Month: January 2023

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warns the world is dangerously unprepared for the next pandemic and this will have severe health, economic and social consequences for countries around the world. The IFRC has just released this year’s World Disaster Report.

In a marked departure from previous reports, the IFRC does not delve into the numerous natural disasters that caused untold devastation last year. It does not rank the severity of disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and drought in terms of deaths and the destruction of livelihoods and infrastructure.

Instead, the report focuses on the global crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic and on warnings of worse calamities to come if the global community does not prepare now for the next health crisis.

IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain said the authors of the report conclude the coronavirus pandemic has been the biggest disaster in our living memory, by any measure.

“I think no other disasters, the hurricane, earthquake, drought, or flood can compete in terms of the terrible human and socio-economic costs. Of course, the most conservative estimates tell us that 6.5 million people died from COVID-19 across these three years. But we all know that the real number could be much, much higher,” said Chapagain.

And the financial costs, he said, are staggering. He said the International Monetary Fund estimates the cost of the pandemic over the last three years to be $13.8 trillion.

He said the COVID-19 pandemic should be a wake-up call for the global community to prepare now for the next health crisis. He notes the World Health Organization and multiple epidemiologists have warned disease outbreaks are growing more frequent.

Chapagain said these outbreaks are being driven by factors such as climate change, increased movement of goods and services, urbanization, as well as growing inequity. He said success in tackling future health crises depends upon building trust among world leaders, within and between communities and countries.

“Without trust, lifesaving pandemic counter measures will not be accepted and implemented by the people who need them most. Preparedness will require equity. Our preparedness must include provisions for greater equity because public health emergencies will thrive on and aggravate existing inequities,” he said.

Chapagain said community-based organizations are an integral part of pandemic preparedness and response. He said local actors and communities have important roles to play as frontline responders in all phases of disease outbreak management.

He notes IFRC staff, and its global network of volunteers have reached more than 1.1 billion people over the past three years and helped to keep them safe from the virus.

Source: Voice Of America

World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warns global health challenges are growing and threatening the well-being of millions of people worldwide. He spoke at the opening of WHO’s week-long executive board meeting.

The WHO chief began his presentation on a somber note. He told meeting participants that an emergency committee convened to assess the status of the pandemic has concluded that COVID-19 remains a global health emergency.

He said the situation is much better now than a year ago when the omicron variant of the coronavirus was at its peak. But, he added, weekly reported deaths have been rising since early December. He said more than 170,000 people have lost their lives to COVID-19 in the past eight weeks.

“And that is just the reported deaths. We know the actual number is much higher. We cannot control the virus, but we can do more to address the vulnerabilities in populations and health systems.”

Tedros said health providers have the knowledge and means to control the spread of other diseases as well. He outlined an ambitious program for promoting health and protecting people from diseases. These, as well as other proposals for how the world can better prepare and respond to future health emergencies will be under discussion by member countries this week.

Tedros said progress has been made over the past year in promoting health, by addressing the root causes of disease. He called this action essential in achieving a target set by WHO of seeing one billion more people enjoying better health and well-being.

“On trans-fat, we have seen an almost five-fold increase in the number of people protected by WHO-recommended policies on the use of industrially produced trans-fat, from 550 million people to 2.6 billion, in just four years. But as you know, still five billion are unprotected.”

Last year, he said, WHO reached the target it set to support 100 million tobacco users in stopping smoking. He noted, however, this left an estimated 600 million users who want to kick the habit and need support.

Tedros presented numerous examples of key health achievements in both communicable and non-communicable diseases. He also acknowledged setbacks in many of these same areas, indicating the necessity of remaining alert and responding rapidly to health emergencies whenever and wherever they may arise.

Source: Voice Of America

The discovery of an asteroid the size of a small shipping truck mere days before it passed Earth on Thursday, albeit one that posed no threat to humans, highlights a blind spot in our ability to predict those that could actually cause damage, astronomers say.

NASA for years has prioritized detecting asteroids much bigger and more existentially threatening than 2023 BU, the small space rock that streaked by 2,200 miles from the Earth’s surface, closer than some satellites. If bound for Earth, it would have been pulverized in the atmosphere, with only small fragments possibly reaching land.

But 2023 BU sits on the smaller end of a size group, asteroids 5-to-50 meters in diameter, that also includes those as big as an Olympic swimming pool. Objects that size are difficult to detect until they wander much closer to Earth, complicating any efforts to brace for one that could impact a populated area.

The probability of an Earth impact by a space rock, called a meteor when it enters the atmosphere, of that size range is fairly low, scaling according to the asteroid’s size: a 5-meter rock is estimated to target Earth once a year, and a 50-meter rock once every thousand years, according to NASA.

But with current capabilities, astronomers can’t see when such a rock targets Earth until days prior.

“We don’t know where most of the asteroids are that can cause local to regional devastation,” said Terik Daly, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

The roughly 20-meter meteor that exploded in 2013 over Chelyabinsk, Russia is a once-every-100-years event, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It created a shockwave that shattered tens of thousands of windows and caused $33 million in damage, and no one saw it coming before it entered Earth’s atmosphere.

Some astronomers consider relying only on statistical probabilities and estimates of asteroid populations an unnecessary risk, when improvements could be made to NASA’s ability to detect them.

“How many natural hazards are there that we could actually do something about and prevent for a billion dollars? There’s not many,” said Daly, whose work focuses on defending Earth from hazardous asteroids.

Avoiding a really bad day

One major upgrade to NASA’s detection arsenal will be NEO Surveyor, a $1.2 billion telescope under development that will launch nearly a million miles from Earth and surveil a wide field of asteroids. It promises a significant advantage over today’s ground-based telescopes that are hindered by daytime light and Earth’s atmosphere.

That new telescope will help NASA meet a goal assigned by Congress in 2005: detect 90% of the total expected amount of asteroids bigger than 140 meters, or those big enough to destroy anything from a region to an entire continent.

“With Surveyor, we’re really focusing on finding the one asteroid that could cause a really bad day for a lot of people,” said Amy Mainzer, NEO Surveyor principal investigator. “But we’re also tasked with getting good statistics on the smaller objects, down to about the size of the Chelyabinsk object.”

NASA has fallen years behind on its congressional goal, which was ordered for completion by 2020. The agency proposed last year to cut the telescope’s 2023 budget by three quarters and a two-year launch delay to 2028 “to support higher-priority missions” elsewhere in NASA’s science portfolio.

Asteroid detection gained greater importance last year after NASA slammed a refrigerator-sized spacecraft into an asteroid to test its ability to knock a potentially hazardous space rock off a collision course with Earth.

The successful demonstration, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), affirmed for the first time a method of planetary defense.

“NEO Surveyor is of the utmost importance, especially now that we know from DART that we really can do something about it,” Daly said.

“So by golly, we gotta find these asteroids.”

Source: Voice Of America

Ahead of World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day Monday, the World Health Organization is calling for action to tackle these debilitating illnesses, which affect an estimated 1.65 billion people globally.

A diverse group of 20 parasitic and bacterial tropical diseases is categorized as neglected. This is because they disproportionally affect people who live in poor, remote communities and are not on the list of global health priorities.

Ibrahima Soce Fall is director of WHO’s Department of Neglected Tropical Diseases. He says these vector-borne diseases are transmitted by insects in areas that lack safe water, sanitation, and access to health care. He says they also are spread via contaminated food and water.

Fall says they cause immense suffering because of their disfiguring and disabling impact.

“If you take diseases like onchocerciasis, you know, so-called river blindness because it can lead to blindness. The same for trachoma. So, these are so many diseases that are fatal and very debilitating,” he said.

Trachoma is an eye disease that can cause permanent blindness.

Fall says these diseases do not attract the amount of investment needed to access health services or develop new tools for diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.

He notes some of these ailments have been around for a very long time. For instance, the biblical disease, leprosy, still exists in 139 countries and dengue, which has been around for 800 years, remains prevalent in 129 nations.

Despite the many challenges, progress is being made in the elimination of the NTDs. WHO reports the number of people requiring NTD interventions fell by 80 million between 2020 and 2021. It finds 47 countries have eliminated at least one NTD and more countries are in the process of achieving this target.

According to the Carter Center, there were only 13 human cases of Guinea worm disease last year, pushing the illness closer to eradication. The Atlanta-based center was co-founded by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn Carter. When it began leading the international campaign to eradicate Guinea worm in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases in at least 21 countries in Africa and Asia.

WHO officials say the goal it has set to eliminate at least one neglected tropical disease in 100 countries by 2030 can be achieved. It says the scientific community has the tools and the know-how to save lives and prevent suffering. But WHO says nations need to act together and invest in helping get rid of this dreaded group of diseases.

Source: Voice Of America