Dangerous Diseases On The Rise In Poor Countries

From FairWarning:

By Jessica McKenzie

Unintended consequence: Many poorer countries around the world canceled vaccination drives this spring in order to limit the spread of coronavirus, but the result has been more illness and death from diseases that are easily preventable, Jan Hoffman and Ruth Maclean report for The New York Times.

Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal have seen outbreaks of diphtheria, and cholera has been found in South Sudan, Cameroon, Mozambique, Yemen and Bangladesh; a strain of poliovirus has made its way to more than 30 countries, and measles has sickened people in Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Nigeria and Uzbekistan. Chibuzo Okonta, the president of Doctors Without Borders in West and Central Africa, said that there could be “an epidemic in a few months’ time that will kill more children than Covid.”

The World Health Organization and UNICEF, which initially warned of Covid outbreaks from children gathering to get their shots, have now recommended countries carefully resume them.

Also: The number of confirmed cases globally has passed 8 million, with more than 438,000 deaths; of those, over 2.1 million cases are from the U.S., as are more than 116,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. More than 50,000 of those killed in the U.S. have been residents or staff members of nursing homes and long-term care centers, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Coronavirus infections are rising in 20 U.S. states, mostly in the West and across the Sun Belt where restrictions on the economy and activities have loosened, The New York Times reports. “I’m very concerned about it,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson told The Times.

“They’ve been asked for quite some time to not be around people they love, and that they want to spend time with. Wearing a mask is not pleasant. And I think people are tired.” In Los Angeles County, health officials visited about 2,000 restaurants over the weekend to see if they were meeting the county’s reopening guidelines, the Los Angeles Times reports. About half were in violation, including by placing tables too close together.

Also: Public health experts are warning that President Trump’s campaign rally on Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a state where Covid cases are rising, could contribute to the spread of infections, according to The Washington Post. Attendees are required to agree when registering for tickets that they will not sue the Trump campaign or the venue if they get sick. “I’m concerned about our ability to protect anyone who attends a large, indoor event,” Bruce Dart, director of the Tulsa city and county health department, told the Tulsa World. “And I’m also concerned about our ability to ensure the president stays safe as well.”

Social distancing a social nicety? An investigation by ProPublica sheds light on the numerous outbreaks of Covid-19 at meatpacking and processing plants across rural America, which have killed at least 87 workers and sickened thousands more. Emails reviewed by ProPublica show local health departments were quickly overwhelmed by outbreaks from local plants, but had little or no power to impose safety measures or even warn the community.

Meanwhile, companies preferred to stay open and keep production lines rolling. In March, just weeks before a massive outbreak at its South Dakota pork plant, Smithfield Foods’ chief executive Kenneth Sullivan emailed Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts with his worries that stay-at-home orders were causing “hysteria.” “Social distancing,” he wrote, “is a nicety that makes sense only for people with laptops.”

Unemployment crackdown: Worried about rampant unemployment fraud, many states have taken aggressive action to scrutinize applications and halt payments to potential fraudsters, but hundreds of thousands of honest out-of-work Americans have been shut out of benefits they desperately need, Tony Romm writes for The Washington Post. “They said benefits would only be stopped for few days, but it’s been weeks,” said John Tirpak, executive director of the Unemployment Law Project, a worker advocacy group.

Workplace protections: The Supreme Court has ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall report for The Wall Street Journal.

“An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” wrote conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch in the majority opinion. Gorsuch was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts in addition to the four more liberal members of the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in the 6-3 decision. Prior to the ruling, it was illegal in about half the states to fire a worker simply for being gay or transgender. The decision extends the protection to workers in the remaining states.

One thousand: That’s about how many people the police have shot and killed each year since The Washington Post began tracking these deaths in 2015 after nationwide protests against police brutality. This May, police shot and killed 110 people, the most in a single month since The Post began keeping track. About half of those shot and killed by police have been white, though black Americans and Latinos have been shot at a disproportionate rate.

Experts are baffled by the distressing consistency of the numbers year to year. “There’s been significant investments that have been made in de-escalation training. There’s been a lot of work,” former Charlotte police chief Darrel Stephens said.

Also: At least 96 law enforcement agencies have used some form of tear gas in response to demonstrations against police brutality, according to a New York Times investigation, the most widespread domestic use of the chemical weapon since the 1960s and 1970s.

“Thousands and thousands of utterly ordinary people who thought they were going to an ordinary protest event are finding themselves receiving a really aggressive police response,” Stuart Schrader of Johns Hopkins University, who studies race and policing, told The Times. Tear gas causes eye, skin, and lung irritation; prolonged exposure or high doses can cause permanent vision damage, asthma, and other injuries.

Protesters have been seriously injured by tear gas canisters, including Balin Brake, a 21-year-old student in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who lost an eye. Police chiefs across the country have defended their use of tear gas, saying it was only deployed as a last resort.

Plastic rain: Janice Brahney, an assistant professor at Utah State University, spent more than a year collecting atmospheric dust samples and rain water from remote parts of 11 National Parks and Wilderness areas in the U.S., and hand-counting the microplastics in each sample, Kate S. Petersen reports for Environmental Health News. Nearly all of the samples—98 percent of them—contained microplastics, possibly carried there by global atmospheric currents.

In a new paper published in Science, Brahney and the other researchers estimate the total yearly plastic deposition in their study areas to be equivalent to between 123 and 300 million water bottles. Most of the microplastics were from synthetic textiles in clothing, which sheds microfibers when worn and during washing and drying, but there were also industrial fibers and microbeads that may have come from industrial paint and coatings.

Also: Single-use masks and other PPE are littering beaches and oceans, potentially exacerbating a dire plastics pollution problem, Ashifa Kassam reports for The Guardian. The French nonprofit Opération Mer Proprewould like to see people embrace reusable masks and swap latex gloves for more frequent handwashing. “With all the alternatives, plastic isn’t the solution to protect us from Covid,” said Opération Mer Propre’s Joffrey Peltier.

What’s in your water? The nonprofit Food & Water Watch and other groups have sued the Environmental Protection Agency for allowing fluoride to be added to drinking water supplies, arguing that it presents an “unreasonable risk” of neurological damage to babies and fetuses, Dan Ross reports for FairWarning.

Fluoride is commonly added to drinking water to prevent tooth decay. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises no more than 0.7 parts of fluoride per million parts of water, the Environmental Protection Agency has not set a limit for the amount of fluoride that can be added. If the lawsuit, currently in trial in federal court in San Francisco, is successful, it could change that.

FairWarning is a nonprofit (501(c)(3)) investigative news organization that focuses on public health, consumer, workplace and environmental issues, and related topics of government and business accountability. For more stories from FairWarning, visit FairWarning.org.