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An expert group convened by the World Health Organization said Tuesday it “strongly supports urgent and broad access” to booster doses, in a reversal of the U.N. agency’s previous insistence that boosters weren’t necessary and contributed to vaccine inequity.

In a statement, WHO said its expert group concluded that immunization with authorized COVID-19 vaccines provide high levels of protection against severe disease and death amid the global circulation of the hugely contagious omicron variant.

It said vaccination, including the use of boosters, was especially important for people at risk of severe disease.

Last year, WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for a moratorium on booster doses while dozens of countries embarked on administering the doses, saying rich countries should immediately donate those vaccines to poor countries instead. WHO scientists said at the time they would continue to evaluate incoming data.

Numerous scientific studies have since proven that booster doses of authorized vaccines help restore waning immunity and protect against serious COVID-19. Booster programs in rich countries including Britain, Canada and the U.S. have been credited with preventing the surge in omicron infections from spilling over into hospitals and cemeteries.

WHO said it is continuing to monitor the global spread of omicron, including a “stealth” version known as BA.2, which has been documented to have re-infected some people after an initial case of omicron. There’s mixed research on whether it causes more severe disease, but vaccines appear just as effective against it.

WHO noted that the current authorized COVID-19 vaccines are all based on the strain that was first detected in Wuhan, China more than three years ago.

“Since then, there has been continuous and substantial virus evolution and it is likely that this evolution will continue, resulting in the emergence of new variants,” the agency said. It added that coronavirus vaccines would likely need to be updated.
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Chocolate makers are expected to raise prices this year due to higher costs of cocoa from exporters like Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer.

Hershey, the largest producer of chocolate products in the United States, said last month it will raise prices on its products across the board due to the rising cost of ingredients.   

Meanwhile, chocolate makers like Dana Mroueh said they are seeing cocoa prices rise in Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa producer.  

“We’ve noticed the price of cocoa is going up these few years, especially organic cocoa. So, from the beginning to today, those five years, we can say the price has risen 20 percent,” Mroueh said.  

Demand for chocolate in America increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and cocoa producers in Ivory Coast are struggling to keep up with that demand.   

Experts say one reason is the impact of climate change.  

Harvard University says that by 2030, parts of West Africa will be too hot and dry to adequately produce cocoa. The West African countries of Ghana and Ivory Coast alone produce 70 percent of global supply.  

Cocoa farmer Raphael Konan Kouassi took VOA to his plantation, a shady orchard where fat green and yellow cocoa pods hung from tree trunks. He said trees are yielding less due to rising temperatures and poor rains.  

“Almost all of the young plants die in the high season. If you have not been able to get water to them, you have no cocoa,” he said.  

Kouassi receives government assistance in the form of cocoa trees, which are more resilient to the fluctuations of climate change, but he said government distributions happen at the wrong time of year for the saplings to survive.  

Christian Bunn of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers, a global scientific organization, said information about how the climate is changing can inform farmers on how to better nurture their crops.  

“What we’re seeing is that the onset of both dry and wet season can change. It’s less reliable. During the season, there may be breaks in terms of rain during the dry season, or there’s a dry spell during the wet season, and the overall distribution or amounts of rainfall they’re receiving may change,” Bunn said.  

The data shows it may be better for farmers to stop producing cocoa and diversify into other crops, he said.   

However, Olga Yenou, the CEO of an Ivorian company that supplies The Hershey Company, said higher prices for cocoa could be welcomed by farmers.  

“My opinion is that these farmers should have better prices, should earn more, because they work hard. Most are poor,” Yenou said.  

Her wish appears to be coming true. As climate change continues to bite, prices continue to surge.  

 
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Afghanistan faces a serious risk of backtracking to its notoriously high maternal mortality rates because of sudden drops in foreign funding, a shortage of health care workers, mobility restrictions and worsening poverty, health professionals have told VOA.  

More than 1,600 Afghan mothers were dying for every 100,000 live births in 2001. With strong technical and financial support from donors, the country reduced the rate to about 640 deaths by 2018.  

Donors were spending about $1 billion annually on Afghanistan’s health sector, but all development funding ceased immediately when the Taliban returned to power in August.  

The abrupt funding shortage crippled the country’s donor-dependent public health system amid a global pandemic and a nearly universal poverty rate in the country.  

By September 2021, more than 80% of the country’s health care facilities were reported as dysfunctional because of a lack of funding and medical supplies and a shortage of personnel.  

“After the change of the government in August, there was a significant drop [cumulative around 25%] in the availability and utilization of maternal health services,” Joy Rivaca Caminade, a communication specialist with the World Health Organization in Afghanistan, told VOA.  

The United Nations’ children’s agency, UNICEF, gave a similar bleak assessment. 

“Following the events of mid-August 2021, Afghanistan’s health sector was close to collapse, with coverage of many lifesaving interventions for women and children falling between 20 and 30% within days,” said Joe English, a UNICEF spokesperson.  

Such setbacks have given rise to one of Afghanistan’s long-standing health crises — high maternal mortality. 

Mortality rates during childbirth might even have gone back to what they were in 2001, said Nadia Akseer, a scientist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.  

While there is no data showing how much infant and maternal mortality rates have worsened over the past six months, public health experts say the situation has deteriorated and the future remains uncertain.  

Too little aid  

After aid organizations warned that Afghanistan was facing widespread starvation and famine during the cold season, Western donors agreed to provide only lifesaving humanitarian assistance, to be delivered through U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations.  

In December, the World Bank announced it was transferring $100 million from the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund — a multidonor fund set up to coordinate international aid — to UNICEF and WHO to fund emergency health activities in the country until June 2022.  

U.N. agencies have welcomed the funding resumption and say the aid flow must continue or there will be serious public health consequences.  

There are also concerns about the insufficiency of the funding as well as the mechanisms established for disbursement.  

In addition to the nearly $1 billion in foreign assistance, the former Afghan government used to allocate about $200 million for the health sector from domestic resources annually.  

The current humanitarian funding is only a fraction of what the country used to spend on health programs. And while the aid is insufficient, some are criticizing the U.N.-led aid disbursement regime. 

“We know that U.N. agencies have high overhead costs, and they have their own fees,” Akseer told VOA, adding that donors must find a more cost-effective aid delivery system and consider removing economic sanctions on Afghanistan.  

The World Bank and other Western donors have said no funding should be given to or disbursed through the Afghan Health Ministry, which manages public health facilities and personnel all over the country.  

The United States, the largest humanitarian donor to Afghanistan, has imposed strong economic and political sanctions on the Taliban government, blocking access to about $9 billion in foreign assets, held mostly by the U.S. To help mitigate the growing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has issued special licenses for the delivery of essential aid to needy Afghans on the condition that the aid will not directly benefit the Taliban.  

U.N. and partner health care NGOs use foreign funds to ensure health facilities remain operational and to tackle a host of public health crises facing Afghanistan, including the pandemic, a recent increase in measles cases, growing malnutrition among children, and infectious diseases — not just infant and maternal health.  

Brain drain  

According to a Doctors Without Borders statement on February 23, “The Afghan heath system has been under-funded, under-staffed and dysfunctional for years. Most health facilities in Afghanistan remain under great pressure due to shortages of staff and equipment—some are barely functioning or are closed altogether.”  

Even in 2016, Afghanistan had the lowest number of doctors per every 1,000 people (0.3) in Asia, according to the World Bank.  

Tens of thousands of educated Afghans, among them health care professionals affiliated with international organizations, have been evacuated out of Afghanistan over the past six months.  

This has created a “brain drain of health professionals,” Akseer said.  

“Let’s say a midwife who worked in a typical village in Afghanistan and who was trained by an international organization, that affiliation is her ticket out of the country.” 

WHO confirmed the shortage of health professionals but added there was no data to measure how this was impacting the delivery of essential health services across the country.  

Afghanistan’s health problems have been compounded by economic and institutional crises.  

“The increase in poverty to over 97%, the large-scale loss of livelihoods, and widespread displacement do not bode well for maternal and child health,” said English, the UNICEF spokesperson.  

The Taliban’s restrictions on women’s mobility has also limited Afghan mothers’ access to health care services, aid agencies say.  

“It’s very possible that just in the past six months we’ve seen higher rates of maternal mortality and maternal illness than maybe the country has seen in the past 15 years,” Akseer said.  
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Hammered by climate change and relentless deforestation, the Amazon rainforest is losing its capacity to recover and could irretrievably transition into savannah, with dire consequences for the region and the world, according to a study published Monday.   

Researchers warned that the findings mean the Amazon could be approaching a so-called tipping point faster than previously understood.    

Analyzing 25 years of satellite data, researchers measured for the first time the Amazon’s resilience against shocks such as droughts and fires, a key indicator of overall health. 

Resilience has declined across more than three-quarters of the Amazon basin, home to half the world’s rainforest, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Climate Change. 

In areas hit hardest by destruction or drought, the forest’s ability to bounce back was reduced by approximately half, co-author Tim Lenton, director of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, told AFP. 

“Our resilience measure changed by more than a factor of two in the places nearer to human activity and in places that are driest,” he said in an interview.   

Climate models have suggested that global heating – which has on average warmed Earth’s surface 1.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels – could by itself push the Amazon past a point of no return into a far drier savannah-like state. 

If carbon pollution continues unabated, that scenario could be locked in by mid-century, according to some models. 

“But, of course, it’s not just climate change – people are busy chopping or burning the forest down, which is a second pressure point,” Lenton said. 

“Those two things interact, so there are concerns the transition could happen even earlier.” 

Besides the Amazon, ice sheets on Greenland and the West Antarctic, Siberian permafrost loaded with CO2 and methane, monsoon rains in South Asia, coral reef ecosystems, and the Atlantic Ocean current are all are vulnerable to tipping points that could radically alter the world as we know it. 

Global fallout 

Deforestation in Brazil has surged since far-right President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019, hitting a 15-year high last year. 

Scientists reported recently that Brazil’s rainforest – 60% of the Amazon basin’s total – has shifted from a “sink” to a “source” of CO2, releasing 20% more of the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere over the past decade than it absorbed. 

Terrestrial ecosystems worldwide have been a crucial ally as the world struggles to curb CO2 emissions. Vegetation and soil globally have consistently absorbed about 30% of carbon pollution since 1960, even as emissions increased by half.  

“Savannification” of the Amazon would be hugely disruptive, in South America and across the globe.  

More than 90 billion tons of CO2 stored in its rainforest – twice worldwide annual emissions from all sources – could be released into the atmosphere, pushing global temperatures up even faster. 

Regionally, “it’s not just the forests that take a hit,” said Lenton. “If you lose the recycling of rainfall from the Amazon, you get knock-on effects in central Brazil, the country’s agricultural heartland.” 

Ominously, the new findings marshal data pointing in the same direction. 

“Many researchers have theorized that a tipping point could be reached,” said co-author Niklas Boers, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.  

“Our study provides vital empirical evidence that we are approaching that threshold.” 

‘Saving grace’ 

To assess change in the resilience of the rainforest, Lenton, Boers and lead author Chris Boulton from Exeter University analyzed two satellite data sets, one measuring biomass and the other the “greenness” of the canopy.   

“If too much resilience is lost, dieback may become inevitable – but that won’t become obvious until the major event that tips the system is over,” said Boers. 

There may be a “saving grace” that could pull the Amazon back from the brink. 

“The rainforest naturally has a lot of resilience – this is a biome that weathered the ice ages, after all,” said Lenton. 

“If you could bring the temperature back down again even after passing the tipping point, you might be able to rescue the situation.” 

“But that still puts you in the realm of massive carbon dioxide removal, or geoengineering, which has its own risks.” 

Just under 20% of the Amazon rainforest – straddling nine nations and covering more than 5 million square kilometers (2 million square miles) – has been destroyed or degraded since 1970, mostly for the production of lumber, soy, palm oil, biofuels and beef. 
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Duke University doctors say a baby is thriving after a first-of-its-kind heart transplant — one that came with a bonus technique to try to help prevent rejection of the new organ.

The thymus plays a critical role in building the immune system. Doctors have wondered if implanting some thymus tissue that matched a donated organ might help it survive without the recipient needing toxic anti-rejection medicines.

Easton Sinnamon of Asheboro, North Carolina, received his unique transplant last summer when he was 6 months old. But Duke waited to announce it until Monday after doctors learned the specially processed thymus implants appear to be functioning like they’d hoped — producing immune cells that don’t treat the tot’s new heart like foreign tissue.

Doctors eventually will try weaning Easton off the immune-suppressing drugs required after a transplant, said Dr. Joseph Turek, Duke’s chief of pediatric cardiac surgery.

The research is in very early stages and just one possible method scientists are testing in hopes of inducing what’s called immune tolerance to a transplant.

But Turek says if it works, it could be attempted with other organ transplants, not just the heart.

Easton was a candidate for the experimental transplant because he had two separate health problems. He was born with some heart defects that surgeries right after birth failed to solve. And he suffered recurrent infections that doctors eventually realized meant his own thymus wasn’t working properly.

Some babies are born without a thymus, which stimulates development of part of the immune system known as T cells. Separately, Duke researchers had been working with Enzyvant Therapeutics to develop lab-grown implants of donated thymus tissue to treat that rare disorder.

Easton got a combination of the two procedures. First surgeons implanted his new heart while the donated thymus was sent to a lab. About two weeks later, he had a second operation to implant the processed thymus tissue. His own partially working thymus was removed, to clear the way for new immune cells to take hold.

About six months later, testing shows the thymus tissue is building Easton well-functioning new T cells, said Turek.
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