October 2023

State and local health departments across the U.S found out in June they’d be losing the final two years of a $1 billion investment to strengthen the ranks of people who track and try to prevent sexually transmitted diseases — especially the rapid increase of syphilis cases.

The fallout was quick.

Nevada, which saw a 44 percentage-point jump in congenital syphilis from 2021 to 2022, was supposed to get more than $10 million to bolster its STD program budget. Instead, the state’s STD prevention budget fell by more than 75%, reducing its capacity to respond to syphilis, according to Dawn Cribb at the Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health.

Several states told The Associated Press the loss of funding is affecting efforts to expand their disease intervention workforce. These are people who do contact tracing and outreach and are key in stopping the spread of syphilis, which reached a low point in the U.S. in 2000 but has increased almost every year since. In 2021, there were 176,713 cases — up 31% from the prior year.

“It was devastating, really, because we had worked so hard to shore up our workforce and also implement new activities,” said Sam Burgess, the STD/HIV program director for the Louisiana Department of Health.

His state was slated to receive more than $14 million overall, but instead got $8.6 million to stretch until January 2026. “And we’re still scrambling to try to figure out how we can plug some of those funding gaps,” he said.

While men who have sex with men are disproportionately impacted by syphilis, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health officials across the country also point to the increase in pregnant women who are passing syphilis to their babies. It can cause serious health issues for infants, including blindness and bone damage, or lead to stillbirths. In 2021, there were 77.9 cases of congenital syphilis per 100,000 live births.

Disease intervention specialists often link infected mothers and their partners with care for syphilis, which has mild symptoms for adults, like fever and sores. Doing so in a timely manner can prevent congenital syphilis. The specialists also can help pregnant patients find prenatal care.

“When you have a mother who didn’t know (she had syphilis), it can be very emotional trying to explain … it could have been prevented if we could have caught it before,” said Deneshun Graves, a public health investigator with the Houston Health Department.

The Houston Health Department is in the midst of what it calls a “rapid community outreach response” because syphilis cases increased by 128% among women from 2019 to 2022, and congenital syphilis cases went from 16 in 2019 to 151 in 2021.

Its STD/HIV bureau was set to receive a total of $10.7 million from the federal grant but will end up with about 75% of that.

The department has used the money to hire disease intervention specialists and epidemiologists — including Graves. But Lupita Thornton, a public health investigator manager, said she could use “double of everything,” and had planned to bring down the caseload for her investigators by hiring even more people.

It would help Graves, who deals with more than 70 cases at a time.

“You got people that don’t want to go in and get treatment. You have people that don’t want to answer the phone, so you got to continue to call,” Graves said.

Mississippi is also seeing an increase in congenital syphilis cases, which a recently published study showed rose tenfold between 2016 and 2022. Health officials said a combination of funding shortages and poor access to prenatal care compounds their ability to stop the spread of syphilis.

The Mississippi State Department of Health was supposed to get more than $9 million in federal grant money over five years to expand its disease intervention workforce. Agency head Dr. Dan Edney said one of his top priorities now is finding money from other parts of the state’s health budget.

Arizona has the highest rate of congenital syphilis in the nation: 232.3 cases per 100,000 live births. The federal money helped the state Department of Health Services clear out a backlog of several thousand non-syphilis STD investigations that had been stalled for years, said Rebecca Scranton, the deputy bureau chief of infectious disease and services.

“We were finally at the point where we were able to breathe again,” Scranton said, “and start really kind of tackling it.”
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Runners undeterred by thick smog engulfing the Chinese capital ran the Beijing Marathon maskless on Sunday, many wearing shorts in one of the warmest Octobers on record.

Despite a greyish brown smog settling, some 30,000 marathoners set off at 7:30 a.m. (2330 GMT) from Tiananmen Square on the route through four districts of the Chinese capital over 42.195 km (26.2 miles).

Beijing was the second most-polluted major city in the world on Sunday, according to Swiss air-quality technology firm IQAir.

In the Haidian district on Beijing’s outskirts, the sky looked dreary, but hikers and visitors showed up at the Fragrant Hills Park where many go to enjoy autumn foliage, according to a Reuters witness.

China’s national forecaster advised the public to wear masks, warning on Sunday morning that air quality was reaching moderate or severe pollution.

Smog and fog will blanket parts of China for the next few days, reducing visibility and affecting travel in northeastern, northern, central and some eastern provinces, the National Meteorological Center said on Sunday.

Beijing’s observatory cautioned in the evening that visibility in most areas of the city will drop to less than 1 km (0.62 mile) overnight.

The smoggy weather is expected to gradually weaken and dissipate from Friday, but not before heavy fog forecast to cover parts of Jiangsu, Anhui and Sichuan provinces over the next three days could reduce visibility to less than 200 meters (650 feet), the forecaster said.

Steel production hubs in Tangshan, Handan and other cities in the northern province of Hebei launched emergency responses on Friday after heavy air pollution forecasts. The notices did not indicate when the controls would be lifted.

The smog adds unusually warm October weather, due to significantly weaker cold air currents from the north as the polar vortex that sends cold air southward was situated further north recently, experts said.

Beijing’s high on Sunday was 19 C (66 F), according to the national weather bureau.

Parts of China, including in the north and northeast, have been experiencing temperatures 2 to 4 degrees Celsius (4-7 Fahrenheit) higher than normal the past 10 days.

“At present, a total of 237 national meteorological stations have broken historically highest temperatures in late October, which is still a relatively rare situation,” meteorological bureau’s chief forecaster Fang Chong was quoted by state media as saying.

Weak cold air currents were forecast to last the rest of the month before beginning to cool in early November.

While the smog was expected to clear up in less than a week, the backdrop of hazy weather resembled that of Beijing’s annual race almost a decade ago. In 2014 then-Premier Li Keqiang, who died on Friday, declared “war” on pollution and many marathoners donned masks for protection.

 
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Mouse embryos have been grown on the International Space Station and developed normally in the first study indicating it could be possible for humans to reproduce in space, a group of Japanese scientists said.

The researchers, including Teruhiko Wakayama, professor of University of Yamanashi’s Advanced Biotechnology Centre, and a team from the Japan Aerospace Space Agency (JAXA), sent frozen mouse embryos on board a rocket to the ISS in August 2021.

Astronauts thawed the early-stage embryos using a special device designed for this purpose and grew them on the station for four days.

“The embryos cultured under microgravity conditions developed” normally into blastocysts, cells that develop into the foetus and placenta, the scientists said.

The experiment “clearly demonstrated that gravity had no significant effect,” the researchers said in a study that was published online in the scientific journal iScience on Saturday.

They also said there were no significant changes in condition of the DNA and genes, after they analysed the blastocysts that were sent back to their laboratories on Earth.

This is “the first-ever study that shows mammals may be able to thrive in space,” University of Yamanashi and national research institute Riken said in a joint statement on Saturday.

It is “the world’s first experiment that cultured early-stage mammalian embryos under complete microgravity of ISS,” the statement said.

“In the future, it will be necessary to transplant the blastocysts that were cultured in ISS’s microgravity into mice to see if mice can give birth” to confirm that the blastocysts are normal, it added.

Such research could be important for future space exploration and colonisation missions.

Under its Artemis programme, NASA plans to send humans back to the Moon in order to learn how to live there long-term to help prepare a trip to Mars, sometime towards the end of the 2030s.

 
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The Australian Capital Territory, which includes Canberra and surrounding areas, Saturday became Australia’s first jurisdiction to decriminalize possession of small amounts of illegal drugs.

The Australian Capital Territory, or ACT, now considers illegal drug use a health, not criminal, issue. While the ACT government has promised to remain tough on dealers and traffickers, it wants low-level cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine users to receive treatment, a police caution or a fine rather than going to court. Drugs will be confiscated.

The law was passed in 2022 by the ACT Legislative Assembly. Hard drugs, including LSD, cocaine and methamphetime, remain illegal.

Welfare and health campaigners welcomed the new measures, saying they will lead to more drug users getting help rather than being treated as criminals.

Alice Salomon, the Head of Media and Advocacy at Uniting ACT, a community services organization, said in a statement Thursday that “a shift to a focus on health-based and community responses for drug use and dependency rather than seeing the police and the courts as the place where we seek to address this is long overdue but warmly welcomed.”

Senior police officials say they fear the changes could encourage people to take illicit substances for the first time.

ACT Chief Police Officer Neil Gaughan told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. the new laws are too permissive.

“You know, I am concerned about people trying drugs that have not historically done it because I think there will be confusion between, particularly young people, who will not understand the difference between decriminalization and legalization,” he said. “The harm-minimization issue still needs to be front and center, and that means people do not take drugs. I mean, they are dangerous.”

Michaelia Cash, a federal Liberal Party senator, is a staunch critic of the new drug law in the ACT. Earlier this month, she failed to overturn the legislation in Federal Parliament. Cash told Parliament that parking offenses in Canberra would now be treated more seriously than dangerous drugs and that the region was at risk of becoming Australia’s “drug capital.”

Australia’s federated system includes six states and two main territories. They are all self-governed and pass their own laws. The federal government has responsibility over several areas, including defense, foreign affairs, trade and immigration. The Federal Parliament can overturn state or territory legislation, but it is uncommon.

Often, reforms introduced in one jurisdiction are adopted by others. For instance, laws similar to Victoria’s 2017 voluntary assisted dying legislation will be introduced into the state of New South Wales in November.

In the ACT, allowable amounts of hard drugs vary depending on the substance: 1.5 grams for cocaine, 1 gram of heroin and 5 doses of LSD.
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Fighting the global environmental impacts of climate change unfortunately requires local impacts from mining the minerals needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines and power grids. The Biden administration aims to increase U.S. production of these critical minerals that China and other countries with weaker environmental standards have come to dominate. But local opposition is complicating the effort. VOA’s Steve Baragona looks at the battle over one such mine in the northern U.S. state of Minnesota.
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Iceland’s meteorological office reported Friday the Nordic Island nation’s southwestern Reykjanes Peninsula has been experiencing a “seismic swarm” of small earthquakes over the last three days, with at least 5,800 recorded since it began and around 1,000 since midnight Thursday.

In a series of reports on its website, the meteorological office — known as the “Met” office — said the vast majority of the quakes have been under magnitude 3, although two in the last three days were over 4.

The largest tremor, on Wednesday, measured 4.5 north of the town of Grindavík.

While small earthquakes are a daily occurrence in the nation, situated between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, the so-called seismic swarm is unusual.

The earthquakes prompted the national police commissioner to declare a Civil Protection “Level of Uncertainty,” encouraging residents to secure loose objects in their homes and noting that the earthquakes could trigger rocks or loose earth to slide in areas with steep slopes.

The Met office attributed the seismic swarm to stress changes in the earth’s crust induced by the flow of magma — molten rock — toward the surface beneath the Fagradalsfjall volcanic system.

In an interview with Reuters, Met Office Research division chief Matthew Roberts said the earthquakes are a warning sign for a volcanic eruption sometime in the next 12 months, although he added that predicting the timing of earthquakes is difficult.

Iceland’s last volcanic eruption, in July, occurred in an uninhabited part of the Reykjanes Peninsula after similar intense earthquake activity.

Some information for this report was provided by Reuters.
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Wu Zunyou, an epidemiologist who helped drive the country’s strict zero-COVID measures in China that suspended access to cities and confined millions to their homes, died on Friday. He was 60.

An announcement from China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention about Wu’s death gave no cause but said that “rescue measures failed.”

Wu’s health had been poor. He disappeared from the public eye for months last year while battling cancer.

Wu, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, had spent much of his early career working on HIV/AIDS prevention in China.

Wu was instrumental in developing China’s flagship policy in the HIV epidemic among intravenous drug users, according to his biography on the UCLA website. In recognition of this work, he was awarded the 2005 International Rolleston Award. Later, he was also awarded a UNAIDS Gold Medal in 2008 for his overall work.

Yet, as China battled the COVID-19 virus, Wu came to be criticized by some for his choice to publicly voice support for the country’s strict virus control measures even as the weaknesses of the strategy became more pronounced.

“Dynamic zero-COVID is appropriate for China’s reality and is the best choice to control our country’s current COVID situation,” he said in April 2022, during the height of Shanghai’s lockdown.

The strategy bought China time in the early days of the pandemic, but by 2022, as the virus became more and more easily spread, it showed signs of strain.

The mega city of Shanghai was unprepared for a lockdown, and its residents scrambled for groceries and basic necessities, while many also found it hard to access urgent medical services as people were barred from leaving their homes or even entering hospitals. Many were also angry about a key aspect of virus controls, which involved mass field hospitals where people who tested positive were forced to go by public health workers.

In private, Wu disagreed with the excesses of the zero-COVID strategy but felt powerless to go against it.

As zero-COVID became unsustainable in the fall of 2022, he wrote an internal report urging the government to avoid excessive measures. But in public press conferences throughout the past few years, he voiced the official line.

Wu visibly aged during the virus fight. He was pictured in 2020 with mostly black hair; by 2022, his locks had gone entirely gray.

The news of Wu’s death came just hours after the death of former Premier Li Keqiang was announced. Li was the country’s No. 2 leader during the pandemic.
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