Turkey’s plastic recycling industry is strongly criticized in a Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday. The report highlights health problems for workers and residents and criticizes the European Union, for which Turkey is the main plastics recycler. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.
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The World Health Organization warns noncommunicable diseases kill 41 million people each year, equivalent to 74 percent of all deaths globally.

A new global report by the World Health Organization finds noncommunicable diseases now outnumber infectious diseases as the top killers globally. Each year, it says 17 million people under age 70 die prematurely from noncommunicable diseases or NCD. The biggest killers are cardiovascular diseases, followed by cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes.

WHO director of noncommunicable diseases, Bente Mikkelsen, says most of these deaths are preventable.

“Every two seconds, someone under the age of 70 is dying from an NCD,” said Mikkelsen. “And many people do not still realize that 86 percent of these premature deaths, namely dying too young are taking place in low-and-middle-income countries, making NCD an issue of equity and sustainable development as well as health.”

WHO blames most of these preventable deaths on four key risk factors. It cites high blood pressure as the biggest threat, noting 1.3 billion adults worldwide have this condition.

Mikkelsen says too many people are unaware they have this potentially deadly condition. Consequently, they are not getting the lifesaving treatment they need.

“If people had access to health services where they could get their blood pressure checked and get support to manage hypertension, nearly 10 million heart attacks and strokes could be averted by 2030,” said Mikkelsen. “Other major risk factors like unhealthy diet, tobacco use, and harmful use of alcohol are heavily influenced by industry, including the formulation, packaging design, marketing, and promotional product.”

WHO reports at least 39 million deaths could be averted by 2030 if every country were to adopt the interventions known to work.

The U.N. Health Agency urges people to embrace healthier lifestyles and modify risky behavior to reduce their chances of getting a deadly disease. It says those who stop smoking, exercise more, eat a healthier diet and drink only moderate amounts of alcohol will add years to their lives.
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For the first time in India, a domestically-made vaccine that provides protection against cervical cancer—the second-most common type of cancer afflicting women in the country—will be accessible to the majority of the population, including the poorest, according to leading healthcare professionals.

The vaccine, Cervavac, is produced by The Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. The vaccine shot is expected to launch by December this year, SII chief executive Adar Poonawalla said in a statement Tuesday.

“Cervavac will make India self-sufficient in controlling female mortality caused by cervical cancer. The government of India will induct it in the national [vaccination] program in a few months,” Poonawalla said.

The vaccine protects against the Human Papilloma Virus, the main cause of cervical cancer and a potential cause of other cancers. SSI says it will be accessible to both men and women at a price range of 200 to 400 rupees—about $2.50 to $5.

Dr. Smita Joshi, leader of the SII’s HPV vaccine study, said “The vaccine will be chiefly beneficial for girls aged 9 to 15 or women who are not yet sexually active.

“If we vaccinate adolescent girls now, its effect on reducing the cancer burden in the country will be seen within three to four decades,” she said.

According to Joshi, the effectiveness of the vaccine is lower among adult women, who will require cervical cancer screenings—preferably with an HPV test—followed by appropriate management for those who test positive for sexually transmitted HPV.

Dr. Mayoukh Kumar Chakraborty, assistant professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Kolkata’s KPC Medical College & Hospital, said even though three highly effective foreign-manufactured HPV vaccines are already available in India, the cheapest of them is priced around $35 per dose.

“So, HPV vaccination was not included in the national immunization program following its introduction in 2008,” he said.

In a statement, SII said it is offering Cervavac at a lower price because of the company’s “philanthropic philosophy” and to protect under-privileged children all over the world.

According to India’s Science and Technology Ministry, cervical cancer kills about 75,000 Indian women per year.

Science and Technology Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh said that the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked awareness regarding preventative healthcare and India can now afford to start developing its own vaccines.

“Therefore, vaccination against HPV is the most promising initiative in the quest to prevent cervical cancer,” he said.

Joshi, who also leads the World Health Organization’s HPV vaccine study at Jehangir Clinical Development Center in the city of Pune, said: “The awareness about cervical cancer prevention in India, which includes vaccination and cervical cancer screening, is dismally low.”

There are many misconceptions regarding the disease, even among the educated population and healthcare providers, she said.

“It is advised that adolescent girls get HPV vaccinations, and that women between the ages of 30 to 49 get cervical cancer screenings, even if they have no symptoms,” she added.

Chakraborty, the gynecologist, said the upcoming Indian vaccine is expected to be effective.

“The country’s drug regulatory authority examined the data of Cervavac’s immunogenicity trials conducted at 13 centers across India and approved the vaccine in July. It is expected to generate a robust response in 100% of the vaccine recipients, according to the third phase of the trials,” he said.

Joshi added: “Through this initiative, the goal of eliminating cervical cancer from the country may be attainable.”

Bollywood actor Manisha Koirala, who has been an ovarian cancer survivor for ten years, thanked the Ministry of Science and Technology at the event announcing the impending launch of Cervavac.

“It is a great day for women in India and the world over, as there is life beyond cancer,” she said.
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Hollywood actress and U.N. humanitarian Angelina Jolie made a surprise visit to one of the worst flood-hit areas in southern Pakistan on Tuesday, officials said, as the death toll from months-long deluges rose to 1,559.

TV footage showed Jolie arriving at an airport in Karachi, the capital of southern Sindh province, where floods since mid-June have killed 692 people, damaged hundreds of thousands of homes and left half a million people homeless.

Later, she visited some of the flood-affected areas, according to local media.

According to the IRC, a prominent international aid group, Jolie is visiting Pakistan to support communities affected by the devastating floods.

There was no comment from the government about Jolie’s visit to Dadu, one of the worst-hit districts where waterborne diseases have also caused nearly 300 deaths since July. Currently, doctors are trying to contain the outbreak of waterborne diseases among flood survivors.

The visit comes as Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif is in New York for the 77th session of the U.N. General Assembly. In his speech, Sharif will highlight the damages caused by climate-change induced floods in the impoverished country.

Pakistan says the floods have caused $30 billion in damages to the country’s economy.
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Officials in Uganda have confirmed an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus. The country’s Ministry of Health says a young man died of the virus in central Uganda Monday, and several of his relatives who died earlier this month are also suspected to have had Ebola. The government has sent a rapid response team to the area to investigate. 

Uganda’s Ministry of Health officials say the suspected Ebola case was identified Saturday in a village in the central Mubende district.  

The ministry’s permanent secretary, Dr. Diana Atwine, says a 24-year-old man was admitted to a hospital for pneumonia and diarrhea.  

But his symptoms also included those of the deadly virus — a dry cough, high fever, convulsions, blood-stained vomit and bleeding in the eyes. 

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Atwine said the clinical team and the Uganda Virus Research Institute conducted tests for Ebola.

“The results were released yesterday evening and they confirmed Ebola, the Sudan strain,” she said. “Unfortunately, that morning of 19th, the patient who had been confirmed with Ebola passed on.”

Atwine said six of the man’s relatives who died earlier this month — three adults and three children from the same family — also may have had Ebola. 

The World Health Organization’s Uganda office says there are eight more people with suspected cases that are receiving care at a health facility.  

Uganda’s health ministry has yet to identify the source of the infection but suspects wildlife to human contact.

A rapid response team was sent to Mubende to investigate, put in place control measures, and use rapid testing on contacts in the community. 

But the World Health Organization says vaccinating those who were in contact with the infected or someone linked to them, known as ring vaccination, will not be possible.

WHO-Uganda’s head of disease prevention and control, Dr. Bayo Fatunmbi, told the briefing there is currently no effective vaccine available for the Sudan strain of Ebola.

“The ring vaccination that worked with [the] Zaire virus, will not be useful for this particular Sudan strain,” he said. “But there’s another type of vaccine, Johnson and Johnson, that is being tested currently [to see] whether it will be useful for this particular strain.”

The WHO says ring vaccination has been highly effective in controlling the spread of the Zaire strain in recent Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The WHO says Uganda’s last Ebola outbreak in 2019 was the Zaire strain. Uganda last reported the relatively rare Sudan strain outbreak in 2012.  

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is helping Uganda deal with this latest outbreak.  

Amy Boore, the CDC’s Global Health Protection program director, told reporters they were prepared to assist the Uganda Virus Research Institute.

“CDC headquarters is already in communication with UVRI (Uganda Virus Research Institute) and is already helping them develop plans for how they will continue to test and expand testing and have all the support they need during this,” she said.

Ebola is spread through bodily fluids and causes a hemorrhagic fever that kills up to 90% of those infected.  The WHO says case fatality rates of the Sudan virus have varied from 41% to 100% in past outbreaks.

The Sudan strain of Ebola, discovered in Sudan in 1976, is less common than the Zaire strain that was found that same year.

The Zaire strain of Ebola was named after the country and river where it was found, the Ebola River in the former Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  

The DRC’s name was changed to Zaire in 1971 then changed back to Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997.  

Health authorities in the neighboring DRC in late August declared a resurgence of Ebola after confirming a case in the country’s eastern North Kivu province.  

It was the fifteenth resurgent outbreak recorded in the DRC.
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A bay-breasted warbler weighs about the same as four pennies, but twice a year makes an extraordinary journey. The tiny songbird flies nearly 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) between Canada’s spruce forests and its wintering grounds in northern South America.

“Migratory birds are these little globetrotters,” said Jill Deppe, the senior director of the migratory bird initiative at the National Audubon Society.

A new online atlas of bird migration, published on Thursday, draws from an unprecedented number of scientific and community data sources to illustrate the routes of about 450 bird species in the Americas, including the warblers.

The Bird Migration Explorer mapping tool, available free to the public, is an ongoing collaboration between 11 groups that collect and analyze data on bird movements, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, the U.S. Geological Survey, Georgetown University, Colorado State University, and the National Audubon Society.

For the first time, the site will bring together online data from hundreds of scientific studies that use GPS tags to track bird movements, as well as more than 100 years of bird-banding data collected by USGS, community science observations entered into Cornell’s eBird platform, genomic analysis of feathers to pinpoint bird origins, and other data.

“The past twenty years have seen a true renaissance in different technologies to track bird migrations around the world at scales that haven’t been possible before,” said Peter Marra, a bird migration expert at Georgetown University who collaborated on the project.

The site allows a user to enter a species — for instance, osprey — and watch movements over the course of a year. For example, data from 378 tracked ospreys show up as yellow dots that move between coastal North America and South America as a calendar bar scrolls through the months of the year.

Or users can enter the city where they live and click elsewhere on the map for a partial list of birds that migrate between the two locations. For example, ospreys, bobolinks and at least 12 other species migrate between Washington, D.C. and Fonte Boa, Brazil.

As new tracking data becomes available, the site will continue to expand. Melanie Smith, program director for the site, said the next phase of expansion will add more data about seabirds.

Washington, D.C. resident Michael Herrera started birdwatching about four months ago and was quickly hooked. “It’s almost like this hidden world that’s right in front of your eyes,” he said. “Once you start paying attention, all these details that were like background noise suddenly have meaning.”

Herrera said he’s eager to learn more about the migratory routes of waterbirds in the mid-Atlantic region, such as great blue herons and great egrets.

Georgetown’s Marra hopes that engaging the public will help spotlight some of the conservation challenges facing birds, including loss of habitat and climate change.

In the past 50 years, the population of birds in the U.S. and Canada has dropped nearly 30%, with migratory species facing some of the steepest declines.
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Marking World Patient Safety Day, Saturday, the World Health Organization warns unsafe medication practices and errors are a leading cause of avoidable harm in world health care systems. 

The WHO is calling for urgent action to stop the medication errors putting millions at risk of severe harm or even death.  

The agency’s quality of care coordinator, Neelam Dhingra-Kumar, noted everyone will, at some point take medicine, expecting to benefit.  However, she said they can be harmful with improper use.

“There is ample evidence around the world that unsafe medication practices and medication errors is actually avoidable,” she said. “Such as incorrect prescriptions, wrong dispensing, wrong use of medicines, lack of proper monitoring. Once the physicians prescribe medicines, they are not monitored and even use of substandard and falsified medicines are a leading cause of avoidable harm in health care systems.”

The WHO said half of all preventable harm in medical care is medication-related and that a quarter of these patients suffer clinically severe or life-threatening harm.

It said the elderly are most at risk, especially those taking multiple medications. It said high rates of medication-related harm also occur in surgical care, intensive care, and emergency medicine.

Dhingra-Kumar said the amount of harm related to medication is twice as prevalent in low- and middle-income countries as in rich countries.

“That is primarily because of weak medication systems, lack of resources, lack of human workforce, not a fully trained workforce,” she said. “And even the culture; it is very, very difficult to change cultures as seen as very deeply in the system of blame.”  

She said medication errors often are caused by such human factors as fatigue, poor environmental conditions, and staff shortages. 

The WHO says medication practices and medication errors are a main cause of injury and avoidable harm in health care systems.  It estimates the global cost associated with medication errors at $42 billion a year. 
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Two Chinese astronauts went on a spacewalk Saturday from a new space station that is due to be completed later this year.

Cai Xuzhe and Chen Dong’s installed pumps, a handle to open the hatch door from outside in an emergency, and a foot-stop to affix an astronaut’s feet to a robotic arm, state media said.

China is building its own space station after being excluded by the U.S. from the International Space Station because its military runs the country’s space program. American officials see a host of strategic challenges from China’s space ambitions, in an echo of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry that prompted the race to the moon in the 1960s.

The latest spacewalk was the second during a six-month mission that will oversee the completion of the space station. The first of two laboratories, a 23-ton module, was added to the station in July and the other is to be sent up later this year.

The third member of the crew, Liu Yang, supported the other two from inside during the spacewalk. Liu and Chen conducted the first spacewalk about two weeks ago.

They will be joined by three more astronauts near the end of their mission in what will be the first time the station has six people on board.

China became the third nation to send a person into space in 2003, following the former Soviet Union and the United States. It has sent rovers to the moon and Mars and brought lunar samples back to Earth.
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Research to develop a pill form of insulin is showing promise at the University of British Columbia in western Canada. The goal is to eliminate the need for diabetics to inject themselves with the lifesaving medication.

According to the World Health Organization, there are an estimated 422 million diabetics worldwide. The disease claims 1.5 million lives each year. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 30 million Americans have diabetes.

Although widely available in the developed world, current forms of insulin require refrigeration, which can be a stumbling block in developing nations.

An oral version of insulin, in the form of an everyday pill, could change everything, making it easier and cheaper to transport and distribute — even to remote regions of the planet.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver think they might have discovered a formula for a pill that effectively delivers a full dose of insulin to a patient’s liver — where it is needed to regulate blood sugar levels — without dissipating uselessly in the stomach.

The trick is to not swallow the pill, according to Anubhav Pratap-Singh, an assistant professor at the school’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems and the project’s lead researcher. He said the pill can be absorbed in the mouth by wedging it between the cheek and gums. In laboratory studies on rats, full doses of insulin reached the liver, he said.

“So we are getting quite a high amount of yield and so we hope that this will be more economical,” Pratap-Singh said.

Pratap-Singh started studying oral insulin in 2018, inspired to help his diabetic father, who has to inject insulin multiple times a day. He said a pill form would increase the quality of life for millions of patients who use insulin around the world.

“Instead of having to take insulin and having to travel with it in refrigerated boxes, one will simply have [a] normal capsule or tablet in a normal wrapper, which will be shelf stable, and very, very affordable,” Pratap-Singh said.

Dr. Daniel Drucker is professor of medicine at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and the University of Toronto. He said previous attempts at oral insulin failed to efficiently deliver enough of the drug within the body. To compensate, huge pill doses were required that would have driven prices higher for the drug.

“We have to pay the manufacturing costs of a large amount of insulin in this case that never makes it into the body,” Drucker said.

Drucker said new insulin pumps, which act as an artificial pancreas, have become increasingly effective in treating diabetes. He also said the development of cell-based insulin replacement therapy, which would create beta cells that automatically release necessary insulin, look promising.

For Pratap-Singh and other researchers, the next steps involve years of further testing of what could be a revolutionary method of insulin delivery.
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The World Health Organization has declared an end to Ghana’s outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus after more than six weeks without any new cases. 

Three cases of the virus were recorded in the West African country in late June, killing two people. 

Marburg is a highly infectious viral hemorrhagic fever in the same family as Ebola. The symptoms of Marburg include diarrhea, fever, nausea and vomiting. 

Speaking at a press conference Friday in Accra, head of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, said having passed the mandatory 42-day period without a new case, the country is now free of the virus. 

“I do hereby state that, the appropriate outbreak reasons to Marburg disease have been implemented during the 42 days, following the last negative PCR test result for the sole surviving patient with recommendation from WHO,” he said. “Ghana has, therefore, successfully interrupted the first Marburg virus disease outbreak and hereby declare that the outbreak is over.”

A total of 198 people were tested for the virus when it first broke in Ghana. They all tested negative. 

It is the second time Marburg made a West African appearance. The first outbreak was in Guinea in September of last year. 

Marburg has also appeared in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. 

There are no vaccines or antiviral treatments for Marburg, but WHO says supportive care — rehydration with oral or intravenous fluids — and treatment of specific symptoms improves the rate of survival. 

 
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Mount Everest base camp, a sprawling tent village that is home away from home during climbing season for hundreds of aspiring summiteers and support staff, may soon be on the move.

Nepalese officials say they are considering the move to a lower elevation because the Khumbu glacier on which the camp sits is being melted away by climate change, which is undermining its foundation and slowly releasing decades worth of frozen trash and human waste.

But some of the Sherpa climbing guides who make Everest ascents possible are not happy with the idea, arguing that the government should first consider less drastic measures such as limiting the ballooning number of climbing permits, which at around $11,000 apiece have become an important source of revenue for the country.

“I see glaciers vanishing on daily basis. Uncontrollable number of visitors is a problem and it doesn’t make any sense to shift the base camp down,” said Dawa Chhiri Sherpa, 57, who began his career as a cook for a trekking company 35 years ago.

“Consult experts and relevant stakeholders is what should be government doing and not rushing to any decision,” agreed 62-year-old Kay Sherpa, who was born in Scotland and has been living in Nepal since 2009.

He added that the government should try to reduce the influx of helicopters ferrying climbers and other visitors to landing pads at either end of the approximately 22-hectare site to minimize the damage to the ecologically fragile area.

Nepal’s Department of Tourism recommended earlier this summer that a seven-person research group be formed with National Mountaineering Association chairman Nima Nuru Sherpa as its chair. The committee’s mission would be to investigate the present base camp location and potential relocation options.

Taranath Adhikari, director general of the tourism department, said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. that the idea was to move the camp entirely off the fast-receding glacier to a level some 330 meters lower on the mountain.

“It is basically about adapting to the changes we are seeing at the Base Camp, and it has become essential for the sustainability of the mountaineering business itself,” he told the BBC.

The Khumbu glacier has lost the equivalent of 2,000 years of ice in just 30 years, according to research by the 2019 National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition.

That problem is compounded by the sheer number of visitors to the camp, where more than 1,500 individuals stay for a minimum of two months during the climbing season. Wealthier mountaineers are able to enjoy relatively luxurious accommodations including hot showers, Wi-Fi and catered meals, while acclimatizing to the 5,364-meter altitude.

The proposed move makes sense to Shilshila Acharya, who has played a leading role in efforts to clean up the huge amount of trash that has built up around the base camp since Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa first reached the summit in 1953.

“Once the waste is accumulated there, mountain cleanup is very risky and expensive work,” said Acharya, the director of Avni Ventures Pvt Ltd., which is an official recycling partner of Mountain Clean Up Campaign 2021 and 22. Moving the camp would at least temporarily facilitate the clean-up and have safety benefits, she told VOA.

Based on current estimates that the government is spending $1.5 to $2 million a year on the clean-up, “it will take another 50 to 100 years to clean up the existing waste from all mountains,” she said. “So it is going to be costly in the long run if something is not done about it.”

Shafkat Masoodi, a veteran hiker from Kashmir who visited the base camp in 2018, argued that the government must act quickly to move the camp and limit the number of climbing permits issued each season.

“It will prove disastrous in the near future” if they don’t act, he said. “Just imagine the number of climbers per season supported by almost double the number of Sherpas and porters spending at least six months in a year in these glaciers. The garbage and human waste dumped by these is just turning the Khumbu glacier into a polluted river down the mountains.”

But Anja Bagale, operations director at Hotel Himalaya in Kathmandu, pointed out that the current base camp location was selected by experienced Sherpa guides because it is the safest and most practical place from which to launch a final three- to five-day assault on the summit. He argued that the solution is to limit the traffic to the site, not to move it.

Ramesh Bhushal, the Nepal editor of Third Pole and an environment journalist based in Kathmandu, also questioned whether the underlying problems troubling the base camp would be resolved by moving it.

“I don’t see any valid point to shift Everest base camp as it won’t solve any problem as stated and possibly increase problems in [the] future,” he said. “But it is also okay to mull about how to deal with problems that have forced the government to reach into that thought of changing the base camp.”
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The 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s “moonshot” speech, which rallied a nation behind NASA. Plus, President Biden calls for a moonshot of his own, and a private spaceflight company suffers its first failure. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Russia’s war on Ukraine has seen scores of hospitals and clinics bombed, and frequent power cuts that can turn off lifesaving machines. Medical aid groups are using a Kenyan-manufactured breathing device for premature babies that works without electricity, helping save vulnerable newborns in countries affected by conflict. Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Camera – Jimmy Makhulo.
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