Australian scientists say it could be another five years before a vaccine is developed to protect pigs from African swine fever.  It is estimated that a quarter of the world’s pig population has died this year, following the deadly outbreak of the virus in China. African swine fever, or ASF, has yet to reach Australia, but it is close.  The virus has been spreading rapidly through Asia, and outbreaks have been reported in East Timor, one of Australia’s closest neighbors.Hong Kong Reports a Case of African Swine Fever A case of African swine fever has been detected in a Hong Kong slaughterhouse, prompting the culling of all 6,000 pigs at the facility. Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan said in a statement Friday that the incurable virus was found in a single pig imported from a farm in Guangdong province in mainland China, where the monthslong outbreak has devastated herds. …

After a month of preparations and goodbyes, Bei Bei, the Washington National Zoo’s most eligible giant panda bachelor, was on his way to China on Tuesday, where scientists hope he will help increase the population of his species.The departure of 4-year-old Bei Bei to his parents’ homeland had been pre-arranged and was announced last month by the zoo, where giant pandas have always been a visitor favorite.Bei Bei, which means “precious treasure,” munched his last American breakfast of bamboo and leaf eater biscuits early Tuesday before entering a custom travel crate that was loaded onto a truck for the trip to Dulles International Airport, the zoo said.From there, he began the 16-hour direct flight to Chengdu, China, aboard a dedicated Boeing 777F flown by FedEx and stocked with his favorite snacks, such as bamboo shoots, pears, and cooked sweet potatoes, it said.Workers look at a FedEx’s crate where Bei Bei, …

Baba Awolu reports for work at 5 a.m. each day at a local toilet and washroom facility he owns in the Jahi district of Abuja. The facility, known in the native Hausa language as “Gidan Wanka,” was built to serve poor people without access to bathrooms.Awolu says he has to arrive early so he can attend to users who are preparing for the day.Gutters and byways in the heart of Abuja covered with feces. Nov. 18, 2019. (Timothy Oviezu/VOA)”What we’re doing is helping people and the government,” Awolu said. “Instead of going to nearby bushes to defecate, they can use our facility and pay a token.” In  October a survey by the U.N. Children’s Fund named  Nigeria as the country with the most people practicing open defecation, passing India, which outlawed the practice.About 25 percent, or more than 47 million Nigerians, lack access to toilet facilities. The majority are in rural …

BIR SALAH, TUNISIA — Samira Sghaier and a group of friends prune moringa trees under a searing sun, dropping fistfuls of leafy branches into plastic tubs. Prickly acacias edge the plot of land, protecting bone-dry soil from further erosion.Sghaier’s father once grew olive and fruit trees — varieties that mostly shriveled and died under her watch. “There hasn’t been enough rain in recent years,” says the 52-year-old farmer.Her tiny farm in eastern Tunisia is a bellwether for the dramatic environmental changes already reshaping North Africa, which threaten to intensify with climate change.A farmer in Bir Salah checks acacias, hardy plants which produce gum arabic. (Lisa Bryant/VOA)Sandwiched between an encroaching Sahara and a warming Mediterranean Sea, the region has seen a sharp drop in rainfall over the past half century—a trend experts say will likely intensify in the coming decades. Indeed, over the course of this century parts of North Africa …

The federal government wants a judge to reject Nevada’s request for a court order to remove weapons-grade plutonium from a site north of Las Vegas, arguing that officials have already promised that no more will be shipped to the state.                     In documents filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Reno, the federal government brands as “conjectural” or “hypothetical” state claims that residents are harmed by radiation from the one-half metric ton of plutonium secretly trucked a year ago from South Carolina to Nevada.                     The decision cannot be undone, the material is already in the state and the federal government has sovereign immunity, meaning the state can’t force the federal government to act, the motion contends.                     The Department of Energy “routinely and safely transports nuclear materials into and out of Nevada and stores classified amounts of plutonium in Nevada,” it added.                     State Attorney …

The U.S. research vessel Sikuliaq can break through ice as thick as 2.5 feet (0.76 meters). In the Chukchi Sea northwest of Alaska this month, which should be brimming with floes, its limits likely won’t be tested.University of Washington researchers left Nome on Nov. 7 on the 261-foot (79.5-meter) ship, crossed through the Bering Strait and will record observations at multiple sites including Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow, America’s northernmost community. Sea ice is creeping toward the city from the east in the Beaufort Sea, but to find sea ice in the Chukchi, the Sikuliaq would have to head northwest for about 200 miles (322 kilometers).In the new reality of the U.S. Arctic, open water is the November norm for the Chukchi. Instead of thick, years-old ice, researchers are studying waves and how they may pummel the northern Alaska coastline.”We’re trying to understand what the new autumn looks like in the Arctic,” …

The state of California on Monday sued e-cigarette maker Juul Labs, alleging the San Francisco company engaged in a “systematic” and “wildly successful” campaign to attract teenagers to its nicotine devices.The lawsuit draws on internal correspondence and other evidence, asserting the company did little to prevent sales to underage customers. It also claims that Juul used a “flawed” age-verification process for online sales.Filed in California state court in Alameda County, the lawsuit also cites passages from a recent Reuters investigation that documented how Juul disregarded evidence soon after its launch in 2015 that teenagers were attracted to the product.The Reuters story documented how Juul rarely mentioned nicotine in early consumer marketing, while at the same time pitching retailers on Juul’s unique addictive power.FILE – A woman buys refills for her Juul at a smoke shop in New York, Dec. 20, 2018.Juul spokesman Austin Finan said the company had not yet …

Heavy winds stirred dozens of fires across Australia’s east coast on Tuesday, blanketing Sydney in hazardous smoke and prompting health warnings for the country’s most populous city.Wildfires have destroyed about 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of farmland and bush over the past couple of weeks, fuelled by tinder-dry conditions after three years of drought that experts say has been exacerbated by climate change.Strong winds fanned around 60 fires still ablaze across New South Wales (NSW) state and officials said smoke that stretched across Sydney was measured at 10 times above hazardous levels in some parts of the city.The NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS) said the smoke would linger for most of Tuesday as strong winds exacerbated the threat of more fires across Australia’s east coast.The state’s health department said people should stay inside as much as possible.”For most people, smoke causes mild symptoms like sore eyes, nose and throat. …

Scientists on Monday unveiled the first global geological map of Saturn’s moon Titan including vast plains and dunes of frozen organic material and lakes of liquid methane, illuminating an exotic world considered a strong candidate in the search for life beyond Earth.The map was based on radar, infrared and other data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which studied Saturn and its moons from 2004 to 2017. Titan, with a diameter of 3,200 miles (5,150 km), is the solar system’s second-biggest moon behind Jupiter’s Ganymede. It is larger than the planet Mercury.Organic materials — carbon-based compounds critical for fostering living organisms — play a leading role on Titan.”Organics are very important for the possibility of life on Titan, which many of us think likely would have evolved in the liquid water ocean under Titan’s icy crust,” said planetary geologist Rosaly Lopes of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.”Organic materials can, we …

When President Donald Trump boarded Air Force One to fly to a Kentucky campaign rally two weeks ago, a plan was in place for him to give final approval to a plan to ban most flavored e-cigarettes.By the time Trump landed back at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington a few hours later, the plan was off. And its future is unclear.For nearly two months, momentum had been building inside the White House to try to halt a youth vaping epidemic that experts feared was hurting as many as 5 million teenagers.Both first lady Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser, pushed for the ban, which was also being championed internally by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who has taken the lead on some public health issues.But as Trump sat surrounded by political advisers on the flights to and from Lexington, he grew reluctant to sign the …

New research has found that U.S. agriculture uses child workers without proper training and care for their safety. The report published last week in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine says 33 children are injured every day while working on U.S. farms, and more child workers die in agriculture than in any other industry. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports rights groups blame loopholes in U.S. laws for failing to protect child workers in agriculture …

The World Health Organization is calling for stricter regulations on the marketing and sale of e-cigarettes as more information comes to light about the potentially harmful impact of these products.   Health officials are increasingly worried about the risks posed by e-cigarettes as reported cases of deaths and illnesses from these devices spread from the United States to Europe and beyond. They see the recent death of a young man in Belgium and reports of vaping-related illnesses in the Philippines and other countries in the world as a call to action.  The World Health Organization says it is disturbed that vaping devices continue to be marketed as products that are healthy and that can wean smokers off their nicotine addiction.  WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier tells VOA these industry health claims are unproven.“While these electronic nicotine delivery systems may be less toxic than conventional cigarettes, this does not make them harmless,” he …

Samoa declared a state of emergency this weekend, closing all schools and cracking down on public gatherings, after several deaths linked to a measles outbreak that has spread across the Pacific islands.The island state of about 200,000, south of the equator and half way between Hawaii and New Zealand, declared a measles epidemic late in October after the first deaths were reported.Since then, at least six deaths, mostly infants younger than 2, have been linked to the outbreak, the health ministry said in a statement late last week. Of the 716 suspected cases of measles, 40% required hospitalization.Worst yet to comeAs of the weekend, vaccination “for members of the public who have not yet received a vaccination injection, is now a mandatory legal requirement,” the government said in a statement. Only about two-thirds of the population has been immunized, according to the health ministry.“The way it is going now and …

People with severe but stable heart disease from clogged arteries may have less chest pain if they get a procedure to improve blood flow rather than just giving medicines a chance to help, but it won’t cut their risk of having a heart attack or dying over the following few years, a big federally funded study found.The results challenge medical dogma and call into question some of the most common practices in heart care. They are the strongest evidence yet that tens of thousands of costly stent procedures and bypass operations each year are unnecessary or premature for people with stable disease.That’s a different situation than a heart attack, when a procedure is needed right away to restore blood flow.For nonemergency cases, the study shows “there’s no need to rush” into invasive tests and procedures, said New York University’s Dr. Judith Hochman.There might even be harm: To doctors’ surprise, study …

A new report by leading health and safety agencies finds millions of sanitation workers in developing countries are forced to work under horrific conditions that put their health and lives at risk.Sanitation workers everywhere occupy the lowest rung of society and are stigmatized and marginalized because they do the dirty work that other people do not want to do.  The report’s authors – the International Labor Organization, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and WaterAid – say they hope to raise awareness on the plight of sanitation workers and the dehumanizing conditions under which they are forced to work. For example, the report says that many sanitation workers aren’t given the safety training or equipment needed to protect them when handling effluent or fecal sludge.World Health Organization spokesman Christian Lindmeier says sanitation workers make an important contribution to public health at the risk of their own lives. Poor sanitation, …

New rules from the Trump administration Friday would require insurers and hospitals to disclose upfront the actual prices for common tests and procedures to promote competition and push down costs.But the sweeping changes face stiff pushback from the health care industry. A coalition of major hospital groups quickly announced that hospitals will sue to block key provisions, which in any case don’t take effect immediately.Even in an ideal world where information flows freely, patients and their families would have to deal with a learning curve to get comfortable with the byzantine world of health care billing. What sounds like the same procedure can have different billing codes depending on factors that may not be apparent to an untrained person.President Donald Trump pauses during an event on healthcare prices in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Nov. 15, 2019, in Washington.Speaking at a White House event, President Donald Trump skipped …

U.S. regulators on Friday approved a new medicine that can prevent some extremely painful sickle cell disease flare-ups.The Food and Drug Administration approved Novartis AG’s Adakveo for patients 16 and older. The monthly infusion, which halves occurrences of sickle cell pain episodes, will carry a list price of roughly $85,000 to $113,000 per year, depending on dosing. Insured patients generally will pay less.Sickle cell disease is one of the most common inherited blood disorders, affecting about 100,000 Americans, most of them black, and about 300 million people worldwide.Its hallmark is periodic episodes in which red blood cells stick together, blocking blood from reaching organs and small blood vessels. That causes intense pain and cumulative organ damage that shortens the lives of people with the disease.“The duration and severity of these pain crises worsens with aging. Often patients die during one of these crises,” said Dr. Biree Andemariam, chief medical officer …