The head of the top U.S. public health agency on Wednesday announced a shake-up of the organization, intended to make it more nimble.

The planned changes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — CDC leaders call it a “reset”— come amid ongoing criticism of the agency’s response to COVID-19, monkeypox and other public health threats. The changes include internal staffing moves and steps to speed up data releases.

The CDC’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, told the agency’s staff about the changes on Wednesday. It’s a CDC initiative, and was not directed by the White House or other administration officials, she said.

“I feel like it’s my my responsibility to lead this agency to a better place after a really challenging three years,” Walensky told The Associated Press.

The CDC, with a $12 billion budget and more than 11,000 employees, is an Atlanta-based federal agency charged with protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other public health threats. It’s customary for each CDC director to do some reorganizing, but Walensky’s action comes amid a wider demand for change.

The agency has long been criticized as too ponderous, focusing on collection and analysis of data but not acting quickly against new health threats. But public unhappiness with the agency grew dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts said the CDC was slow to recognize how much virus was entering the U.S. from Europe, to recommend people wear masks, to say the virus can spread through the air, and to ramp up systematic testing for new variants.

“We saw during COVID that CDC’s structures, frankly, weren’t designed to take in information, digest it and disseminate it to the public at the speed necessary,” said Jason Schwartz, a health policy researcher at the Yale School of Public Health.

Walensky, who became director in January 2021, has long said the agency has to move faster and communicate better, but stumbles have continued during her tenure.

In April, she called for an in-depth review of the agency, which resulted in the announced changes. Her reorganization proposal must be approved by the Department of Health and Human Services secretary. CDC officials say they hope to have a full package of changes finalized, approved, and underway by early next year.

Some changes still are being formulated, but steps announced Wednesday include:

—Increasing use of preprint scientific reports to get out actionable data, instead of waiting for research to go through peer review and publication by the CDC journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

—Restructuring the agency’s communications office and further revamping CDC websites to make the agency’s guidance for the public more clear and easier to find.

—Altering the length of time agency leaders are devoted to outbreak responses to a minimum of six months — an effort to address a turnover problem that at times caused knowledge gaps and affected the agency’s communications.

—Creation of a new executive council to help Walensky set strategy and priorities.

—Appointing Mary Wakefield as senior counselor to implement the changes. Wakefield headed the Health Resources and Services Administration during the Obama administration and also served as the No. 2 administrator at HHS. Wakefield, 68, started Monday.

—Altering the agency’s organization chart to undo some changes made during the Trump administration.

—Establishing an office of intergovernmental affairs to smooth partnerships with other agencies, as well as a higher-level office on health equity.

Walensky also said she intends to “get rid of some of the reporting layers that exist, and I’d like to work to break down some of the silos.” She did not say exactly what that may entail, but emphasized that the overall changes are less about redrawing the organization chart than rethinking how the CDC does business and motivates staff.

“This will not be simply moving boxes” on the organization chart, she said.

Schwartz said flaws in the federal response go beyond the CDC, because the White House and other agencies were heavily involved.

A CDC reorganization is a positive step but “I hope it’s not the end of the story,” Schwartz said. He would like to see “a broader accounting” of how the federal government handles health crises.
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Despite a nationwide vaccination campaign that started in May, Malawi is struggling to contain a cholera outbreak that has infected more than 1,073 people and caused 44 deaths. 

The figures from the Malawi Ministry of Health, updated as of Aug. 16, 2022, are triple the numbers recorded when the vaccination campaign was launched three months ago. 

 

The report also says the outbreak has spread to 10 districts from eight in May. The hardest hit districts include Blantyre with 489 cases, Neno with 128 cases, and Nsanje with 289 cases.  

 

George Mbotwa, spokesperson for a health office in Nsanje district, which borders Mozambique south of Malawi, said continued incidents of cholera in the district are largely because of movements of people between the two countries. 

 

“What is worrisome is that we have now continued to record the cases when by now we would have contained the situation,” he said. “It’s because some of these cases we are sharing with Mozambique. So, the cases will be coming from Mozambique and then reporting to health facilities in Nsanje, then being recorded as Nsanje cases.”

Mbotwa said the situation is slowly improving, after officials on the Mozambican side agreed during recent discussions to set up cholera treatment sites on their side of the border.  

“The Mozambican side by then didn’t have cholera treatment sites, and now they have them there, so people are able to report the cases right there, unlike coming with cases to Malawi,” he said. 

Cholera is an acute diarrheal infection caused by ingesting food or water contaminated with bacteria. The disease affects both children and adults, and if untreated, it can kill within hours.  

 

Penjani Chunda, environmental health officer in Blantyre, said although Blantyre is largely an urban area, cholera cases are on the rise because most people fetch water from unprotected sources like rivers and streams. 

 

“In most parts of Blantyre, we don’t have portable water sources,” he said. “It might be like an urban setup, but it has no portable water sources, and we have got dry taps in some of the areas and [water] kiosks are not working at all.”  

The spokesperson for the Health Ministry, Adrian Chikumbe, said health authorities are currently distributing chlorine for water treatment, and providing public education on good hygiene.  

 

Chikumbe also hopes the second phase of the national oral cholera vaccination campaign, which is expected to start soon in the most-hit districts, will help contain the situation.     

 
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China’s dominance in global sector creates supply chain and national security concerns, says US solar manufacturer
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NASA’s gigantic Space Launch System moon rocket, topped with an uncrewed astronaut capsule, is set to begin an hourslong crawl to its launchpad Tuesday night ahead of the behemoth’s debut test flight later this month. 

The 98-meter-tall rocket is scheduled to embark on its first mission to space — without any humans — on August 29. It will be a crucial, long-delayed demonstration trip to the moon in NASA’s Artemis program, the United States’ multibillion-dollar effort to return humans to the lunar surface as practice for future missions to Mars. 

The Space Launch System, whose development in the past decade has been led by Boeing, is scheduled to emerge from its assembly building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida around 9 p.m. EDT on Tuesday (0100 GMT on Wednesday) and begin the 6-km-long trek to its launchpad. Moving less than 1.6 km per hour, the rollout takes roughly 11 hours. 

Sitting atop the rocket is NASA’s Orion astronaut capsule, a pod built by Lockheed Martin Corp LMT.N. It is designed to separate from the rocket in space, ferry humans toward the moon’s vicinity and rendezvous with a separate spacecraft that will take astronauts down to the lunar surface. 

But for the August 29 mission, called Artemis 1, the Orion capsule will launch atop the Space Launch System without any humans and orbit around the moon before returning to Earth for an ocean splashdown 42 days later. 

If bad launch weather or a minor technical issue triggers a delay from August 29, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has backup launch dates on September 2 and September 5. 

 
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A measles outbreak in Zimbabwe has killed at least 157 children, with more than 2,000 infections reported across the country, the government said Tuesday.

Cases have been growing rapidly in the southern African nation since authorities said the first infection was logged earlier this month, with reported deaths almost doubling in less than a week.

“As of 15 August, the cumulative figure across the country has risen to 2,056 cases and 157 deaths,” Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa said, briefing journalists after a weekly Cabinet meeting.

Mutsvangwa said the government was going to step up vaccinations and has invoked special legislation allowing it to draw money from the national disaster fund “to deal with the emergency.”

She said the government was to engage with traditional and faith leaders to garner their support with the vaccination campaign, adding most victims were not vaccinated.

The health ministry has previously blamed the outbreak on church sect gatherings.

The measles virus attacks mainly children with the most serious complications including blindness, brain swelling, diarrhea and severe respiratory infections.

Its symptoms are a red rash that appears first on the face and spreads to the rest of the body. Once very common it can now be prevented with a vaccine.

In April, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Africa was facing an explosion of preventable diseases due to delays in vaccinating children, with measles cases jumping 400%.
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New York health officials announced in July that an unvaccinated adult man from Rockland County had been diagnosed with polio—the first case of the life-threatening disease in the United States since 2013. The virus that causes polio was later detected in New York City wastewater, and city and state health officials now say the virus is probably circulating in the city.

The virus identified in New York is a vaccine-derived poliovirus. Wild polioviruses were eliminated from most of the world and now circulate only in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But vaccine-derived viruses, which emerge when the weakened viruses in the oral polio vaccine mutate and spread in unvaccinated populations, still occasionally cause outbreaks.

VOA spoke with three polio experts about vaccine-derived polioviruses and the oral polio vaccine. Here’s what you need to know.

What are vaccine-derived polioviruses?

Vaccine-derived polioviruses are related to the active viruses in the oral polio vaccine (OPV).

OPV works by infecting cells in the gut with weakened polioviruses, allowing the body to safely develop immunity to polio without the risk of paralysis posed by the real disease.

“[The weakened viruses] would still infect you. They would still replicate in your gut. You will develop a lifelong immunity, but you will not get paralyzed,” said virologist Konstantin Chumakov, a Global Virus Network Center of Excellence director and an adjunct professor at The George Washington University.

“But the [vaccine-derived] virus will still be able to transmit [from person to person],” Chumakov added. “It was considered a big advantage of the vaccine, because basically, you can immunize several kids with one dose.”

This transmission becomes problematic in communities with low vaccination rates. If the virus can spread for a long time, it has many chances to mutate and revert to a dangerous paralytic form.

Why is the oral polio vaccine (OPV) used?

Although OPV is linked to vaccine-derived polioviruses, it also has a number of advantages over the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) — the injected vaccine — which is still used in most of the world.

People who receive OPV cannot be “silent spreaders.” After developing an immune response to the vaccine, they are immune to polio for life. Polioviruses cannot replicate in their gut and infect others.

In contrast, IPV protects against paralysis, but does not prevent the virus from replicating in the gut. People who receive IPV can spread polio, even though they won’t get sick from it.

“In populations where you want to stop the spread, that ‘gut immunity’ that OPV confers is essential,” said Captain Derek Ehrhardt, a polio incident manager at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “If you have just IPV, it’s possible that the child will be protected, but they could still spread [paralytic polio] to their neighbor, their brother, their sister, whomever.”

This made OPV instrumental in the eradication of wild polio from most of the world, including in countries such as the United States that now use IPV exclusively.

OPV also has other advantages.

“We work with oral polio vaccine because it is low cost,” said Richter Razafindratsimandresy, head of the National Reference Laboratory for Poliomyelitis at the Institut Pasteur de Madagascar. “And it is easy to administer, because it is oral — they don’t need to inject the children, and it is not a problem for the parents to accept.”

If OPV prevents silent spread, why are the U.S. and other nations using only IPV?

After the United States and other wealthy countries eliminated wild polio, they stopped using OPV because it carries the risk of creating vaccine-derived polioviruses in undervaccinated communities, and because it has a slight risk of causing paralysis. This happens between roughly two and four times per million births, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). Because there are so few cases in the U.S., thanks to the very successful campaigns with OPV, that risk is now seen as unacceptable.

The U.S. and other wealthy countries have robust health care systems and can effectively acquire the more expensive IPV and get it into every arm. So, using IPV means the well-vaccinated populations in these countries are well-protected from paralysis from polio, despite being less protected against catching and spreading polioviruses.

How do vaccine-derived poliovirus cause outbreaks?

Countries with weak vaccination systems are more likely to experience outbreaks of vaccine-derived poliovirus. That’s happened several times in Madagascar, Razafindratsimandresy said.

“[The virus] is not from another country. Because in Madagascar, we have … immunization coverage [that] is very, very low,” he said.

Imported vaccine-derived polioviruses can also cause outbreaks in countries with high vaccination rates, especially if IPV is used instead of OPV.

“Basically, it can transmit from person to person to person without causing any symptoms, because everybody is protected from paralysis,” said Chumakov. “But at some point, the virus can hit an unvaccinated person or a person with immune deficiency, and then it can paralyze this person. And this is exactly what happened in New York.”

Is OPV safe?

“Our vaccines are safe and effective,” said Ehrhardt. “We need to vaccinate our under- and unimmunized children to stop the ongoing spread of these viruses.”

Chumakov said that developing better versions of OPV could reduce risks while also keeping the gut immunity provided by OPV, which he said is important for preventing silent spread. He was previously involved in a GPEI effort to develop a safer oral vaccine for Type 2 polioviruses. Clinical trial data suggest the novel OPV is less likely to revert to a dangerous form.

While the future may bring improved vaccines, vaccinating as many children as possible with existing OPV remains a priority in much of the world.

According to the CDC, global polio vaccination coverage sunk to 81% in 2021, the lowest in a decade. This was largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but not all countries have enough resources for vaccination campaigns even in normal times.

Razafindratsimandresy said that even though Madagascar aims to vaccinate all children with OPV, the country doesn’t have enough personnel and often runs out of vaccine.

“These immunity gaps must be closed for us to stop these diseases,” Ehrhardt said. “If you have polio anywhere, then children everywhere are still at risk.”

 
…

The widely used tuberculosis vaccine also fends off a slew of unrelated infectious diseases, and its immune boost can protect newborns for more than a year, researchers in Australia have found.

The bacillus calmette-guérin (BCG) vaccine for tuberculosis causes front-line immune cells to make long-lasting biological “marks” on their DNA, changing how they read genetic instructions for fighting off viruses, the researchers say.

“The DNA is like the manual for the cell. It tells you what it can and can’t do,” study author and molecular immunologist Boris Novakovic of the University of Melbourne told VOA. “You might have a sentence that says, ‘If you see a virus, turn the following genes on.’ And what we’ve done with the BCG vaccine [is] sort of [change] that full stop at the end of that sentence to an exclamation mark.”

The findings were published in the Science Advances journal.

“What is new here is the durability, the long-lasting imprinting effects of BCG vaccine at birth in these Australian babies, and also [that] they can show [in detail] how that takes place,” vaccine epidemiologist Christine Stabell Benn, of the University of Southern Denmark, said in an interview with VOA. She was not involved in the study.

Developed more than a century ago, the BCG vaccine contains live, weakened bacteria. It is one of the oldest vaccines still used and is the most frequently administered vaccine in the world.

Decades ago, Benn and her colleagues noticed that children in Guinea-Bissau who received the tuberculosis shot were less likely to die from other, unrelated diseases. They later confirmed this in a randomized trial, showing that low-birthweight babies who got BCG at birth were about a third less likely to die in their first month of life than those who got BCG later on the normal schedule. Later trials in Guinea-Bissau and Uganda corroborated these findings.

Today, this “non-specific effect” of BCG vaccination has been observed in babies, healthy adults and elderly people. The vaccine’s immune boost is used to treat bladder cancer. Clinical trials are ongoing to see if it could help protect against COVID-19.

There is growing evidence that BCG trains the innate immune system — the non-specific, fast-acting response that activates to fight a wide range of threats.

But it wasn’t until recently that scientists started to figure out how this “trained immunity” that the BCG vaccine generates actually works.

Previous studies found marks of trained immunity a month to three months after BCG vaccination in adults. But the vaccine is typically administered to young babies, and scientists had not tested whether training could last for a long time.

Novakovic and his colleagues compared the immune cells of 63 newborns who received the BCG vaccine right after birth to those of 67 babies who didn’t get the vaccine. They found that exposure to BCG left marks on virus-fighting regions of the genome that tell cells to activate specific genes more or less often. Immune cells passed down these marks, generation to generation, as they divided to make new cells. The marks of trained immunity persisted for more than a year.

In lab tests using cultured human immune cells, the scientists were able to piece together the cellular machinery involved in making these marks more precisely than before.

“We were able to look at all these different levels to see, in a really comprehensive way, what happens to these cells when they directly get exposed to BCG,” said Novakovic.

In the future, Novakovic — who also works at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute — said he’d like to see if the study’s findings hold in different populations — especially in places where infectious disease is more common than in Australia. And in the long term, he thinks scientists should design vaccines that specifically target the immune-boosting pathways BCG incidentally activates.

“The BCG vaccine is great — it’s safe, and it works. But it’s a bit of a dirty method because we don’t really know what it does. We just know it works,” he said. “Imagine you can just make a purely trained-immunity vaccine.”

Benn said future studies should consider factors such as sex and mother’s vaccination status, which epidemiologists have noticed can affect the immune boost from BCG. For instance, boys seem to benefit from the vaccine’s extra protection more than girls during the first weeks of life, she said.

But beyond more research, Benn hopes the new study will give public health officials more confidence in off-target immunity from BCG, a vaccine she says should be recommended as protection against death from infectious disease — not just as a tuberculosis vaccine.

“I feel that we’re sitting on our hands,” she said, “waiting for biological mechanisms while children could be saved.”
…

Banks along parts of the Colorado River where water once streamed are now just caked mud and rock as climate change makes the Western U.S. hotter and drier. 

More than two decades of drought have done little to deter the region from diverting more water than flows through it, depleting key reservoirs to levels that now jeopardize water delivery and hydropower production. 

Cities and farms in seven U.S. states are bracing for cuts this week as officials stare down a deadline to propose unprecedented reductions to their use of the water, setting up what’s expected to be the most consequential week for Colorado River policy in years. 

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in June told the states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — to determine how to use at least 15% less water next year, or have restrictions imposed on them. The bureau is also expected to publish hydrology projections that will trigger additional cuts already agreed to. 

Tensions over the extent of the cuts and how to spread them equitably have flared, with states pointing fingers and stubbornly clinging to their water rights despite the looming crisis. 

Representatives from the seven states convened in Denver last week for last-minute negotiations behind closed doors. Those discussions have yet to produce concrete proposals, but officials close to the negotiations say the most likely targets for cuts are Arizona and California farmers. Agricultural districts in those states are asking to be paid generously to bear that burden. 

The proposals under discussion, however, fall short of what the Bureau of Reclamation has demanded and, with negotiations stalling, state officials say they hope for more time to negotiate details. 

“Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, the last 62 days produced exactly nothing in terms of meaningful collective action to help forestall the looming crisis,” John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority wrote in a letter Monday. He called the agricultural district demands “drought profiteering.” 

The Colorado River cascades from the Rocky Mountains into the arid deserts of the Southwest. It’s the primary water supply for 40 million people. About 70% of its water goes toward irrigation, sustaining a $15 billion-a-year agricultural industry that supplies 90% of the United States’ winter vegetables. 

Water from the river is divided among Mexico and the seven U.S. states under a series of agreements that date back a century, to a time when more flowed. 

But climate change has transformed the river’s hydrology, providing less snowmelt and causing hotter temperatures and more evaporation. As the river yielded less water, the states agreed to cuts tied to the levels of reservoirs that store its water. 

Last year, federal officials for the first time declared a water shortage, triggering cuts to Nevada, Arizona and Mexico’s share of the river to help prevent the two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — from dropping low enough to threaten hydropower production and stop water from flowing through their dams. 

The proposals for supplemental cuts due this week have inflamed disagreement between upper basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — and lower basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — over how to spread the pain. 

The lower basin states use most of the water and have thus far shouldered most of the cuts. The upper basin states have historically not used their full allocations but want to maintain water rights to plan for population growth. 

Gene Shawcroft, the chairman of Utah’s Colorado River Authority, believes the lower basin states should take most of the cuts because they use most of the water and their full allocations. 

He said it was his job to protect Utah’s allocation for growth projected for decades ahead: “The direction we’ve been given as water purveyors is to make sure we have water for the future.” 

In a letter last month, representatives from the upper basin states proposed a five-point conservation plan they said would save water, but argued most cuts needed to come from the lower basin. The plan didn’t commit to any numbers. 

“The focus is getting the tools in place and working with water users to get as much as we can rather than projecting a water number,” Chuck Cullom, the executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, told The Associated Press. 

That position, however, is unsatisfactory to many in lower basin states already facing cuts. 

“It’s going to come to a head particularly if the upper basin states continue their negotiating position, saying, ‘We’re not making any cuts,'” said Bruce Babbitt, who served as Interior secretary from 2003-2011. 

Lower basin states have yet to go public with plans to contribute, but officials said last week that the states’ tentative proposal under discussion fell slightly short of the federal government’s request to cut 2 to 4 million acre-feet. 

An acre-foot of water is enough to serve 2-3 households annually. 

Bill Hasencamp, the Colorado River resource manager at Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District, said all the districts in the state that draw from the river had agreed to contribute water or money to the plan, pending approval by their respective boards. Water districts, in particular Imperial Irrigation District, have been adamant that any voluntary cut must not curtail their high priority water rights. 

Southern California cities will likely provide money that could fund fallowing farmland in places like Imperial County and water managers are considering leaving water they’ve stored in Lake Mead as part of their contribution. 

Arizona will probably be hit hard with reductions. The state over the past few years shouldered many of the cuts. With its growing population and robust agricultural industry, it has less wiggle room than its neighbors to take on more, said Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke. Some Native American tribes in Arizona have also contributed to propping up Lake Mead in the past and could play an outsized role in any new proposal. 

Irrigators around Yuma, Arizona, have proposed taking 925,000 acre-feet less of Colorado River water in 2023 and leaving it in Lake Mead if they’re paid $1.4 billion or $1,500 per acre-foot. The cost is far above the going rate, but irrigators defended their proposal as fair considering the cost to grow crops and get them to market. 

Wade Noble, the coordinator for a coalition that represents Yuma water rights holders, said it was the only proposal put forth publicly that includes actual cuts, rather than theoretical cuts to what users are allocated on paper. 

Some of the compensation-for-conservation funds could come from $4 billion in drought funding included in the Inflation Reduction Act under consideration in Washington, U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona told the AP. 

Sinema acknowledged that paying farmers to conserve is not a long-term solution: “In the short term, however, in order to meet our day-to-day needs and year-to-year needs, ensuring that we’re creating financial incentives for non-use will help us get through,” she said. 

Babbitt agreed that money in the legislation will not “miraculously solve the problem” and said prices for water must be reasonable to avoid gouging because most water users will take be impacted. 

“There’s no way that these cuts can all be paid for at a premium price for years and years,” he said. 

 
…

In an effort to boost monkeypox vaccination rates, Los Angeles County is organizing pop-up clinics where eligible individuals can get the shot. Angelina Bagdasaryan has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
Videographer: Vazgen Varzhabetian
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People who live in the poorest regions of England are diagnosed with serious illnesses earlier and die sooner than their counterparts in more affluent regions, according to a new study.

The Health Foundation study, published Monday, found that “A 60-year-old woman in the poorest areas of England has a level of ‘diagnosed illness’ equivalent to that of a 76-year-old woman in the wealthiest areas . . . While a 60-year-old man in the poorest areas of England will on average have a level of diagnosed illness equivalent to that of a 70- year-old man in the wealthiest areas.”

The Health Foundation is an independent charity dedicated to improving “the health and healthcare of the people in the UK.”

The foundation said while previous studies about health inequalities in England have mostly relied on self-reported health outcomes, their study “linked hospital and primary care data to examine socioeconomic, regional and ethnic variations in the prevalence of diagnosed long-term illnesses.”

The study also uncovered “significant ethnic disparities in diagnosed illness” in populations of people from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and black Caribbean backgrounds.  This group had higher levels of long-term illness than the white population.

People from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds also had “the highest rates of diagnosed chronic pain, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.”

The Health Foundation, however, also found that the white population “had the highest levels of diagnosed anxiety or depression, and alcohol problems.”

“White people are also more likely to be living with cancer,” according to the study’s findings. This may be occurring because of “the increased survival rates associated with cancers that are more prevalent in this group and due to more diagnoses resulting from greater access to cancer screening in the white population.”

‘The NHS wasn’t set up to carry the burden of policy failings in other parts of society,” Jo Bibby, director of Healthy Lives at the Health Foundation said in a statement. “A healthy, thriving society must have all the right building blocks in place, including good quality jobs, housing and education. Without these, people face shorter lives, in poorer health”.
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NASA researchers are studying “Mars-like” salt lakes in Western Australia in their hunt for extra-terrestrial life. Experts from the United States say the region, with its pink-hued water and distinctive trees, is more like Mars than almost any other location on Earth.

The Yilgarn Craton is a vast mineral-rich region about 400 kilometers east of Perth in Western Australia.

Yilgarn is a word used by the area’s indigenous people to describe quartz. The region has been the focus of exploration and mining, but scientists believe it could harbor clues about the universe and life on other planets.

Western Australia’s acidic lakes are said to mimic conditions on ancient Mars. Three-billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia are some of the oldest on Earth and academics believe they are about the same age as those on the Red Planet.

A team of U.S. experts, supported by local Indigenous elders, are investigating how so-called “hyper-saline environments” — or places with lots of salt — are not only present-day ecosystems, but how they preserve a record of the past.

Associate Professor Britney Schmidt, from Cornell University in New York state, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the project is funded by NASA, the Washington-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“We are members of the Oceans Across Space and Time project, which is a program funded by the NASA Astrobiology Program and we are out here studying analogues, or examples, of what we think ancient Mars might have been like. So, Western Australia’s unique because it has very, very old rocks. So, here in the Yilgarn Craton somewhere around two to three million years old as well as highly acidic water, and so those two combinations are things that we see on the surface of other planets. So, it is really unique,” she said.

The U.S. team of researchers has been working with indigenous elders, who have explained the region’s so-called “dreaming stories,” which chart the creation of the land by ancestral spirits.

There are many big questions to answer; if life can survive in toxic and hyper-saline environments in Western Australia, could it have existed in extreme conditions on other planets?

We may never find out, but together science and traditional knowledge could yield valuable clues.

Much of the data will help to craft Ph.D. and master’s theses when the team returns to the United States.
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A measles outbreak has killed 80 children in Zimbabwe since April, the ministry of health said, blaming church sect gatherings for the surge.

In a statement seen by Reuters Sunday, the ministry said the outbreak had now spread nationwide, with a case fatality rate of 6.9%.

Health Secretary Jasper Chimedza said that as of Thursday, 1,036 suspected cases and 125 confirmed cases had been reported since the outbreak, with Manicaland in eastern Zimbabwe accounting for most of the infections.

“The ministry of health and childcare wishes to inform the public that the ongoing outbreak of measles which was first reported on 10th of April has since spread nationwide following church gatherings,” Chimedza said in a statement.

“These gathering which were attended by people from different provinces of the country with unknown vaccination status led to the spread of measles to previously unaffected areas.”

Manicaland, the second-most populous province, had 356 cases and 45 deaths, Chimedza said.

Most reported cases are among children aged between six months and 15 from religious sects who are not vaccinated against measles due to religious beliefs, he added.

Bishop Andby Makuru, leader of Johane Masowe apostolic sect, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Zimbabwe, some apostolic church sects forbid their followers from taking vaccinations or any medical treatment. The churches attract millions of followers with their promises to heal illnesses and deliver people from poverty.

With a low vaccination rate and in some cases, no record keeping, the government has resolved to start a mass vaccination campaign in areas where the outbreak was recorded.

The measles outbreak is expected to strain an ailing health sector already blighted by lack of medication and intermittent strikes by health workers. 
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China’s financial hub Shanghai said on Sunday it would reopen all schools including kindergartens, primary and middle schools on Sept. 1 after months of COVID-19 closures.

The city will require all teachers and students to take nucleic acid tests for the coronavirus every day before leaving campus, the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission said.

It also called for teachers and students to carry out a 14-day “self health management” within the city ahead of the school reopening, the commission said in a statement.

Shanghai shut all schools in mid-March before the city’s two-month lockdown to combat its worst COVID outbreak in April and May.

It allowed some students at high schools and middle schools to return to classrooms in June while most of the rest continued home study for the remainder of the semester.

The announcement on schools reopening brings great relief to many residents but fears about COVID lockdowns continue to persist, as China vows to stick to its dynamic zero policy which requires all positive cases and their close contacts to undergo quarantine.

On Saturday, videos circulating on Chinese social media showed customers pushing past security guards and running out of an IKEA mall in central Shanghai in panic as an announcement blared over its sound system saying the mall was being locked down due to COVID contact tracing.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the videos, but IKEA customer service said on Sunday the mall was shut due to COVID curbs. IKEA did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

Shanghai, the most populous in China, reported five new local infections of COVID, all asymptomatic, for Saturday, while 2,467 domestically transmitted cases were reported nationwide.

It has extended its weekly COVID-19 test requirement and extended free testing until the end of September in a bid to keep the virus in check, authorities announced on Saturday.

The southern province of Hainan is now China’s worst hit region, with 494 symptomatic cases and 846 asymptomatic cases reported for Saturday.

Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan urged Hainan to achieve zero cases at the community level as soon as possible when she inspected several places on the island, including the Sanya Phoenix International Airport on Saturday, state media reported. 
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Poland’s environment minister says laboratory tests following a mass fish die-off have detected high salinity levels but no mercury in the Oder River. That means the mystery is continuing as to what killed tons of fish in Central Europe.
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