A report by leading United Nations agencies says global progress in reducing maternal and newborn deaths has stalled for nearly a decade largely due to underinvestment in providing the health care.

The report shows more than 4.5 million women and babies die every year in pregnancy, childbirth or the first weeks after birth — equivalent to one death every seven seconds — “mostly from preventable or treatable causes if proper care was available.”

Allisyn Moran, unit head for maternal health at the World Health Organization, said all the deaths have similar risk factors and causes.

While the trends pre-date the coronavirus pandemic, she said “COVID-19-related service disruptions and funding diversions, rising poverty and worsening humanitarian crises are intensifying pressures on already overstretched maternity and newborn health services.”

Since 2018, the report finds, more than three-quarters of all conflict-affected and sub-Saharan African countries report funding for maternal and newborn health has declined and that only one in 10 of more than 100 countries surveyed reported they had the money needed to implement their current plans.

Speaking in Cape Town, South Africa, the site of a major global conference on maternal health, Moran said that a lack of investment in primary health care risked lowering survival prospects.

“For instance, while prematurity is now the leading cause of all under-5 deaths globally, less than a third of countries report having sufficient newborn care units to treat small and sick babies,” she said. “Two-thirds of emergency childbirth facilities in sub-Saharan Africa lack essential resources like medicines and supplies, water, electricity or staffing for 24-hour care.”

Steven Lauwerier, UNICEF director of health, agreed with that assessment. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, he said “babies, children, and women who were already exposed to threats to their well-being, especially those living in fragile countries and emergencies, are facing the heaviest consequences of decreased spending and efforts on providing quality and accessible healthcare.”

The report, “Improving Maternal and Newborn Health and Survival and Reducing Stillbirth,” found that in sub-Saharan Africa and central and southern Asia, the regions with the greatest number of newborn and maternal deaths, fewer than 60 percent of women receive even four of the WHO’s recommended eight prenatal checks.

“The death of any woman or young girl during pregnancy or childbirth is a serious violation of their human rights,” said Julitta Onabanjo, director of the technical division at the U.N. Population Fund.  “It also reflects the urgent need to scale-up access to quality sexual and reproductive health services as part of universal health coverage and primary health care, especially in communities where maternal mortality rates have stagnated or even risen during recent years.”

The authors of the report agree that women and babies must have quality, affordable health care before, during and after childbirth, as well as access to family planning services to increase survival rates.

They add that “more skilled and motivated health workers, especially midwives, are needed, alongside essential medicine and supplies, safe water, and reliable electricity.”

The stated aim of health leaders from over 30 countries attending the week-long conference is to develop plans that accelerate progress where it is most needed.

Anshu Banerjee, the WHO director of maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and aging, is in no doubt as to where that is. “Pregnant women and newborns continue to die at unacceptably high rates worldwide,” he said, “and the COVID-19 pandemic has created further setbacks to providing them with the healthcare they need.”

“If we wish to see different results, we must do things differently,” he said. “More and smarter investments in primary health care are needed now so that every woman and baby — no matter where they live — has the best chance of health and survival.”
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Providing simple and cheap healthcare measures to pregnant women — such as offering aspirin — could prevent more than a million babies from being stillborn or dying as newborns in developing countries every year, new research said on Tuesday.   

An international team of researchers also estimated that one quarter of the world’s babies are born either premature or underweight, adding that almost no progress is being made in this area.    

The researchers called for governments and organizations to ramp up the care women and babies receive during pregnancy and birth in 81 low- and middle-income countries.   

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Timothy Obiezu

Eight proven and easily implementable measures could prevent more than 565,000 stillbirths in these countries, according to a series of papers published in the Lancet journal.    

The measures included providing micronutrient, protein and energy supplements, low-dose aspirin, the hormone progesterone, education on the harms of smoking, and treatments for malaria, syphilis and bacteria in urine.   

If steroids were made available to pregnant women and doctors did not immediately clamp the umbilical cord, the deaths of more than 475,000 newborn babies could also be prevented, the research found.    

Implementing these changes would cost an estimated $1.1 billion, the researchers said.   

This is “a fraction of what other health programs receive”, said Per Ashorn, a lead study author and professor at Finland’s Tampere University.    

‘Shockingly’ common 

Another study author, Joy Lawn of the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told AFP that the researchers used a new definition for babies born premature or underweight.   

She said the traditional way to determine a baby had a low birthweight — if it was born weighing under 2.5 kilograms — was “a bit randomly selected” by a Finnish doctor in 1919.   

 This “very blunt measure” has remained the benchmark for more than a century, despite plentiful evidence that “those babies are not all the same”, Lawn said.   

The researchers analyzed a database that included 160 million live births from 2000 to 2020 to work out how often babies are born “too soon and too small”, she said.   

“Quite shockingly, we found that this is much more common once you start to think about it in a more nuanced way.”   

The researchers estimated that 35.3 million — or one in four — of the babies born worldwide in 2020 were either premature or too small, classifying them under the new term “small vulnerable newborns.”   

While most of the babies were born in southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, Lawn emphasized that every country was affected.    

One reason progress has flatlined is that these problems tend “to be something that happens to families and women with less of a voice”, Lawn said.   

For example, pregnant African American women in the United States received a lower level of care than other groups, she added. 
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Mexican officials and the conservation group Sea Shepherd said Monday that experts would set out in two ships in a bid to locate the few remaining vaquita marina, the world’s most endangered marine mammal. 

Mexico’s environment secretary said experts from the United States, Canada and Mexico will use binoculars, sighting devices and acoustic monitors to try to pinpoint the location of the tiny elusive porpoises. The species cannot be captured, held or bred in captivity. 

The trip will start Wednesday and run to May 26 in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, the only place the vaquita lives. The group will travel in a Sea Shepherd vessel and a Mexican boat and try to sight vaquitas. As few as eight of the creatures are believed to remain. 

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Annika Hammerschlag

Illegal gillnet fishing traps and kills the vaquita. Fishermen set the nets to catch totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is considered a delicacy in China and can fetch thousands of dollars per pound (0.45 kilograms). 

Sea Shepherd has been working in the Gulf alongside the Mexican navy to discourage illegal fishing in the one area where vaquitas were last seen. The area is known as the “zero tolerance” zone, and fishing is supposedly not allowed there. However, illegal fishing boats are regularly seen there, and so Mexico has been unable to completely stop them. 

Pritam Singh, Sea Shepherd’s chairman, said that a combination of patrols and the Mexican navy’s sinking of concrete blocks with hooks to snare illegal nets has reduced the number of hours that fishing boats spend in the restricted zone by 79% in 2022, compared with the previous year. 

Singh said that “the last 18 months have been incredibly impactful and encouraging,” while noting that “the road ahead for saving this species is long.” 

SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Henry Wilkins

The last such sighting expedition in 2021 yielded probable sightings of between five and 13 vaquitas, a decline from the previous survey in 2019. The porpoises are so small and so elusive, and are usually seen from so far away, that it is hard for observers to be certain that they saw a vaquita, count how many they saw or determine whether they saw the same animal twice. 

Illegal fishing itself has impeded population calculations in the past. 

According to a report published in 2022, both the 2019 and 2021 surveys “were hindered by the presence of many illegal fishing boats with gillnets in the water. Some areas could not be surveyed at all on some days due to the density of illegal fishing.” 

The government’s protection efforts have been uneven, at best, and often face violent opposition from local fishermen. 

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration has largely declined to spend money to compensate fishermen for staying out of the vaquita refuge and not using gillnets, or to monitor the fishing boats or the areas they launch from. 
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Funding for a global initiative aimed at creating more environmentally friendly and climate-resilient farming has grown to $13 billion, co-leaders the United States and the United Arab Emirates said Monday.

That money means the Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate, launched in 2021, now exceeds its $10 billion target for the COP28 climate talks, to be hosted by the UAE in November and December.

“Climate change continues to impact longstanding agricultural practices in every country and a strong global commitment is necessary to face the challenges of climate change head-on,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

Vilsack and his Emirati counterpart Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri, the UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment, are co-hosting an AIM for Climate Summit in Washington this week.

“I think the beauty of this is that of the $13 billion, $10 billion comes from the government and three billion is coming from the private sector,” said Almheiri.

Between a quarter and a third of global greenhouse emissions come from food systems, from factors like deforestation to make way for agricultural land, methane emissions from livestock, the energy costs associated with supply chains and energy used by consumers to store and prepare food.

At the same time, the changing climate is threatening food security across the world, as global warming increases the frequency of punishing heat waves, droughts and extreme weather events.

Projects underway include developing newer, greener fertilizers that use less fossil fuels to create, and returning to so-called “regenerative agriculture” practices that restore soil biodiversity, thus improving both yield and carbon sequestration while reducing the need for fertilization.

Artificial intelligence-enhanced tools meanwhile are being developed to take data from sources including satellites and ground sensors to then accurately estimate how carbon-rich any given plot of land is, which could help farmers boost soil health or enable the creation of a viable carbon offset market.

Also on the group’s agenda are efforts to adopt more efficient farming techniques and to switch to growing crops that require less water in some climate-impacted areas.

“Black farmers, Indigenous farmers, low-income farmers, they need access to this innovation as well,” former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and climate activist told the summit’s opening meeting.

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, as well as ministers from Britain, the European Commission, Australia, Kenya, Mexico and Panama are all set to address the conference.
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For the first time, the U.S. government will pay for a large study measuring whether overdoses can be prevented by so-called safe injection sites, places where people can use heroin and other illegal drugs and be revived if they take too much.

The grant provides more than $5 million over four years to New York University and Brown University to study two sites in New York City and one opening next year in Providence, Rhode Island.

Researchers hope to enroll 1,000 adult drug users to study the effectiveness of the sites to prevent overdoses, to estimate their costs and to gauge potential savings for the health care and criminal justice systems.

The universities announced the grant Monday. The money will not be used to operate the sites, the universities said.

With U.S. drug overdose deaths reaching nearly 107,000 in 2021, supporters contend safe injection sites, also called overdose preventions centers, can save lives and connect people with addiction treatment, mental health services and medical care.

Opponents worry the sites encourage drug use and that they will lead to the deterioration of surrounding neighborhoods.

“There is a lot of discussion about overdose prevention centers, but ultimately, we need data to see if they are working or not, and what impact they may have on the community,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which awarded the grant.

Sites operate in 14 countries, including Canada, Australia and France, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, a group working for decriminalization and safe drug use policies.

In the U.S., New York City opened the first publicly recognized safe injection site in 2021, and Rhode Island became the first state to authorize them that year.

States including Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico have considered allowing them. The governors of California and Vermont vetoed bills allowing safe injection sites last year, and Pennsylvania’s Senate last week voted for a ban on them.

The grant marks another move by the Biden administration toward what is known as harm reduction, a strategy focused on preventing death and illness in drug users while helping them get care, as opposed to punishment.

The White House’s drug control strategy is the first to emphasize harm reduction, and the Justice Department has signaled it will allow safe injection sites.

In December, the National Institutes of Health established a harm reduction research network to study programs providing services and supplies, including naloxone, a drug that can reverse overdoses, and materials to test drugs for fentanyl, a powerful opioid driving record numbers of overdoses. The new study on safe injection sites will be part of that project.
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Most Democrats and Republicans agree that the federal government should better regulate the biggest technology companies, particularly social media platforms. But there is little consensus on how it should be done. 

Concerns have skyrocketed about China’s ownership of TikTok, and parents have grown increasingly worried about what their children are seeing online. Lawmakers have introduced a slew of bipartisan bills, boosting hopes of compromise. But any effort to regulate the mammoth industry would face major obstacles as technology companies have fought interference. 

Noting that many young people are struggling, President Joe Biden said in his February State of the Union address that “it’s time” to pass bipartisan legislation to impose stricter limits on the collection of personal data and ban targeted advertising to children. 

“We must finally hold social media companies accountable for the experiment they are running on our children for profit,” Biden said.

A look at some of the areas of potential regulation: 

Children’s safety

Several House and Senate bills would try to make social media, and the internet in general, safer for children who will inevitably be online. Lawmakers cite numerous examples of teenagers who have taken their own lives after cyberbullying or have died engaging in dangerous behavior encouraged on social media. 

In the Senate, at least two bills are focused on children’s online safety. Legislation by Senators Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, approved by the chamber’s Commerce Committee last year would require social media companies to be more transparent about their operations and enable child safety settings by default. Minors would have the option to disable addictive product features and algorithms that push certain content. 

The idea, the senators say, is that platforms should be “safe by design.” The legislation, which Blumenthal and Blackburn reintroduced last week, would also obligate social media companies to prevent certain dangers to minors — including promotion of suicide, disordered eating, substance abuse, sexual exploitation and other illegal behaviors. 

A second bill introduced last month by four senators — Democratic Senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Katie Britt of Alabama — would take a more aggressive approach, prohibiting children under 13 from using social media platforms and requiring parental consent for teenagers. It would also prohibit companies from recommending content through algorithms for users under 18.

Critics of the bills, including some civil rights groups and advocacy groups aligned with tech companies, say the proposals could threaten teens’ online privacy and prevent them from accessing content that could help them, such as resources for those considering suicide or grappling with their sexual and gender identity. 

“Lawmakers should focus on educating and empowering families to control their online experience,” said Carl Szabo of NetChoice, a group aligned with Meta, TikTok, Google and Amazon, among other companies. 

Data privacy 

Biden’s State of the Union remarks appeared to be a nod toward legislation by Senators Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, that would expand child privacy protections online, prohibiting companies from collecting personal data from younger teenagers and banning targeted advertising to children and teens. The bill, also reintroduced last week, would create an “eraser button” allowing parents and kids to eliminate personal data, when possible. 

A broader House effort would attempt to give adults as well as children more control over their data with what lawmakers call a “national privacy standard.” Legislation that passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee last year would try to minimize data collected and make it illegal to target ads to children, usurping state laws that have tried to put privacy restrictions in place. But the bill, which would have also given consumers more rights to sue over privacy violations, never reached the House floor. 

Prospects for the House legislation are unclear now that Republicans have the majority.

 

TikTok, China 

Lawmakers introduced a raft of bills to either ban TikTok or make it easier to ban it after a combative March House hearing in which lawmakers from both parties grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew over his company’s ties to China’s communist government, data security and harmful content on the app. 

Chew attempted to assure lawmakers that the hugely popular video-sharing app prioritizes user safety and should not be banned because of its Chinese connections. But the testimony gave new momentum to the efforts. 

Soon after the hearing, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, tried to force a Senate vote on legislation that would ban TikTok from operating in the United States. But he was blocked by a fellow Republican, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who said that a ban would violate the Constitution and anger the millions of voters who use the app. 

Another bill sponsored by Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida would, like Hawley’s bill, ban U.S. economic transactions with TikTok, but it would also create a new framework for the executive branch to block any foreign apps deemed hostile. His bill is co-sponsored by Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, and Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican. 

There is broad Senate support for bipartisan legislation sponsored by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and South Dakota Senatpr John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, that does not specifically call out TikTok but would give the Commerce Department power to review and potentially restrict foreign threats to technology platforms. 

The White House has signaled it would back that bill, but its prospects are uncertain. 

Artificial intelligence 

A newer question for Congress is whether lawmakers should move to regulate artificial intelligence as rapidly developing and potentially revolutionary products like AI chatbot ChatGPT begin to enter the marketplace and can in many ways mimic human behavior. 

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York has made the emerging technology a priority, arguing that the United States needs to stay ahead of China and other countries that are eyeing regulations on AI products. He has been working with AI experts and has released a general framework of what regulation could look like, including increased disclosure of the people and data involved in developing the technology, more transparency and explanation for how the bots arrive at responses.

The White House has been focused on the issue as well, with a recent announcement of a $140 million investment to establish seven new AI research institutes. Vice President Kamala Harris met Thursday with the heads of Google, Microsoft and other companies developing AI products.
…

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says America’s leading cause of overdose deaths is synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. U.S. law enforcement says illicit fentanyl is cheaply made from chemicals mostly coming from China, trafficked through Mexico, and then smuggled into the United States. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya looks at fentanyl in Washington state in a series that today explores how stigmas about fentanyl abuse complicate treatment for addicts.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says America’s leading cause of overdose deaths is synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin. U.S. law enforcement says illicit fentanyl is cheaply made from chemicals mostly coming from China, trafficked through Mexico, and then smuggled into the United States, says U.S. law enforcement. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya looks at fentanyl in a series from the state of Washington that concludes by showing how breaking free from addiction can be a lifelong journey.
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“Being in hospitals during the early days of COVID-19 was terrifying, like I was going to war. But as far as I’m concerned, those days are done, Danielle King, a nurse working in Luling, Louisiana, told VOA.

“I think it’s pretty obvious that the pandemic was over a year ago,” she added. “The government’s lagging behind that reality, so maybe they’ll finally catch up.”

The U.S. government will take a big step in that direction Thursday as Washington officially declares an end to the coronavirus pandemic by allowing the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) to expire.

The emergency was first instituted more than three years ago to provide funding and resources that would keep Americans safe during the then-growing global pandemic.

While many health care officials agree the time is right to end the national emergency and let state and local governments allocate resources to the COVID-19 response, some worry the move will harm Americans — particularly the impoverished — who will be less likely to afford vaccinations and risk being dropped from government programs such as Medicaid.

“It’s regrettable, but we have no certainty on what impact the PHE’s end will have on the public,” said Amy Pisani, CEO of Vaccinate Your Family, a national nonprofit organization.

“Public health advocates haven’t had a seat at the table to discuss how the end of the PHE declaration will look,” she said. “We know, for example, that COVID-19 vaccinations have been essential in keeping us safe, but how will uninsured adults access and afford the vaccines when the PHE is done? How long will free vaccines be available? Will it vary from region to region? We have no idea. All we know is it’s going to affect a lot of people.”

‘No longer a threat’

The PHE was first declared in January 2020 by former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

Since entering office in 2021, President Joe Biden has repeatedly extended the emergency. Many public health officials, including Dr. Jeffrey Elder, associate chief medical officer for emergency management at LCMC Health in New Orleans, Louisiana, believe the emergency allowed the government to take sweeping steps to support the country’s economic, health and welfare systems throughout the crisis.

“The PHE supported and funded nationwide coronavirus testing, the research and distribution of vaccinations and treatments, telehealth services, disaster responses, hospital-at-home services, nurse aide training for nursing homes and so much more,” Elder told VOA.

“And it gave our patients the comfort of knowing they couldn’t be kicked off their Medicaid insurance coverage during the emergency,” he added. “It was invaluable.”

Most public health officials, however, acknowledge the coronavirus no longer presents the crisis it once did, and the PHE may no longer be necessary.

“While we continue to see illness and deaths from COVID-19, it is no longer the threat it once was, thanks to testing, vaccines and treatment,” said Dr. Susan Kansagra, director of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services Division of Public Health.

She believes COVID-19 will soon be treated as routinely as other respiratory illnesses the country regularly faces.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said this is a good thing.

“To call this an emergency is to elevate it above other viruses that are causing basically the same number of hospitalizations and deaths,” he said.

“I think there’s a danger to that, and I see that danger with some of my friends,” Offit said. “When their 8-year-old is sick they say, ‘Oh, I hope it’s not COVID,’ and then they test them. If they test negative, they just send them to school or to their grandparents or wherever they are going, as if it’s OK to pass on whatever disease they do have. Maybe putting coronavirus on the level of these other diseases will encourage us to take their spread all a little more seriously, as well.”

‘Wide-ranging chaos’

Coronavirus cases and deaths continue to drop, but thousands of Americans are still affected by the disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,773 people died of COVID-19 during the week ending April 5.

Some fear that with so many people still being impacted, suddenly ending the declaration could create a new set of problems.

“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system — for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy earlier this year.

Dr. Joe McLaughlin, Alaska state epidemiologist, believes ending the PHE can reduce government spending and help the country return to a more traditional health care model. But he warns of downsides.

“We’re going to see fewer health care provider flexibilities, a reduction in access to over-the-counter tests and a decrease in some social safety net benefits. This is definitely going to affect people,” he said.

Of particular concern to health care providers is that states will no longer be forbidden from dropping enrollees from Medicaid, a federal health care program for the poor and disadvantaged, as they were during the PHE. In the months following the emergency’s conclusion, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million of America’s most vulnerable will lose their Medicaid coverage.

Additionally, it is expected that COVID-19 tests and vaccinations will no longer be offered free of charge. Once the government stops buying vaccines, the cost is expected to skyrocket. Pfizer announced it could charge as much as $130 per dose.

Challenge and opportunity

“I think it’s the right time to end it,” New Orleans nurse Brandon Legnion said of the PHE.

“I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of a single COVID-positive admission at our hospital in the last six months,” he told VOA. “The demand for PPE [personal protective equipment] and vaccines are way down, so maybe it’s time to treat coronavirus patients with the same well-researched protocols we use for other airborne transmitted diseases like tuberculosis or varicella [chickenpox].”

Ending the PHE will restructure the federal government’s COVID-19 response as an endemic, rather than a pandemic, managed through government agencies’ normal authorities. In addition to tapering coronavirus relief funds, the development of vaccines and treatments will be shifted away from federal government control.

State health department officials say the transition will be a challenge, but they are ready.

“We’ve been preparing for the possibility of the end of the federal public health emergency for some time now, and we released our state’s plan in a roadmap last year,” said AnneMarie Harper, communications director at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

“It’s a sustainable, continued response to COVID-19 that features partnerships between public and private entities that ensure all Coloradans are being taken care of, including those without insurance,” she said.

In Maryland, similar work has been done to prepare for what has become a critical transition in the country’s health care system.

Chase Cook, acting director of communications at the Maryland Department of Health, said ending the PHE makes sense because it aligns with a decrease in COVID-19 hospitalization and severity, as well as an increasing integration of coronavirus-related services into existing public health infrastructure.

“The end of the public health emergency can be seen as a challenge,” Cook told VOA, “but it’s also an opportunity … to continue responding to the effects of the pandemic on public health, to strengthen relationships within the health care system, to maintain public-private partnerships, to grow the public health workforce, and to build on renewed efforts to decrease health disparities in Maryland. It’s an opportunity, and we’re ready.” 
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Mohammed Azhar holds his baby niece next to a storm drain full of plastic and stinking black sludge, testament to India’s failure to treat nearly two-thirds of its urban sewage.

“We stay inside our homes. We fall sick if we go out,” the 21-year-old told AFP in the Delhi neighborhood of Seelampur, where open gutters packed with plastic and sickly greyish water flow alongside the narrow lanes.

“It stinks. It attracts mosquitoes. We catch diseases and the kids keep falling sick,” he added. “There is no one to clean the filth.”

India at the end of April was projected to have overtaken China as the world’s most populous country, according to the United Nations, with almost 1.43 billion people.

Its urban population is predicted to explode in the coming decades, with over 270 million more people forecast to live in its cities by 2040.

But of the 72 billion liters of sewage currently generated in urban centers every day, 45 billion liters — enough to fill 18,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — aren’t treated, according to government figures for 2020-21.

India’s sewerage system does not connect to about two-thirds of its urban homes, according to the National Fecal Sludge and Septage Management Alliance (NFSSM).

Many of the sewage treatment plants in operation don’t comply with standards, including 26 out of Delhi’s 35 facilities, according to media reports.

Coupled with huge volumes of industrial effluent, the sewage is causing disease, polluting India’s waterways, killing wildlife and seeping into groundwater.

Ecologically dead

Although India has made major progress in reducing child mortality, diarrhea — caused mostly by contaminated water and food — remains a leading killer.

More than 55,000 children under five died of diarrhea across India in 2019, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal BMC Public Health.

The Yamuna in Delhi is one of the world’s filthiest rivers and is considered ecologically dead in places, although people still wash clothes and take ritual baths in it.

It often billows with white foam, and facilities processing drinking water from the river for Delhi’s 20 million people regularly shut down because of dangerous ammonia levels.

Despite some bright spots, as well as efforts to plant more trees alongside rivers, the situation elsewhere is often no better in big cities including Mumbai and Chennai.

In Bengaluru, massive Bellandur Lake has on occasion caught fire when methane, generated by bacteria feasting on sewage in the oxygen-depleted water, ignited.

Water crisis

Mridula Ramesh, author of a book about India’s water woes who lives in a “nearly” net-zero-waste home, said properly treating sewage into useable water would help solve the crisis.

According to the World Bank, India is one of the most “water-stressed” countries in the world, with plummeting water tables and increasingly erratic monsoon rains.

Chennai nearly ran out of water briefly in 2019, and other cities may see similar calamities in the coming years due to excessive groundwater pumping and rainfall volatility.

“India is headed for a water crisis. Sewage can so easily be co-opted to fight that and help us to a very large extent solve the problem in our cities,” Ramesh told AFP.

This could be achieved with decentralized treatment plants partially funded by the private sector or non-governmental organizations, with some of the fully treated sewage reused or released into local lakes.

“India’s water is so seasonal. Many cities in India get 50 rain days… but sewage is available every day because you go to the bathroom every day… It’s such a powerful weapon,” she said.

For Khalil Ahmad, standing by the revolting open drain in Seelampur as flies buzz around, a solution can’t come soon enough.

“Children keep falling sick… If they don’t get treatment and medicine, the children will die,” he told AFP. 
…

China has approved the safety of a gene-edited soybean, its first approval of the technology in a crop, as the country increasingly looks to science to boost food production.

The soybean, developed by privately owned Shandong Shunfeng Biotechnology Co. Ltd., has two modified genes, significantly raising the level of healthy fat oleic acid in the plant.

The safety certificate has been approved for five years from April 21, according to a document published last week by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

Unlike genetic modification, which introduces foreign genes into a plant, gene editing alters existing genes.

The technology is considered to be less risky than GMOs and is more lightly regulated in some countries, including China, which published rules on gene-editing last year.

“The approval of the safety certificate is a shot in the arm for the Shunfeng team,” said the firm in a statement to Reuters on Thursday.

Shunfeng claims to be the first company in China seeking to commercialize gene-edited crops.

It is currently researching around 20 other gene-edited crops, including higher yield rice, wheat and corn, herbicide-resistant rice and soybeans and vitamin C-rich lettuce, said a company representative.

United States-based company Calyxt also developed a high oleic soybean, producing a healthy oil that was the first gene-edited food to be approved in the U.S. in 2019.

Several additional steps are needed before China’s farmers can plant the novel soybean, including approvals of seed varieties with the tweaked genes.

The approval comes as trade tensions, erratic weather and war in major grain exporter Ukraine have increased concerns in Beijing over feeding the country’s 1.4 billion people.

A growing middle class is also facing a surge in diet-related disease.

China is promoting GMO crops too, starting large-scale trials of GM corn this year.

Getting gene-edited crops onto the market is expected to be faster however, given fewer steps in the regulatory process.

Aside from the United States, Japan also has approved gene-edited foods, including healthier tomatoes and faster-growing fish.
…

The World Health Organization has declared the COVID-19 pandemic to be over as a global health emergency. 

 

“However, that does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said Friday. ‘This virus is here to stay. It is killing, and it is still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths.” 

 

The first known outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in November 2019 in Wuhan, China. When the WHO declared COVID a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020, there were fewer than 100 reported cases, and no reported deaths outside China. 

 

In the three years since then, the number of global COVID deaths reported to WHO has risen to nearly 7 million, though the true death toll, according to Tedros, is several times higher, reaching at least 20 million. 

 

“COVID-19 has turned our world upside down,” he said, severely disrupting health systems, causing severe economic and social upheaval, and plunging millions into poverty.  

 

But for more than a year now, he said, “the pandemic has been on a downward trend, with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing.” 

 

He noted these were among the many reasons he decided to take the advice of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee to lower the level of alarm and declare an end to COVID-19 as a public health emergency of international concern. 

 

Didier Houssin, chair of the IHR committee, said only two or three people on the 18-member committee displayed any hesitation about declaring an end to the pandemic as a global threat.

 

He acknowledged that many uncertainties remained, “particularly regarding the evolution of the virus,” which he said continued to circulate in every country as the pandemic continued. 

 

Houssin said the committee also expressed concern about the big gaps in surveillance, reporting and health care, “particularly in the most vulnerable countries.” 

 

“However, the situation has markedly improved, with less mortality and an increased immunity against the virus, an immunity which is vaccine-induced or naturally induced, and a better access to diagnosis, vaccines and treatment,” he said. 

 

Houssin emphasized that after more than three years, it was “time to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused so much suffering, with new tools and new ambitions,” underscoring the need to prepare for future pandemics.

‘The battle is not over’

Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, said this virus would continue to persist and threaten, but at a much lower levels of impact, tragedy, hospitalization and death. 

 

“We have got control over the virus by applying the science, and by applying the hard-won lessons we have learned from this pandemic,” Ryan said.  

 

“We now need to move on to the next phase. The battle is not over. We still have weaknesses, and those weaknesses that we still have in our system will be exposed by this virus or another virus, and it needs to be fixed,” he said. 

 

While the public health emergency might be over, he observed that in most cases, “pandemics truly end when the next pandemic begins,” which means that the world must prepare for what is to come. 

 

His colleague, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on COVID-19, picked up on this theme, warning that the virus was evolving. “While we are not in a crisis mode, we cannot let our guard down. Epidemiologically, this virus will continue to cause waves,” she said.   

 

“What we are hopeful of is that we have the tools in place to ensure that the future waves do not result in more severe disease, do not result in waves of death, and we can do that with the tools we have at hand,” she said. “We just have to make sure that we are tracking the virus, because it will continue to evolve.”  

 

WHO chief Tedros said, “The virus is here to stay and … it is time for countries to transition from emergency mode to managing COVID-19 alongside other infectious diseases.” 

 

He said the world must prepare for the next pandemic that surely will come and “move forward with a shared commitment to meet shared threats with a shared response.”
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The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies and killed millions of people worldwide.

The announcement, made more than three years after WHO declared the coronavirus an international crisis, offers a coda to a pandemic that stirred fear and suspicion, hand-wringing and finger-pointing across the globe.

The U.N. health agency’s officials said that even though the emergency phase was over, the pandemic hasn’t ended, noting recent spikes in cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

WHO says thousands of people are still dying from the virus every week, and millions of others are suffering from debilitating, long-term effects.

“It’s with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

“That does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat,” he said, adding he wouldn’t hesitate to reconvene experts to assess the situation should a new variant “put our world in peril.”

Tedros said the pandemic had been on a downward trend for more than a year, acknowledging that most countries have already returned to life before COVID-19.

He bemoaned the damage that COVID-19 had done to the global community, saying the pandemic had shattered businesses, exacerbated political divisions, led to the spread of misinformation and plunged millions into poverty.

The political fallout in some countries was swift and unforgiving. Some pundits say missteps by President Donald Trump in his administration’s response to the pandemic had a role in his losing reelection bid in 2020. The United States saw the deadliest outbreak of any country in the world — where more than 1 million people died.

Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief, said it was incumbent on heads of states and other leaders to negotiate a wide-ranging pandemic treaty to decide how future health threats should be faced.

Ryan said that some of the scenes witnessed during COVID-19, when people resorted to “bartering for oxygen canisters,” fought to get into emergency rooms and died in parking lots because they couldn’t get treated, must never be repeated.

When the U.N. health agency first declared the coronavirus to be an international crisis on Jan. 30, 2020, it hadn’t yet been named COVID-19 and there were no major outbreaks beyond China.

More than three years later, the virus has caused an estimated 764 million cases globally and about 5 billion people have received at least one dose of vaccine.

In the U.S., the public health emergency declaration made regarding COVID-19 is set to expire on May 11, when wide-ranging measures to support the pandemic response, including vaccine mandates, will end. Many other countries, including Germany, France and Britain, dropped most of their provisions against the pandemic last year.

When Tedros declared COVID-19 to be an emergency in 2020, he said his greatest fear was the virus’ potential to spread in countries with weak health systems.

In fact, some of the countries that suffered the worst COVID-19 death tolls were previously judged to be the best-prepared for a pandemic, including the U.S. and Britain. According to WHO data, the number of deaths reported in Africa account for just 3% of the global total.

WHO doesn’t “declare” pandemics, but first used the term to describe the outbreak in March 2020, when the virus had spread to every continent except Antarctica, long after many other scientists had said a pandemic was already underway.

WHO is the only agency mandated to coordinate the world’s response to acute health threats, but the organization faltered repeatedly as the coronavirus unfolded.

In January 2020, WHO publicly applauded China for its supposed speedy and transparent response, even though recordings of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press showed top officials were frustrated at the country’s lack of cooperation.

WHO also recommended against mask-wearing for the public for months, a mistake many health officials say cost lives.

Numerous scientists also slammed WHO’s reluctance to acknowledge that COVID-19 was frequently spread in the air and by people without symptoms, criticizing the agency’s lack of strong guidance to prevent such exposure.

Tedros was a vociferous critic of rich countries who hoarded the limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, warning that the world was on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” by failing to share shots with poor countries.

Most recently, WHO has struggled to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, a challenging scientific endeavour that has also become politically fraught.

After a weeks-long visit to China, WHO released a report in 2021 concluding that COVID-19 most likely jumped into humans from animals, dismissing the possibility that it originated in a lab as “extremely unlikely.”

But the U.N. agency backtracked the following year, saying “key pieces of data” were still missing and that it was premature to rule out that COVID-19 might have ties to a lab.

Tedros lamented that the catastrophic toll of COVID-19 could have been avoided.

“We have the tools and the technologies to prepare for pandemics better, to detect them earlier, to respond to them faster,” Tedros said, without citing missteps by WHO specifically.

“Lives were lost that should not have been. We must promise ourselves and our children and grandchildren that we will never make those mistakes again.”
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