Lack of access to clean drinking water is being exacerbated by climate change. In fact, less than 1% of the world’s water is fresh and accessible, according to Melissa Ho, senior vice president of freshwater and food at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

“Although we see water all around the planet, we do not necessarily realize what a precious and finite resource it is,” she said.

Ho cited that statistic during “This is Climate: Water,” a Washington Post event that featured leaders at the forefront of water crisis initiatives discussing possible solutions to address global water inequities and the role of water in sustainable development.

Ahead of Wednesday’s World Water Day, Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper outlined growing demands on the Colorado River, which drains a watershed from seven Western U.S. states and Mexico.

While lack of access to clean water is especially prevalent in developing nations, more than 2 million Americans are without running water in their homes.

“In the U.S., race is the No. 1 predictor of water access,” said DigDeep co-CEO Julie Waechter. “Native American households are 19 times more likely than white households to not have running water, and Black and Latino households are twice as likely.”

According to Waechter, when water infrastructure was expanded in the U.S., “many communities of color were not included in that expansion.”

“So communities of color that are trying to catch up and get that water infrastructure are having a really hard time finding the funding to do that.”

WWF’s Ho said women and girls are disproportionately affected by inaccessible water, with millions of girls worldwide routinely walking more than 3 kilometers to fetch water. “Think of what that means for their safety and health and access to schooling and educational opportunities,” she added.

Contaminated water in US

Even when water is accessible, in too many instances it is unsafe to drink. Ho said water quality is an issue that should be of “prime concern” given that chemicals, heavy metals, hormones and other potentially toxic substances are routinely present in the U.S. water supply.

The White House on Tuesday announced the first-ever national drinking water standard for six polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also referred to as “forever chemicals.” The proposal would enforce limits on the amount of PFAS allowed in drinking water.

Water use in industry

Speakers also addressed the use of water in industry, where it’s needed but often wasted.

In the United States, agriculture, including farming and ranching, is the biggest user of water, with 70% of fresh water going to agriculture. World Environment Center CEO Glenn Prickett said that makes farmers “also the most vulnerable to climate impacts in terms of drought or flooding.”

With all industries depending on water in some way, limited availability of water worsened by climate change is an economic reality.

“Water scarcity is a key portion of what companies should be thinking about as they think about their water sustainability programs so that they can be more water resilient into the future,” said Calvin Emanuel, vice president and general manager of Sustainable Growth Solutions at Ecolab. “It has to be a part of their growth strategy and path forward.”

“Some are obvious, like food and beverage manufacturing,” Prickett said, “but others may be less obvious but highly valuable to our economy, like fabrication of microchips or data centers for the cloud or chemical manufacturing. All use water, and if they didn’t have it, it would be a big impact on their business and their profitability.”

Environmental activist Alexia Leclercq closed the session with thoughts on how activists are trying to conserve clean water sources for future generations.

“Not to diminish the complexity of policy and of these solutions that we direly need, but I think that if we shift away from prioritizing profit, I think that gives us a lot of space to imagine what our future could look like and actually put our resources towards finding those solutions and working on those solutions,” the Start: Empowerment co-founder said. “It’s really limitless what we can create.”
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U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a number of improvements in access to mental health care on Thursday to reduce suicides in the military but held off on endorsing more controversial recommendations to restrict gun and ammunition purchases by young troops, sending them to another panel for study.

An independent committee in late February recommended that the Defense Department implement a series of gun safety measures, including waiting periods for the purchase of firearms and ammunition by service members on military property and raising the minimum age for service members to buy guns and ammunition to 25.

In a memo released Thursday, Austin called for the establishment of a suicide prevention working group to “assess the advisability and feasibility” of recommendations made by the initial study committee — which would include the gun measures. He also asked for cost estimates and a description of any “barriers” to implementing other changes and set a deadline of June 2 for that report. At no point did he specifically refer to the gun proposals or mention gun safety.

Growing concern 

Austin’s orders reflect increasing concerns about suicides in the military despite more than a decade of programs and other efforts to prevent them and spur greater intervention by commanders, friends and family members. But his omission of any gun safety and control measures underscores the likelihood that they would face staunch resistance, particularly in Congress, where such legislation has struggled in recent years.

The more immediate changes address broader access to care.

To more quickly provide help for troops who might be struggling, Austin directed the Pentagon to hire more behavioral health specialists and implement a scheduling system for appointments where patients receive multiple health care visits weekly when they first seek care.

Austin also ordered military primary care health clinics to screen for unhealthy levels of alcohol use, make unhealthy alcohol use treatment easier to receive, and make sure mental health care is available through service members’ primary care as well.

“The mental health support available for our teammates must be comprehensive and easy to access,” Austin said in the memo.

Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters in a briefing Thursday that Austin’s orders involved areas where the department already has the authority to take immediate steps.

“While we recognize that suicide has no single cause, and that no single preventative action, treatment or cure will eliminate suicide altogether, we will exhaust every effort to promote the wellness, health and morale of our total force,” Ryder said.

Committee recommends rules about firearms

The initial study committee recommended that the department require anyone living in military housing to register all privately owned firearms. In addition, the panel said the department should restrict the possession and storage of privately owned firearms in military barracks and dorms.

Confirming findings in annual suicide reports, the panel noted that about 66% of all active-duty military suicides — and more than 70% of those by National Guard and Reserve members — are done with firearms. It said reducing access to guns could prevent some deaths.

Craig Bryan, a clinical psychologist and member of the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, said the department should slow down troops’ access to guns — specifically those bought in stores on bases — so people under stress can survive periods of high risk.

He likened the expanded gun safety measures to requirements that the department puts on motorcycle usage — such as mandated helmets — that are often more strict than some state laws. Asked how likely such changes would be, Bryan said he believes troops are more receptive to such limits than civilians might be.
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Deaths of pregnant women in the United States fell in 2022, dropping significantly from a six-decade high during the pandemic, new data suggests.

More than 1,200 U.S. women died in 2021 during pregnancy or shortly after childbirth, according to a final tally released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2022, there were 733 maternal deaths, according to preliminary agency data, though the final number is likely to be higher.

Officials say the 2022 maternal death rate is on track to get close to pre-pandemic levels. But that’s not great: The rate before COVID-19 was the highest it had been in decades.

“From the worst to the near worst? I wouldn’t exactly call that an accomplishment,” said Omari Maynard, a New Yorker whose partner died after childbirth in 2019.

Experts blame COVID-19 

The CDC counts women who die while pregnant, during childbirth, and up to 42 days after birth. Excessive bleeding, blood vessel blockages, and infections are leading causes.

COVID-19 can be particularly dangerous to pregnant women, and experts believe it was the main reason for the 2021 spike. Burned-out physicians could have added to the risk by ignoring pregnant women’s worries, some advocates said.

In 2021, there were about 33 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births. The last time the government recorded a rate that high was 1964.

What happened “isn’t that hard to explain,” said Eugene Declercq, a longtime maternal mortality researcher at Boston University. “The surge was COVID-related.”

Previous government analyses concluded that one quarter of maternal deaths in 2020 and 2021 were COVID-related — meaning that the entire increase in maternal deaths was due to coronavirus infections or the pandemic’s wider impact on health care. Pregnant women infected with the coronavirus were nearly eight times as likely to die as their uninfected peers, according to a recent study published by BMJ Global Health.

The bodies of pregnant women are already under strain, their heart forced to pump harder. Other health problems can make their condition more fragile. And then on top of that, “COVID is going to make all that much worse,” said Dr. Elizabeth Cherot, chief medical and health officer for the March of Dimes.

It didn’t help that vaccination rates among pregnant women were low in 2021 — particularly among Black women. Part of that was related to limited vaccine availability, and that the CDC did not fully recommend shots for pregnant women until August 2021.

“Initially, there was a lot of mistrust of the vaccine in Black communities,” said Samantha Griffin, who owns a doula service that mainly serves families of color in the Washington area.

But there’s more to it than that, she and others added. The 2021 maternal mortality rate for Black women was nearly three times higher than it was for white women. And the maternal death rate for Hispanic American women that year rose 54% compared with 2020, also surpassing the death rate for white moms.

More than a year into the pandemic, a lot of doctors and nurses were feeling burned out and they were getting less in-person time with patients.

Providers at the time “were needing to make snap decisions and maybe not listening to their patients as much,” Griffin said. “Women were saying that they thought something was wrong and they weren’t being heard.”

‘She wasn’t being heard’

Maynard, who is 41 and lives in Brooklyn, said he and his partner experienced that in 2019.

Shamony Gibson, a healthy 30-year-old, was set to have their second child. The pregnancy was smooth until her contractions stopped progressing and she underwent a cesarean section.

The operation was more involved than expected but their son Khari was born in September. A few days later, Shamony began complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath, Maynard said. Doctors told her she just needed to relax and let her body rest from the pregnancy, he said.

More than a week after giving birth, her health worsened and she begged to go to the hospital. Then her heart stopped, and loved ones called for help. The initial focus for paramedics and firefighters was whether Gibson was taking illicit drugs, Maynard said, adding that she didn’t.

She was hospitalized and died the next day of a blood clot in the lungs. Her son was 13 days old.

“She wasn’t being heard at all,” said Maynard, an artist who now does speaking engagements as a maternal health advocate.
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Moonwalking astronauts will have sleeker, more flexible spacesuits that come in different sizes when they step onto the lunar surface later this decade. 

Exactly what that looks like remained under wraps. The company designing the next-generation spacesuits, Axiom Space, said Wednesday that it plans to have new versions for training purposes for NASA later this summer. 

The moonsuits will be white like they were during NASA’s Apollo program more than a half-century ago, according to the company. That’s so they can reflect heat and keep future moonwalkers cool. 

The suits will provide greater flexibility and more protection from the moon’s harsh environment, and will come in a wider range of sizes, according to the Houston-based company. 

NASA awarded Axiom Space a $228.5 million contract to provide the outfits for the first moon landing in more than 50 years. The space agency is targeting late 2025 at the earliest to land two astronauts on the moon’s south pole. 

At Wednesday’s event in Houston, an Axiom employee modeled a dark spacesuit, doing squats and twisting at the waist to demonstrate its flexibility. The company said the final version will be different, including the color. 

“I didn’t want anybody to get that mixed up,” said Axiom’s Russell Ralston. 
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For the first time, scientists have created baby mice from two males. 

This raises the distant possibility of using the same technique for people — although experts caution that very few mouse embryos developed into live mouse pups, and no one knows whether it would work for humans. 

Still, “It’s a very clever strategy,” said Diana Laird, a stem cell and reproductive expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research. “It’s an important step in both stem cell and reproductive biology.” 

Scientists described their work in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. 

First, they took skin cells from the tails of male mice and transformed them into “induced pluripotent stem cells,” which can develop into many different types of cells or tissues. Then, through a process that involved growing them and treating them with a drug, they converted male mouse stem cells into female cells and produced functional egg cells. Finally, they fertilized those eggs and implanted the embryos into female mice. About 1% of the embryos — 7 out of 630 — grew into live mouse pups. 

The pups appeared to grow normally and were able to become parents themselves in the usual way, research leader Katsuhiko Hayashi of Kyushu University and Osaka University in Japan told fellow scientists at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing last week. 

In a commentary published alongside the Nature study, Laird and her colleague, Jonathan Bayerl, said the work “opens up new avenues in reproductive biology and fertility research” for animals and people. Down the road, for example, it might be possible to reproduce endangered mammals from a single male. 

“And it might even provide a template for enabling more people,” such as male same-sex couples, “to have biological children, while circumventing the ethical and legal issues of donor eggs,” they wrote. 

But they raised several cautions. The most notable one: The technique is extremely inefficient. They said it’s unclear why only a tiny fraction of the embryos placed into surrogate mice survived; the reasons could be technical or biological. They also stressed that it’s still too early to know if the protocol would work in human stem cells at all. 

Laird also said scientists need to be mindful of the mutations and errors that may be introduced in a culture dish before using stem cells to make eggs. 

The research is the latest to test new ways to create mouse embryos in the lab. Last summer, scientists in California and Israel created “synthetic” mouse embryos from stem cells without a dad’s sperm or a mom’s egg or womb. Those embryos mirrored natural mouse embryos up to 8 ½ days after fertilization, containing the same structures, including one like a beating heart. Scientists said the feat could eventually lay the foundation for creating synthetic human embryos for research in the future.
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Every month, young girls in Ghana are forced to miss school days due to menstruation. But a schoolteacher is working to find a solution by providing reusable sanitary pads. Hamza Adams visited a school in Afari, Ghana, and has this story narrated by Salem Solomon.
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In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses, truck drivers, grocery clerks and other essential workers were hailed as heroes.

“Now we are vilifying them … and this has long-term ramifications for our well-being,” said Manuela Tomei, International Labor Organization assistant director-general for governance, rights, and dialogue.

“The work that these persons perform is absolutely essential for families and societies to function,” she said, speaking Wednesday in Geneva. “So, the non-availability of their services would really result into a loss of well-being and the impossibility of ensuring safe lives to society at large.”

And yet a new study by the International Labor Organization (ILO) finds essential workers are undervalued, underpaid and laboring under poor working conditions, exposed to treatment that “exacerbates employee turnover and labor shortages, jeopardizing the provision of basic services.”

The U.N. agency’s report classifies key workers into eight main occupation groups covering health, food systems, retail, security, cleaning and sanitation, transport, manual, and technical and clerical occupations.

Data from 90 countries show that during the COVID-19 crisis key workers suffered higher mortality rates than non-key workers overall, with transport workers being at highest risk.

The report found 29% of key workers globally are low paid, earning on average 26% less than other employees. It reports they tend to work long, unpredictable hours under poor conditions.

Tomei said inaction in improving sub-standard conditions of work is having consequences today.

“In a number of countries, these sectors are facing some labor shortages because people are increasingly reluctant to engage in work which is not fairly valued by society and rewarded in terms of better pay and also improved working conditions.

“So, we are facing a crisis right now,” she added.

Richard Samans, director of the ILO research department, noted that a critical shortage of nurses in many countries is of particular concern.

“This affects the very life of people,” he said Wednesday. “Many people in countries are facing long delays in treatment. In the event of a shock — some sort of a major health disruption or natural disaster or otherwise — if the system is already strained, it cannot handle the major influx of demand for those nursing services.”

A new report by the World Health Organization warns the “widespread disruptions to health services” due to the COVID-19 pandemic “has resulted in a rapid acceleration in the international recruitment of health professionals,” mainly from poor to rich countries, exacerbating shortages of this vital workforce in developing countries.

The ILO reports that countries are still experiencing supply shortages three years after WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. ILO research director Richard Samans attributes this to a scarcity of truck drivers due to lack of training and bad working conditions.

“In the event of a shock that increases the demand for certain types of products and services, if the underlying logistical infrastructure is not fit for purpose, then that affects the daily livelihood of people and, in some cases, their health and well-being,” he said.

The ILO report also says key workers fare worse than non-key workers in both wealthy and poor countries, but ILO senior economist Janine Berg said the problems are worse in low-income countries.

“There are particularly severe problems, for example, in agricultural work in low-income countries, and the entire agricultural food chain is part of the key worker definition,” she said. “There are also very severe problems in lower-income countries with respect to very low coverage in social protection.”

The report urges nations to identify gaps in decent work and develop national strategies to address the problems facing key workers through strengthened policies and investment.

Among its recommendations, the report calls on governments to reinforce occupational health and safety systems, improve pay for essential workers, guarantee safe and predictable working hours through regulation, and increase access to training so that key workers can carry out their work effectively and safely.
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