Officials in Cameroon say vaccine hesitancy is preventing them from inoculating millions of children for childhood diseases in the first major campaign since the COVID-19 pandemic began. 

The country has an outbreak of measles and rubella that has killed 18 children and sickened more than 4,000 this year. The public health ministry said several thousand vaccinators have been dispatched to over 200 hospitals in Cameroon to inoculate more than 5.5 million children against measles and rubella. 

The government says the vaccinators are also visiting homes, churches, mosques, markets and camps to make sure every child under 10 years old is inoculated.

Thirty-six-year-old carpenter Ongene Pierre says he stopped the vaccinators from inoculating his three children at Nyom, a neighborhood in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde. 

He said he doesn’t understand why the government wants all children under 10 to be vaccinated, adding that health workers should not be visiting public places to vaccinate children without the approval of parents.

Ongene said he has never received a vaccine and sees no reason for his children to be vaccinated.

Jeanette Moloua, a medical staff member in the public health ministry, said the nationwide vaccination campaign targets children from 9 months to 5 years who are the most affected by the measles outbreak. 

“We should make sure our children take the two doses of the vaccine because this will boost their immune system,” she said. “We should sensitize the public, those with rubella, we direct them to the hospital for them to get treatment, and also it is treated by the same vaccine, the MMR vaccine which fights against measles, mumps and rubella.”

Moloa said the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is safe and there is no harm getting another dose.

Cameroon’s ministry of health says less than 30% of about 5.5 million children targeted for vaccination in the five-day campaign launched Wednesday have been vaccinated. The government says a lack of trust is the leading cause of vaccine hesitancy. In addition, a lack of access to vaccination information and long distances from vaccination centers and hospitals prevent mothers from getting their children vaccinated.

The National Institute of Statistics says that Cameroon has a high proportion of he world’s zero-dose or unvaccinated children. The center says several pockets in Cameroon traditionally miss essential health care services, including vaccinations.

Health officials say parents should make sure their children get two doses of MMR vaccine, starting with the first dose at 12 to 15 months of age, and the second dose at 4 through 6 years of age.

The ongoing vaccination campaign is the biggest since Cameroon reported its first cases of COVID-19 in March 2020. The government says when COVID-19 was reported in the central African state, parents were afraid to take their children to hospitals for vaccinations because hospitals were also COVID-19 test and treatment centers.

Health workers say a major challenge for them now is having access to some parts of western English-speaking regions. Separatist fighters have declared that they don’t want workers from the central government in Yaounde in English-speaking towns and villages.

Cameroon’s military says it is protecting health workers and is asking civilians to denounce fighters against government troops so the vaccination drive can be successful. 
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Earth’s average temperature set a new unofficial record high on Thursday, the third such milestone in a week that already rated as the hottest on record.

The planetary average hit 63 degrees Fahrenheit (17.23 degrees Celsius), surpassing the 62.9-degree mark (17.18-degree mark) set Tuesday and equaled Wednesday, according to data from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition.

That average includes places that are sweltering under dangerous heat — like Jingxing, China, which checked in almost 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius) — and the merely unusually warm, like Antarctica, where temperatures across much of the continent were as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) above normal this week.

The temperature is ramping up across Europe this week, too. Germany’s weather agency, DWD, has predicted highs of 37C (99F) on Sunday and the Health Ministry has issued a warning to vulnerable people.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday issued a note of caution about the Maine tool’s findings, saying it could not confirm data that results in part from computer modeling.

“Although NOAA cannot validate the methodology or conclusion of the University of Maine analysis, we recognize that we are in a warm period due to climate change,” NOAA said.

Still, the Maine data has been widely regarded as another troubling sign of climate change around the globe. Some climate scientists said this week they weren’t surprised to see the unofficial records.

Robert Watson, a scientist and former chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said governments and the private sector “are not truly committed to address climate change.” Nor are citizens, he said.

“They demand cheap energy, cheap food and do not want to pay the true cost of food and energy,” Watson said.
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WASHINGTON – South Korean officials are seeking to tamp down domestic opposition to the likely release of treated wastewater from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The release has the potential to undermine a recent warming of relations between the two countries in the face of an increasingly aggressive China, and some analysts worry that Beijing could use it to try to drive a wedge between them.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi is expected to visit Seoul from Friday to Sunday to explain his approval for Japanese plans to release the treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean.

Grossi issued the approval Tuesday during his trip to Tokyo where he presented a 140-page IAEA report to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Grossi said in the report the release of the water into the ocean would have a “negligible radiological impact on people and the environment.”

However the plan to release the water has fueled protests in South Korea. Thousands of people have been gathering in Seoul, demanding the Yoon government block it.

Opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung said Thursday at an overnight protest at the National Assembly that the government of President Yoon Suk Yeol is “forcing people to believe Japan and the IAEA report.”

However the Yoon administration has declared it is satisfied with the IAEA’s safety review. During a news briefing on Wednesday, Park Ku-yeon, the first deputy chief of the Office for Government Policy Coordination, said the government recognizes the IAEA “as a prestigious internationally agreed-upon agency and we respect its findings.”

Experts said Beijing could use the protests against the dumping of the water into the ocean as a political tool to separate the renewed Seoul-Tokyo ties. Washington views the bilateral ties between its key allies as important in its effort to counter China’s regional assertiveness.

Dennis Wilder, senior director for East Asia Affairs at the White House’s National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, said, “Beijing has been working hard to try to find ways to divide the increasingly effective trilateral relationship so it would not be a surprise if they try to exploit this issue by attempting to scare the public in South Korea and elsewhere in the region.”

He continued, “Nuclear power and nuclear waste are highly charged issues, and it is easy to mislead the public with disinformation even if a credible international organization like the IAEA has ruled the activity safe.”

During a press briefing Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, “The report should not be the ‘shield’ or ‘green light’ for Japan’s discharge of nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean.”

Wang continued to say the report does not address “the strong opposition” to the discharge by the people of Japan, South Korea, Pacific Island countries and elsewhere.

The IAEA report concluded the discharge of 1.3 million metric tons of wastewater from the Fukushima plant, which has been filtered through the Advanced Liquid Processing System, would be safe as it meets the international safety standard. The system removes most radioactive contamination with the exception of tritium.

The findings were based on a two-year assessment by an IAEA task force advised by experts from 11 countries, including China, South Korea, and the U.S., according to the IAEA.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant was damaged by a deadly combination of an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, causing reactors to overheat and contaminate water in the plant with radioactive material.

New water was used to cool the damaged reactors, and now that water is stored in about 1,000 tanks, the amount equivalent to about 500 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Japan is planning to release the water over the next 30 to 40 years, starting around August, according to the IAEA.

South Korea sent a team of 21 experts to examine the safety of the treated water in the Fukushima plant in May and plans to release its own report soon.  Yoon and Kishida are expected to discuss the discharge of the water on the sidelines of a NATO summit next week in Lithuania.

The U.S. “welcomes” the IAEA report, “noting Japan’s plans to release treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site are safe and consistent with internationally accepted nuclear safety standards,” Matthew Miller, a spokesperson for the State Department, said on Wednesday.

Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center’s Reimaging U.S. Grand Strategy Program, said Beijing could use the issue “to drive a wedge between Seoul and Tokyo and halt the trajectory of South Korea-Japan security and economic cooperation.” He noted that China has tried to “inflame South Korean historic distrust of Japan” in the past.

Yoon reached out to Tokyo in March to mend ties frayed over a longtime dispute with roots in the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. The rapprochement resulted in summits with Kishida in March and May, the first for the two nations in 12 years.

The two leaders also met on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Hiroshima and held a trilateral meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden. He invited them to Washington for a trilateral summit on an unspecified date later this summer.

Andrew Yeo, the SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy, said despite Beijing being “very vocal” about the discharge and attempting “to find common cause with Seoul in driving a wedge between Tokyo and Seoul,” the U.S. should not be “too worried.”

Yeo continued, “Trilateral cooperation is proceeding with strong understanding that ongoing cooperation is necessary to deter and defend against North Korean threats and also coordinate on broader Indo-Pacific issues.” 
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The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency is visiting the Asia-Pacific region this week after giving Tokyo the green light on Tuesday to release more than 1 million metric tons of treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The IAEA says the water is safe for release, but the decision has done little to ease concerns of fishing and environmental communities throughout the region. VOA’s Jessica Stone reports.
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China reported Thursday that 239 people died from COVID-19 in June in a significant uptick months after it lifted most containment measures.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention had reported 164 deaths in May and none in April and March.

China started employing a “zero-COVID” containment strategy in early 2020 and credits the strict lockdowns, quarantines, border closures and compulsory mass testing with significantly saving lives.

But the measures were lifted suddenly in December with little preparation, leading to a final surge in which about 60,000 people died, according to the official toll. Deaths this year peaked in January and February, hitting a high of 4,273 on January 4, but then declined gradually to zero on February 23, according to the Chinese CDC.

Chinese health officials didn’t say whether they expect the trend to continue or if they would recommend that preventative measures be restored.

Two of the deaths in June were from respiratory failure caused by infection, while the CDC said the others involved underlying conditions. Those can include diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and other chronic illnesses.

Between January 3, 2020, and July 5, 2023, China reported 99,292,081 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 121,490 deaths to the World Health Organization.

Experts estimate that many hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more, may have died in China — far higher than the official toll, but still a significantly lower death rate than in the United States and Europe.
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OceanGate, the U.S.-based company that managed the tourist submersible that imploded during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, has suspended all exploration and commercial operations, its website showed on Thursday.  

The company did not elaborate beyond a red banner at the top of its website: “OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations.” 

OceanGate had planned two expeditions to the century-old Titanic ruins, located in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, for June 2024, its website showed.  

U.S. and Canadian authorities are investigating the cause of the June undersea implosion, which killed all five people aboard and raised questions about the unregulated nature of such expeditions. 

The U.S. Coast Guard last week recovered presumed human remains and debris from the submersible, known as the Titan, after searching the ocean floor. Examination of the debris is expected to shed more light on the cause of the implosion.  

The Titan lost contact with its support vessel during its descent on June 18. Its remains were found four days later, littering the seabed about 488 meters from the bow of the Titanic wreck. 
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The planet’s temperature spiked on Tuesday to its hottest day in at least 44 years and likely much longer. Wednesday could become the third straight day that Earth unofficially marks a new record high, the latest in a series of climate-change extremes that alarm but don’t surprise scientists.

The globe’s average temperature reached 62.9 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius) on Tuesday, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a common tool based on satellite data and computer simulations and used by climate scientists for a glimpse of the world’s condition.

On Monday, the average temperature was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (17.01 degrees Celsius), breaking a record that lasted only 24 hours.

While it is not an official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration record, “this is showing us an indication of where we are right now,” NOAA chief scientist Sarah Kapnick said. Even though the dataset used for the unofficial record goes back only to 1979, she said that given other data, it’s likely the hottest day in “several hundred years that we’ve experienced.”

The previous hottest day was in August 2021, Kapnick said.

“A record like this is another piece of evidence for the now massively supported proposition that global warming is pushing us into a hotter future,” said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who was not part of the calculations.

With many places seeing temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius), the new average temperatures might not seem very hot. But Tuesday’s global high was nearly 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (a full degree Celsius) higher than the 1979-2000 average, which already tops the 20th- and 19th-century averages.

Higher temperatures translate into brutal conditions for people around the world. When the heat spikes, humans suffer health effects — especially young and elderly people, who are vulnerable to heat even under normal conditions.

“People aren’t used to that. Their bodies aren’t used to that,” said Erinanne Saffell, Arizona’s state climatologist and an expert in extreme weather and climate events. “That’s important to understand who might be at risk, making sure people are hydrated, they’re staying cool, and they’re not exerting themselves outside and taking care of those folks around you who might be at risk.”

The highs come after months of “truly unreal meteorology and climate stats for the year,” such as off-the-chart record warmth in the North Atlantic, record low sea ice in Antarctica and a rapidly strengthening El Nino, said University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Jason Furtado.

Scientists generally use much longer measurements — months, years, decades — to track the Earth’s warming. But the new figures are an indication that climate change is reaching uncharted territory, even if the data aren’t quite the type used by gold-standard climate measurement entities such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.

The figures legitimately capture global-scale heating, and NOAA will take them into consideration for its official record calculations, said Deke Arndt, director of the National Center for Environmental Information, a division of NOAA.

High-temperature records were surpassed this week in Quebec and Peru. Beijing reported nine straight days last week when the temperature exceeded 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). Cities across the U.S. from Medford, Oregon, to Tampa, Florida, have been hovering at all-time highs, said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Wednesday may bring another unofficial record, with the Climate Reanalyzer again forecasting record or near-record heat. Antarctica’s average forecast for Wednesday is 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the 1979-2000 average.

In the U.S., heat advisories are in effect this week for more than 30 million people in places including portions of western Oregon, inland far northern California, central New Mexico, Texas, Florida and the coastal Carolinas, according to the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center. Excessive heat warnings are continuing across southern Arizona and California.
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Health organizations in Sudan’s White Nile state said at least 13 children have died over the past week due to a suspected measles outbreak. An official with the Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said Sudan’s conflict and the approach of the rainy season could make the situation much worse.

Officials with the international medical organization MSF say they remain concerned about an increase of suspected measles cases among children in Sudan’s White Nile state.

Speaking to VOA via a messaging application from Nairobi, Mitchell Sangma, MSF’s health advisor, says MSF’s ground team have documented more than 200 suspected cases of measles among children in the last month.

He says out of that number, 72 were admitted to hospitals and 13 died.

“We are also seeing an increasing number of suspected measles in our other projects such as in Blue Nile state in Sudan. And in Renk, on the other side of the border in South Sudan, we are also seeing increasing measles cases in our measles isolation wards. So, the situation for people fleeing the conflict is desperately concerning,” he said.

The MSF official says the nearly three-month-old conflict in Sudan between the army and a rival paramilitary group has created a huge medical need and intense pressure on health care facilities all over the country.

Sangma says MSF and other aid agencies are concerned about the collapsing health system. He says health centers still in operation are struggling to cope with limited supplies and staff.

Sangma notes that as the rainy season draws near, there is an increased possibility of disease outbreaks among the millions of people displaced from their homes by the war.

The organization says there is a need to step up services like vaccinations, nutritional support, shelter, water and sanitation.

“Rainy season is fast approaching and we are very concerned about the rising waterborne diseases such as cholera and also to note that malaria is also very much endemic in this region. We need to scale up, we need experienced medical expertise on the ground,” said Sangma.

VOA reached out to Mustafa Jabrallah Ahmed, director general at the Ministry of Health in Blue Nile for this story, but he declined to comment, saying he was busy with meetings.

More than 2.8 million people have been displaced due to the Sudan conflict, including over 2.2 million internally, according to a report released by the International Organization for Migration this week.

The violence makes it difficult for people to access health care, with many getting treatment late as it is too dangerous to travel to health facilities.
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Deeply loved but wracked by crisis, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) on Wednesday marks 75 years since it was founded as the Western world’s first universal, free health care system.

In a secular age, the NHS is the closest thing Britain has to a national religion — devoutly cherished, with levels of public support higher than the royal family or any other British institution.

It was founded three years after World War II by a pioneering Labour government on the principle that everyone should access top-quality health care funded by general taxation, free at the point of care.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose parents were an NHS doctor and a pharmacist, paid tribute last week as he outlined a 15-year plan aimed at recruiting hundreds of thousands of new health staff.

“For every minute of every day of every one of those 75 years, the NHS has been kept going by the millions of people who’ve worked for it. To them on behalf of a grateful nation, I want to say: thank you,” he said.

“I feel a powerful sense of responsibility to make sure that their legacy endures. And to make sure the NHS is there for our children and grandchildren, just as it was there for us.”

Like Sunak’s parents, immigrant staff were pivotal to the NHS’s early growth, helping to remake the face of Britain itself in the decades after the war.

Its centrality to national life was underscored in a memorable dance sequence featuring NHS staff and patients during the opening of the London Olympics in 2012.

Justin Bieber remixed his hit “Holy” with an NHS choir for Christmas 2020, in a year when the public, clapping on their doorsteps, paid tribute to medics battling the Covid pandemic.

Sickly state

Sunak’s new workforce plan, however, is recognition that the NHS is under unprecedented strain following the pandemic, even though the government spends nearly 12% of its budget on healthcare — by far its single biggest item.

Demoralized doctors and nurses have been striking for better pay, an ageing and unfit population needs ever-more complex treatment, cancers go undiagnosed for lack of scanners, and hospitals are crumbling.

Sumi Manirajan, deputy chair of the British Medical Association’s junior doctors committee, accused Sunak’s Conservative government of failing to value doctors.

“And what that leads to is doctors leaving the country, going abroad, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and actually it’s the public that loses out,” she told AFP at a protest rally by striking doctors.

“The government [ministers], they may use private health care but the ordinary citizen in the UK uses the NHS, relies on the NHS.”

In a report for the 75th anniversary, the King’s Fund charity compared the health systems of 19 similar countries and found Britain’s in a sickly state.

It cited data showing the UK performed worst in fatality rates for strokes and second worst for heart attacks.

The UK has a “strikingly low number of both nurses and doctors per person compared to its peers” and four times fewer hospital and intensive care beds than Germany, the report said.

But opinion polls show scant support in Britain for radical reform such as switching to a mixed model of funding, with patients paying via insurance for some of their treatment, as is the norm elsewhere.

Fully 93% of more than 3,000 respondents believe the NHS should remain free at the point of care, based on general taxation, according to the annual British Social Attitudes Survey last year.

But the authoritative survey also found a record 51% were dissatisfied with their quality of care, especially with waiting times for appointments to see general practitioners and hospital doctors.

Terminal decline?

Sunak has been resisting the medics’ pay demands as he battles to get soaring UK inflation under control, while insisting his government is investing “record sums” in the NHS.

But the service needs to be modernized via better use of digital technology including artificial intelligence, he said on Friday.

Sunak argued that his workforce plan would make the NHS fit “for decades to come.” But some on the front lines give a far gloomier prognosis.

“Right now, as a functional, universal public service, the NHS is failing,” geriatrics consultant David Oliver wrote in The BMJ, a medical journal.

He warned: “It may not quite be in end-of-life care, or about to have its financial or political life support removed, but without immediate action and longer-term thinking it won’t see its 85th birthday.”
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London’s expansion of a fiercely debated scheme that charges the most polluting vehicles in the city should be blocked, local authorities bringing a legal challenge over the plan argued on Tuesday.

The British capital’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) levies a $16 daily charge on drivers of non-compliant vehicles, in order to tackle pollution and improve air quality.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan last year decided to extend the scheme to cover almost all of the Greater London area, encompassing an extra five million people in leafier and less-connected outer boroughs, from the end of next month.

The decision has pitched Khan and health campaigners against those who say they cannot tolerate another economic hit at a time of soaring living costs.

Khan, who is running for a third four-year term in the 2024 London mayoral election, has said he is determined to face down his critics.

But his plan, which echoes hundreds of others in place in traffic-choked cities across Europe, came under challenge at London’s High Court on Tuesday as five local authorities argued the decision to expand ULEZ into their areas was unlawful.

London’s transport authority – Transport for London (TfL) – had launched a public consultation on the plan, which said 91% of vehicles driven in outer London would not be affected.

However, the local authorities’ lawyers argue that TfL provided no detail on how it calculated the 91% figure, which they say was fundamental to justifying the expansion.

The local authorities are also challenging Khan’s decision to not extend a 110 million pound scrappage scheme to those living just outside the expanded ULEZ. The scheme subsidises the cost of buying a replacement vehicle for those affected.

Lawyers representing Khan and TfL argued in court filings that TfL provided sufficient information for the consultation and said that extending the scrappage scheme beyond London was rejected in order to target those directly affected.
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Maternal deaths across the United States more than doubled over the course of two decades, and the tragedy unfolded unequally. 

Black mothers died at the nation’s highest rates, while the largest increases in deaths were found in American Indian and Native Alaskan mothers. Some states — and racial or ethnic groups within them – fared worse than others. 

The findings were laid out in a new study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers looked at maternal deaths between 1999 and 2019 — but not the pandemic spike — for every state and five racial and ethnic groups. 

“It’s a call to action to all of us to understand the root causes — to understand that some of it is about health care and access to health care, but a lot of it is about structural racism and the policies and procedures and things that we have in place that may keep people from being healthy,” said Dr. Allison Bryant, one of the study’s authors and a senior medical director for health equity at Mass General Brigham. 

Among wealthy nations, the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality, which is defined as a death during pregnancy or up to a year afterward. Common causes include excessive bleeding, infection, heart disease, suicide and drug overdose. 

Bryant and her colleagues at Mass General Brigham and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington started with national vital statistics data on deaths and live births. They then used a modeling process to estimate maternal mortality out of every 100,000 live births. 

Overall, they found rampant, widening disparities. The study showed high rates of maternal mortality aren’t confined to the South but also extend to regions like the Midwest and states such as Wyoming and Montana, which had high rates for multiple racial and ethnic groups in 2019. 

Researchers also found dramatic jumps when they compared maternal mortality in the first decade of the study to the second and identified the five states with the largest increases between those decades. Those increases exceeded: 

— 162% for American Indian and Alaska Native mothers in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Rhode Island and Wisconsin; 

— 135% for white mothers in Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee; 

— 105% for Hispanic mothers in Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Tennessee; 

— 93% for Black mothers in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and Texas; 

— 83% for Asian and Pacific Islander mothers in Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan and Missouri. 

“I hate to say it, but I was not surprised by the findings. We’ve certainly seen enough anecdotal evidence in a single state or a group of states to suggest that maternal mortality is rising,” said Dr. Karen Joynt Maddox, a health services and policy researcher at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s certainly alarming, and just more evidence we have got to figure out what’s going on and try to find ways to do something about this.” 

Maddox pointed to how, compared with other wealthy nations, the U.S. underinvests in things like social services, primary care and mental health. She also said Missouri hasn’t funded public health adequately, and during the years of the study hadn’t expanded Medicaid. They’ve since expanded Medicaid — and lawmakers passed a bill giving new mothers a full year of Medicaid health coverage. Last week, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed budget bills that included $4.4 million for a maternal mortality prevention plan. 

In neighboring Arkansas, Black women are twice as likely to have pregnancy-associated deaths as white women, according to a 2021 state report. 

Dr. William Greenfield, the medical director for family health at the Arkansas Department of Health, said the disparity is significant and has “persisted over time,” and that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why there was an increase in the state’s maternal mortality rate for Black mothers. 

Rates among Black women have long been the worst in the nation, and the problem affects people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, U.S. Olympic champion sprinter Tori Bowie, 32, died from complications of childbirth in May. 

The pandemic likely exacerbated all of the demographic and geographic trends, Bryant said, and “that’s absolutely an area for future study.” According to preliminary federal data, maternal mortality fell in 2022 after rising to a six-decade high in 2021 — a spike experts attributed mainly to COVID-19. Officials said the final 2022 rate is on track to get close to the pre-pandemic level, which was still the highest in decades. 

Bryant said it’s crucial to understand more about these disparities to help focus on community-based solutions and understand what resources are needed to tackle the problem. 

Arkansas already is using telemedicine and is working on several other ways to increase access to care, said Greenfield, who is also a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Arkansas Medical Center in Little Rock and was not involved in the study. 

The state also has a “perinatal quality collaborative,” a network to help health care providers understand best practices for things like reducing cesarean sections, managing complications with hypertensive disorders, and curbing injuries or severe complications related to childbirth. 

“Most of the deaths we reviewed and other places have reviewed … were preventable,” Greenfield said. 
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The head of the United Nations called Monday for maritime nations to agree on a course for the shipping industry to reduce its climate-harming emissions to net zero by the middle of the century at the latest.

The appeal by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres came at the start of a meeting of the International Maritime Organization in London that’s seen as key for helping achieve the international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

“Shipping, which accounts for almost 3% of global emissions, will be vital,” Guterres said.

He urged delegates to agree a new greenhouse gas strategy for shipping that includes “ambitious science-based targets starting in 2030 – both on absolute emissions reductions and the use of clean fuels.”

The IMO’s current target is for the shipping industry to cut its emissions by at least half from 2008 to 2050.

Guterres said the new targets should include all greenhouse gas emissions caused by the industry and backed the idea of introducing a carbon price for shipping. Campaigners have suggested that funds generated from a levy on emissions could be used to help poor nations tackle climate change, though the industry wants the money to go toward the development of clean technologies.
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