Geneva — The World Health Organization and STOP, a global tobacco industry watchdog, warn the tobacco industry is using a variety of manipulative tactics to hook a new generation of young people into becoming users of their addictive, toxic tobacco and nicotine products for life.

“The terrible truth is that eight million people every year die from tobacco use. The single greatest cause for these deaths is a vast industry that works relentlessly to sell products that are essentially poison,” Jorge Alday, director of STOP at Vital Strategies, said at the recent launch of a new tobacco interference report, “Hooking the next generation.”

Speaking in advance of World No Tobacco Day on May 31, Alday asserted that the tobacco industry’s products kill at least half of the people who use them, therefore, he said, “It has an endless need to replace its customers.”

“From the perspective of a tobacco company, an addictive customer means a lifetime of profits. So, the younger someone gets hooked the more money they can make at the expense of that person’s health,” he said.

The report shows that globally, an estimated 37 million children ages 13 to 15 use tobacco, and in many countries, the rate of e-cigarette use among adolescents exceeds that of adults.

While significant progress has been made in reducing tobacco use, the report says the emergence of e-cigarettes and other new tobacco and nicotine products presents “a grave threat to youth and tobacco control.”

“Studies demonstrate that e-cigarette use increases conventional cigarette use, particularly among non-smoking youth, by nearly three times,” it says.

Ruediger Krech, director of health promotion at WHO, told journalists attending the global launch of the report last week that the industry is “exploiting digital and social media, delivery apps, and other innovative ways to reach our children. At the same time, they are continuing with old tricks such as giving away free samples to recruit a new generation as customers.”

He said the use of child-friendly flavored e-cigarettes combined with sleek and colorful designs that resemble toys “is a blatant attempt” by tobacco and related industries “to addict young people to these harmful products.”

“Currently, we have about 16,000 flavors that are very appealing to children and young people—fruity flavors, candy, bubble gum and vanilla ice-cream,” he said, noting that most adult tobacco users start their deadly habit when they are young.

“Most of them have started before the age of 21. Then they stay tobacco or nicotine users for the rest of their lives,” he said. “That is alarming when we are now seeing that with these novel products, so many children and young people are taking up this nicotine use.

“So, there is an urgency to act now to regulate those products, ban them if possible. But to be very, very serious about this,” he added.

One of many youth advocates around the world taking a stand against “the destructive influence and manipulative marketing practices” of the tobacco and nicotine industry is Given Kapolyo of Zambia. She is the Global Young Ambassador of the Year with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, CTFK.

“I totally agree with the sentiments shared already today that the industry continues to hook young people,” she said, speaking from the Zambian capital, Lusaka.

“It is extremely sad here in Africa because they continue to target low-income communities because they know that these young people do not have access to information on just how deadly these products are. … They tell young people that vaping is cooler, that electronic cigarettes are cooler, and they continue to hook young people as early as 10 years and 13 years old.

“Their only interest is profits, and they want to hook young people while they are young, so they can have lifelong customers, which means more profits for them, without caring how many lives we are losing due to non-communicable diseases caused by tobacco abuse,” she said.

The World Health Organization is urging governments to protect young people from taking up tobacco, e-cigarettes and other nicotine products by banning or tightly regulating them. Its recommendations include the creation of smoke-free indoor public places, bans on flavored e-cigarettes, as well as bans on marketing, advertising, and promotions, and the enactment of higher taxes.

Authors of the reports say these measures work. They cite an example from the United States where research found that “more than 70 percent of youth e-cigarette users would quit if the products were only available in tobacco flavor.”
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SACRAMENTO, California — California could eventually join the European Union in requiring all new cars to alert drivers when they break the speed limit, a proposal aimed at reducing traffic deaths that would likely impact motorists across the country should it become law.

The federal government sets safety standards for vehicles nationwide, which is why most cars now beep at drivers if their seat belt isn’t fastened. A bill in the California Legislature — which passed its first vote in the state Senate on Tuesday — would go further by requiring all new cars sold in the state by 2032 to beep at drivers when they exceed the speed limit by at least 16 kph.

“Research has shown that this does have an impact in getting people to slow down, particularly since some people don’t realize how fast that their car is going,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco and the bill’s author.

The bill narrowly passed Tuesday, an indication of the tough road it could face. Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle said he voted against it in part because he said sometimes people need to drive faster than the speed limit in an emergency.

“It’s just a nanny state that we’re causing here,” he said.

While the goal is to reduce traffic deaths, the legislation would likely impact all new car sales in the U.S. That’s because California’s auto market is so large that car makers would likely just make all of their vehicles comply with the state’s law.

California often throws its weight around to influence national — and international — policy. California has set its own emission standards for cars for decades, rules that more than a dozen other states have also adopted. And when California announced it would eventually ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, major automakers soon followed with their own announcement to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles.

The technology, known as intelligent speed assistance, uses GPS technology to compare a vehicle’s speed with a dataset of posted speed limits. Once the car is at least 16 kph over the speed limit, the system would emit “a brief, one-time visual and audio signal to alert the driver.”

It would not require California to maintain a list of posted speed limits. That would be left to manufacturers. It’s likely these maps would not include local roads or recent changes in speed limits, resulting in conflicts.

The bill states that if the system receives conflicting information about the speed limit, it must use the higher limit.

The technology is not new and has been used in Europe for years. Starting later this year, the European Union will require all new cars sold there to have the technology — although drivers would be able to turn it off.

The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 10% of all car crashes reported to police in 2021 were speeding related — including an 8% increase in speeding-related fatalities. This was especially a problem in California, where 35% of traffic fatalities were speeding-related — the second highest in the country, according to a legislative analysis of the proposal.

Last year, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended federal regulators require all new cars to alert drivers when speeding. Their recommendation came after a crash in January 2022 when a man with a history of speeding violations was traveling more than 100 miles per hour when he ran a red light and hit a minivan, killing himself and eight other people.

The NTSB has no authority and can only make recommendations.
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TRENTO, Italy — In a lush greenhouse high in the Alps, butterflies of various species and colors flutter freely while butterfly pupae are suspended in a structure as they grow into adult insects.

This is the Butterfly Forest in the tropical mountain greenhouse in Trento, Italy, a project by the Museo delle Scienze (MUSE), an Italian science museum. It’s modeled on Udzungwa Mountains, a mountain range and rainforest area in south-central Tanzania that’s one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. The Butterfly Forest features plant species endemic to the region, as well as birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and invertebrates from different parts of the world, all inside 600 square meters of forest with cliffs, inclinations and a waterfall.

The Butterfly Forest was created this spring to create public awareness on some of the research that MUSE is doing in Udzungwa Mountains to study and protect the world’s biodiversity against threats such as deforestation and climate change.

Deforestation leads to habitat loss, which causes declines in nectar sources for butterflies, changing the functioning of the ecosystem. It can also limit the movements of the insects causing a decline in biodiversity and potential extinction of vulnerable butterfly species. Changes to soil and air temperatures are altering the life cycles of the insects, impacting their development rates, mating behaviors, and migration patterns. Butterfly populations are declining in many areas, especially in places under intensive land use.

“Our aim is that of being able to study better, to understand better what is happening,” said Lisa Angelini, a botanist and director of the MUSE greenhouse. “Our work consists of monitoring and trying to develop projects in order to bring attention to biodiversity-related issues.”

Butterflies are pollinators that enable plants to reproduce and therefore facilitate food production and supply. They are also food for birds and other animals.

Because of the multiple roles of butterflies in the ecosystem and their high sensitivity to environmental changes, scientists use them as indicators of biodiversity and a way to study the impact of habitat loss and other threats. “Insects in general play a fundamental role in the proper functioning of ecosystems,” said Mauro Gobbi, an entomologist and researcher at MUSE.

Through a partnership with the Tanzania National Parks Authority, MUSE established the Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Center in 2006 to support research as well as in development of environmental education programs for schools.

“Research on butterflies is essential for informing conservation efforts and ensuring the long-term survival of the insects,” said Arafat Mtui, research coordinator at Udzungwa Ecological Monitoring Centre. Conservation efforts such as habitat restoration and good land management practices, which address climate change impacts, are essential for protecting butterfly populations, he added.

With at least 2,500 plant species, more than 120 mammals, and thousands of invertebrate species, Udzungwa Mountains is rich in biological diversity. It’s part of the Eastern Arc Mountains of Kenya and Tanzania that are a proposed UNESCO Heritage site. It has more than 40 endemic species of butterflies.

MUSE’s work here is vital because of this variety, said Sevgan Subramanian, principal scientist and head of environmental health at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi.

“If you want to have a monitoring of the health of the ecosystem, monitoring such indigenous or endemic insect population diversity is very critical, so that we have an idea whether the ecosystem is still healthy or not,” he said.

Gobbi, the entomologist, said high-altitude environments like Udzungwa Mountains National Park are suitable for studying the effects of climate change because they usually have no direct human impact.

He and other scientists have warned that failure to protect insects from climate change effects will drastically reduce the planet’s ability to build a sustainable future.

Scientists at MUSE said the main challenge in butterfly conservation is changing the current farming policies to increase the amount of low-intensity farmland, and promote diverse landscapes preserving the remaining patches of natural habitats.

“Often our grandparents used to say ‘there are no longer as many butterflies as there used to be,'” he said. This is “absolutely supported by scientific research, which confirms that butterflies, like other insects, are in crisis. We are losing species, we’re losing them forever, and this is going to break the balance of ecosystems.”
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NAIROBI, Kenya — The impact of the calamitous rains that struck East Africa from March to May was intensified by a mix of climate change and rapid growth of urban areas, an international team of climate scientists said in a study published Friday.

The findings come from World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists that analyzes whether and to what extent human-induced climate change has altered the likelihood and magnitude of extreme weather events.

The downpours caused floods that killed hundreds of people, displaced thousands of others, killed thousands of livestock and destroyed thousands of acres of crops.

To assess how human-caused climate may have affected the floods, the researchers analyzed weather data and climate model simulations to compare how these types of events have changed between today’s climate and the cooler pre-industrial one. They focused on regions where the impacts were most severe, including southern Kenya, most of Tanzania and a part of Burundi.

It found that climate change had made the devastating rains twice as likely and 5% more intense. The study also found that with further warming, the frequency and intensity of the rains would continue to increase.

“We’re likely to see this kind of intensive rainfall happening this season going into the future,” said Joyce Kimutai, research associate at Imperial College London and the lead author of the study.

The study also found that the rapid urbanization of East African cities is increasing the risk of flooding.

Highly populated urban areas, especially high-density informal settlements, were significantly impacted by the downpours. Torrential rain flooded houses and roads, in some places exposing weaknesses in urban planning to meet the demands of fast-growing populations.

March to May is “long rains” season in East Africa. It’s when most of the region’s average annual rainfall occurs, and is typically characterized by torrential rains.

East Africa also suffered flooding during the “short rains” of October to December 2023 and before that, it endured a three-year drought. WWA scientists found that both events were worsened by climate change.

Philip Omondi, climate change specialist at the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre in Nairobi and wasn’t involved in the study, said human-caused impacts result in intense and high-frequency extreme floods and droughts.

Shaun Ferris, senior technical advisor for agriculture and climate change at Catholic Relief Services in Nairobi, said more intense weather put a new level of pressure on old and unplanned buildings and basic infrastructure and there’s a need to put up infrastructure that will be more able to cope with climate change.

“There is huge pressure on basic services,” he said giving the example of Nairobi, whose population has doubled over the past 20 years.

Ferris said that the global community needs to start using the loss and damage fund for climate disasters so they can repair and upgrade their basic infrastructure.
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SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, California — High in the evergreen canopy of General Sherman, the world’s largest tree, researchers searched for evidence of an emerging threat to giant sequoias: bark beetles.

The climbers descended the towering 2,200-year-old tree with good news on Tuesday.

“The General Sherman tree is doing fine right now,” said Anthony Ambrose, executive director of the Ancient Forest Society, who led the expedition. “It seems to be a very healthy tree that’s able to fend off any beetle attack.”

It was the first time climbers had scaled the iconic 85-meter sequoia tree, which draws tourists from around the world to Sequoia National Park.

Giant sequoias, the Earth’s largest living things, have survived for thousands of years in California’s western Sierra Nevada range, the only place where the species is native.

But as the climate grows hotter and drier, giant sequoias previously thought to be almost indestructible are increasingly threatened by extreme heat, drought and wildfires.

In 2020 and 2021, record-setting wildfires killed as much as 20% of the world’s 75,000 mature sequoias, according to park officials.

“The most significant threat to giant sequoias is climate-driven wildfires,” said Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration at Save the Redwoods League. “But we certainly don’t want to be caught by surprise by a new threat, which is why we’re studying these beetles now.”

But researchers are growing more worried about bark beetles, which didn’t pose a serious threat in the past.

The beetles are native to California and have co-existed with sequoias for thousands of years. But only recently have they been able to kill the trees. Scientists say they recently discovered about 40 sequoia trees that have died from beetle infestations, mostly within the national parks.

“We’re documenting some trees that are actually dying from kind of a combination of drought and fire that have weakened them to a point where they’re not able to defend themselves from the beetle attack,” Ambrose said.

The beetles attack the trees from the canopy, boring into branches and working their way down the trunk. If left unchecked, the tiny beetles can kill a tree within six months.

That’s why park officials allowed Ambrose and his colleagues to climb General Sherman. They conducted the tree health inspection as journalists and visitors watched them pull themselves up ropes dangling from the canopy. They examined the branches and trunk, looking for the tiny holes that indicate beetle activity.

But it’s not possible to climb every sequoia tree to directly inspect the canopy in person. That’s why they’re also testing whether drones equipped with sensors and aided by satellite imagery can be used to monitor and detect beetle infestations on a larger scale within the forests.

Tuesday’s health inspection of General Sherman was organized by the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, a group of government agencies, Native tribes and environmental groups. They hope to establish a health monitoring program for the towering trees.

If they discover beetle infestations, officials say, they could try to combat the attacks by spraying water, removing branches or using chemical treatments.

Bark beetles have ravaged pine and fir forests throughout the Western United States in recent years, but they previously didn’t pose a threat to giant sequoias, which can live 3,000 years.

“They have really withstood insect attacks for a lot of years. So why now? Why are we seeing this change?” said Clay Jordan, superintendent for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. “There’s a lot that we need to learn in order to ensure good stewardship of these trees for a long time.”
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WASHINGTON — Get ready for what nearly all the experts think will be one of the busiest Atlantic hurricane seasons on record, thanks to unprecedented ocean heat and a brewing La Nina. 

There’s an 85% chance that the Atlantic hurricane season starting in June will be above average in storm activity, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday in its annual outlook. The weather agency predicted between 17 and 25 named storms will brew up this summer and fall, with eight to 13 achieving hurricane status (at least 75 mph sustained winds) and four to seven of them becoming major hurricanes, with at least 111 mph winds. 

An average Atlantic hurricane season produces 14 named storms — seven of them hurricanes and three major hurricanes. 

“This season is looking to be an extraordinary one in a number of ways,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said. He said this forecast is the busiest that NOAA has seen for one of their May outlooks; the agency updates its forecasts each August. 

About 20 other groups — universities, other governments, private weather companies — also have made seasonal forecasts. All but two expect a busier, nastier summer and fall for hurricanes. The average of those other forecasts is about 11 hurricanes, or about 50% more than in a normal year. 

“All the ingredients are definitely in place to have an active season,” National Weather Service Director Ken Graham said. “It’s a reason to be concerned, of course, but not alarmed.” 

What people should be most concerned about is water because 90% of hurricane deaths are in water and they are preventable, Graham said. 

When meteorologists look at how busy a hurricane season is, two factors matter most: ocean temperatures in the part of the Atlantic where storms spin up and need warm water for fuel, and whether there is a La Nina or El Nino, the natural and periodic cooling or warming of Pacific Ocean waters that changes weather patterns worldwide. A La Nina tends to turbocharge Atlantic storm activity while depressing storminess in the Pacific, and an El Nino does the opposite. 

La Nina usually reduces high-altitude winds that can decapitate hurricanes, and generally during a La Nina there’s more instability or storminess in the atmosphere, which can seed hurricane development. Storms get their energy from hot water. Ocean waters have been at record temperatures for 13 months in a row, and a La Nina is forecast to arrive by mid- to late summer. The current El Nino is dwindling and is expected to be gone within a month or so. 

“We’ve never had a La Nina combined with ocean temperatures this warm in recorded history, so that’s a little ominous,” said University of Miami tropical meteorology researcher Brian McNoldy. 

This May, ocean heat in the main area where hurricanes develop has been as high as it usually is in mid-August. “That’s crazy,” McNoldy said. It’s both record warm on the ocean surface and at depths, which “is looking a little scary.” 

He said he wouldn’t be surprised to see storms earlier than normal this year as a result. Peak hurricane season usually is mid-August to mid-October, with the official season starting June 1 and ending November 30. 

A year ago, the two factors were opposing each other. Instead of a La Nina, there was a strong El Nino, which usually inhibits storminess a bit. Experts said at the time they weren’t sure which of those factors would win out. 

Warm water won. Last year had 20 named storms, the fourth-highest year since 1950 and far more than the average of 14. An overall measurement of strength, duration and frequency of storms last season was 17% bigger than normal. 

Record hot water seems to be key, McNoldy said. 

“Things really went of the rails last spring [2023], and they haven’t gotten back to the rails since then,” McNoldy said. 

“Hurricanes live off of warm ocean water,” said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. “That tends to basically be fuel for the hurricane. But also, when you have the warm Atlantic, what that tends to do is also force more air up over the Atlantic, more rising motion, which helps support strong thunderstorms.” 

There’s the background of human-caused climate change that’s making water warmer in general, but not this much warmer, McNoldy said. He said other contributors may include an undersea volcano eruption in the South Pacific in 2022, which sent millions of tons of water vapor into the air to trap heat, and a reduction in sulfur in ship fuels. The latter meant fewer particles in the air that reflect sunlight and cool the atmosphere a bit. 

Seven of the last 10 Atlantic hurricane seasons have been more active than the long-term normal. 

Climate change generally is making the strongest hurricanes even more intense, making storms rain more and making them rapidly intensify more, McNoldy said. 

This year, Colorado State University — which pioneered hurricane season forecasting decades ago — is forecasting a season that’s overall 71% stronger and busier than the average season with 23 named storms and 11 hurricanes. 

That’s at “levels comparable to some of the busiest seasons on record,” said Klotzbach. 

Klotzbach and his team gave a 62% probability that the United States will be hit with a major hurricane with winds of at least 111 mph. Normally the chance is 43%. The Caribbean has a two-out-of-three chance of getting hit by a major hurricane, and the U.S. Gulf Coast has a 42% likelihood of getting smacked by such a storm, the CSU forecast said. For the U.S. East Coast, the chance of being hit by a major hurricane is 34%. 

Klotzbach said he doesn’t see how something could shift soon enough to prevent a busy season this year. 

“The die is somewhat cast,” Klotzbach said. 
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New York — A Michigan dairy worker has been diagnosed with bird flu — the second human case associated with an outbreak in U.S. dairy cows. 

The patient had mild eye symptoms and has recovered, U.S. and Michigan health officials said in announcing the case Wednesday. The worker had been in contact with cows presumed to be infected, and the risk to the public remains low, officials said. 

A nasal swab from the person tested negative for the virus, but an eye swab tested positive, “indicating an eye infection,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement. 

The first case happened in late March, when a farmworker in Texas was diagnosed in what officials called the first known instance globally of a person catching this version of bird flu from a mammal. That patient also reported only eye inflammation and recovered. 

Since 2020, a bird flu virus has been spreading among more animal species — including dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises — in scores of countries. The detection in U.S. livestock earlier this year was an unexpected twist that sparked questions about food safety and whether it would start spreading among humans. 

That hasn’t happened, although there’s been a steady increase of reported infections in cows. As of Wednesday, the virus had been confirmed in 51 dairy herds in nine states, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. 

Fifteen of the herds were in Michigan. Health officials there have declined to say how many people exposed to infected cattle have been tested or monitored. 

The virus has been found in high levels in the raw milk of infected cows, but government officials say pasteurized products sold in grocery stores are safe because heat treatment has been confirmed to kill the virus. 

The new case marks the third time a person in the United States has been diagnosed with what’s known as Type A H5N1 virus. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program picked it up while killing infected birds at a poultry farm in Montrose County, Colorado. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered. That predated the virus’s appearance in cows. 
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