In many African societies, elders are highly regarded as powerful figures who keep the culture alive and guide the young. But sometimes that power doesn’t help when it comes to obtaining health care. Juma Majanga reports from Nairobi, Kenya. (Camera and produced by: Jimmy Makhulo)
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will give $40 million, including to a Belgian biotech company and two leading African vaccine manufacturers, in a bid to boost access to mRNA vaccines for protection against various diseases in Africa.   

Nivelles-based Quantoom Biosciences will get $20 million to advance work on its mRNA manufacturing platform, while the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal and Biovac in South Africa will get $5 million each to buy the technology. A further $10 million is available for other vaccine manufacturers who want to use the platform.   

Vaccines made using mRNA revolutionized the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but access was drastically inequitable. A number of initiatives have since been set up to tackle this and try to use the new technology for existing threats that disproportionately affect lower-income countries, such as malaria and tuberculosis.   

The World Health Organization launched its mRNA vaccine technology hub in Cape Town in April this year. One member, Afrigen Biologics, has already made Africa’s first-ever mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 in the lab.   

But mRNA vaccines remain expensive to produce, particularly at the scale needed to test and roll out safe and effective vaccines.   

Quantoom’s platform, called Ntensify, allows batches of mRNA to be produced more cheaply and efficiently at scale, a Gates Foundation spokeswoman told Reuters ahead of an announcement at its 2023 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Dakar on Monday.   

“[This] is an important and necessary step towards vaccine self-reliance in the region,” said Dr Amadou Sall, chief executive of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar.   

Ntensify was first developed using Gates’ funding to Quantoom’s parent company, Univercells, given in 2016.   

Afrigen is already using the platform, including for the development of Rift Valley fever and gonorrhea vaccines. Gates and Afrigen said it could cut the costs of developing a vaccine by half compared to traditional mRNA technology.   

“The second generation (of mRNA) is to reduce the cost,” said Petro Terblanche, Afrigen’s chief executive, on a phone call from Dakar on Sunday. 

 
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Athletes from 20 countries took the field in Malaysia for the fourth World Deaf Football Championships. Ukraine is the men’s champion, and the United States won the women’s crown. As Dave Grunebaum reports, the athletes are succeeding on and off the field.
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In fifth grade, Stella Gage’s class watched a video about puberty. In ninth grade, a few sessions of her health class were dedicated to the risks of sexual behaviors.

That was the extent of her sex education in school. At no point was there any content that felt especially relevant to her identity as a queer teenager. To fill the gaps, she turned mostly to social media.

“My parents were mostly absent, my peers were not mature enough, and I didn’t have anyone else to turn to,” said Gage, who is now a sophomore at Wichita State University in Kansas.

Many LGBTQ+ students say they have not felt represented in sex education classes. To learn about their identities and how to build healthy, safe relationships, they often have had to look elsewhere.

As lawmakers in some states limit what can be taught about sex and gender, it will be that much more difficult for those students to come by inclusive material in classrooms.

New laws targeting LGBTQ+ people have been proliferating in GOP-led states. Some elected officials, including candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, have been pushing to remove LGBTQ+ content from classrooms.

Sex education curriculum varies widely. Some groups including Planned Parenthood have called for sex education to be inclusive of LGBTQ+ students, but some states outright forbid such an approach.

The penal code in Texas, for one, still says curriculum developed by the Department of State Health Services must say homosexuality is not acceptable and is a criminal offense, even though such language was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. Attempts in the Legislature to remove that line from state law have failed.

In practice, LGBTQ+ students say they have looked elsewhere for sex education. Some described watching their peers turn to pornography, and others said they watched videos on YouTube about how to tell if someone is gay and how to flirt with people of the same sex.

Gage grew up in Oklahoma before her military family relocated and she spent her eighth and ninth grade years in a U.S. Department of Defense school in the Netherlands. She then finished high school in Kansas, where she began to recognize she wasn’t attracted only to men.

Not seeing a safe outlet at her high school to explore who she was, she went online to research for herself the history of the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S.

“I started to realize there is a huge portion of our history that is conveniently left out. But that history is important to queer youth,” she said. She never really questioned gender or social norms, she said, until she started to learn about discrimination others have faced throughout history. “We have such rigid boxes that we expect people to fit into. If you didn’t fit, you were called slurs. I wasn’t really aware that if you strayed from those norms that people would feel you were attacking their way of life.”

Still, the internet contains vast amounts of false information. Some advocates worry students turning to the internet to fill gaps in sex education will struggle to find their way through the morass.

“Any time you have a political controversy, there is a greater potential for a lot more disinformation to be generated,” said Peter Adams, senior vice president of research and design at the News Literacy Project.

When schools address sexuality, it is often in the context of disease prevention or anti-bullying programs. School can be a difficult place if your identity is seen only in such negative ways, said Tim’m West, a former teacher and now executive director of the LGBTQ Institute at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. West can relate: He grew up in Arkansas as a queer Black kid and preacher’s son and was constantly made to feel ashamed.

“What if you are a boy in high school that knows you like boys, and you sit in a divided room and listen to a teacher explain how not to have sex with girls. You would be sitting there rolling your eyes, because that is not your issue. But you also haven’t been given any instructions on how to protect yourself should you experiment with a person of the same gender,” West said.

Students need more applicable sex education regardless of their gender identity or expression, said Gage, who volunteers with a youth justice advocacy group and is also president of the Planned Parenthood Generation Action Chapter at Wichita State.

“We all have to make large decisions for ourselves about our sexuality and reproductive health. Those decisions should be grounded in knowledge,” she said.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Ashton Gerber had more sex education classes than most. But Gerber, who is transgender, said the lessons weren’t all that applicable to their experience.

“Even if you can have sex education every day of the year, there is always going to be something that gets left out,” said Gerber, who is a student at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Gerber said educators should point students to trusted online resources so they can do their own research.

Not knowing who you are is a horrible feeling many LGBTQ+ students wrestle with, Gage said. But equally horrible is not feeling accepted once you do understand your sexual identity.

“Had I known then what I know now, I would have felt safe and confident coming out sooner,” Gage said. “No one should feel like they don’t understand themselves because we are forced to conformity in a world that doesn’t care. We can all be inclusive.” 
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A dose of patience may come in handy at the pharmacy counter this fall.

Drug and staffing shortages haven’t gone away. Stores are starting their busiest time of year as customers look for help with colds and the flu. And this fall, pharmacists are dealing with a new vaccine and the start of insurance coverage for COVID-19 shots.

Some drugstores have addressed their challenges by adding employees at busy hours. But experts say many pharmacies, particularly the big chains, still don’t have enough workers behind the counter.

Chris Adkins said he left his job as a pharmacist with a major drugstore chain a couple years ago because of the stress. Aside from filling and checking prescriptions, Adkins routinely answered the phone, ran the register and stocked pharmacy shelves.

“I just didn’t have time for the patients,” he said. “I am OK working hard and working long hours, but I just felt like I was not doing a good job as a pharmacist.”

In recent years, drugstores have struggled to fill open pharmacist and pharmacy technician positions, even as many have raised pay and dangled signing bonuses.

Larger drugstore chains often operate stores with only one pharmacist on duty per shift, said Richard Dang, an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Southern California. That kind of thin staffing can make it hard to recruit employees.

“I think that many pharmacists in the profession are hesitant to work for a company where they don’t feel supported,” said Dang, a former president of the California Pharmacists Association.

Customers have noticed.

John Staed, of Pelham, Alabama, said a CVS pharmacist gave him the wrong prescription about a decade ago: the pills were a different color than usual. He worries the chances for another mistake could increase as pharmacists take on more work.

“These pharmacists always look stressed,” he said.

A CVS spokeswoman said the company is focused on addressing concerns raised by its pharmacists and has taken several actions, including “providing additional pharmacy resources” in markets that need support. She declined to say how many pharmacists or technicians the company has hired.

Former Walgreens CEO Rosalind Brewer said in late June that the company had added more than 1,000 pharmacists in the second quarter, but was running into a shortage of job candidates. Walgreens is adding processing centers around the country to ease some of the prescription workload for its stores.

Brewer, who left in late August, also said the company was limiting hours at 1,100 pharmacies, or about 12% of its U.S. locations. That was down from 1,600 earlier this year, but a company executive has said it doesn’t expect to return all pharmacies to normal operating hours by year’s end.

Labor strife and staffing shortages in health care are not isolated to drugstores, as the recent Kaiser Permanente strike shows.

But drugstores have some additional challenges in the fall. Many customers come to them for vaccines for COVID-19, flu and pneumonia. Plus, federal officials have approved a new shot for people ages 60 and older for a virus called RSV.

All told, CVS touts in a pharmacy counter brochure that the company can offer more than 15 vaccines to customers.

Ongoing drug shortages also have kept pharmacy workers on the phone more.

Jonathan Marquess said one of his drugstores fielded 100 questions one day last fall about the antibiotic amoxicillin and the attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder treatment Adderall, two drugs in short supply.

Marquess runs several independent pharmacies in Georgia and serves on the National Community Pharmacists Association board. He has done a few things to help his stores adapt to the extra workload, he said, including training all employees to answer basic questions about vaccines.

Marquess also adds extra staff when he knows they will have an influx of customers, like when a nearby company sends its employees over for vaccines.

“We learned from our experiences,” he said. “Training your entire staff is very, very important.”

Pharmacists say customers aren’t powerless and can help things run smoothly.

People should bring all their insurance cards to vaccine appointments, especially since insurance coverage is new for the COVID-19 shots, Marquess said.

Dang said customers should avoid showing up right after pharmacies reopen from a lunch break or just before they close, times when pharmacists and technicians are especially busy.

Making appointments for vaccines gives pharmacy workers a better sense for their workload. Calling several days in advance for a prescription refill also helps, said Jen Cocohoba, a pharmacy professor at University of California San Francisco.

“That tiny piece of control can help, because there’s so many things you cannot predict when you’re inside the community pharmacy,” Cocohoba said.
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A massive number of migrating birds collided with McCormick Place — a Chicago convention center — this week, resulting in an unprecedented number of bird deaths.

Dave Willard has collected dead and injured birds from around the center during the migration season for about 40 years. In an interview with the Audubon website, Willard said that he and his colleagues collected 964 dead birds and approximately 80 “stunned live ones.”

“It was truly unprecedented,” he said of Thursday’s event.

Hundreds more dead and injured birds were subsequently found around the city.

Before this week’s catastrophe, the largest number of dead birds he had collected was 200.

“Unfortunate weather” combined with “disorienting brightly lit buildings” confused the birds, resulting in the high death and injury numbers.

“You pick up a Rose-breasted Grosbeak and realize, if it hadn’t been for a building in Chicago, it would be spending its winter in the foothills of the Andes,” Willard said. “It’s just a shame that a city can’t be less of an obstacle.”
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Spanish company PLD Space launched its reusable Miura-1 rocket early on Saturday from a site in southwestern Spain, carrying out Europe’s first fully private rocket launch and offering hope for the continent’s stalled space ambitions.

The startup’s test nighttime launch from Huelva came after two previous attempts were scrubbed. The Miura-1 rocket, named after a breed of fighting bulls, is as tall as a three-story building and has a 100-kilogram cargo capacity. The launch carries a payload for test purposes, but this will not be released, the company said.

Mission control video showed engineers cheering as the rocket gained altitude against the dark nighttime sky, shouting for joy and congratulating one another.

A first attempt to launch the Miura-1 rocket in May was abandoned due to strong high-altitude winds. A second attempt in June failed when umbilical cables in the avionics bay did not all release in time, halting the lift off as smoke and flames spewed out from the rocket.

Airspace, areas of the sea and roads were closed around the high-security launch site ahead of the launch.

Europe’s efforts to develop capabilities to send small satellites into space are in focus after a failed orbital rocket launch by Virgin Orbit from Britain in January. That system involved releasing the launcher from a converted Boeing 747. Competitors lining up to join the race to launch small payloads include companies in Scotland, Sweden and Germany.

Saturday’s mission on the Miura-1 demonstrator was the first of two scheduled suborbital missions. However, analysts say the most critical test of its ambitions will be the development of orbital services on the larger Miura-5, planned for 2025.

In July, the last launch of Europe’s largest rocket, the premier Ariane 5 space launcher, took place at the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

Europe has until recently depended on Ariane 5 and its 11-tonne-plus capacity for heavy missions, as well as Russia’s Soyuz launcher for medium payloads and Italy’s Vega, which is also launched from Kourou, for small ones.

The end of Ariane 5 has left Europe with virtually no autonomous access to space until its successor, Ariane 6, is launched. Russia halted access to Soyuz in response to European sanctions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the upgraded Vega-C has been grounded for technical reasons and Ariane 6 is delayed until next year.

The European Space Agency said last week that Vega-C would not return to service until the fourth quarter of 2024, following a failed mission last December.
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Indian rescuers are searching for over 100 people missing in a flash flood caused by a glacial lake bursting its banks, a risk scientists warn is increasing with climate change.

Agence France-Presse explains what glacial lake outburst floods are and the risks they pose, particularly in parts of Asia.

What is a glacial lake outburst flood?

A glacial lake outburst flood, or GLOF, is the sudden release of water that has collected in former glacier beds.

These lakes are formed by the retreat of glaciers, a naturally occurring phenomenon that has been turbocharged by the warmer temperatures of human-caused climate change.

Glacier melt is often channeled into rivers, but ice or the build-up of debris can form what is effectively a natural dam, behind which a glacial lake builds.

If these natural dams are breached, large quantities of water can be released suddenly from the lakes, causing devastating flooding.

What causes these breaches?

The natural dams holding back glacial lakes can be breached for a variety of reasons, explained Lauren Vargo, a glacier expert and scientist at the Antarctic Research Centre in New Zealand. Causes include “an avalanche of snow, or a landslide causing a wave in the lake, or overfilling of the lake … from rain or the glacier melting,” she told AFP.

Sometimes the dam has been gradually degraded over time or is ruptured by an event such as an earthquake.

The breaches are highly unpredictable, “because they can be caused by so many different factors,” she said.

What is the impact of climate change?

Climate change is driving the disappearance of glaciers, with half the Earth’s 215,000 glaciers projected to melt by the end of the century, even if warming can be capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The volume of glacial lakes has jumped by 50% in 30 years, according to a 2020 study based on satellite data.

The more lakes that form and the larger they grow, the greater the risk they pose to populations downstream.

Climate change is not only driving the creation of glacial lakes, but also can produce the conditions that result in dam breaches.

“The flooding can be caused by glaciers melting or these big rainfall events,” said Vargo. “We know that’s happening more because of climate change.”

How dangerous are these floods?

The particular danger of GLOFs lies in their unpredictability.

“The probability of a lake releasing a GLOF is difficult to accurately quantify without detailed and localized studies,” a study of the problem globally warned this year.

The study, published in Nature Communications, found that 15 million people live within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of a glacial lake and within one kilometer of potential flooding from a breach.

The risk was greatest in “High Mountains Asia,” an area that covers parts of 12 countries, including India, Pakistan, China and Nepal.

That is partly because more people live closer to glacial lakes in the region than in other parts of the world, making warning times even shorter.

But it also reflects the vulnerability of those populations, who may be poorer and less prepared to deal with the sudden arrival of catastrophic floodwaters.

“The most dangerous basins … do not always host the most, or the largest, glacial lakes,” the authors wrote.

“Rather it is the high number of people and the reduced capacity of those people to cope with disaster that plays a key role in determining overall GLOF danger.”

Thousands of people, for example, have been killed by glacier lake outburst floods in High Mountains Asia but only a handful in North America’s Pacific Northwest, even though that region has twice as many glacial lakes.

Experts have called for more research on the risks posed by GLOFs, particularly in the Andean region, which remains comparatively understudied, but also for better preparedness.

“But then there’s the larger part of what we can do in terms of reducing emissions, to try to slow down climate change and reduce the threats of this from growing even more,” Vargo said.
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At a rally Friday in the southern city of Blantyre, unemployed nurses called for more jobs and gave Malawi’s president 14 days to help them find new opportunities for work.

Frank Kamwendo, the chairperson of concerned nurses, said the demonstrations were a last resort after several meetings with Malawi government officials.

“We have been trying our level best to discuss with the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of local government to recruit more than 2,260 nursing officers,” said Kamwendo. “Unfortunately, these ministries have been telling us that there are no funds for recruitment.”

Kamwendo said the nurses have also tried in vain to get the government to help them work in other countries.

Thousands without jobs

Government statistics show that Malawi has about 3,000 unemployed nurses and 160 vacant positions for nurses in public medical facilities.

Last year, Malawi’s government stopped a plan by the National Organization of Nurses and Midwives that could have helped some 2,000 unemployed nurses find work in the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Ministry of Labor authorities said the organization has no legal mandate to export labor.

Shouts Simez, the president of the National Organization of Nurses and Midwives in Malawi, told VOA that there are now positive signs that the situation will soon be better for unemployed nurses.

“I am happy to share that the approach has changed now because now it’s from the Ministry of Labor to the Ministry of Trade and Industry,” said Simeza. “So, the Ministry of Trade and Industry is looking at exporting services. Nursing is one of the services that can be exported.”

Simeza said his organization is part of the group including the Ministry of Trade that is working on a legal framework for exporting services.

“When the Ministry of Labor said, ‘No you cannot do this,’ I ended up agreeing because we did not have the guidelines, meaning that if we had to send nurses or midwives to work in the diaspora, they were not going to be safe and protected,” said Simeza. “That’s now where the issues of exploitation were going to come in.”

Protesters threaten to stage vigils

However, the demonstrators delivered a petition to the office of a Blantyre district commissioner and threatened to hold vigils at the State House to pressure authorities into action.

Director for the Blantyre District Council, Rejison Nkolobwe, promised to deliver the petition to the responsible authorities for action.

“Our duty as DC for Blantyre is to take this petition and forward it to the relevant authorities, which is the office of president and cabinet,” said Nkolobwe.

While government authorities have not formally responded to the unemployed nurses’ demands, Simeza said he hopes the demonstration will help push the government to fast-track the process of putting in place guidelines on labor migration.
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A study published Friday indicates 1 in 10 babies around the world are born prematurely — before 37 weeks — leading to deaths, disability and chronic illnesses.

The study was conducted by the World Health Organization, the U.N. Children’s Fund, UNICEF and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The study monitored global births between 2010 and 2020 and documented global, regional and country estimates and trends. It found 13.4 million babies — 1 in 10 of all live births — were born prematurely in 2020, with large disparities between regions and nations.

It showed about 65% of 2020 preterm births worldwide occurred in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, where more than 13% of all births were preterm. The rates in the most affected countries — Bangladesh, 16.2%; Malawi 14.5%; and Pakistan, 14.3% — were three or four times higher than those in the world’s least affected countries — Serbia, 3.8%; Moldova, 4%; and Kazakhstan, 4.7%.

The study indicates premature birth is not limited to low- and middle-income countries, with data showing preterm rates of 10% or higher in wealthier nations such as Greece, with 11.6%, and the United States, at 10%. No region saw a significant reduction in premature births during the 10-year period.

The WHO said that premature birth is a leading cause of death among young children, and that those who survive are more susceptible to disabilities, developmental issues and chronic illness as adults.

The U.N. agency called for greater global investment in prevention and ensuring access to quality health care.

The study, titled “National, regional, and global estimates of preterm birth in 2020, with trends from 2010: a systematic analysis,” was published in the British medical journal Lancet.
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AT&T and Gallaudet University have developed a football helmet for players who are deaf or hard of hearing and communicate using American Sign Language. 

The company and the Washington-based school for students who are deaf or hard of hearing unveiled the new technology Thursday. 

It allows a coach to call a play on a tablet from the sideline that then shows up visually on a small display screen inside the quarterback’s helmet. Gallaudet, which competes in Division III, was cleared by the NCAA to use the helmet in its game on Saturday at home against Hilbert. 

Gallaudet coach Chuck Goldstein said he thinks the helmet “will change football.” 

“We work out the same way as every other college football program, we practice the same way, we compete the same way,” Goldstein said. “The difference between coaching a hearing team compared to a Deaf team is first the communication.” 

The final product is the result of almost two years of communication between the team and AT&T, which came up with the concept as a way to close the inclusion gap for the Deaf community with its 5G network. 

“We came up with ideas on how to make this helmet more effective [and] we’d interact with [players and coaches],” said Corey Anthony, AT&T senior VP of networking engineering and operations. “They would give us feedback. We’d go back, make changes, work on it. It’s just a beautiful relationship that we have with that university.” 

Anthony said the company also leaned on employees who are deaf or hard of hearing during the process. 

“This is probably one of the more sort of exciting and enriching projects that we’ve worked on in a very long time,” he said.
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All About America explores American culture, politics, trends, history, ideals and places of interest.

Money may not buy happiness, but a new analysis of the happiest and unhappiest U.S. states suggests the lack of cash can contribute to a person’s misery.

“The thing about money and happiness is that being increasingly and increasingly wealthy doesn’t make you more and more happy, but experiencing poverty definitely can make you unhappy,” says Miriam Liss, professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

That’s because basic needs of shelter, food, clothing, safety, health care and transportation are hard to meet when people aren’t financially secure, she adds.

In order to assess levels of happiness in all 50 states, personal finance company WalletHub looked at three key factors: emotional and physical well-being, work environment, and community and environment. Utah, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota and New Jersey were the happiest states, according to WalletHub’s analysis.

Liss thinks it makes sense that Utah emerged as the happiest state, where about 60% of its population identify as Mormon.

“I’m not surprised by that, because I do think there is an association between religious affiliation and happiness,” Liss says. “And that’s largely because of the community and the connection that people experience if you feel nurtured and loved by your community.”

WalletHub identifies the unhappiest states as Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee and West Virginia.

“It’s not surprising to me. These are poor states,” Liss says. She adds that in order to be happy, a person must have a sense of autonomy, feel competent and have strong and meaningful relationships with others.

“You need enough money to be secure and able to meet both those basic human needs of housing and safety,” Liss says. “But also the psychological needs of the time to build relationships, the ability to engage in work that’s meaningful — and not what you hate just to pay the bills — and the ability to have some autonomy and flexibility over how you spend your day.”

The analysis found that only half of Americans feel “very satisfied” with their personal lives. Liss says there’s a genetic component to happiness that people can’t change, but that much of happiness – about 40 percent – is influenced by engaging in what she calls “intentional” activities.

“Really paying attention and enjoying when we eat, when we’re in a beautiful location, enhances mindfulness,” she says. “Practicing gratitude is a really powerful, intentional activity that has some really strong effects. … Community connection and kindness kind of go hand in hand, lots of volunteering, performing acts of service, getting involved in the community. Those are all things that can increase your happiness.”

Moving to one of the happiest states won’t automatically make you happy, she says, unless your most critical needs are met.

“Live somewhere where you can afford your lifestyle, because if you can’t, that really limits your autonomy,” Liss says. “You also want to live in a place where you have a meaningful job which allows you to feel competence and ability. … But I also think it’s really important to live somewhere where you can develop true and meaningful connections and relationships with other people.”
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Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant said it began releasing a second batch of treated radioactive wastewater into the sea on Thursday after the first round of discharges ended smoothly.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings said workers activated a pump to dilute the treated water with large amounts of seawater, slowly sending the mixture into the ocean through an underground tunnel.

The wastewater discharges, which are expected to continue for decades, have been strongly opposed by fishing groups and neighboring countries including South Korea, where hundreds of people staged protest rallies. China banned all imports of Japanese seafood, badly hurting Japanese seafood producers and exporters.

The plant’s first wastewater release began Aug. 24 and ended Sept. 11. During that release, TEPCO said it discharged 7,800 tons of treated water from 10 tanks. In the second discharge, TEPCO plans to release another 7,800 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean over 17 days.

About 1.34 million tons of radioactive wastewater is stored in about 1,000 tanks at the plant. It has accumulated since the plant was crippled by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

TEPCO and the government say discharging the water into the sea is unavoidable because the tanks will reach capacity early next year and space at the plant will be needed for its decommissioning, which is expected to take decades.

They say the water is treated to reduce radioactive materials to safe levels, and then is diluted with seawater to make it much safer than international standards.

Some scientists say, however, that the continuing release of low-level radioactive materials is unprecedented and needs to be monitored closely.

Japan’s government has set up a relief fund to help find new markets and reduce the impact of China’s seafood ban. Measures also include the temporary purchase, freezing and storage of seafood and promotion of seafood sales at home.

Cabinet ministers have traveled to Fukushima to sample local seafood and promote its safety.

TEPCO is tasked with providing compensation for reputational damage to the region’s seafood caused by the wastewater release. It started accepting applications this week and immediately received hundreds of inquiries. Most of the damage claims are linked to China’s seafood ban and excess supply at home causing price declines, TEPCO said.

Agriculture Minister Ichiro Miyashita promoted Japanese scallops at a food fair in Malaysia on Wednesday on the sidelines of a regional farm ministers’ meeting.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has reviewed the safety of the wastewater release and concluded that if carried out as planned, it would have a negligible impact on the environment, marine life and human health.
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