Malawi Wire

A study released Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that infants are less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 if their mothers are vaccinated during their pregnancy.

The study found that babies whose mothers received two doses of an mRNA vaccine while pregnant were about 60% less likely to be hospitalized for the virus during their first six months of life. The odds are strengthened if the mother is vaccinated after the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The agency has urged all women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning to get pregnant to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, which it says increases the risk of a variety of complications, including premature birth and stillbirth.

The CDC researchers based their conclusions from monitoring 379 infants who had been hospitalized at 20 pediatric hospitals across the U.S. between last July and January of this year, including 176 who tested positive for COVID-19.

In another vaccine-related development, Britain’s Health Security Agency says the results of several studies suggests a COVID-19 vaccine reduces the chances of someone suffering from the lingering effects of a COVID-19 infection, a condition commonly known as “long COVID,” according to The Guardian newspaper.

The agency came to its conclusion after examining data from 15 studies conducted at home and abroad, half of which looked at whether the vaccine could protect someone from developing long COVID if they had not been infected, with the others focusing on the effect of vaccination among people who were already suffering from long COVID.

The HSA researchers found that those who have received one or two doses of a vaccine are less likely to develop long COVID symptoms, such as fatigue, headaches, hair loss, shortness of breath or loss of smell, compared with those who are unvaccinated. The review also said there was evidence that unvaccinated people suffering from long COVID had fewer or reduced symptoms once they were vaccinated, compared to those who remained unvaccinated.

Meanwhile, South Korea says its daily number of new COVID-19 cases has risen above 90,000 for the first time Wednesday. The 90,443 new infections reported by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency was a dramatic increase from the 57,164 new cases from Tuesday.

Despite the increasing number of new cases driven by the highly-contagious omicron variant, Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum said the government may soon ease current coronavirus restrictions, including lifting a 9 p.m. curfew on restaurants, cafes and bars, and ending the cap on the number of people allowed for private gatherings at six.

In the United States, the administration of President Joe Biden has told key lawmakers that it needs an additional $30 billion to fund its COVID-19 response efforts.

The extra spending requested by President Biden comes nearly a year after passage of the massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan aimed at helping the U.S. economy recover from the pandemic. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that while the administration continues to have “sufficient funds” to respond to the current omicron-driven surge, “our goal has always been to ensure that we are well prepared to stay ahead of the virus.”

Source: Voice Of America

A Nigerian rights group has filed a lawsuit to force authorities to publish an agreement reached with Twitter in January to lift a block on the social media company. The rights group says the failure by Nigerian authorities to publish all the details of the agreement raises concerns about citizens’ rights and censorship.

A Nigerian rights group, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), said this week that authorities ignored its request last month to publish the agreement.

The lawsuit seeks a court order compelling authorities to publish details of the agreement reached with Twitter before the company restored access to the site in Nigeria.

Nigeria suspended Twitter last June for deleting a tweet from President Muhammadu Buhari that threatened regional separatists and referred to the 1960s war in the Biafra region.

Nigerian authorities lifted the ban in January, boasting that its new engagement with the company will create jobs and generate revenue for the country.

But rights groups are concerned the terms of agreement may include clauses that violate the rights of citizens, says Kolawole Oluwadare, a deputy director at SERAP.

“If this agreement has the tendency to impact on the rights of Nigerians to freedom of expression, it’s important that Nigerians have access to the agreement, scrutinize the terms and critique it if necessary, because of the effect it will have on our ability to use Twitter freely,” said Oluwadare. “How are we sure that those terms do not necessarily affect even the rights to privacy? I’m talking about the access of Nigerian government to the data of Nigerians.”

Nigerian authorities are often accused of trying to stifle free speech.

In 2019, lawmakers considered a bill that sought to punish statements on social media deemed to diminish public confidence in the president or government officials. The bill never passed.

This week, Nigerian Information Minister Lai Mohammed criticized Twitter and the Canadian government as having double standards citing the truckers protest against COVID-19 mandates in Canada.

“Twitter actively supported the EndSARS protesters and even raised funds,” said Mohammed. “These are the same entities that are now rushing to distance themselves from the protest in Canada and even denying them the use of their platforms.”

But Amnesty International spokesperson Seun Bakare has this to say: “International human rights laws are clear on standards that even platforms like Twitter and Facebook must uphold,” said Bakare. “They must uphold the fundamental tenets of freedom of expression, and access to information and they must not bend their rules just to please any government at all.”

Under its agreement with Twitter, Nigeria said the company agreed to be legally registered in the country, run a local office, appoint country representatives to interface with authorities, pay taxes and enroll officials in its partner support portals.

It remains unclear if Nigerian officials have the ability to monitor and block prohibited content.

An ECOWAS court of justice is scheduled to rule on SERAP’s lawsuit this week.

Source: Voice of America

As few as three major criminal groups are responsible for smuggling the vast majority of elephant ivory tusks out of Africa, according to a new study.

Researchers used analysis of DNA from seized elephant tusks and evidence such as phone records, license plates, financial records and shipping documents to map trafficking operations across the continent and better understand who was behind the crimes. The study was published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

“When you have the genetic analysis and other data, you can finally begin to understand the illicit supply chain — that’s absolutely key to countering these networks,” said Louise Shelley, who researches illegal trade at George Mason University and was not involved in the research.

Conservation biologist Samuel Wasser, a study co-author, hopes the findings will help law enforcement officials target the leaders of these networks instead of low-level poachers who are easily replaced by criminal organizations.

“If you can stop the trade where the ivory is being consolidated and exported out of the country, those are really the key players,” said Wasser, who co-directs the Center for Environmental Forensic Science at the University of Washington.

Africa’s elephant population is fast dwindling. From around 5 million elephants a century ago to 1.3 million in 1979, the total number of elephants in Africa is now estimated to be around 415,000.

A 1989 ban on international commercial ivory trade hasn’t stopped the decline. Each year, an estimated 1.1 million pounds (500 metric tons) of poached elephant tusks are shipped from Africa, mostly to Asia.

For the past two decades, Wasser has fixated on a few key questions: “Where is most of the ivory being poached, who is moving it, and how many people are they?”

He works with wildlife authorities in Kenya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and elsewhere, who contact him after they intercept ivory shipments. He flies to the countries to take small samples of tusks to analyze the DNA. He has now amassed samples from the tusks of more than 4,300 elephants trafficked out of Africa between 1995 and today.

“That’s an amazing, remarkable data set,” said Princeton University biologist Robert Pringle, who was not involved in the study. With such data, “it becomes possible to spot connections and make strong inferences,” he said.

In 2004, Wasser demonstrated that DNA from elephant tusks and dung could be used to pinpoint their home location to within a few hundred miles. In 2018, he recognized that finding identical DNA in tusks from two different ivory seizures meant they were harvested from the same animal – and likely trafficked by the same poaching network.

The new research expands that approach to identify DNA belonging to elephant parents and offspring, as well as siblings — and led to the discovery that only a very few criminal groups are behind most of the ivory trafficking in Africa.

Because female elephants remain in the same family group their whole life, and most males don’t travel too far from their family herd, the researchers hypothesize that tusks from close family members are likely to have been poached at the same time, or by the same operators.

Such genetic links can provide a blueprint for wildlife authorities seeking other evidence — cell phone records, license plates, shipping documents and financial statements — to link different ivory shipments.

Previously when an ivory shipment was intercepted, the one seizure wouldn’t allow authorities to identify the organization behind the crime, said Special Agent John Brown III of the Office of Homeland Security Investigations, who has worked on environmental crimes for 25 years.

But the scientists’ work identifying DNA links can “alert us to the connections between individual seizures,” said Brown, who is also a co-author. “This collaborative effort has definitely been the backbone of multiple multinational investigations that are still ongoing,” he said.

They identified several poaching hotspots, including regions of Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana, Gabon and Republic of Congo. Tusks are often moved to warehouses in another location to be combined with other contraband in shipping containers, then moved to ports. Current trafficking hubs exist in Kampala, Uganda; Mombasa, Kenya; and Lome, Togo.

Two suspects were recently arrested as a result of one such investigation, said Wasser.

Traffickers that smuggle ivory also often move other contraband, the researchers found. A quarter of large seizures of pangolin scales – a heavily-poached anteater-like animal – are co-mingled with ivory, for instance.

“Confronting these networks is a great example of how genetics can be used for conservation purposes,” said Brian Arnold, a Princeton University evolutionary biologist who was not involved in the research.

Source: Voice of America

A billionaire who led an all-private space crew into orbit last year has announced plans for up to three new missions in conjunction with SpaceX, including one with a spacewalk.

Jared Isaacman, who founded payment processing company Shift4, will lead the first of the new flights with a launch potentially coming by the end of this year.

In addition to a mission featuring the first spacewalk attempted by non-professional astronauts, the planned flight also includes achieving a record altitude in Earth orbit.

As part of the partnership with SpaceX, the flights are set to utilize SpaceX spacecrafts.

Source: Voice of America