The world’s largest coral colony has been discovered near the remote Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean – an undersea mass that is so big, it can be seen from space, National Geographic scientists announced Nov. 12, 2024.   
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Authorities in Sierra Leone have launched an Ebola vaccination campaign targeting at least 5,000 health workers. Many health workers caught the Ebola virus during the outbreak that hit West Africa a decade ago. Victoria Amunga reports from Kenema, Sierra Leone. Camera: Jimmy Makhulo.
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NEW YORK — The decline in U.S. drug overdose deaths appears to have continued this year, giving experts hope the nation is seeing sustained improvement in the persistent epidemic. 

There were about 97,000 overdose deaths in the 12-month period that ended June 30, according to provisional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released Wednesday. That’s down 14% from the estimated 113,000 for the previous 12-month period. 

“This is a pretty stunning and rapid reversal of drug overdose mortality numbers,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends. 

Overdose death rates began steadily climbing in the 1990s because of opioid painkillers, followed by waves of deaths led by other opioids like heroin and — more recently — illicit fentanyl. Provisional data had indicated a slight decline for 2023, and the tally released Wednesday showed that the downward trend has kept going. 

Of course, there have been moments in the last several years when U.S. overdose deaths seemed to have plateaued or even started to go down, only to rise again, Marshall noted. 

“This seems to be substantial and sustained,” Marshall said. “I think there’s real reason for hope here.” 

Experts aren’t certain about the reasons for the decline, but they cite a combination of possible factors. 

One is COVID-19. In the worst days of the pandemic, addiction treatment was hard to get, and people were socially isolated — with no one around to help if they overdosed. 

“During the pandemic we saw such a meteoric rise in drug overdose deaths that it’s only natural we would see a decrease,” said Farida Ahmad of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. 

Still, overdose deaths are well above what they were at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The recent numbers could represent the fruition of years of efforts to increase the availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, and addiction treatments such as buprenorphine, said Erin Winstanley, a University of Pittsburgh professor who researches drug overdose trends. 

Marshall said such efforts likely are being aided by money from settlements of opioid-related lawsuits, brought by state, local and Native American governments against drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies. Settlement funds have been rolling out to small towns and big cities across the U.S., and some have started spending the money on naloxone and other measures. 

Some experts have wondered about changes in the drug supply. Xylazine, a sedative, has been increasingly detected in illegally manufactured fentanyl, and experts are sorting out exactly how it’s affecting overdoses. 

In the latest CDC data, overdose death reports are down in 45 states. Increases occurred in Alaska, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington. 

The most dramatic decreases were seen in North Carolina and Ohio, but CDC officials voiced a note of caution. Some jurisdictions have had lags in getting death records to federal statisticians — particularly North Carolina, where death investigations have slowed because of understaffing at the state medical examiner’s office. The CDC made estimates to try to account for incomplete death records, but the decline in some places may ultimately turn out not to be as dramatic as initial numbers suggest. 

Another limitation of the provisional data is that it doesn’t detail what’s happening in different groups of people. Recent research noted the overdose deaths in Black and Native Americans have been growing disproportionately larger. 

“We really need more data from the CDC to learn whether these declines are being experienced in all racial ethnic subgroups,” Marshall said.
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BAKU, Azerbaijan — When more than two dozen world leaders deliver remarks at the United Nations’ annual climate conference on Wednesday, many have detailed their nations’ firsthand experience with the catastrophic weather that has come with climate change.

“Over the past year, catastrophic floods in Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as well as in southern Croatia have shown the devastating impact of rising temperatures,” said Croatia’s prime minister, Andrej Plenkovic. “The Mediterranean, one of the most vulnerable regions, calls for urgent action.”

The Greek prime minister said Europe and the world needs to be “more honest” about the trade-offs needed to keep global temperatures down.

“We need to ask hard questions about a path that goes very fast, at the expense of our competitiveness, and a path that goes some much slower, but allows our industry to adapt and to thrive,” he said. His nation this summer was hammered by successive heat waves after three years of below-average rainfall. In Greece, the misery included water shortages, dried-up lakes and the death of wild horses.

Other speakers on the list include Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose nation has seen deadly flooding this year from monsoon rains that scientists say have become heavier with climate change. Just two years ago, more than 1,700 people died in widespread flooding. Pakistan has also suffered from dangerous heat, with thousands of people hospitalized with heatstroke this spring as temperatures soared to 47 degrees Celsius.

Also on the list of speakers Wednesday is Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Edward Davis. Like many other countries in the Global South, the Bahamas has piled up debt from warming-connected weather disasters it did little to cause, including Hurricanes Dorian in 2019 and Matthew in 2016. Leaders have been seeking help and money from the Global North and oil companies.

Early on Wednesday, ministers and officials from African nations called for initiatives to advance green development on the continent and strengthen resilience to extreme weather events — from floods to droughts — across the region.

Plenty of big names and powerful countries are noticeably absent from COP29 this year. That includes the 13 largest carbon dioxide-polluting countries — a group responsible for more than than 70% of the heat-trapping gases emitted last year — were missing. The world’s biggest polluters and strongest economies — China and the United States — didn’t send their No. 1s. Neither did India and Indonesia.

But U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was there, and he announced an 81% emissions reduction target on 1990 levels by 2035, in line with the Paris Agreement goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. That’s up from the 78% the U.K. had already pledged.

The main focus of this year’s talks is climate finance — wealthier nations compensating poor countries for damages from climate change’s weather extremes, helping them pay to transition their economies away from fossil fuels and helping them with adaptation.
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TORONTO, canada — A teenager is in critical condition in a British Columbia children’s hospital, sick with Canada’s first presumptive human case of avian influenza.

“This was a healthy teenager prior to this, so no underlying conditions,” said provincial health officer Bonnie Henry in a news conference on Tuesday. “It just reminds us that in young people this is a virus that can progress and cause quite severe illness, and the deterioration that I mentioned was quite rapid.”

British Columbia health officials said on Saturday the province had detected Canada’s first human case of H5 bird flu in a teenager.

Henry said the province is still identifying the exact strain but assumes the case is H5N1.

The World Health Organization says H5N1’s risk to humans is low because there is no evidence of human transmission, but the virus has been found in an increasing number of animals, including cattle in the United States.

Henry would not disclose the teen’s gender or age but said the patient had first developed symptoms on November 2 and was tested on November 8, when admitted to a hospital. Symptoms included conjunctivitis, fever and coughing.

As of Tuesday, the teen was hospitalized with acute respiratory distress syndrome, she said.

The teen had no farm exposure but had been exposed to dogs, cats and reptiles, Henry said. No infection source had been identified. “That is absolutely an ongoing investigation.”

More severe illness takes place when the virus binds to receptors deep in the lungs, she said.

Public health officials had identified and tested about three dozen contacts and had not found anyone infected with the virus.

There has been no evidence that the disease is easily spread between people. But if that were to happen, a pandemic could unfold, scientists have said.

Earlier in November, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked that farm workers exposed to animals with bird flu be tested for the virus even if they did not have symptoms.

Bird flu has infected nearly 450 dairy farms in 15 U.S. states since March, and the CDC has identified 46 human cases of bird flu since April.

In Canada, British Columbia has identified at least 26 affected premises across the province, Henry said Tuesday, and numerous wild birds have tested positive.

Canada has had no cases reported in dairy cattle and no evidence of bird flu in samples of milk.
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BAKU, Azerbaijan — World leaders are converging Tuesday at the United Nations annual climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan although the big names and powerful countries are noticeably absent, unlike past climate talks which had the star power of a soccer World Cup.

But 2024’s climate talks are more like the International Chess Federation world championship, lacking recognizable names but big on nerd power and strategy. The top leaders of the 13 largest carbon dioxide-polluting countries will not appear. Their nations are responsible for more than 70% of 2023’s heat-trapping gases.

The world’s biggest polluters and strongest economies — China and the United States — aren’t sending their No. 1s. India and Indonesia’s heads of state are also not in attendance, meaning the four most populous nations with more than 42% of all the world’s population aren’t having leaders speak.

“It’s symptomatic of the lack of political will to act. There’s no sense of urgency,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. He said this explains “the absolute mess we’re finding ourselves in.”

Transition to clean energy

The world has witnessed the hottest day, months and year on record “and a master class in climate destruction,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the world leaders who did show up.

But Guterres held out hope, saying, in a veiled reference to Donald Trump’s re-election in the United States, that the “clean energy revolution is here. No group, no business, no government can stop it.”

United Nations officials said in 2016, when Trump was first elected, there were 180 gigawatts of clean energy and 700,000 electric vehicles in the world. Now there are 600 gigawatts of clean energy and 14 million electric vehicles.

Host Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev kicked off two scheduled days of world leaders’ speeches by lambasting Armenia, western news media, climate activists and critics who highlighted his country’s rich oil and gas history and trade, calling them hypocritical since the United States is the world’s biggest oil producer. He said it was “not fair” to call Azerbaijan a “petrostate” because it produces less than 1% of the world’s oil and gas.

Oil and gas are “a gift of the God” just like the sun, wind and minerals, Aliyev said. “Countries should not be blamed for having them. And should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market because the market needs them.”

As the host and president of the climate talks, called COP29, Aliyev said his country will push hard for a green transition away from fossil fuels, “but at the same time, we must be realistic.”

Lack of star power

Aliyev, United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are the headliners of around 50 leaders set to speak on Tuesday.

There’ll also be a strong showing from the leaders of some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. Several small island nations presidents and over a dozen leaders from countries across Africa are set to speak over the two-day World Leaders’ Summit at COP29.

As a sense of how the bar for celebrity has lowered, on Tuesday morning photographers and video cameras ran alongside one leader walking through the halls of the meeting. It was the emergency management minister for host country Azerbaijan.

United Nations officials downplayed the lack of head of state star power, saying that every country is represented and active in the climate talks.

One logistical issue is that next week, the leaders of the most powerful countries have to be half a world away in Brazil for the G20 meetings. The United States recent election, Germany’s government collapse, natural disasters and personal illnesses also have kept some leaders away.

The major focus of the negotiations is climate finance, which is rich nations trying to help poor countries pay for transitioning their economies away from fossil fuels, coping with climate change’s upcoming harms and compensating for damages from weather extremes.

Nations are negotiating over huge amounts of money, anywhere from $100 billion a year to $1.3 trillion a year. That money “is not charity, it’s an investment,” Guterres said.

“Developing countries must not leave Baku empty-handed,” Guterres said. “A deal is a must.”
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MEXICO CITY — Cassandra Garduño squinted in the sunlight, her pink boots smudged by dirt as she gazed out over her family’s chinampa — one of the islands first built up by the Aztecs with fertile mud from the bottom of a lake that, later drained, would one day become Mexico City.

Food from these islands has fed people for hundreds of years, but the chinampas are under threat from urbanization. The produce grown here doesn’t fetch much money, and many families are abandoning the ancient practice to rent out or sell their land for more lucrative uses such as soccer fields.

“People don’t want to farm anymore,” said Garduño. “They don’t see it as a necessity, they don’t want to produce, and people don’t want to buy the products.”

Some of those remaining, like Garduño, are banding together to preserve and promote the traditional use of the chinampas.

“None of this can exist without human hands, the hands of those who worked here and created the chinampa a thousand years ago,” she said on a recent morning as the smell of celery growing nearby filled the air.

The gardens crisscrossed by canals in the capital’s southern Xochimilco borough are built up from layers of dredged soil, held together by tall, thin ahuejotes — a kind of willow tree — planted around their perimeter. Xochimilco has more than 2,500 acres of protected land owned by generations of local chinamperos, as those who farm the islands are known.

Garduño’s earliest memories of her family’s chinampa came from peering through her grandparents’ window at the plot of land and watching canoes weave in and out of the canals. Even then, she saw how the chinampas were deteriorating under pressure from urbanization and as some farmers began to drop the practice.

When her grandfather died in 2010 and her uncles didn’t want to carry on, Garduño took it upon herself to learn and conserve generations of farming. Her neighbors and relatives were skeptical at first, but she bought land for her own chinampa from a friend’s uncle in 2020 and now grows an assortment of produce, including sunflowers, eggplant, and the Mexican marigold “cempasuchil.”

Now the 32-year-old Garduño is one of the growing collective called Chinampa Refuge, started by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and she and other famers encourage chinamperos to preserve their land. They follow ancient growing techniques but are trying new commercial approaches to compete with cheaper produce grown on massive farms elsewhere in Mexico. That includes a special tag — Etiqueta Chinampera — that tells buyers the produce came from a chinampa, and may tout things like water quality or the chinampa’s status as a biodiversity refuge.

“Change comes with educating the new generations,” said Garduño. “Talking about the origins and efforts to conserve and why it’s important to do it.”

Luis Zambrano, an ecologist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has worked in Xochimilco for decades, said the fields are largely self-sustaining. Nourished by the lake, they can produce three to five crops of vegetables a year without the need of chemicals or irrigation, he said.

Moreover, the ecosystem of Xochimilco benefits the sprawling city. Many different species of birds and fish thrive there, and the extensive canals help reduce the city’s overall temperature, he said.

But now, on weekends, it’s common to see more soccer players boating to islands in their jerseys and cleats than farmers tending their crops. The soccer fields stretch for miles along the canals after what Zambrano called “a massive increase” over the past two to three years.

In Xochimilco, many people are reluctant to talk about transforming their chinampas to soccer fields. One landowner who declined to be identified for fear of legal or community backlash said keeping the chinampas productive required more work and financial investment and yielded less revenue. Instead, she has established multiple businesses on her land — a soccer field for weekend games, a food stand and kayaking tours for foreign visitors.

“If you do well (farming) you could earn $5,000 to $10,000 (100,000 to 200,000 pesos) a year,” Garduño said. “In the tourist area you could have that within a couple of weekends.”

But converting the agricultural fields carries ecological impact. While traditional farming methods avoid insecticides and fertilizers, the soccer fields are another story.

“It doesn’t look that detrimental because there’s no construction,” said Zambrano. But “it’s just as damaging because the amount of chemicals that are used, the amount of pollution that is generated is very, very large.”

The chinampas are among the significant features that led Mexico City’s historic center and Xochimilco to be recognized as a world heritage site by UNESCO. But any protective measures are up to federal, state and local authorities. Carlos Vasquez, director of the Natural Protected Areas under Mexico City’s Environmental Department, said they are working on proposals to address the soccer fields.

“Many are counter to the conservation of the ecosystems,” he said. “We’re looking to regulate these activities.”

After a long day’s work out in the sun, Garduño and some neighboring farmers congregate under Garduño’s makeshift hut for a feast of chicken and tortillas. They catch up on their tasks and outline what’s left to do.

Juan Ávalos, 63, and his brother Salvador Gonzalez Ávalos, 55, have been working on chinampas all their lives. Their family has several plots in Xochimilco’s San Gregorio neighborhood. A year ago, after some convincing by Garduño, the brothers joined Chinampa Refuge to adopt a more holistic approach to their farming.

Salvador said the approach is a continuous reminder of his family’s legacy in maintaining the ancient practices — something they want to pass on to their grandchildren.

“That’s something we need to work on as grandparents,” he said. “That they integrate themselves with a taste for this earth.” 
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OTTAWA, Ontario — Canada has detected its first presumptive case of H5 bird flu in a person, a teenager in the western province of British Columbia, health officials said Saturday.

The teenager likely caught the virus from a bird or animal and was receiving care at a children’s hospital, the province said in a statement.

The province said it was investigating the source of exposure and identifying the teenager’s contacts. The risk to the public remains low, Canada’s Health Minister Mark Holland said in posting on X.

“This is a rare event,” British Columbia Health Officer Bonnie Henry said in a statement. “We are conducting a thorough investigation to fully understand the source of exposure here in B.C.”

H5 bird flu is widespread in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows, with several recent human cases in U.S. dairy and poultry workers.

There has been no evidence of person-to-person spread so far. But if that were to happen, a pandemic could unfold, scientists have said.

Earlier in November, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked for farm workers who have been exposed to animals with bird flu to be tested for the virus even if they do not have symptoms.

Bird flu has infected nearly 450 dairy farms in 15 U.S. states since March, and the CDC has identified 46 human cases of bird flu since April.

In Canada, British Columbia has identified at least 22 infected poultry farms since October, and numerous wild birds tested positive, according to the province.

Canada has had no cases reported in dairy cattle and no evidence of bird flu in samples of milk.  
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Most strokes could be prevented, according to new guidelines aimed at helping people and their doctors do just that. 

Stroke was the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than half a million Americans have a stroke every year. But up to 80% of strokes may be preventable with better nutrition, exercise and identification of risk factors. 

The first new guidelines on stroke prevention in 10 years from the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association, include recommendations for people and doctors that reflect a better understanding of who gets strokes and why, along with new drugs that can help reduce risk. 

The good news is that the best way to reduce your risk for stroke is also the best way to reduce your risk for a whole host of health problems — eat a healthy diet, move your body and don’t smoke. The bad news is that it’s not always so easy to sustain. 

Dr. Sean Duke, a stroke doctor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, blames the forces in society that keep people sedentary and eating poorly, like cell phones and cheap, unhealthy food. “Our world is stacked against us,” he said. 

Here’s what to know about stroke and the new guidelines: 

What is a stroke? 

A stroke happens when blood flow to part of the brain is blocked or if a blood vessel in the brain bursts. That deprives the brain of oxygen which can cause brain damage that can lead to difficulty thinking, talking and walking, or even death. 

How eating healthy can reduce your risk for stroke 

Eating healthy can help control several factors that increase your risk for stroke, including high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and obesity, according to the heart association. 

The group recommends foods in the so-called Mediterranean diet such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains and olive oil, which can help keep cholesterol levels down. It suggests limiting red meat and other sources of saturated fat. Instead, get your protein from beans, nuts, poultry, fish and seafood. 

Limit highly processed foods and foods and drinks with a lot of added sugar. This can also reduce your calorie intake, which helps keep weight in check. 

Moving your body can help prevent strokes 

Getting up and walking around for at least 10 minutes a day can “drastically” reduce your risk, said Dr. Cheryl Bushnell, a neurologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine who was part of the group that came up with the new guidelines. Among the many benefits: Regular exercise can help reduce blood pressure, a major risk factor for stroke. 

Of course, more is better: The heart association recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic or 75 minutes of vigorous activity — or some combination — per week. How you do it doesn’t matter so much, experts said: Go to the gym, take a walk or run in your neighborhood or use treadmills or stepper machines at home. 

New tools to reduce obesity, a risk factor for stroke 

Diet and exercise can help control weight, another important risk factor for strokes. But a new class of drugs that can drastically reduce weight have been approved by regulators, providing new tools to reduce stroke risk since guidelines were last updated. 

The guidelines now recommend that doctors consider prescribing these drugs, including those sold under the brand names Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound, to people with obesity or diabetes. 

But while those drugs can help, people still need to eat well and get exercise, cautions Dr. Fadi Nahab, a stroke expert at Emory University Hospital. 

Guidelines help identify people who might be at higher risk 

The new guidelines for the first time recommend doctors screen patients for other factors that could increase stroke risk, including sex and gender and non-medical factors such as economic stability, access to health care, discrimination and racism. For example, the risk for having a first stroke is nearly twice as high for Black adults in the U.S. as it is for white adults, according to the CDC. 

“If somebody doesn’t have insurance or they can’t get to a doctor’s office because of transportation issues or they can’t get off work to get health care … these are all things that can impact the ability to prevent stroke,” Bushnell said. 

Doctors may be able to point to resources for low-cost health care or food, and can give ideas about how to be active without breaking the bank for a gym membership. 

The guidelines also now recommend doctors should screen for conditions that could increase a woman’s risk for stroke, such as high blood pressure during pregnancy or early menopause. 

How do I know if I’m having a stroke and what do I do? 

Three of the most common stroke symptoms include face weakness, arm weakness and difficulty speaking. And time is important, because brain damage can happen quickly and damage can be limited if a stroke is treated quickly. Stroke experts have coined an acronym to help you remember: FAST. F for face, A for arm, S for speech, and T for time. If you think you or a loved one could be having a stroke, call 911 right away. 
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GENEVA — Ahead of next week’s U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan, health experts warn that the climate crisis is also a health crisis and say they must be addressed in tandem to save the planet for future generations.

“Human health and planetary health are intertwined,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “Countries must take meaningful action to protect their people, boost resources, cut emissions, phase out fossil fuels and make peace with nature.”

His call for action is buttressed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, who calls COP29 “a crucial opportunity for global leaders to integrate health considerations into strategies for adapting to and mitigating climate change.”

In preparation for the climate summit, the World Health Organization, in collaboration with more than 100 organizations and 300 experts, has developed a plan of action to protect the health of all people, “particularly the estimated 3.6 billion people who live in areas which are most susceptible to climate change.”

“This document is a collective call from the health community to make sure that everybody understands the devastating impacts that climate change is having on our health” and to know what actions must be taken to prevent the worst from happening, Dr. Maria Neira, director of the WHO’s Environment Department, told journalists at a briefing Thursday.

“We must move away from fossil fuel subsidies,” she said, noting that “implementing fair carbon pricing and, of course, mobilizing the finance that is needed for climate and health action could save millions of lives every year.”

WHO data show the many ways in which climate change threatens human lives. Between 2030 and 2050, the WHO estimates that climate change will cause 250,000 additional deaths every year “from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”

Without preventive action, the WHO warns, temperature and precipitation changes will spread death and illness from vector-borne diseases, which currently stand at more than 700,000 a year. It says heat-related deaths among people over age 65 have risen by 70% in two decades and are likely to rise further as the planet heats up.

“If we were to meet the Paris Agreement goals, we would save somewhere in the region of a million lives a year from reduced air pollution alone,” said Dr. Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, WHO team lead for climate change and health.

The 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change enjoins nations to keep greenhouse gas emissions from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The U.N. environment agency’s annual emissions gap report, however, finds the world is headed in the wrong direction, with temperatures likely to rise to 3.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century if preventive action is not taken.

“At the moment, the world is currently massively subsidizing fossil fuel consumption,” Campbell-Lendrum said. “The costs of fossil fuel consumption are not only felt in the atmosphere, they are felt in people’s lungs, old people’s lungs, triggering heart attacks and so on, but also young people’s lungs, impairing their development, giving them asthma, hampering their life chances.

“If we were to invest those resources more wisely, then we would have both a healthier planet and also much healthier populations,” he said, adding that financing climate action “is a really good investment, in that you get a lot more back than you put in.”

“We will be able to save almost 2 million lives a year and bring in $4 in benefits for every $1 that you invest in climate action,” he said.

His colleague, Dr. Vanessa Kerry, WHO director-general special envoy for climate change health, agreed that the world cannot afford to ignore the warnings of the impact of climate change on health.

“Whether we choose to recognize it or not, climate change is here. Its impacts are accelerating, altering our ecosystems and communities and threatening our lives.

“Poor health destabilizes economies, widens inequalities and drives political unrest,” she said. “When people cannot access essential needs for their families and lives, it leads to political and social instability. We must address health as a fundamental part of our climate response to prevent these cascading effects.”

Kerry called on leaders gathering for COP29 to urgently “fast-track a just transition and increase funding for health systems” and for frontline health workers to protect the most vulnerable.
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London — 2024 is likely to be the hottest year ever recorded, with global warming already exceeding the threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, according to scientists, who released the latest data ahead of the COP29 climate summit due to start Monday in Azerbaijan. 

Carlo Buontempo, the director of the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation program, which produced the data, said it was an important moment for humankind. 

“I call it psychological because it’s something that has been agreed not only among scientists, but between scientists and policymakers and society and nations to use as a reference point. … It is a benchmark with respect to that global discussion,” he told the Associated Press on Thursday. 

Paris Agreement 

Keeping global warming to within 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels was a central pillar of the 2016 Paris Agreement, a deal signed by 196 countries, which forms the basis for the annual COP summits. Scientists say exceeding that threshold will likely have catastrophic impacts. 

“It can be the difference between a country existing, particularly small island developing states, and not. We’re also nearing a lot of Earth system tipping points,” said Ruth Townend, a senior research fellow at Britain’s Chatham House and co-author of its recent report, Azerbaijan’s climate leadership challenge. 

“Our delicate Earth systems are in a fine balance. And once we pass certain thresholds, we can trigger climate impacts that might not be reversible, moving ourselves into new types of systems.” 

Emissions gap 

As for the current trajectory, the United Nations says the world is heading toward around 3°C of warming by the end of this century. 

“We are teetering on a planetary tightrope,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a recorded message ahead of the summit. 

“Either leaders bridge the emissions gap or we plunge headlong into climate disaster, with the poorest and most vulnerable suffering the most. This report shows annual greenhouse gas emissions at an all-time high, rising 1.3% last year. They must fall 9% each year to 2030 to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C and avoid the very worst of climate change,” Guterres said. 

COP29 

Such is the backdrop for the COP29 summit in Baku.  

Over 12 days, hundreds of world leaders and thousands of delegates will enter thorny negotiations on how to cut global greenhouse gas emissions — and, crucially, who should pay for those cuts, along with the adaptation measures necessary to mitigate against climate change caused by past emissions. 

Who pays? 

A key part of COP29 is “to establish the finance in place to help developing countries produce strong new climate plans,” explained Townend.  

“And those climate plans are meant to be delivered ahead of COP30 in Brazil next year. Without the finance domino in that line of dominoes, everything will essentially fall apart a little bit because developing countries won’t have any kind of promise of support from developed countries in order to produce those ambitious new climate plans,” Townend said. 

Fossil fuels 

Some have questioned Azerbaijan’s suitability as host of the summit. It is a major producer of oil and gas — among the fossil fuels that drive climate change.  

“Around 90% of its export revenues come from oil and gas. And it is also a climate vulnerable country — so it gets around 50 to 70% of its water from over its borders, outside its borders,” Townend said. 

“So, it really is between a rock and a hard place on climate action and transition. And as such, it has a really strong interest in getting finance in place to help developing countries such as itself to find a feasible path forward,” she told VOA. 

Trump shadow 

Looming over the summit is Donald Trump’s victory in the Tuesday U.S. presidential election. 

In his first term, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement and could do so again once he assumes the presidency in January. He has also pledged to open vast areas of the U.S. for oil and gas drilling. 

There are also fears that Trump’s proposed import tariffs could lead to a trade war with China. The U.S. and China are the top two emitters of greenhouse gases and together account for around a third of global emissions. 

The world must adapt to such tensions, said Townend. 

“We’re unlikely to be moving towards a world that is more stable with increasing climate impact. So, we do need to learn to manage under these conditions of geopolitical instability, which will only increase going forward.” 

Extreme weather 

From the wildfires currently raging in California to the recent deadly floods in Spain’s Valencia, scientists say extreme weather events are a clear indication of the urgency of curbing global warming.  

“There is very strong evidence suggesting that many of these extreme events have become more intense because of climate change. And there is a good understanding of why,” said Buontempo of the EU Copernicus program, who added it’s vital that COP29 is a success. 

“These multilateral negotiations and discussion is the mechanism we have to find a global solution,” he added.
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The COP29 climate summit is due to get under way on Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan — a country whose economy is largely based on selling fossil fuels. Over 12 days, world leaders and thousands of delegates will try to negotiate ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, amid warnings that efforts to limit global warming are way off track. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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When a volcanic eruption buried the ancient city of Pompeii, the last desperate moments of its citizens were preserved in stone for centuries.

Observers see stories in the plaster casts later made of their bodies, like a mother holding a child and two women embracing as they died.

But new DNA evidence suggests things were not as they seem — and these prevailing interpretations come from looking at the ancient world through modern eyes.

“We were able to disprove or challenge some of the previous narratives built upon how these individuals were kind of found in relation to each other,” said Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “It opens up different interpretations for who these people might have been.”

Mittnik and her colleagues discovered that the person thought to be a mother was actually a man unrelated to the child. And at least one of the two people locked in an embrace — long assumed to be sisters or a mother and daughter — was a man. Their research was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

The team, which also includes scientists from Harvard University and the University of Florence in Italy, relied on genetic material preserved for nearly two millennia. After Mount Vesuvius erupted and destroyed the Roman city in 79 A.D., bodies buried in mud and ash eventually decomposed, leaving spaces where they used to be. Casts were created from the voids in the late 1800s.

Researchers focused on 14 casts undergoing restoration, extracting DNA from the fragmented skeletal remains that mixed with them. They hoped to determine the sex, ancestry and genetic relationships between the victims.

There were several surprises in “the house of the golden bracelet,” the dwelling where the assumed mother and child were found. The adult wore an intricate piece of jewelry, for which the house was named, reinforcing the impression that the victim was a woman. Nearby were the bodies of another adult and child thought to be the rest of their nuclear family.

DNA evidence showed the four were male and not related to one another, clearly showing “the story that was long spun around these individuals” was wrong, Mittnik said.

Researchers also confirmed Pompeii citizens came from diverse backgrounds but mainly descended from eastern Mediterranean immigrants – underscoring a broad pattern of movement and cultural exchange in the Roman Empire. Pompeii is located about 241 kilometers from Rome.

The study builds upon research from 2022 when scientists sequenced the genome of a Pompeii victim for the first time and confirmed the possibility of retrieving ancient DNA from the human remains that still exist.

“They have a better overview of what’s happening in Pompeii because they analyzed different samples,” said Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, a co-author of that research who was not involved in the current study. “We actually had one genome, one sample, one shot.”

Though much remains to be learned, Scorrano said, such genetic brushstrokes are slowly painting a truer picture of how people lived in the distant past. 
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Federal health officials on Thursday called for more testing of employees on farms with bird flu after a new study showed that some dairy workers had signs of infection, even when they didn’t report feeling sick. 

Farmworkers in close contact with infected animals should be tested and offered treatment even if they show no symptoms, said Dr. Nirav Shah, principal director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The new guidance comes after blood tests for 115 farmworkers in Michigan and Colorado showed that eight workers — or 7% — had antibodies that indicated previous infection with the virus known as Type A H5N1 influenza. 

“The purpose of these actions is to keep workers safe, to limit the transmission of H5 to humans and to reduce the possibility of the virus changing,” Shah told reporters. 

The CDC study provides the largest window to date into how the bird virus first detected in March in dairy cows may be spreading to people. It suggests that the virus has infected more humans than the 46 farmworkers identified in the U.S. as of Thursday. Nearly all were in contact with infected dairy cows or infected poultry. 

Outside experts said it’s notable that the study prompted the CDC to take new action. Previous recommendations called for testing and treating workers only when they had symptoms. 

“This is a significant move towards the assessment that these H5N1 viruses are a greater risk than the CDC estimated before,” said Dr. Gregory Gray, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. 

Every additional infection in animals or humans gives the virus the chance to change in potentially dangerous ways, said Angela Rasmussen, a virus expert at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. 

“It shows yet again that we are not responding effectively to the H5N1 cattle outbreak in humans or animals and if we continue to let this virus spread and jump from species to species, our luck will eventually run out,” Rasmussen said in an email. 

The CDC study included 45 workers in Michigan and 70 in Colorado tested between June and August. Of the eight workers with positive blood tests, four reported no symptoms. All eight cleaned milking parlors and none used respiratory protection such as face masks. Three said they used eye protection. 

High levels of the virus have been found in the milk of infected cows, increasing the risk of exposure and infection, researchers said. 

Researchers said that efforts to monitor dairy workers for illness have been hindered by several barriers including the reluctance of farm owners and farmworkers to allow testing. 

The virus has been confirmed in at least 446 cattle herds in 15 states. Last week, the Agriculture Department said a pig at an Oregon farm was confirmed to have bird flu, the first time the virus was detected in U.S. swine. 
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KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO — The spread of mpox has slowed down slightly across Africa, but the epidemic is not over, the African Union’s health watchdog said Thursday.

Fifteen countries across Africa recorded 11,453 mpox cases in the last four weeks, compared with 12,802 in the four weeks prior, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said during an online briefing.

But the head of the Africa CDC, Jean Kaseya, warned the epidemic was not over.

“We are still in the acute phase of the outbreak that is pushing us to double our effort to control mpox in Africa,” Kaseya said.

“Unfortunately, we are still losing a number of people,” he said.

Since the start of the year, authorities have recorded 50,840 mpox cases and 1,083 deaths across Africa.

Central Africa accounts for more than 85% of cases and almost all deaths.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, which has recorded more than 39,000 cases and more than 1,000 deaths since the start of the year, launched a vaccination campaign last month that is still “limited,” according to the Africa CDC.

Some 51,649 people have been vaccinated in six provinces, the Africa CDC said.

“We hope that with these vaccines we can continue to support countries to stop this outbreak,” Kaseya said.

Health agencies across the world have allocated just under 900,000 vaccine doses for nine African countries “hard hit by the current mpox surge,” the Africa CDC said in a statement Tuesday.

The countries include the DRC, Kenya and Uganda.

“The largest number of doses — 85% of the allocation — will go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as the most affected country, reporting four out of every five laboratory confirmed cases in Africa this year,” the statement said.

Mpox, previously known as monkeypox, is caused by a virus transmitted to humans by infected animals but can also be passed from human to human through close physical contact.

It causes fever, muscular aches and large boil-like skin lesions, and can be deadly.
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