Doctors Without Borders said Sunday that there is a suspected outbreak of measles in an internal displacement camp in Sudan.

The international humanitarian organization said 13 children have died recently in the suspected outbreak at the camp in Sudan’s White Nile state.

“We are receiving sick children with suspected measles every day, most with complications,” the organization posted in a tweet.

A steady stream of people is coming to the camp as they flee the fighting between the country’s two warring factions.

Doctors Without Borders has two clinics in White Nile. The organization says it had over 3,000 patients in June and needs to “increase assistance, scale up services like vaccinations, nutritional support, shelter, water and sanitation.”
…

The head of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Qu Dongyu, was re-elected Sunday for a second term as head of the U.N. agency.

He was the only candidate standing for the role of FAO director-general and received 168 out of 182 votes in a ballot in Rome on Sunday.

Qu, a former Chinese government minister who was nominated for the post by Beijing, will serve a new four-year term from August 1.

His appointment is seen as a part of a drive by Beijing to get more Chinese figures into senior jobs at international bodies.

Qu, a biologist by training, was vice-minister of agriculture before taking over as head of the U.N. agency in 2019.

FAO directors can hold the role for a maximum of two consecutive terms.

The vote came during the FAO Conference, which runs until July 7.
…

Following an outbreak of anthrax disease in the West African nation of Ghana, Nigerian authorities have urged citizens to halt consumption of cooked animal hides, a delicacy also known as “pomo” in the country. Gibson Emeka has this story from Abuja, Nigeria, narrated by Salem Solomon.
…

The only break much of America can hope for soon from eye-watering, dangerous smoke from fire-struck Canada would be brief bouts of shirt-soaking, sweltering heat and humidity from a deadly, Southern heat wave, forecasters say.

And then the smoke will likely return to the Midwest and East.

Here’s why: Neither the 235 out-of-control Canadian wildfires nor the weather pattern that’s responsible for this mess of meteorological maladies are showing signs of relenting for the next week or longer, according to meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center.

First, the weather pattern made abnormally hot and dry conditions for Canada to burn at off-the-chart record levels. Then it created a setup where the only relief comes when low pressure systems roll through, which means areas on one side get smoky air from the north and the other gets sweltering air from the south.

Smoke or heat.

“Pick your poison,” said prediction center forecast operations chief Greg Carbin. “The conditions are not going to be very favorable.

“As long as those fires keep burning up there, that’s going to be a problem for us,” Carbin said. “As long as there’s something to burn, there will be smoke we have to deal with.”

Take St. Louis. The city had two days of unhealthy air Tuesday and Wednesday, but for Thursday “they’ll get an improvement of air quality with the very hot and humid heat,” said weather prediction center meteorologist Bryan Jackson. The forecast is for temperatures that feel like 42.8 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) — with 38.3 degrees Celsius (101 degrees Fahrenheit) heat and stifling humidity.

On Wednesday, the low pressure system was parked over New England and because winds go counter-clockwise, areas to the west – such as Chicago and the Midwest – get smoky winds from the north, while areas east of the low pressure get southerly hot winds, Jackson said.

As that low pressure system moves on and another one travels over the central Great Plains and Lake Superior, the Midwest gets temporary relief, Jackson said. But when low pressure moves on, the smoke comes back.

“We have this, this carousel of air cruising around the Midwest, and every once in a while is bringing the smoke directly onto whatever city you live in,” said University of Chicago atmospheric scientist Liz Moyer. “And while the fires are ongoing, you can expect to see these periodic bad air days and the only relief is either when the fires go out or when the weather pattern dies.”

The weather pattern is “awfully unusual,” said NOAA’s Carbin who had to look back in records to 1980 to see anything even remotely similar. “What gets me is the persistence of this.”

Why is the weather pattern stuck? This seems to be happening more often — and some scientists suggest that human-caused climate change causes more situations where weather patterns stall. Moyer and Carbin said it’s too soon to tell if that’s the case.

But Carbin and Canadian fire scientist Mike Flannigan said there’s a clear climate signal in the Canadian fires. And they said those fires aren’t likely to die down anytime soon, with nothing in the forecast that looks likely to change.

Nearly every province in Canada has fires burning. A record 80,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) have burned, an area nearly as large as South Carolina, according to the Canadian government.

And fire season usually doesn’t really get going until July in Canada.

“It’s been a crazy, crazy year. It’s unusual to have the whole country on fire,” said Flannigan, a professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. “Usually, it’s regional … not the whole shebang at once.”

Hotter than normal and drier air made for ideal fire weather, Flannigan said. Warmer weather from climate change means the atmosphere sucks more moisture out of plants, making them more likely to catch fire, burn faster and hotter.

“Fires are all about extremes,” he said.

And where there’s fire, there’s smoke.

High heat and smoky conditions are stressors on the body and can present potential challenges to human health, said Ed Avol, a professor emeritus at the Keck School of Medicine at University of Southern California.

But Avol added that while the haze of wildfire smoke provides a visual cue to stay inside, there can be hidden dangers of breathing in harmful pollutants such as ozone even when the sky looks clear. He also noted there are air chemistry changes that can happen downwind of wildfire smoke, which may have additional and less well-understood impacts on the body.

It’s still only June. The seasonal forecast for the rest of the summer in Canada “is for hot and mostly dry” and that’s not good for dousing fires, Flannigan said. “It’s a crazy year and I’m not sure where it’s going to end.”
…

Researchers say they are detecting a dramatic spike in ocean surface temperatures around the world — reaching as much as 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal in the North Atlantic — and they could rise even higher.

“It is very alarming, and as temperatures keep spiking, this is not unexpected,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist and professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University in Rhode Island.

As the oceans get warmer each year, scientists say they are triggering chaotic weather patterns around the world, including torrential downpours and intense heat waves that cause flooding and severe drought.

Climate scientists attribute much of the warming to so-called greenhouse gases and say that to prevent the most severe consequences, the use of fossil fuels must be cut in half by 2030.

The most recent increase has caused the most extreme ocean heat wave in the British Isles in 170 years, according to the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather service.

“This is an off-the-charts heat wave in the oceans,” said John Abraham, a climate change scientist at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. “The temperatures we are seeing this year are a remarkable excursion from normal temperatures.”

Oceans, which cover 70% of the Earth, have a huge impact on weather.

“When the air blows over the oceans, the air warms up and gets more humid and that drives storms,” Abraham told VOA.

“The water vapor amplifies warming by trapping outgoing radiation from escaping and that feeds the storms,” noted Kevin Trenberth, a global warming expert and a scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “So, there is a huge magnifying effect.”

A study in the journal Earth System Science Data published in April warns that oceans are heating-up more rapidly than previously thought, creating a greater risk for extreme weather, rising sea levels, and the loss of marine ecosystems.

Even a small increase in ocean temperature can have other profound effects, which include coral bleaching and more intense hurricanes.

“There is also the loss of ice, the disintegration of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets that are contributing to sea level rise earlier than we expected it to,” said Michael Mann, professor of environmental science at Pennsylvania State University.

There are many places in the world that will be warmer than usual this year, Abraham said.

“In South America, we expect both coasts to be warmer than average and the Caribbean and Central American regions to be both warm and dry. In large parts of Southeast Asia, we should expect drier conditions in the upcoming months.”

Adding to the already crucial situation, an El Niño has formed that is likely to bring extreme weather patterns later this year. An El Niño refers to a warming of the ocean surface in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Scientists say the phenomenon is not caused by global warming but may be exacerbated by it.

“It causes unprecedented but strong dry spells in many places, and droughts that may promote wildfires, such as those we’re seeing in Canada, and torrential rains in other places in the world,” said Trenberth.

“The temperatures will spike higher every time there is an El Niño,” said Abraham. “What we’re seeing now is a foretelling of our future unless we reduce our greenhouse emissions.”

“In a warmer world, we’re in for a very bumpy ride that includes extreme rainfall, mudslides, wildfires, drought and failed crop yields,” said Cobb of Brown University.

Mann said greenhouse gases need to be significantly reduced soon or the environmental consequences will become even worse.

“We need governments to provide incentives to move the energy and transportation industries away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy,” he said.
…

Elon Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would temporarily restrict how many tweets users could read per day, in a move meant to tamp down on the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence companies. 

The platform is limiting verified accounts to reading 6,000 tweets a day. Non-verified users — the free accounts that make up the majority of users — are limited to reading 600 tweets per day.  

New unverified accounts would be limited to 300 tweets. 

The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly hit their limits. 

“Goodbye Twitter” was a trending topic in the United States following Musk’s announcement. 

Twitter would soon raise the ceiling to 8,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts, Musk said. 

Twitter’s billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.  

The day before, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account. 

Much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models, Musk said, to the point that it was causing traffic issues with the site. 

In creating AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed them examples of real-life conversations from social media sites. 

“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk said.  

“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” he said.  

“It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation,” he said. 

Twitter is not the only social media giant to have to wrangle with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector. 

In mid-June, Reddit raised prices on third-party developers that were using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums. 

It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site via third-party platforms and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data had generally been provided for free or a small charge.
…

Need Plan B? Tap your credit card and enter B6. 

Since last November, a library at the University of Washington has featured a different kind of vending machine, one that’s become more popular on campuses around the country since the U.S. Supreme Court ended constitutional protections for abortion last year. It’s stocked with ibuprofen, pregnancy tests and the morning-after pill. 

With some states enacting abortion bans and others enshrining protections and expanding access to birth control, the machines are part of a push on college campuses to ensure emergency contraceptives are cheap, discreet and widely available. 

There are now 39 universities in 17 states with emergency contraceptive vending machines, and at least 20 more considering them, according to the American Society for Emergency Contraception. Some, such as the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, are in states where abortion is largely banned. 

Over-the-counter purchase of Plan B and generic forms is legal in all 50 states. 

The 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade “is putting people’s lives at stake, so it makes pregnancy prevention all the more urgent,” said Kelly Cleland, the ASEC’s executive director. “If you live in a state where you cannot get an abortion and you can’t get an abortion anywhere near you, the stakes are so much higher than they’ve ever been before.” 

Washington this year became first U.S. state to set aside money — $200,000 to fund $10,000 grants that colleges can obtain next year through an application process — to expand access to emergency contraceptives at public universities and technical colleges through the automatic dispensers. 

The University of Washington’s machine was installed after a student-led campaign. It offers boxes of generic Plan B for $12.60, about a quarter of what the name-brand versions sell for in stores, and more than 640 have been sold. 

The drug is even cheaper in some machines than it is in UW’s, as low as $7 per box. That’s because it is sold at just above wholesale cost, compared with pharmacy retail prices that might go up to $50. 

In Illinois and New York, lawmakers are developing legislation that would require at least one vending machine selling emergency contraceptives on state college campuses. 

In Connecticut, Yale had to drop plans to install an emergency contraceptive vending machine in 2019 after learning it would violate state law. 

But this year the state approved a measure allowing Plan B and other over-the-counter medications to be sold from vending machines on campuses and other locations. 

The machines can’t be placed in K-12 schools or exposed to the elements, and they must have temperature and humidity controls and include plans for power outages and expired items. 

“This just enables people to have better access and easier access,” said Rep. Nicole Klarides-Ditria, one of several Republicans in Connecticut’s Democratic-controlled General Assembly who supported the measure. “You may need Plan B, as we all know, in the middle of the night, and you won’t have access to a pharmacy until the morning.” 

Although the morning-after pill has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for over-the-counter sale, many stores and pharmacies keep it behind the counter or locked up, require identification for purchase and make the experience of purchasing it intimidating. 

“There is a stigma associated with getting access to these medications,” said Zoe Amaris, a University of Washington pharmacy student and board member of UW Pharmacists for Reproductive Education and Sexual Health. “Having a vending machine is so easy. You don’t need to go to a pharmacy. You don’t need to go through your health care provider.” 

Plan B is more effective the sooner it is taken, and vending machine access could be particularly crucial for victims of rape when pharmacies are closed. The anonymity the machines afford may also be important to some assault victims. 
…

WASHINGTON – Long time, no speak: NASA has re-established contact with the intrepid Ingenuity Mars Helicopter after more than two months of radio silence, the space agency said Friday. 

The mini rotorcraft, which hitched a ride to the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover in early 2021, has survived well beyond its initial 30-day mission to prove the feasibility of its technology in five test flights. 

Since then, it has been deployed dozens of times, acting as an aerial scout to assist its wheeled companion in searching for signs of ancient microbial life from billions of years ago, when Mars was much wetter and warmer than today.  

Ingenuity’s 52nd flight launched on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California lost contact as it descended to the surface following its two minute, 1,191-foot (363-meter) hop. 

The loss of communications was expected, because a hill stood between Ingenuity and Perseverance, which acts as a relay between the drone and Earth.  

Nonetheless, “this has been the longest we’ve gone without hearing from Ingenuity so far in the mission,” Joshua Anderson, Ingenuity team lead at JPL, told AFP. 

“Ingenuity is designed to take care of itself when communication gaps like this occur, but we all still had a sense of relief finally hearing back.” 

Data so far indicate that the helicopter is in good shape. If further health checks also come back normal, Ingenuity will be all set for its next flight, westward toward a rocky outcrop the Perseverance team is interested in exploring.  

It’s not the first time Ingenuity has experienced downed communications. The helicopter was scouring an ancient river delta when it went missing for around six days in April, “an agonizingly long time,” chief engineer Travis Brown wrote in a blog post.
…

Heat waves like the one that engulfed parts of parts of the South and Midwest and killed more than a dozen people are becoming more common, and experts say the extreme weather events, which claim more lives than hurricanes and tornados, will likely increase in the future.

A heat dome that pressured the Texas power grid and killed 13 people there and another in Louisiana pushed eastward Thursday and was expected to be centered over the mid-South by the weekend. Heat index levels of up to 112 degrees (44 Celsius) were forecast in parts of Florida over the next few days.

Eleven of the heat-related deaths in Texas occurred in Webb County, which includes Laredo. The dead ranged in age from 60 to 80 years old, and many had other health conditions, according to the county medical examiner. The other two fatalities were Florida residents who died while hiking in extreme heat at Big Bend National Park.

Scientists and medical experts say such deaths caused by extreme heat will only increase in the U.S. each summer without more action to combat climate change that has pushed up temperatures, making people especially vulnerable in areas unaccustomed to warm weather.

“Here in Boston we prepare for snowstorms. Now we need to learn how to prepare for heat,” said Dr. Gaurab Basu, a primary care physician and the director of education and policy at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Planting more trees to increase shade in cities and investing in green technology like heat pumps for home cooling and heating could help, Basu said.

Extreme heat already is the deadliest of all weather events in the United States, including hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and flooding.

“Heat waves are the deadliest because they affect such large areas and can go on for days or weeks,” said Joellen Russell, a climate scientist who teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson and is currently on a Fulbright scholarship in Wellington, New Zealand. “And they catch people by surprise.”

Phoenix, the hottest large city in America, faces an excessive heat warning headed into the weekend. Dangerously hot conditions are forecast from Saturday through Tuesday, including temperatures of 107-115 degrees (41.6-46.1 Celsius) across south-central Arizona.

“Arizona already understands heat to a certain extent, but it’s getting hotter for us, too,” said Russell. “That means a lot of people will continue to die.”

Counting heat deaths has become a science in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes metro Phoenix. The county tallied 425 heat-associated deaths last year, a 25% increase over 2021.

Located in the Sonoran Desert, Maricopa County counts not just deaths due to exposure but also deaths in which heat is among several major contributing factors, including heart attacks and strokes.

The county’s Office of the Medical Examiner updates suspected and confirmed heat-associated deaths every week through the warm season, which runs from May through October. So far this season, there have been six heat-associated deaths in Maricopa County, home to nearly 4.5 million people.

Dr. Sameed Khatana, a staff cardiologist at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, said deaths in which heat contributed significantly to fatalities from causes like heart failure should also be considered to provide a more complete picture.

Khatana participated in research published last year that suggested that from 2008 and 2017 between 13,000 to 20,000 adult deaths were linked to extreme heat, about half due to heart disease.

Older people and those with diabetes, obesity, heart disease and other serious health conditions are most at risk, he said.

“Hurricanes, flooding and wildfires are very dramatic,” said Khatana. “Heat is harder to see and especially affects people who are socially isolated or living on the margins.”

The city of Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation has opened summertime shelters for homeless people, operates cooling centers in libraries and other community spaces to help people get out of the sun and distributes bottled water, hats and sunscreen. The city also has a “Cool Callers” program with volunteers dialing vulnerable residents who ask to be checked on during hot periods.

Even the Phoenix Zoo is taking measures to cool off the monkeys, big cats and rhinos, spraying them with water, delivering frozen treats, and providing shaded areas and cooled water pools.

Extreme heat deaths are a global problem.

Mexican health authorities this week said there have been at least 112 heat-related deaths so far this year, acknowledging for the first time the deadliness of a recent heat wave that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador previously dismissed as an invention of alarmists.

The report released Wednesday also shows a significant spike in heat-related fatalities in the last two weeks. So far this year, Mexico’s overall heat-related deaths are almost triple the figures seen in 2022.

A flash study released this spring said record-breaking April temperatures in Spain, Portugal and northern Africa were made 100 times more likely by human-caused climate change.

Deaths and widespread hospitalizations were caused by searing heat wave that broiled parts of southern Asia in April with temperatures of up to 113 degrees (45 Celsius) was made at least 30 times more likely by climate change, according to a rapid study by international scientists.
…

In the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, women are crafting products from pine needles as part of an initiative that aims at providing them with livelihood opportunities while reducing the risk of forest fires. Anjana Pasricha reports on one project in the district of Mandi. Video: Rakesh Kumar
…

SYDNEY – Australia on Saturday will become one of the first countries to recognize psychedelic drugs as medicines. In February, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, Australia’s medical regulator, sanctioned use of psychedelics for some mental health conditions. Experts agree that psychedelic-assisted therapies in Australia are in their infancy.

Starting Saturday, authorized psychiatrists in Australia will be able to prescribe methylenedioxy methamphetamine – MDMA, the active ingredient in such party drugs as ecstasy or molly — to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

They will also be allowed to prescribe psilocybin, a compound found in psychotropic “magic” mushrooms, to treat depression that has not responded to other therapies.

Susan Rossell, a cognitive neuropsychologist at Swinburne University in Melbourne, is conducting one of Australia’s biggest clinical trials of psilocybin. Preliminary results show significant improvements in some patients’ mental health while others have shown no signs of getting better.

Rossell told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that psychedelic therapies research is still in its early stages.

“We have been stuck for very many years in terms of mental health treatments for people with treatment-resistant conditions,” she said. “So, the fact that psychedelic medicines do seem to be working for a number of people is fantastic. However, they are not working for some people as well, and that is where I would note a great deal of caution in this field at the moment.”

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists has issued new guidelines for its members’ use of psychedelic drugs. They must only be administered in a hospital or clinic, where two psychotherapists must stay with the patient for six to eight hours to ensure their safety.

The organization has said that with a lack of mental health professionals in Australia, it is likely that few providers will be able to meet these conditions.

Other experts fear that the new regulations that permit the use of MDMA and psilocybin in Australia have been approved too quickly. They believe there is potential for psychedelic substances to provoke anxiety, panic or cause psychological damage to patients.

Australia’s official medical regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, approved the use of psychedelics to treat some mental health conditions in February, making the country one of the first in the world to recognize the drugs as medicines.

In announcing its decision, the regulators said the “benefits to patients and public health … outweigh the risks.”
…

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO — A team of Italian researchers reached the edge of space Thursday morning, flying aboard Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered plane as the company prepares for monthly commercial flights.

The flight launched from Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, with two Italian Air Force officers and an engineer with the National Research Council of Italy focusing on a series of microgravity experiments during their few minutes of weightless.

One wore a special suit that measured biometric data and physiological responses while another conducted tests using sensors to track heart rate, brain function and other metrics while in microgravity. The third studied how certain liquids and solids mix in that very weak gravity.

Virgin Galactic livestreamed the flight on its website, showing the moment when the ship released from its carrier plane and the rocket was ignited. The entire trip took about 90 minutes, with the plane’s touchdown on the runway prompting cheers and claps by Virgin Galactic staff.

With the ship’s copilots, it marked the most Italians in space at the same time. Colonel Walter Villadei, a space engineer with the Italian Air Force, celebrated by unfolding an Italian flag while weightless.

Next up for Virgin Galactic will be the first of hundreds of ticket holders, many who have been waiting years for their chance at weightlessness and to see the curvature of the Earth. Those commercial flights are expected to begin in August and will be scheduled monthly, the space tourism company said.

Virgin Galactic has been working for years to send paying passengers on short space trips and in 2021 finally won the federal government’s approval. The company completed its final test fight in May.

The Italian research flight was initially scheduled for the fall of 2021 but Virgin Galactic at the time said it was forced to push back its timeline due to a potential defect in a component used in its flight control system. Then the company spent months upgrading its rocket ship before resuming testing in early 2023.

After reaching an altitude of nearly 15,000 meters, Virgin Galactic’s space plane is released from a carrier aircraft and drops for a moment before igniting its rocket motor. The rocket shuts off once it reaches space, leaving passengers weight before the ship then glides back to the runway at Spaceport America.

Virgin Galactic has sold about 800 tickets over the past decade, with the initial batch going for $200,000 each. Tickets now cost $450,000 per person.

The company said early fliers have already received their seat assignments.
…

LONDON – One of the world’s most common artificial sweeteners is set to be declared a possible carcinogen next month by a leading global health body, according to two sources with knowledge of the process, pitting it against the food industry and regulators.

Aspartame, used in products from Coca-Cola diet sodas to Mars’ Extra chewing gum and some Snapple drinks, will be listed in July as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” for the first time by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization’s (WHO) cancer research arm, the sources said.

The IARC ruling, finalized earlier this month after a meeting of the group’s external experts, is intended to assess whether something is a potential hazard or not, based on all the published evidence.

It does not take into account how much of a product a person can safely consume. This advice for individuals comes from a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, known as JECFA (the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization’s Expert Committee on Food Additives), alongside determinations from national regulators.

However, similar IARC rulings in the past for different substances have raised concerns among consumers about their use, led to lawsuits, and pressured manufacturers to recreate recipes and swap to alternatives. That has led to criticism that the IARC’s assessments can be confusing to the public.

JECFA, the WHO committee on additives, is also reviewing aspartame use this year. Its meeting began at the end of June, and it is due to announce its findings on the same day that the IARC makes public its decision – on July 14.

Since 1981, JECFA has said aspartame is safe to consume within accepted daily limits. For example, an adult weighing 60 kilograms would have to drink between 12 and 36 cans of diet soda – depending on the amount of aspartame in the beverage – every day to be at risk. Its view has been widely shared by national regulators, including in the United States and Europe.

An IARC spokesperson said both the IARC and JECFA committees’ findings were confidential until July, but added they were “complementary,” with IARC’s conclusion representing “the first fundamental step to understand carcinogenicity.” The additives committee “conducts risk assessment, which determines the probability of a specific type of harm (e.g., cancer) to occur under certain conditions and levels of exposure.”

However, industry and regulators fear that holding both processes at around the same time could be confusing, according to letters from U.S. and Japanese regulators seen by Reuters.

“We kindly ask both bodies to coordinate their efforts in reviewing aspartame to avoid any confusion or concerns among the public,” Nozomi Tomita, an official from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, wrote in a letter dated March 27 to WHO’s deputy director general, Zsuzsanna Jakab.

The letter, reviewed by Reuters, also called for the conclusions of both bodies to be released on the same day, as is now happening. The Japanese mission in Geneva, where the WHO is based, did not respond to a request for comment.

Debate

The IARC’s rulings can have huge impact. In 2015, its committee concluded that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic.” Years later, even as other bodies like the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) contested this assessment, companies were still feeling the effects of the decision. Germany’s Bayer in 2021 lost its third appeal against U.S. court verdicts that awarded damages to customers blaming their cancers on use of its glyphosate-based weedkillers.

The IARC’s decisions have also faced criticism for sparking needless alarm over hard to avoid substances or situations. It has previously put working overnight and consuming red meat into its “probably cancer-causing” class, and using mobile phones as “possibly cancer-causing,” similar to aspartame.

“IARC is not a food safety body, and their review of aspartame is not scientifically comprehensive and is based heavily on widely discredited research,” said Frances Hunt-Wood, the secretary general of the International Sweeteners Association (ISA).

The body, whose members include Mars Wrigley, a Coca-Cola unit and Cargill, said it had “serious concerns with the IARC review, which may mislead consumers.”

Aspartame has been extensively studied for years. Last year, an observational study in France among 100,000 adults showed that people who consumed larger amounts of artificial sweeteners – including aspartame – had a slightly higher cancer risk.

It followed a study from the Ramazzini Institute in Italy in the early 2000s, which reported that some cancers in mice and rats were linked to aspartame.

However, the first study could not prove that aspartame caused the increased cancer risk, and questions have been raised about the methodology of the second study, including by EFSA, which assessed it.

Aspartame is authorized for use globally by regulators who have reviewed all the available evidence, and major food and beverage makers have for decades defended their use of the ingredient. The IARC said it had assessed 1,300 studies in its June review.

Recent recipe tweaks by soft drinks giant Pepsico demonstrate the struggle the industry has when it comes to balancing taste preferences with health concerns. Pepsico removed aspartame from sodas in 2015, bringing it back a year later, only to remove it again in 2020.

Listing aspartame as a possible carcinogen is intended to motivate more research, said the sources close to the IARC, which will help agencies, consumers and manufacturers draw firmer conclusions.

But it will also likely ignite debate once again over the IARC’s role, as well as the safety of sweeteners more generally.

Last month, the WHO published guidelines advising consumers not to use non-sugar sweeteners for weight control. The guidelines caused a furor in the food industry, which argues they can be helpful for consumers wanting to reduce the amount of sugar in their diet. 
…

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called godfathers of artificial intelligence, on Wednesday urged governments to step in and make sure that machines do not take control of society.

Hinton made headlines in May when he announced he had quit Google after a decade of work to speak more freely on the dangers of AI, shortly after the release of ChatGPT captured the imagination of the world.

The highly respected AI scientist, who is based at the University of Toronto, was speaking to a packed audience at the Collision tech conference in the Canadian city.

The conference brought together more than 30,000 startup founders, investors and tech workers, most looking to learn how to ride the AI wave and not hear a lesson on its dangers.

“Before AI is smarter than us, I think the people developing it should be encouraged to put a lot of work into understanding how it might try and take control away,” Hinton said.

“Right now there are 99 very smart people trying to make AI better and one very smart person trying to figure out how to stop it taking over and maybe you want to be more balanced,” he said.

AI could deepen inequality, says Hinton

Hinton warned that the risks of AI should be taken seriously despite his critics who believe he is overplaying the risks.

“I think it’s important that people understand that this is not science fiction, this is not just fearmongering,” he insisted. “It is a real risk that we must think about, and we need to figure out in advance how to deal with it.”

Hinton also expressed concern that AI would deepen inequality, with the massive productivity gain from its deployment going to the benefit of the rich, and not workers.

“The wealth isn’t going to go to the people doing the work. It is going to go into making the rich richer and not the poorer and that’s very bad for society,” he added.

He also pointed to the danger of fake news created by ChatGPT-style bots and said he hoped that AI-generated content could be marked in a way similar to how central banks watermark cash money.

“It’s very important to try, for example, to mark everything that is fake as fake. Whether we can do that technically, I don’t know,” he said.

The European Union is considering such a technique in its AI Act, a legislation that will set the rules for AI in Europe, which is being negotiated by lawmakers.

‘Overpopulation on Mars’

Hinton’s list of AI dangers contrasted with conference discussions that were less over safety and threats, and more about seizing the opportunity created in the wake of ChatGPT.

Venture Capitalist Sarah Guo said doom and gloom talk of AI as an existential threat was premature and compared it to “talking about overpopulation on Mars,” quoting another AI guru, Andrew Ng.

She also warned against “regulatory capture” that would see government intervention protect the incumbents before it had a chance to benefit sectors such as health, education or science.

Opinions differed on whether the current generative AI giants, mainly Microsoft backed OpenAI and Google, would remain unmatched or whether new actors will expand the field with their own models and innovations.

“In five years, I still imagine that if you want to go and find the best, most accurate, most advanced general model, you’re probably going to still have to go to one of the few companies that have the capital to do it,” said Leigh Marie Braswell of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

Zachary Bratun-Glennon of Gradient Ventures said he foresaw a future where “there are going to be millions of models across a network much like we have a network of websites today.”
…

TERRA CEIA ISLAND, FLORIDA — The Florida Health Department has issued a statewide mosquito-borne illness advisory after four locally contracted cases of malaria were reported along the Gulf Coast south of Tampa. 

On Monday, a health alert issued by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also noted that another case had been detected in Texas, marking the first time there has been a local spread of malaria in the United States in 20 years. 

The four residents in Sarasota County received treatment and have recovered, according to the state’s Health Department advisory. Malaria, caused by a parasite that spreads through bites from Anopheles mosquitoes, causes fever, chills, sweating, nausea and vomiting, and headaches. It is not spread person to person. 

It’s the threat of the mosquito-borne illness that concerns Kathleen Gibson-Dee, who lives on Terra Ceia Island, which is about 32 kilometers north of Sarasota County. 

Even though no malaria cases have been reported in Manatee County, where Terra Ceia is located, Gibson-Dee said that she’s now routinely using bug repellent while working in her garden. 

“I don’t go out without it,” she told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “And we don’t go out in the evening because you can see clouds and clouds of bugs now. They may not all be mosquitoes, but there’s certainly mosquitos out there.” 

Another resident, Tom Lyons, says news of the malaria cases “makes me take mosquito protection a little more seriously.” 

The mosquito population thrives in Terra Ceia because “it’s an island surrounded by a lot of shallow water and mangroves, and ideal places for mosquitoes,” Lyons said. 

Stepping up control efforts

Officials in Manatee County have ramped up efforts to control the mosquito population. 

Chris Lesser, director of the Manatee County mosquito control district, said they’re primarily using helicopters to combat the mosquito population because they cover between 6,070 to 8,082 hectares in one night. A truck can only cover around 404 hectares a night, he said. 

“We really want to focus on killing the adult mosquito before they have the opportunity to feed on one person that may be infected with malaria and then transmit that disease to a second person,” Lesser said. 

He said the time frame for when a mosquito can become infected to when it can transmit the disease to a person is about 14 days. 

“So, we’re trying to get in there about once every seven to 10 days and really knock down the mosquito population. And that process will continue until the public health alert that we’re currently under is lifted,” Lesser said. 

“It’s a curtain,” he continued. “We’re trying to keep the malaria mosquitos from coming into our county through our southern border by using aggressive mosquito control activities.” 

Officials in Sarasota County area also are using similar tactics to control mosquitos, the county’s health department said in an advisory. 

The initial malaria advisory was issued in Sarasota County after the first case was reported in late May. That was followed by a second case, and then two more, said Jae Williams, the press secretary for the Florida Department of Health. 

“As soon as it crossed over from one to two confirmed cases, it progressed to an alert,” Williams said, comparing it to the system of issuing a hurricane watch versus a hurricane warning — when a storm is imminent. 

“Listen, the conditions are favorable,” Williams continued. “It’s not just some rogue one mosquito. People need to be paying attention.” 

Williams said health officials are being proactive. 

“We know we are going into the Fourth of July holiday. We know the summer’s only getting hotter and wetter over the next couple of months,” Williams said. “So, we just wanted to give Floridians a big kind of heads up, put the whole state on notice.” 

About 2,000 U.S. cases of malaria are diagnosed each year — the vast majority in travelers coming from countries where malaria commonly spreads. 

Since 1992, there have been 11 outbreaks involving malaria from mosquitoes in the U.S. The last one occurred in 2003 in Palm Beach County, Florida, where eight cases were reported.
…