February 2022

U.S. intelligence agencies may have ruled out the idea that a rash of mysterious illnesses plaguing American diplomats and other officials is part of a sustained campaign by one of Washington’s adversaries, but they now say that in a small number of cases the only likely explanation is the use of some sort of weapon. 

A report released Wednesday by a panel of experts assembled by U.S. intelligence officials finds that the core symptoms in these cases are “distinctly unusual and unreported elsewhere in the medical literature,” making it highly unlikely the cause could be natural. 

“Pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radiofrequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics,” the report said. 

“Sources exist that could generate the required stimulus, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements,” the report added. “Using nonstandard … antennas and techniques, the signals could be propagated with low loss through air for tens to hundreds of meters, and with some loss, through most building materials.” 

The mystery illness was first reported in 2016 among diplomats and other employees at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba. 

Since then, hundreds of cases have been reported in Russia, China, Poland, Austria and elsewhere, with symptoms ranging from nausea and dizziness to debilitating headaches and memory problems.  

The U.S. government has been engaged in a yearlong effort to find the source of the anomalous health incidents, or AHI, commonly called Havana Syndrome. 

An interim report issued last month by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), concluded most of the cases “can be reasonably explained by medical conditions or environmental and technical factors, including previously undiagnosed illnesses.” 

However, it warned that a smaller number of cases continued to defy explanation and that, in those cases, officials “have not ruled out the involvement of a foreign actor.” 

Wednesday’s report appears to support that conclusion, though officials said the latest effort was not focused on assigning responsibility for the possible attacks. 

“There are a small number of the cases we looked at that had no other plausible mechanism,” according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the expert panel’s work who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity.  

Mystery remains

Exactly how the possible attacks were carried out, though, remains a mystery. 

“We don’t have a specific device,” said a second official, who like the first was familiar with the panel’s work. 

But the official said the idea that some cases of Havana Syndrome are the result of a weapon of some sort is “more than a theory.”  

“We had accounts of people that had been around RF [radio frequency] energy inadvertently and describe symptoms like that,” the official added. 

The notion that a directed, pulsed radio frequency mechanism was behind key symptoms of Havana Syndrome — the quick onset of pain or problems with the inner ear, including a loss of balance, dizziness and nausea — was first raised in 2020 the National Academy of Sciences, which called such as source “the most plausible mechanism in explaining” the growing number of cases. 

Wednesday’s report affirmed that finding, but also left open the possibility that some of the cases could have been caused by a device using ultrasound technology, though it said an ultrasonic device would only be able to produce the right combination of symptoms if deployed in close proximity to the victim. 

Making progress

In a statement Wednesday, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and CIA Director William Burns said the effort to determine the cause of Havana Syndrome is making progress. 

“We continue to pursue complementary efforts to get to the bottom of Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs) — and to deliver access to world-class care for those affected,” they said in a statement. 

“We will stay at it, with continued rigor, for however long it takes,” they added. “Nothing is more important than the wellbeing and safety of our colleagues.” 

Officials familiar with the work on Havana Syndrome said Wednesday “it’s frustrating” not being able to get a clear-cut, definitive answer as to what has happened to as many as a couple of dozen of their colleagues and U.S. diplomatic personnel. 

But they said that despite the many unknowns, the latest findings do offer hope for those who have been impacted. 

“We’ve learned a lot,” one of the officials said. “While we don’t have the specific mechanism for each case, what we do know is if you report quickly and promptly get medical care, most people are getting well.” 

The report also recommended the U.S. create a central database to collect information on future reported cases, develop a set of so-called “bio-markers” to better identify new cases, try to develop technology capable of detecting an attack, and improve communications. 

The White House Wednesday welcomed the report’s findings. 

“The [experts] panel undertook a rigorous, multi-disciplinary study that has identified important findings and recommendations,” a National Security Council spokesperson said in a statement. 

The findings “will inform intensive research and investigation moving forward as we continue our government-wide effort to get to the bottom of AHI,” the spokesperson added. 

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday named a top official to lead the government’s interagency response to Havana Syndrome. 
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As several European nations scale back or drop COVID-19 restrictions altogether, the World Health Organization (WHO) is urging caution as the coronavirus remains.

Denmark lifted most of its COVID-19 restrictions Tuesday, including the use of masks in public places or requiring proof of vaccination to enter public venues, with government officials saying they no longer consider COVID-19 a “socially critical disease.” France, Britain and other European nations are following suit.

At a briefing Tuesday at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it is premature for any country either to surrender, or to declare victory over the pandemic.  

Tedros said because of the omicron variant of the virus that causes COVID-19, it remains highly transmissible and deadly. He said that in the 10 weeks since the omicron variant was identified, almost 90 million cases have been reported, more than in all of 2020. And he said the WHO is now starting to see a very worrying increase in deaths, in most regions of the world.

At same briefing, WHO COVID lead Maria Van Kerkhove urged nations to be cautious about lifting restrictions “all at once.” She suggested a more gradual process because many countries have not yet gone through the peak of their omicron surges, and others have low levels of vaccination coverage, especially among vulnerable populations.  

WHO Emergencies Program chief Mike Ryan agreed with the call for a cautious approach, and noted all countries are not in the same place regarding the pandemic. He said countries that are making decisions to open more broadly also need to be sure they have the capacity to close back down just as quickly.

Ryan said, “It is important that we keep communities informed and maybe ensure that communities understand that measures may have to be reintroduced,” should COVID-19 cases make a rebound.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.
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President Joe Biden is committing to reduce the cancer death rate by 50% — a new goal for the “moonshot” initiative against the disease that was announced in 2016 when he was vice president.

Biden has set a 25-year timeline for achieving that goal, part of his broader effort to end cancer as we know it, according to senior administration officials who previewed Wednesday’s announcement on the condition of anonymity.

The issue is deeply personal for Biden: He lost his elder son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. Yet the rollout comes without any new funding elements at a time when the gains from new research can be uneven, such that Biden is setting an aspiration for the country more than 50 years after President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act and launched a war on the disease. The benefits of that act were seen recently in areas outside of cancer as well as vaccines that were developed for the coronavirus.

The pain experienced by Biden is shared by many Americans. The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be 1,918,030 new cancer cases and 609,360 cancer deaths this year. What the president is aiming to do is essentially save more than 300,000 lives annually from the disease, something the administration believes is possible because the age-adjusted death rate has already fallen by roughly 25% over the past two decades. The cancer death rate is currently 146 per 100,000 people, down from nearly 200 in 2000.

“The progress in cancer research is slow — some of the fruits of Nixon’s 1971 declaration were only harvested with the development of the COVID mRNA vaccine,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor of oncology and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University and former chief medical and scientific officer for the American Cancer Society. The research progress that has occurred has led to a “better understanding of the biology of cancer and will do even more for us in the future.”

Better public health practices, reducing cancer risks such as smoking and informing people about the best cancer research could reduce deaths. Brawley said that one of his studies found that 130,000 people die annually from cancer because they do not benefit from known science.

Dr. Barron Lerner, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University Langone Health, said that “hyperbolic goals” can be needed to attract public attention but achieving the 50% reduction is “extremely unlikely.”

“Similar past efforts like the ‘War on Cancer’ have made gains, but they have been more modest,” said Lerner, the author “The Breast Cancer Wars.” “Cancer is many diseases and requires very complicated research. Translating these advances to the clinical setting is never easy either.”

Biden was scheduled to give remarks Wednesday from the East Room of the White House, along with his wife, Jill, and Vice President Kamala Harris. Also scheduled to attend the speech: members of Congress and the administration and about 100 members of the cancer community including patients, survivors, caregivers, families, advocacy groups and research organizations.

As part of the effort, Biden will assemble a “cancer Cabinet” that includes 18 federal departments, agencies and offices, including leaders from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy and Agriculture.

There were no plans to announce new funding commitments on Wednesday, though the administration will outline why it believes it can curb cancer through efforts such as increased screening and removing inequities in treatment. The coronavirus pandemic has consumed health care resources and caused people to miss more than 9.5 million cancer screenings.

The White House also will host a summit on the cancer initiative and continue a roundtable discussion series on the subject. The goal is to improve the quality of treatment and people’s lives, something with deep economic resonance as well. The National Cancer Institute reported in October that the economic burden of treatment was more than $21 billion in 2019, including $16.22 billion in patient out-of-pocket costs.

President Barack Obama announced the cancer program during his final full year in office and secured $1.8 billion over seven years to fund research. Obama designated Biden, then his vice president, as “mission control,” a recognition of Biden’s grief as a parent and desire to do something about it. Biden wrote in his memoir “Promise Me, Dad” that he chose not to run for president in 2016 primarily because of Beau’s death.

When Biden announced he wasn’t seeking the Democratic nomination in 2016, he said he regretted not being president because “I would have wanted to have been the president who ended cancer, because it’s possible.”

The effort fell somewhat out of the public focus when Donald Trump became president, though Trump, a Republican, proposed $500 million over 10 years for pediatric cancer research in his 2019 State of the Union address.

Biden continued the work as a private citizen by establishing the Biden Cancer Initiative to help organize resources to improve cancer care. When Biden did seek the presidency in 2020, he had tears in his eyes as he said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that “Beau should be running for president, not me.”
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A study released Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows an extra shot of a COVID-19 vaccine provides solid protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death.

The federal health agency followed more than 400,000 adults in Los Angeles who were infected with either the delta or omicron variants of the coronavirus between November and this past January. Researchers found that unvaccinated residents who were infected with the delta strain between November and December were 83 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who had been vaccinated and gotten the booster shot.

Meanwhile, the study found that in January, when omicron overtook delta as the primary variant in Los Angeles, unvaccinated individuals were more than three times as likely to be infected and 23 times more likely to be hospitalized than people who were fully vaccinated and received a booster.

Elsewhere, France becomes the latest European country to relax its coronavirus restrictions. Effective Wednesday, mandatory outdoor mask-wearing will end, and audience capacity limits for concerts halls, sporting matches and other events are being phased out, according to a report Wednesday by Agence France-Presse. The relaxed mitigation standards are taking effect despite France reaching a record-setting number of new daily cases last month.

France’s actions come a day after Denmark and Norway officially lifted most of their  pandemic restrictions. Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands also have dropped most of their restrictions and containment measures.

Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse.
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Beijing has been exporting traditional Chinese medicine around the world, including to countries on the African continent. With claims of helping with COVID, these herbal clinics are welcomed by some while others are raising concerns about the effectiveness of such medicines, and the lack of regulation in the field. Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi. Camera: Robert Lutta
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When it comes to measuring global warming, humidity, not just heat, matters in generating dangerous climate extremes, a new study finds. 

Researchers say temperature by itself isn’t the best way to measure climate change’s weird weather and downplays impacts in the tropics. But factoring in air moisture along with heat shows that climate change since 1980 is nearly twice as bad as previously calculated, according to their study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

The energy generated in extreme weather, such as storms, floods and rainfall, is related to the amount of water in the air. So, a team of scientists in the United States and China decided to use an obscure weather measurement called equivalent potential temperature — or theta-e — that reflects “the moisture energy of the atmosphere,” said study co-author V. “Ram” Ramanathan, a climate scientist at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Cornell University. It’s expressed in degrees, like temperature. 

“There are two drivers of climate change: temperature and humidity,” Ramanathan said. “And so far, we measured global warming just in terms of temperature.” 

But by adding the energy from humidity, “the extremes — heat waves, rainfall and other measures of extremes — correlate much better,” he said. 

That’s because as the world warms, the air holds more moisture, nearly 4% for every degree Fahrenheit (7% for every degree Celsius). When that moisture condenses, it releases heat or energy, “that’s why when it rains, now it pours,” Ramanathan said. 

In addition, water vapor is a potent heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere that increases climate change, he said. 

From 1980 to 2019, the world warmed about 0.79 degrees Celsius (1.42 degrees Fahrenheit). But taking energy from humidity into account, the world has warmed and moistened 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit), the study said. And in the tropics, the warming was as much as 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). 

When judging by temperature alone, it looks like warming is most pronounced in North America, mid-latitudes and especially the poles — and less so in the tropics, Ramanathan said.

But that’s not the case, he said, because the high humidity in the tropics juices up storm activity, from regular storms to tropical cyclones and monsoons. 

“This increase in latent energy is released in the air, which leads to weather extremes: floods, storms and droughts,” Ramanathan said. 

University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles, who wasn’t part of the study, said it makes sense because water vapor is key in extreme rainfall. “Both heat and humidity are important,” Wuebbles said. 

Environmental scientist Katharine Mach of the University of Miami, who wasn’t part of the study, said “humidity is key in shaping the impacts of heat on human health and well-being, at present and into the future.” 
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A single lightning bolt that leapt across three U.S. states has been identified as the longest ever, the U.N. weather agency said Tuesday. Dubbed a megaflash, the rare low-rate horizontal discharge covered 768 kilometers (477 miles) between clouds in Texas and Mississippi in April 2020.

It was detected by scientists using satellite technology and its distance – beating the previous record by 60 kilometer – confirmed by a World Meteorological Organization committee.

“That trip by air[plane] would take a couple of hours and in this case the distance was covered in a matter of seconds,” WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis said.

Another megaflash that occurred above Uruguay and Argentina in June 2020 also set a record, as the longest-lasting at 17.1 seconds, the WMO said.

While these two newly cataloged megaflashes never touched the ground, they serve as a reminder of the dangers of a weather phenomenon that kill hundreds of people a year.

“We reiterate our message: when thunder roars, when you see lightning — go indoors. Don’t seek shelter in a beach hut, don’t stand under a tree,” Nullis said. 
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A group of pharmaceutical companies and distributors agreed to pay $590 million to settle lawsuits connected to opioid addiction among Native American tribes, according to a U.S. court filing released Tuesday. 

The agreement is the latest amid a deluge of litigation spawned by the U.S. opioid crisis, which has claimed more than 500,000 lives over the past 20 years and ensnared some of the largest firms in American medicine. 

The companies involved in the latest agreement include Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and McKesson, according to a filing in an Ohio federal court by a committee of plaintiffs in the case. 

Native Americans have “suffered some of the worst consequences of the opioid epidemic of any population in the United States,” including the highest per-capita rate of opioid overdoses compared with other racial groups, according to the filing from the tribal leadership committee. 

“The burden of paying these increased costs has diverted scarce funds from other needs and has imposed severe financial burdens on the tribal plaintiffs.” 

J&J, McKesson and the other two companies in the accord – AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health – previously agreed to a $26 billion global settlement on opioid cases. 

J&J said Tuesday the $150 million it agreed to pay in the Native American case has been deducted from what it owes in the global settlement. 

“This settlement is not an admission of any liability or wrongdoing and the company will continue to defend against any litigation that the final agreement does not resolve,” the company said.

It was unclear if the other companies would take their portion under the latest agreement from the global settlement. 

‘Measure of justice’ 

Robins Kaplan, a law firm negotiating on the behalf of the plaintiffs, said the agreement still must be approved by the Native American tribes. 

“This initial settlement for tribes in the national opioid litigation is a crucial first step in delivering some measure of justice to the tribes and reservation communities across the United States that have been ground zero for the opioid epidemic,” Tara Sutton, an attorney at the firm, said in a statement. 

Douglas Yankton, chairman of the North Dakota-based Spirit Lake Nation, said the money from the settlement would “help fund crucial, on-reservation, culturally appropriate opioid treatment services.” 

Steven Skikos, an attorney representing the tribes, told AFP they are pursuing claims against other drugmakers. 

“This is hopefully the first two of many other settlements,” he said. 

All tribes recognized by the U.S. government, 574 in all, will be able to participate in the agreement, even if they have not filed lawsuits. 

The settlement is separate from a prior agreement that resulted in $75 million in payments to the Cherokee Nation from three distribution companies, including McKesson. 

Many of the lawsuits regarding the opioid crisis have centered on Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, a highly addictive prescription painkiller blamed for causing a spike in addiction. 

A judge in December overturned the company’s bankruptcy plan because it provided some immunity for the owners of the company in exchange for a $4.5 billion payout to victims of the opioid crisis. 

The litigation wave also has swamped pharmacies owned by Walmart, Walgreens and CVS, which a jury found in November bear responsibility for the opioid crisis in two counties in Ohio. 

 
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The World Health Organization warns of health care risks posed by discarded COVID-19 equipment and is calling on nations to better manage their systems for disposing of the used gear.

Tackling the COVID-19 pandemic requires the use of huge quantities of personal protective equipment or PPE and the use of needles and syringes to administer vaccines, among other essential products.

A new World Health Organization global analysis finds the quantities of health care waste generated by the goods are enormous and potentially dangerous. Maggie Montgomery is the technical officer for water, sanitation and health in the WHO Department of Environment.

She says COVID-19 has increased health care risks in facilities at up to 10 times previous volumes.

“If you consider that two in three health care facilities in the least developed countries did not have systems to segregate or safely treat waste before this pandemic, you can just imagine how much burden this extra waste load has put on health care workers, on communities, especially where waste is burned,” Montgomery said.

The report finds the hazardous disposal of COVID-19 waste potentially exposes health workers to needle stick injuries, burns and pathogenic microorganisms, air pollution and many dangers associated with living near poorly managed landfills and waste disposal sites.

WHO experts analyzed approximately 87,000 tons of PPE that were shipped to needy countries between March 2020 and November 2021 through a joint U.N. emergency initiative. Most of the equipment, they say, was expected to end up as waste.

The report provides an initial indication of the scale of the COVID-19 waste problem that exists only within the health sector, which is enormous. Montgomery says it does not look at the volumes of waste being generated in the wider community.

“In terms of the waste generated by the public, in particular masks. For example, in 2020, there were 4.5 trillion additional disposable masks thrown away by the public, which led to six million tons of additional waste,” Montgomery said. “So, certainly, the public is generating the most. At the same time, we feel that the health sector has a really important role and there are many concrete things that can be done to reduce, unnecessary use of PPE.”

WHO recommendations for safer and more environmentally sustainable waste practices include using eco-friendly packaging and shipping, safe and reusable gloves and medical masks, and investing in non-burn waste treatment technologies.
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