Changes in air patterns as the world warms will likely push more and nastier hurricanes up against the United States’ East and Gulf coasts, especially in Florida, a new study said.

While other studies have projected how human-caused climate change will probably alter the frequency, strength and moisture of tropical storms, the study in Friday’s journal Science Advances focuses on where hurricanes are going.

It’s all about projected changes in steering currents, said study lead author Karthik Balaguru, a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory climate scientist.

“Along every coast they’re kind of pushing the storms closer to the U.S.,” Balaguru said. The steering currents move from south to north along the Gulf of Mexico; on the East Coast, the normal west-to-east steering is lessened considerably and can be more east-to-west, he said.

Overall, in a worst-case warming scenario, the number of times a storm hits parts of the U.S. coast in general will probably increase by one-third by the end of the century, the study said, based on sophisticated climate and hurricane simulations, including a system researchers developed.

The central and southern Florida Peninsula, which juts into the Atlantic, is projected to get even more of an increase in hurricanes hitting the coast, the study said.

Climate scientists disagree on how useful it is to focus on the worst-case scenario as the new study does, because many calculations show the world has slowed its increase in carbon pollution. Balaguru said because his study looks more at steering changes than strength, the levels of warming aren’t as big a factor.

The study projects changes in air currents traced to warming in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of South America. Climate change is warming different parts of the world at different rates, and models show the eastern Pacific area warming more quickly, Balaguru said.

According to the study, that extra warming sets things in motion through Rossby waves — atmospheric waves that move west to east and are connected to changes in temperature or pressure, like the jet stream or polar vortex events.

“I like to explain it to my students like a rock being dropped in a smooth pond,” said University of Albany atmospheric scientist Kristen Corbosiero, who wasn’t part of the study. “The heating is the rock and Rossby waves are the waves radiating away from the heating which disturbs the atmosphere’s balance.”

The wave ripples trigger a counterclockwise circulation in the Gulf of Mexico, which bring winds blowing from east to west in the eastern Atlantic and south to north in the Gulf of Mexico, Corbosiero and Balaguru said.

It also reduces wind shear — which is the difference in speed and direction of winds at high and low altitudes — the study said. Wind shear often decapitates hurricanes and makes it harder for nascent storms to develop.

Less wind shear means stronger storms, Balaguru said.

Overall, the steering current and wind shear changes increase the risk to the United States, Corbosiero said in an email.
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India’s federal government asked states to identify emergency hotspots and ramp up testing for COVID-19 after the country recorded its highest daily case count since September, a Reuters tally showed on Friday.

There were 6,050 new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, the federal Health Ministry said on Friday, continuing a sharp upward trend since a lull last year.

At a meeting to review the degree to which the states are prepared, Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya asked them to ramp up genome testing and conduct mock drills in hospitals, a government statement said.

Daily new cases have nearly tripled from around 2,000 at the end of March.

The prevalence of XBB.1.16, classified as a variant of interest by the World Health Organization, increased from 21.6% in February to 35.8% in March, the Health Ministry said, adding there that was no evidence of an increase in hospitalizations or deaths.

Active cases totaled more than 28,300 with 14 deaths during the last 24 hours, taking the country’s official death toll from the disease to 530,943.

India has recorded more than 44.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic three years ago, the third-highest tally after the United States and China.
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Health care workers in Zimbabwe have condemned the government’s plan to criminalize their recruitment to work in other countries as part of efforts to reduce a medical brain drain.  Zimbabwe’s vice president and health minister, Constantino Chiwenga, said the country will introduce a law to make it illegal for foreign nations to hire their health care workers. 

Zimbabwe’s Association of Doctors for Human Rights says any attempt to prevent health care workers from leaving the country for better jobs would be illegal.

The head of the association, Dr. Norman Matara, told VOA Friday the government’s plan to criminalize foreign recruitment of health care workers was shocking. 

“Also in our constitution, the Zimbabwe constitution, it guarantees citizens have the right to move freely within the country or leave the country,” Matara said. “We don’t know why those comments were made by the honorable minister of health. The government continue to use scare tactics and command approach to solving health care problems.” 

Matara was responding to comments Wednesday by Zimbabwe’s vice president, Constantino Chiwenga.

Chiwenga, who doubles as health minister, said the government would introduce a law against foreign recruiting of its health care workers to address a medical brain drain. 

“If one deliberately recruits and make the country suffer because it lacks the required professionals, that’s a crime against humanity,” Chiwenga said. “If people die in hospitals because there are no nurses and doctors and somebody who has been so irresponsible of not training their nationals but wanting poor countries to train for them it’s a crime. That must be taken seriously.” 

Matara stressed that Zimbabwe’s health care workers are choosing to leave.

“The government should note that health workers are not being pulled away from the country but pushed away from the country by the meager salaries they are getting,” Matara said. “They are being pushed by the worsening economic crisis in the country. They are being pushed by poor working conditions: lack of equipment, lack of sundries, lack of medicines in the hospitals that they work in. We urge the government to improve working conditions, pay a living wage, you will find that people will not leave the country.”     

Eustina Shava, a nurse who is leaving Zimbabwe in May for better work in Canada, said leaving her home country is not her preference.   

“If we were being given enough money, I don’t think anybody would love to leave their families, their relatives and work abroad,” Shava said. “But at the end of the day, we all want to achieve good things in life. We all want to buy houses, we all want to buy cars and we all want to send our children to good schools.

“That’s the reason we are reaching to recruiters. They have done nothing wrong. They are actually helping us to achieve certain things in life.” 

Zimbabwe’s Health Services Board said in November more than 4,000 nurses have left the country since 2021.

The Zimbabwe Medical Association says the country has only 3,500 doctors for a population of almost 16 million people.

Health care workers regularly go on strike over poor pay and working conditions.

Zimbabwe’s government said it doesn’t have enough funds for raises or better equipment and in January made it illegal for health care workers to strike for more than three days.

Reuters contributed to this report.
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Celebrations marking World Health Day are taking place in the shadow of the coronavirus that has sickened more than 762 million people around the world and killed more than 6.8 million. 

“For the past three years, [the World Health Organization] has coordinated the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the most severe health crisis in a century,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general. “And as COVID-19 has exposed so brutally, there remain serious gaps in the world’s defenses against epidemics and pandemics. 

“For all these reasons and more, the world needs WHO now more than ever,” he said. 

This year’s World Health Day coincides with the 75th anniversary of the founding of the WHO, which emerged from the ashes of World War II to create a healthier world in the aftermath of what is recognized as the deadliest and most destructive war in human history. 

The vision of attaining a higher standard of health and protecting people from diseases, in many ways, has been achieved. 

Tedros notes that “life expectancy globally, for both sexes, has increased from 46 to 73 years, with the biggest gains in the poorest countries.” 

“Smallpox has been eradicated and polio is on the brink,” he said. 

However, many challenges remain, especially with the emergence of new diseases and deadly pathogens, including Ebola, Marburg, SARS and COVID-19. 

“The world is at increasing risk of new pandemics emerging,” said Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the director-general and assistant director-general ad interim for external relations and governance. 

Last month, the WHO’s 194 member states began negotiations on a global accord to prevent and prepare for future pandemic emergencies. Aylward said it was important to reach an agreement as rapidly as possible.

“We hope not just for future generations but today’s generation,” he said. “There is quite a high risk of another pandemic and we want to make sure that we are much, much better prepared for that than we were for this,” he said. 

“And we can be with an accord like the one under negotiation,” Aylward added. 

Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead on COVID-19, stressed the need to find the origins of the coronavirus. She said a study published by China this week offers some clues as to how infected wild animals at the wet market in Wuhan, China, may have infected humans with the deadly virus, triggering the pandemic. 

“But it does not give us concrete answers,” she said. “There is more information that is out there and we need scientists, public health professionals, governments, to share this information.

“We need answers to understand how this pandemic began because we will get better at preventing the next one,” Van Kerkhove said. 

WHO chief Tedros said he has been pressing China to share information about the origins of COVID-19 because “without full access to the information that China has, you cannot say this or that.” 

“All hypotheses are on the table,” he said. “That is WHO’s position and that is why we have been asking China to be cooperative on this.”

Tedros noted that countries will continue to negotiate the pandemic accord over the next year in preparation for the World Health Assembly in 2024, where it will be presented for adoption.

“No nation can protect itself against future epidemics and pandemics without the engagement and cooperation of all nations,” he added. 
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The World Health Organization said Thursday that it was sure China had far more data that could shed light on the origins of COVID-19, demanding that Beijing immediately share all relevant information.

“Without full access to the information that China has … all hypotheses are on the table,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva.

“That’s why we have been asking China to be cooperative on this,” he said, insisting that if Beijing does provide the missing data, “we will know what happened or how it started.”

More than three years after COVID-19 surfaced, heated debate still rages around the origins of the pandemic.

The issue has proved divisive for the scientific community and even different U.S. government agencies, which are split between one theory that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans and another that the virus likely leaked from a Wuhan laboratory — a claim China has angrily denied.

Late last month, new evidence emerged that raccoon dogs, known to be able to carry and transmit viruses similar to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, were at a market in Wuhan when the disease was first detected in humans.

The researchers who unexpectedly stumbled over the genetic data say that those data support but cannot prove the theory that the virus originated in animals, possibly first jumping over to humans at the market.

‘Clues,’ not clarity

Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, told journalists Thursday that the new information provided “clues” but no clear answers, insisting that the data “collected in January and February 2020, more than three years ago,” should have been shared long ago.

“Without information, without data to make a proper assessment, it’s very difficult for us to give a concrete answer,” she said. “And in the present time, we don’t have a concrete answer of how the pandemic began.”

But she voiced certainty that China’s “incredible scientists” had conducted far more studies and collected much more data that could be relevant in the search.

“We know there is more information that’s out there,” she said. “We need scientists, public health professionals and governments to share this information. This is not a game.”

‘A moral imperative’

In an editorial in Science magazine published Thursday, Van Kerkhove said she believed China had data that it had not shared, including on the wild and farmed animal trade at the Wuhan market, the testing of humans and animals in Wuhan and across China, and operations of labs in Wuhan working on coronaviruses.

“Lab audit data exist and have not been shared, for example,” she wrote, demanding that China share all data on the virus that causes COVID-19 “immediately.”

WHO chief Tedros stressed the vital importance of getting to the bottom of the mystery, pointing out that determining COVID-19’s origins could help avert future pandemics.

And with nearly 7 million deaths officially registered in the pandemic — with the real toll believed to be several times higher — he said there was a “moral imperative.”

“We need to know the answer, beyond reasonable doubt.”
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A federal judge in Texas could soon order the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its approval of abortion pill mifepristone, a move that if allowed to stand could severely undermine the agency, health policy and legal experts said.   

The closely followed case could potentially lead to a nationwide ban on mifepristone — part of a two-drug regimen that accounts for more than half of U.S. abortions — and call into question the FDA’s power to regulate all drugs nationwide, they said.   

It also risks leading to self-censure by the pharmaceutical industry as drugmakers embrace treatments perceived as safe investments and shy away from those that might get caught up in politically charged legal entanglements, some experts cautioned.   

“This case potentially has very significant consequences for both products that are already on the market, as well as new products,” said Susan Lee, a partner in Goodwin’s Life Sciences group and FDA practice. “The potential implications are so much broader than just what could happen to mifepristone.”   

A ruling against the agency’s approval of a drug over 20 years earlier would be unprecedented and could ripple through drug research and development for years, with implications for public health and access to new treatments.   

Any impact on the FDA will depend on details of the judge’s ruling in the case known as Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The challenge was brought by a coalition of anti-abortion groups and doctors seeking withdrawal of the FDA’s mifepristone approval before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas, a conservative former Christian activist. 

  The court could order mifepristone pulled from the market while it considers a final ruling. When the case is resolved, that could become a permanent ban, though it is not clear how long that might take and any ruling is expected to be appealed.   

If it finds the FDA did not follow proper procedures, that would undermine confidence in the agency and likely lead it to adopt more stringent regulations, some experts suggested.   

Should the court ban mifepristone sales based on a finding that it’s not safe, that would effectively end the FDA’s status as the ultimate arbiter on drug safety, experts said.   

It would call into question the entire drug approval process, said Laurie Sobel, associate director for Women’s Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.   

“That would have much bigger implications for other drugs and probably would shake up pharma’s ability to rely on the FDA and feel secure when they submit something, if a court can overrule the FDA’s findings on safety,” Sobel said.   

Plaintiffs are arguing that the FDA in its 2000 approval did not adequately consider the drug’s safety when used by girls under age 18 to terminate a pregnancy.   

‘So much uncertainty’  

The possibility of its approvals being overruled would likely see the FDA become more cautious, Lee said.   

The increased scrutiny would make it more difficult and time-consuming to get products approved, and possibly more expensive to develop.   

“There’s going to be so much uncertainty about what would happen even if you were to achieve approval in the first place,” said Lee. “There could be a downstream impact on pricing.”   

A ruling against the FDA is likely to spur increased activism and lobbying from organizations opposed to other drugs or medical treatments, such as COVID-19 vaccines, contraceptives, hormones for artificial reproductive technology or gender affirming procedures, and HIV prevention drugs.   

Similar challenges in front of hand-picked sympathetic judges could lead to other reversed approvals, Lee warned.   

“If you can have somebody come in successfully challenging an approval that was more than 20 years ago,” she said, “there’s very little comfort that any manufacturer could take in their approval.” 
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Cyclone Freddy killed hundreds of people in February and March as it pummeled Madagascar, Malawi, and Mozambique. While the long-running storm’s victims were mostly in Malawi, floodwaters in Mozambique have created a fresh threat there from cholera. Cases have nearly doubled in one week to 19,000 amid a shortage of facilities, many of which were badly damaged by the cyclone, especially in the worst-hit province of Zambezia.

The neighborhood of Icidua, on the outskirts of Quelimane city in Mozambique’s central Zambezia province, has reported the highest number of cholera cases.

Most here lived in flimsy huts made of mud or bamboo that were flattened by the cyclone’s up to 215 kilometer per hour winds.

The local health center’s building is no longer stable, so doctors and nurses work outside under the shade of trees.

Mothers lined up patiently this week with their children for cholera treatment in one of the few wards that survived the storm.

The clinic’s director José da Costa Silva says the staff are working at high risk as the roof could collapse at any minute.

“Cholera cases are increasing, and the health center does not have the capacity to treat everybody. Most patients are referred to the provincial hospital,” he said.

The outbreak is not confined to Quelimane city.

The U.N. says more than 19,000 cases have been confirmed across eight of Mozambique’s 10 provinces.

The World Health Organization’s office has called it the worst cholera outbreak in Mozambique for 20 years.

At Quelimane Provincial Hospital, the director general of Mozambique’s National Health Institute this week addressed health workers in a packed room under a torn roof with two gaping holes.

Eduardo Sam Gudo Jr. tells the workers the cholera outbreak is getting more serious by the day.

Confirmed cases in Quelimane district alone have reached about 600 a day, he says, but the real number could be as high as 1,000.

“The disease is not localized to one neighborhood, it’s everywhere,” he said.” It can only be fought with a local chlorine water treatment product called ‘Certeza,’ but supplies are stretched and there aren’t enough people to distribute the bottles.”

Every day, volunteers collect crates of Certeza from outside the hospital and drive to neighborhoods like Icidua, where they walk from house to house, distributing bottles.

Each one should last a family for a week, but demand is massively outstripping supply as the cholera spreads.

For many Mozambicans still recovering in the cyclone’s wake, cholera is just one of many problems.

Outside the village of Nicoadala, about 300 people live in a makeshift camp of tarpaulin huts on a road next to a flooded field.

Their villages and fields are still under water, forcing them to fish in flooded rice paddies to survive.

Sixty-four-year-old Joaquina Bissane says she had to reach the camp by canoe after her village was submerged.

“Cholera is less of a problem here than malaria, as the damp and heat has turned these flatlands into a breeding ground for mosquitoes,” she said. They have received no support from the government, so they are supporting each other.

The World Food Program estimates the cyclone’s floodwaters destroyed 215,000 hectares of crops in Mozambique.

Seventy-year-old farmer Inácio Abdala says his family’s home and fields were among those destroyed.

He says they eat one day and don’t eat the next as they lost everything in the floods. Even the schools are flooded, so their children can’t go to school.

Even after the floods subside, saltwater brought inland by the cyclone may have damaged much of the soil.

Freddy hit just before the main harvest and officials say it will take months, or even years, for farmlands to fully recover — long after they hope to bring the cholera outbreak under control.
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Life on our planet faced a stern test during the Cryogenian Period that lasted from 720 million to 635 million years ago when Earth twice was frozen over with runaway glaciation and looked from space like a shimmering white snowball.

Life somehow managed to survive during this time called “Snowball Earth,” and a new study offers a deeper understanding as to why.

Fossils identified as seaweed unearthed in black shale in central China’s Hubei Province indicate that habitable marine environments were more widespread at the time than previously known, scientists said Tuesday. The findings support the idea that it was more of a “Slushball Earth” where the earliest forms of complex life — basic multicellular organisms — endured even at mid-latitudes previously thought to have been frozen solid.

The fossils date from the second of the two times during the Cryogenian Period when massive ice sheets stretched from the poles toward the equator. This interval, called the Marinoan Ice Age, lasted from about 651 million to 635 million years ago.

“The key finding of this study is that open-water — ice-free — conditions existed in mid-latitude oceanic regions during the waning stage of the Marinoan Ice Age,” said China University of Geosciences geobiologist Huyue Song, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Our study shows that, at least near the end of the Marinoan ‘Snowball Earth’ event, habitable areas extended to mid-latitude oceans, much larger than previously thought. Previous research argued that such habitable areas, at best, only existed in tropical oceans. More extensive areas of habitable oceans better explain where and how complex organisms such as multicellular seaweed survived,” Song added.

The findings demonstrate that the world’s oceans were not completely frozen and that habitable refuges existed where multicellular eukaryotic organisms — the domain of life including plants, animals, fungi and certain mostly single-celled organisms called protists — could survive, Song said.

Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. The first single-celled organisms arose sometime during roughly the first billion years of the planet’s existence. Multicellular organisms arrived later, perhaps 2 billion years ago. But it was only in the aftermath of the Cryogenian that warmer conditions returned, paving the way for a rapid expansion of different life forms about 540 million years ago.

Scientists are trying to better understand the onset of “Snowball Earth.” They believe a greatly reduced amount of the sun’s warmth reached the planet’s surface as solar radiation bounced off the white ice sheets.

“It is widely believed that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels plummeted just prior to these events, causing the polar ice caps to expand and hence more solar radiation reflected back to space and the polar ice caps expanded further. And the Earth spiraled into Snowball Earth conditions,” Virginia Tech geobiologist and study co-author Shuhai Xiao said.

Seaweed and fossils of some other multicellular organisms were identified in the black shale. This seaweed — a rudimentary plant — was a photosynthetic organism living on the seafloor in a shallow marine environment lit by sunlight.

“The fossils were preserved as compressed sheets of organic carbon,” China University of Geosciences paleontologist and study co-author Qin Ye said.

Multicellular organisms including red algae, green algae and fungi emerged before the Cryogenian and survived “Snowball Earth.”

The Cryogenian freeze was much worse than the most recent Ice Age that humans survived, ending roughly 10,000 years ago.

“Compared to the most recent Ice Age, glacier coverage was much more extensive and, more importantly, much of the ocean was frozen,” Xiao said.

“It is fair to say that the ‘Snowball Earth’ events were significant challenges to life on Earth,” Xiao added. “It is conceivable that these ‘Snowball Earth’ events could have driven major extinctions, but apparently life, including complex eukaryotic organisms, managed to survive, attesting to the resilience of the biosphere.”
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Farmers and Silicon Valley technologists are collaborating to make agriculture more efficient and productive. Michelle Quinn reports on the ag technology being developed and what is to come.
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