Month: January 2022

On the 40th anniversary of a famous skin cancer campaign, research has revealed that a high number of young Australians are not using sun protection.

Australia has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world. A new multi-million-dollar awareness campaign hopes to repeat the success of the ‘Slip Slop Slap’ advertisement of the early 1980s.

“Sid the seagull” the voice of the advertisement’s jingle, urged Australians to protect themselves from the sun with a shirt, sunscreen and a hat. It is an enduring message that has educated generations of people since it was released 40 years ago.

But the government believes rates of skin cancer are too high. The disease kills about 1,300 Australians each year. Research has shown that more than a quarter of Australians do not use any protection from the sun’s ultra-violet radiation.

Heather Walker, from the charity, the Cancer Council, says teenagers need to be reminded of the sun’s dangers.

“We do have a lot of work to do particularly in the secondary school setting and with young adults. But encouragingly, older adults are using sun protection more. So, it does seem to be a dip in the lifecycle and then people do come back to sun protection, which is really encouraging. But the other group that needs a reminder in particular is men. So, in Australia twice as many men as women die from melanoma and that is a huge disparity,” Walker said.

Now, Australia is launching the first national skin cancer campaign in more than a decade. Sid the seagull’s famous ‘slip, slop, slap’ message has been updated to encourage Australians to also seek shade and slide on a pair of sunglasses.

Health authorities have said that skin cancer is Australia’s most common cancer, and it is almost entirely preventable.

The World Cancer Research Fund states that Australia has the highest melanoma rates in the world followed by New Zealand, Norway and Denmark. It is expected that 16,000 Australians will be diagnosed this year with melanoma, a malignant tumor associated with skin cancer, according to government figures.

The Australian Cancer Council lists three main types of skin cancers: basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma and melanoma.

Source: Voice Of America

Conservationists are blaming climate change, land clearing and pesticides for the population crash of one of Australia’s most famous insects. Once a common sight, bogong moths have become rare in recent years. They are now recognized as endangered by the world’s leading scientific authority on vulnerable species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The bogong moth is native to Australia. The mass migration of billions of the small insects has long been a spectacular sight in eastern Australia.

Scientists say the moths are guided by the stars and the earth’s magnetic fields.

They fly up to 1,000 kilometers from Queensland to the mountains of Victoria to shelter in caves from the heat of summer. In the caves, it was once estimated there were as many as 17,000 moths per square meter.

But Jess Abrahams, a nature campaigner from the Australian Conservation Foundation says bogong moth numbers have collapsed.

“It is a dramatic decline, and this population crash has been caused by climate change-fueled extreme drought in their breeding grounds in western Queensland. There has also been land clearing over many years, use of pesticides as well and the consequence is a huge crash in numbers and the flow-on affects to other species is of huge concern. This should be an alarm bell because we are in the midst of an extinction crisis. We are seeing (a) million species globally at risk of extinction and literally these things are disappearing before our very eyes,” Abrahams said.

The decline of the bogong moth has a cascading effect on other species. They were a major source of food for another critically endangered animal, the mountain pygmy-possum. Fewer than 2,000 of Australia’s only hibernating marsupials are thought to be left in the wild.

The moth is one of 124 Australian animals and plants that were added in December to the “Red List” of threatened species compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They include several other types of insects and the grey-headed flying fox, which is Australia’s largest bat.

The Red List classifies how close global animal, plant and fungi species are to dying out, and includes sharks, rays and birds. Many populations are strained by global warming, deforestation, habitat loss and pollution.

Campaigners are urging the Australian government to do more to save the moths that were once in such abundance in cities such as Sydney and Canberra that their vast numbers disrupted sporting events.

Source: Voice of America

A community health service in Africa’s largest urban slum is helping poor people get affordable emergency services during the COVID pandemic.

The Kibera community emergency response team in Nairobi is offering a $1 monthly fee for access to emergency services, including an ambulance.

Poor people — like those living in Nairobi’s Kibera slum — find it difficult to access emergency health care.

Even where public services such as clinics and hospitals are provided within slums, the high cost effectively bars most Kibera residents from calling an ambulance.

It’s a challenge Moses Omondi — who was born and brought up in Kibera slum — has undertaken.

He formed a community emergency response team that provides services to slum residents for a fee of $1 a month, including ambulance transport to the hospitals.

“If you have an ambulance, you can easily access a hospital because no hospital should deny you services when you have been taken there by an ambulance, Moses Omondi said. “It means it’s an emergency case that needs emergency attention.”

Annet Okumu is one of about 300 subscribers to the ambulance service. She said she received potentially lifesaving care inside an ambulance after an accident last year.

“The condition I was in wasn’t that good,” Okumu said. “I was really having a very bad headache, I was bleeding. So maybe I could have overbled if I couldn’t have gotten the first aid service.”

Non-profit groups and other benefactors support the service. So far, there is one ambulance for an estimated 250,000 residents in the slum. Officials hope to increase the number to five.

Ambulance services in Kenya ordinarily cost up to $400 depending on the needs of a patient, such as a ventilator and the distance involved.

Officials say arrangements that provide public access to affordable emergency services are especially important during the COVID-19 era. Judith Okech is the head of the Ambulex Kenya service.

“It’s a service people are acknowledging that they very much need, and you’ll realize that people living within such settings, some of them have never called for an ambulance because they know that if you call for an ambulance it’s never going to get there, or you’ll be asked for a lot of money that they are not able to afford,” Judith said.

Residents say the community service emergency response team offers hope they will have better access to the health care they need.

Source: Voice of America

France has lowered the age of its mask mandate to 6-year-old children, officials announced Saturday. The news comes just days before schools reopen Monday, following the winter holiday break.

While the mandate requires children to wear masks in indoor public places, the mandate will also include outside locations in cities like Paris and Lyon where an outside mandate is already in place.

The wildly contagious omicron variant, French authorities said Saturday, has resulted in four consecutive days of over 200,000 new infections.

The chief executive of Britain’s National Health Service Confederation told the BBC Saturday that the surge in COVID cases fueled by omicron may force hospitals to ban visitors.

“It’s a last resort. But, when you’re facing the kind of pressures the health service is going to be under for the next few weeks, this is the kind of thing managers have to do,” Matthew Taylor said.

Europe has surpassed 100 million cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began nearly two years ago, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Worldwide, nearly 290 million cases have been recorded.

Nearly 5 million of Europe’s cases were reported in the last seven days, with 17 of the 52 countries or territories that make up Europe setting single-day new case records thanks to the omicron variant, Agence France-Presse reported Saturday.

More than 1 million of those cases were reported in France, which has joined the U.S., India, Brazil, Britain and Russia to become the sixth country to confirm more than 10 million cases since the pandemic began, Reuters reported.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Sunday that it has recorded 289.3 million global COVID cases and 5.4 million deaths.

Source: Voice of America