such as hydrogen or ammonia, though these technologies are still in development.The best path to any of these policies would be through legislation passed by Congress, experts note. Many of them are included in Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal.But Republicans are firmly opposed to it.FILE – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., turns to an aide in Washington, March 7, 2021.”Their so-called ‘infrastructure’ plan would aim at completely ‘de-carbonizing’ our electric grid, which means hurting our coal and natural gas industries and putting good-paying American jobs into the shredder,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement.Some policies could be implemented through regulations, which do not require Congress. But it is a riskier approach.”I’m honestly pretty pessimistic on that because the scope of regulatory authority Biden has is limited,” R Street’s Rossetti said. “The courts are going to challenge any sort of proposal that goes outside of those bounds.”Plus, regulations can change with administrations, and climate regulations have whiplashed through the past several presidencies. The Trump administration reversed President Barack Obama’s climate regulations, and Biden is reversing Trump’s reversals.Many of the policies that would get the United States to a 50% cut have strong backing from the private sector.FILE – An Apple logo hangs above the entrance to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City,  July 21, 2015.More than 400 companies signed a letter to Biden ahead of this week’s climate summit asking for a 50% cut. The list includes tech giants Apple and Microsoft, mega-retailers Walmart and Target, automakers Ford and General Motors, and other household names.The electric utility industry’s main lobby group supports a clean energy standard.”A well-designed CES makes some sense for us,” Emily Fisher, senior vice president of clean energy at the Edison Electric Institute, told Reuters.But she cautioned that the industry still needs breakthroughs, in long-term storage and carbon capture, for example, to meet the target.”We need those technologies, and they don’t exist,” Fisher said.Getting to 50% “is certainly going to be challenging,” Orvis said, “but I’m cautiously optimistic.”
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A crew returned from the northernmost islands in the Hawaiian archipelago this week with a boatload of marine plastic and abandoned fishing nets that threaten to entangle endangered Hawaiian monk seals and other animals on the uninhabited beaches stretching nearly 2,100 kilometers north of Honolulu.The cleanup effort in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument lasted three weeks and the crew picked up more than 43 metric tons of “ghost nets” and other marine plastics such as buoys, crates, bottle caps and cigarette lighters from the shores of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.The monument, the largest protected marine reserve in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world, is in the northern Pacific Ocean and surrounded by what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a huge gyre of floating plastic and other debris that circulates in ocean currents. The islands act like a comb that gather debris on its otherwise pristine beaches.The ecosystem in the monument is diverse, unique and one of the most intact marine habitats on Earth. But the beaches are littered with plastic and nets that ensnare endangered Hawaiian monk seals — of which there are only about 1,400 left in the world — and green turtles, among other wildlife.FILE – In this April 11, 2021, photo provided by Matt Saunter, Joao Garriques, left, and Matthew Chauvin load fishing nets onto a ship near Kure Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.The crew removed line from a monk seal on the expedition’s first day.With virtually no predators, the islands are a haven for many species of seabirds, and Midway Atoll is home to the largest colony of albatross in the world. There, the land is littered with carcasses of birds that have ingested plastics and died.The cleanup was organized by the nonprofit Papahanaumokuakea Marine Debris Project, which partners with federal agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.Kevin O’Brien, president of the new organization and a former NOAA employee, said the work is expensive but important.”Talking to some of these folks that are up there for the monk seal camps every summer, they’ll talk about specific nets that have been there for several years,” O’Brien said. “So a trip like this where we’re able to yank pretty much everything we see can have an impact.”The latest expedition focused on the shorelines of the various atolls, and a trip later this year will remove nets from the reefs that surround the islands.FILE – In this April 10, 2021, photo provided by Matthew Chauvin, workers with the Papahanaumokuakea Marine Debris Project push boats loaded with fishing nets and plastic off Kure Atoll in Hawaii.A NOAA study estimated that the shores of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands accumulate about 52 metric tons of debris each year. An analysis of the upcoming reef removal is expected to estimate the total amount of debris that gathers on both the beaches and the critical reef ecosystems that surround them, giving researchers a more complete view of the problem.The crew of 12, which included people from the marine debris project, federal agencies, the state of Hawaii and a local university, removed debris from Laysan Island, Lisianski Island, Midway Atoll, French Frigate Shoals, and Kure Atoll.Matt Saunter, president of the Kure Atoll Conservancy, was among those working on the expedition. He’s spent more than a decade doing monthslong field work on Kure Atoll. He rode out the first nine months of the coronavirus pandemic isolated there with a small crew and returned in November to a new world.He said being back on his “home away from home” in a new role was a unique experience.”I definitely always wanted to remain involved with work being done in the monument, but I thought maybe I could try it at a different capacity,” Saunter said. “We basically visited all the different islands in a short time frame, so I got to see all the different wildlife and how they nest differently and the different types of vegetation this time of the year, and the different state that the beaches are in.”FILE – In this April 13, 2021, photo provided by Kevin O’Brien, workers with the Papahanaumokuakea Marine Debris Project remove fishing nets and plastic from the shoreline of Lisianski Island in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.While on Kure, which is managed by the state of Hawaii and has a year-round team of workers, the crew dropped off new staff and picked up one to return home. They also resupplied the remote field camp.The Kure field crews had about 12 metric tons of debris collected over three years, and it was ready to be picked up when the ship arrived.The marine monument is also a valued Native Hawaiian cultural site, and Hawaiian ceremonies were conducted each day of the trip. The cultural protocols honor the islands and seek permission to work in this rarely visited part of the world.”Papahanaumokuakea is one of the most amazing landscapes on Earth, central to many Native Hawaiian narratives — a place where nature and culture are one,” said Athline Clark, NOAA’s superintendent for the marine monument. “It sustains the most vulnerable Hawaiian wildlife species, and nearly all of its habitat is used by seabirds, turtles and seals for critical nesting, burrowing, basking and pupping.”The monument is also home to the famed World War II Battle of Midway, where researchers recently found sunken Japanese warships that were lost in the fight.Most of the debris that was brought back will be incinerated and turned into electricity that powers homes and businesses on Oahu. Some of the gear will be set aside for student recycling projects, and a number of the fishing nets will be taken to Hawaii Pacific University’s Center for Marine Debris Research for a study that’s trying to identify the sources of this fishing gear.
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