By Columbia Mailman School of Public Health

Globally recognized infectious disease expert Salim Abdool Karim, MB, ChB, CAPRISA Professor for Global Health in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, is an author on two Perspectives published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The piece titled “Threatening the Future of Global Health NIH Policy Changes on International Research Collaborations,(link is external and opens in a new window)” details a new policy that grants the NIH oversight responsibility for all sub-award recipients’ data and documentation to support research outcomes, sending a message to grantees that the NIH does not trust scientists in other countries to follow responsible research practices. Abdool Karim and colleagues make the point that granting NIH the right to examine these documents as part of its oversight responsibilities disrespects the scientific autonomy of international partners and may lead to a politicization of collaborations that are currently working well. They further believe that these excessive demands threaten to reverse progress and damage the reputation of NIH as a global health leader.

The second article, titled “Threatening the Global AIDS Response—Obstacles to PEPFAR’s Reauthorization,”(link is external and opens in a new window) describes the authors’ concerns that with PEPFAR’s authorization ending this month and without a solid plan for extending the program for the next 5 years, there are profound implications for the public health care infrastructure in the U.S. and globally. Additionally, without PEPFAR’s support for HIV treatment and prevention in more than 50 countries where AIDS remains a problem, there is little chance of reaching the global 2030 goal of ending HIV/AIDS as a Public Health Threat, a target of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Abdool Karim also points out that some members of the U.S. Congress want to apply the “global gag rule” regarding abortion to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, further jeopardizing this essential global AIDS control program.

In addition to his professorship at Columbia Mailman School, Abdool Karim is Director of the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and adjunct professor of Medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

His contributions to microbicides for HIV prevention span two decades and culminated in the CAPRISA 004 tenofovir gel trial which provided proof-of-concept that antiretroviral drugs can prevent sexually transmitted HIV infection and herpes simplex virus type 2 in women. He is co-inventor on patents that have been used in several HIV vaccine candidates and his clinical research on TB-HIV treatment has shaped international guidelines on the clinical management of co-infected patients.

Abdool Karim is chair of the UNAIDS Scientific Expert Panel, Chair of the WHO’s HIV and Hepatitis Scientific and Technical Advisory Group and a member of the WHO HIV-TB Task Force. He is an elected Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, the African Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Science in South Africa, the Royal Society of South Africa and the American Academy of Microbiology. He is a Foreign Associate Member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and serves on the boards of NEJM, the Lancet-Global Health, Lancet-HIV, and the Journal of AIDS.

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As glaciers melt and pour massive amounts of water into nearby lakes, 15 million people across the globe live under the threat of a sudden and deadly outburst flood, a new study finds.

More than half of those living in the shadow of the disaster called glacial lake outburst floods are in just four countries: India, Pakistan, Peru and China, according to a study in Tuesday’s Nature Communications. A second study, awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed journal, catalogs more than 150 glacial flood outbursts in history and recent times.

It’s a threat Americans and Europeans rarely think about, but 1 million people live within just 6 miles (10 kilometers) of potentially unstable glacial-fed lakes, the study calculated.

One of the more devastating floods was in Peru in 1941 and it killed between 1,800 and 6,000 people. A 2020 glacial lake outburst flood in British Columbia, Canada, caused a tsunami of water about 330 feet (100 meters) high, but no one was hurt. A 2017 glacial outburst flood in Nepal, triggered by a landslide, was captured on video by German climbers. Alaska’s Mendenhall glacier has had annual small glacial outburst floods in what the National Weather Service calls “suicide basin,” since 2011, according to study lead author Caroline Taylor, a researcher at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom.

Heavy rains and a glacial lake outburst flood combined in 2013 in India to kill thousands of people. A 2021 deadly flood in India that was initially attributed to a glacial lake outburst wasn’t caused by one, studies later found.

Scientists say so far it doesn’t seem like climate change has made those floods more frequent, but as glaciers shrink with warming, the amount of water in the lakes grows, making them more dangerous in those rare situations when dams burst.

“We had glacier lake outburst floods in the past that have killed many many thousands of people in a single catastrophic flooding event,” said study co-author Tom Robinson, a disaster risk scientist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “And with climate change glaciers are melting so these lakes are getting bigger, potentially getting more unstable.”

Dan Shugar, a geoscientist at the University of Calgary who wasn’t part of the two studies, said much of the threat depends simply on how many people live in a glacial flood zone.

“In a warming world we certainly expect more and larger glacial lakes,” Shugar said in an email. “But the threat that these lakes might pose critically depends on where people are living and what their vulnerabilities might be.”

Robinson said what’s different about his study is that it’s the first to look at the climate, geography, population, vulnerability and all these factors to get “a good overview of where in the world is the most dangerous places″ for all 1,089 glacial basins.

At the top of the list is Khyber Pakhtunkhwa basin in Pakistan, north of Islamabad.

“That’s particularly bad,” Robinson said. “Lots of people and they’re very, very vulnerable” because they live in a valley below the lake.

The trouble is that scientists are focusing too much attention on the Pakistan, India, China and the Himalayas, often called High Mountain Asia, and somewhat ignoring the Andes, Robinson said. The second and third highest risk basins are in Peru’s Santa basin, and Bolivia’s Beni basin, the paper said.

After the deadly Andes flood in the 1940s that region “was sort of a leader” in working on glacial flood outburst threats, but in the last decade or so, High Mountain Asia has taken over because of the high population, said University of Dayton geology professor Umesh Haritashya, who wasn’t part of the studies.

India ranks high in the threat list not so much because of the physical setup but because of “a huge number of people downstream.”

Three lake basins in the United States and Canada rank high for threats, from the Pacific Northwest to Alaska, but aren’t nearly as high as areas in Asia and the Andes with few people in the danger zone. They are in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula — distinct from the Mendenhall glacier near Juneau — northeast Washington and west central British Columbia.

“This ranking is a good checklist for further research,” said Oliver Korup of the University of Potsdam in Germany, who co-authored the list of glacial lake outburst floods.

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Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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File # MV222920456

Details:

On October 20, 2022, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was notified of a social media post with rumors of possible violence that might occur at Moreno Valley High School. The Moreno Valley Station, in cooperation with the Moreno Valley Unified School District, investigated the matter and determined there is no credible threat.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department takes threats of school violence very seriously and will be taking extra precautions to ensure the safety of the students and residents of Moreno Valley. We want to reassure the parents and students that their safety is our number one priority and any threat of violence will not be tolerated.

Anyone with information about this incident is encouraged to call Sgt. Jerry Franchville of the Moreno Valley Station at 951–486–6700.

For media inquiries regarding this incident please contact the Media Information Bureau.

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico has acknowledged that the U.S. government has suspended all imports of Mexican avocados after a U.S. plant safety inspector in Mexico received a threat.

The surprise, temporary suspension was confirmed late Saturday on the eve of the Super Bowl, the biggest sales opportunity of the year for Mexican avocado growers — though it would not affect game-day consumption since those avocados had already been shipped.

Avocado exports are the latest victim of the drug cartel turf battles and extortion of avocado growers in the western state of Michoacan, the only state in Mexico fully authorized to export to the U.S. market.

The U.S. government suspended all imports of Mexican avocados “until further notice” after a U.S. plant safety inspector in Mexico received a threatening message, Mexico’s Agriculture Department said in a statement.

“U.S. health authorities … made the decision after one of their officials, who was carrying out inspections in Uruapan, Michoacan, received a threatening message on his official cellphone,” the department wrote.

The import ban came on the day that the Mexican avocado growers and packers association unveiled its Super Bowl ad for this year. Mexican exporters have taken out the pricey ads for almost a decade in a bid to associate guacamole as a Super Bowl tradition.

This year’s ad shows Julius Caesar and a rough bunch of gladiator fans outside what appears to be the Colosseum, soothing their apparently violent differences by enjoying guacamole and avocados.

The association did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ban, which hits an industry with almost $3 billion in annual exports. However, avocados for this year’s Super Bowl had already been exported in the weeks prior to the event.

The U.S. Embassy wrote that “facilitating the export of Mexican avocados to the U.S. and guaranteeing the safety of our agricultural inspection personnel go hand in hand.”

“We are working with the Mexican government to guarantee security conditions that would allow our personnel in Michoacan to resume operations,” the embassy wrote in its social media accounts.

Because the United States also grows avocados, U.S. inspectors work in Mexico to ensure exported avocados don’t carry diseases that could hurt U.S. crops.

It was only in 1997 that the U.S. lifted a ban on Mexican avocados that had been in place since 1914 to prevent a range of weevils, scabs and pests from entering U.S. orchards.

The inspectors work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services.

It is not the first time that the violence in Michoacan — where the Jalisco cartel is fighting turf wars against a collection of local gangs known as the United Cartels — has threatened avocados, the state’s most lucrative crop.

After a previous incident in 2019, the USDA had warned about the possible consequences of attacking or threatening U.S. inspectors.

In August 2019, a U.S. Department of Agriculture team of inspectors was “directly threatened” in Ziracuaretiro, a town just west of Uruapan. While the agency didn’t specify what happened, local authorities say a gang robbed the truck the inspectors were traveling in at gunpoint.

The USDA wrote in a letter at the time that, “For future situations that result in a security breach, or demonstrate an imminent physical threat to the well-being of APHIS personnel, we will immediately suspend program activities.”

Many avocado growers in Michoacan say drug gangs threaten them or their family members with kidnapping or death unless they pay protection money, sometimes amounting to thousands of dollars per acre.

On September 30, 2020, a Mexican employee of APHIS was killed near the northern border city of Tijuana.

Mexican prosecutors said Edgar Flores Santos was killed by drug traffickers who may have mistaken him for a policeman and a suspect was arrested. The U.S. State Department said investigations “concluded this unfortunate incident was a case of Mr. Flores being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The avocado ban was just the latest threat to Mexico’s export trade stemming from the government’s inability to rein in illegal activities.

On Thursday, the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office filed an environmental complaint against Mexico for failing to stop illegal fishing to protect the critically endangered vaquita marina, the world’s smallest porpoise.

The office said it had asked for “environment consultations” with Mexico, the first such case it has filed under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade pact. Consultations are the first step in the dispute resolution process under the trade agreement, which entered into force in 2020. If not resolved, it could eventually lead to trade sanctions.

Mexico’s government has largely abandoned attempts to enforce a fishing-free zone around an area where the last few vaquitas are believed to live in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez. Nets set illegally for another fish, the totoaba, drown vaquitas.

And on Monday, Mexican fishing boats in the Gulf of Mexico were “prohibited from entering U.S. ports, will be denied port access and services,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said, in response to years of Mexican boats illegally poaching red snapper in U.S. waters in the Gulf.

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