1,400+ Killed as South Asia Hit by Worst Floods in Decade

Flooding on the sub-continent makes Houston look like a day at the beach,

but not a mention today on CNN or NYTimes

47 people have been killed in Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath

1400+ have been killed on the sub-continent, 40 million affected

100s of 1000s of children may lose education

Traffic resumes on a muddy road after the water receded in Mumbai on August 30, 2017, following heavy rains that brought major flooding to the coastal city. © Punit Paranjpe / AFP

More than 1,400 people have been killed across India, Nepal and Bangladesh as the region suffers the most devastating flooding in a decade.

Hundreds of towns and villages have been submerged by the devastating floods which have now persisted for over two months, affecting an estimated 40 million people.

Tens of thousands of people have taken refuge in relief camps that are short of food and vulnerable to disease.

The head of a South Asian regional body, launched this year to boost disaster coordination, said the flooding underlined the poor planning, Reuters report.

"The floods this year have exposed the urgency for (South Asian) nations to work together to deal with natural disasters," said PK Taneja, of the India-based SAARC Disaster Management Centre.

Monsoon season causes widespread flooding every year across South Asia.

The heavy rains are being blamed for the collapse of a 117-year-old building in Mumbai on Thursday. At least 34 people were killed when the six story building caved in on itself. The building had reportedly been declared unsafe in 2011 but many people remained living there, according to The Times of India.

The devastating flooding has sparked anger across the affected areas but authorities have tried to distance themselves from culpability by highlighting the scale of this year's deluge.

“If you get a whole year's rain in one to two days, how will you handle it? No preparation and planning will work,” said Anirudh Kumar, of the disaster management department in the Indian state of Bihar.

Over 500 people have died in Bihar with a further 850,000 displaced.

Aid agencies said people are beginning to return to their homes only to find it completely destroyed. Dibya Raj Poudel, of the Nepal Red Cross Society, said: "Many survivors are traumatized... They fear the floods may hit them any time again and they have no place to stay nor any food to eat.”

Around 18,000 schools have also been destroyed or damaged and NGOs are warning that hundreds of thousands of children are at risk of permanently falling out of the education system.

“We haven’t seen flooding on this scale in years and it’s putting the long-term education of an enormous number of children at great risk,” said Rafay Hussain, from Save the Children.

Another Doomsday Prediction on Global Warming

El Niño effect: Global temperatures hit record high for 8th month in a row

© Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center.


Last month was the hottest May on file making it the eighth consecutive month to smash world temperature records.

The global temperature for May was 1.67 °F (0.93 °C) warmer than the May base period (from 1951 to 1980), according to data compiled by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

This follows a warmer than usual April, which was 1.96 °F (1.09 °C) hotter than mean temperatures from 1951 to 1980.

Global temperature records have now been broken for eight straight months since the pattern began in October 2015. The world is on track to call 2016 its hottest year yet.

Climate scientist and director of GISS, Gavin Schmidt says there is a greater than 99 percent probability that 2016 will break all previous heat records.

The string of record-breaking months is a consequence of El Niño - a natural phenomenon that occurs every two to seven years through unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean.

Gavin Schmidt @ClimateOfGavin
With Apr update, 2016 still > 99% likely to be a new record (assuming historical ytd/ann patterns valid).

The most recent El Niño event took place in the eastern tropical Pacific from late 2015 to early 2016 and was considered “very strong.”

Strongest ever, in fact.

The weather event brought excessive rains and exacerbated drought in the Horn of Africa and in Southern Africa, sparking increased food insecurity according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It also prompted the spread of disease, including cholera.


© Feisal Omar / Reuters

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology declared El Niño finished on May 24. However, the effects of the event drag on throughout the year because of a lag in the global response to tropical disturbances, according to Schmidt.

NASA expects the current trend to subside shortly though and says it’s unlikely that the next few months will be ‘chart-toppers’.

Climate change has been raising the planet’s temperature and GISS scientist Reto Ruedy estimates that global warming will catch up with the El Niño 2015 spike in less than 15 years.

This should be a good measure by which to determine the validity of GISS temperature forecasts. As I identified in Global Warming - Getting Off the Fence, temperature increases are subject to 30 year cycles and we are in the midst of a 30 year period of little or no increase in the global temperature. 

For global warming to catch up to the temperatures recorded in this El Nino event in 15 years, it would have to break a pattern that has been very consistent for the past 130 years. Good luck with that Reto Reudy.

Do You Know What Pulmonary Hypertension Is?

You might have it and not know it

May 5th is World Pulmonary Hypertension Day
But November is Pulmonary Hypertension Month

This is a horrible, debilitating and deadly disease
and much too little is known about it

Not well known

Pulmonary Hypertension is a fatal disease that many people have and don't know it. It is not well understood by most family physicians, and they will often diagnose asthma instead. Even some hospitals will refuse to treat a PH'er.

My wife has been on a Facebook group with other PH'ers, and we have lost several of them in the past two years. One of them went to her local hospital in a city of 50,000, and they refused to treat her. They sent her on a 5 hour road trip to the nearest hospital that would treat PH'ers. A few days later she died.

Symptoms

The major symptoms are:

Shortness of breath (dyspnea), initially while exercising and eventually while at rest
Fatigue
Dizziness or fainting spells (syncope)
Chest pressure or pain
Swelling (edema) in your ankles, legs and eventually in your abdomen (ascites)
Bluish color to your lips and skin (cyanosis)

Racing pulse or heart palpitations


What is it

Briefly, it is an increase in blood pressure between your heart and lungs. Left untreated, it can destroy your heart in as little as two years. With treatment, you can survive for another ten to twenty years but life will not be easy. There are no age restrictions that apply to PH; anyone is susceptible.

To find out more about this horrible disease please visit the Mayo Clinic.

For support or to make a donation to badly needed research, please visit the PHAssociation

Bono: Refugee Crisis Threatens The ‘Integration of Europe’

U2 singer spoke to US senate subcommittee 

on causes and consequences of violent extremism

Bono prepares to testify on Capitol Hill in Washington. He said the refugee crisis in Europe ‘has moved from practical to existential. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Aine McMahon

U2 frontman Bono has said the refugee crisis threatens the “integration of Europe”.

The singer spoke to the US Senate’s State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee on the causes and consequences of violent extremism on Tuesday.

He was speaking after a recent trip to refugee camps in Kenya, Jordan and Turkey .

The two fictions

“The two fictions the expedition revealed are, number one, that this refugee problem is temporary. The typical crisis that creates refugees lasts 25 years. On our trip, Senator Graham and I heard the term “permanent temporary solution” thrown around, but without the irony that the phrase requires,” he said.

“The second fiction is that it is simply a Middle Eastern problem. Refugees are flowing from all over the world—especially Africa. Of the top ten countries that are hosting refugees today, five of them are African,” he said.

Yes, but many of these are internally displaced people, i.e. Nigeria. Not that that makes a difference, they are still refugees.

“Aid in 2016 is not charity; it is national security and when it is structured properly with a hard focus on fighting corruption and prudent governance to qualify for that aid it could be the beat bulwark we have against violent extremism that is gaining traction,” he said.

From Practical to Existential

Bono said the refugee crisis in Europe “ has moved from practical to existential.”

“In 1989 the wall that divided Europe came down, a remarkable moment to live through. Who could imagine in 2016 another set of walls are being built up, this time made of mesh and razor wire but walls nonetheless,” he said.

“Members of the Subcommittee, let me soberly suggest to you that the integration of Europe, the very idea of European unity is at risk here.”

“Europe is America’s most important ally since the Second World War… Are we not your most important ally in the fight against violent extremism? This stuff matters,” he said.

“Put simply, as we Europeans have learned, if the Middle East catches fire, the flames jump any border controls. And if Africa fails, Europe cannot succeed,” he said.

He said by 2050, the African population will have doubled to 2.5 billion, twice that of China and that 40 percent of the world’s youth will be African.

“ Of the ONE Campaign’s seven million members, three million of them are in Africa; we have a sense of their potential as an engine of growth, one that roars, but we also fear that if the young people of Africa are misled and marginalised, their anger could be channelled not to hope, but to hate,” he said.

ONE Campaign is a charity co-founded by Bono to address extreme poverty, and disease in poor countries.

Critical of response

Bono was also critical of the international communities response to the refugee crisis.

“The international community although it means well, is having a lot of meeting about the crisis and I believe it is issuing a record amount of press releases but what it is not doing is cutting cheques,” he said.

He said as of last month, the UN’s humanitarian response plan for 2016 had only received nine per cent of the funding they require.

“Grants are handed out annually on a hand to mouth basis with no predictability which makes it impossible to plan which is madness. It is absolute madness,” he said.

Bono also called for funding to be prioritised for the support of countries along the Sahel and the Levant who are not yet in crisis.

“I know this sounds counterintuitive, but the people I met—especially the military—told us it is critical that these countries not only survive but that they thrive. Imagine if the chaos that ripped through Syria were to engulf Egypt or, God forbid, Nigeria. These are giant countries,” he said.

Egypt has a population of about 82 million, and Nigeria about 175 million. That's over a quarter of a billion people. Imagine if half of them decided to relocate to Europe.

Ebola Making a Comeback in Guinea

Guinea has suffered a setback in its fight against Ebola with a rash of new cases, including three doctors infected by the virus, with officials blaming weak surveillance and a failure to follow safety procedures.

Ebola vaccine trial

The outbreak, which began in eastern Guinea more than a year ago and has killed over 10,000 people in the three West African countries worst hit, had appeared to be on the wane, but Guinea has seen cases rise for three consecutive weeks, according to World Health Organization data.

A government health report from the weekend showed there were 21 new cases in a single day, a spike from the recent daily average of eight.

President Alpha Conde said on Tuesday that everything must be done to end the outbreak by mid-April, ahead of a meeting with donors scheduled around that date.

Ending Ebola could reboot Guinea's mining-dependent economy that has been hammered by the outbreak which has scared investors, he said.

"With Ebola, it is easier to go from 100 cases to 10 cases than from 10 cases of to zero. To end it, we need 10 times more effort than when the outbreak was at its height," he said.

New infections

A big source of concern is a chain of new infections that can be linked back to a woman who died of Ebola and was not buried safely, according to Fatoumata Lejeune-Kaba, spokeswoman for the UN's Ebola emergency response mission UNMEER.

"It's a major setback .... It's due to individual behaviours. That is having a devastating effect on the community. People are simply not practising the safety rules that we have been talking about for a year," she told Reuters.

Guinean President Alpha Conde says the final push to get cases down to zero
is a major challenge that requires even more effort than when the Ebola outbreak
 was at its peak. (Cellou Binani/AFP/Getty Images)

Of the other two countries worst hit, Sierra Leone has also seen a spate of new cases while Liberia has no known cases at present and is waiting to be declared free of the disease.

The new cases in Guinea are in the capital and the southwestern town of Forecariah but if the situation is not brought under control they could spread across borders, said Lejeune-Kaba.

Guinea officials said the new cases came from high risk Ebola contacts who had left Forecariah and developed symptoms elsewhere, pointing to poor surveillance.

Sakoba Keïta, Guinea's anti-Ebola task force coordinator, said on Tuesday that the government was putting in place new measures including strict rules regulating the movement of corpses and contact tracing.

"There are numerous gaps in the Ebola response in Guinea, notably in surveillance of contacts, and that explains the difficulty in making any lasting progress towards ending the epidemic," said a spokesman for medical charity MSF.

The three doctors were infected at the Ignace Deen hospital in Conakry, which is not an Ebola centre. More than 50 doctors in Guinea have caught the virus during the outbreak.

France May Ban Super-Skinny Models

The link between high fashion, body image and eating disorders on French catwalks may lead to a ban on super-skinny models.

France's government is likely to back a bill being discussed in Paris banning excessively thin fashion models as well as potentially fining the modelling agency or fashion house that hires them and sending their agents to jail, Health Minister Marisol Touraine said on Monday.

Rosa Cha runway fashion model
looks like she just escaped
from the Holocaust

Style-conscious France, with its fashion and luxury industries worth tens of billions of dollars, would join Italy, Spain and Israel, which all adopted laws against too-thin models on catwalks or in advertising campaigns in early 2013.​

The union representing fashion agencies opposes the ban, arguing that regulating a model's waist line will take a toll on the agencies' bottom line. 

So, obviously the union cares much more about the bottom line than the bottoms.

Under the proposed legislation, any model who wants to work has to have a body mass index (a type of height to weight ratio) of at least 18 and would be subject to regular weight checks. Health Minister Marisol Touraine says the ban would protect young women who see models as the ideal female form. Plus, many models in France are still in their teens.

So, a woman who is 5-foot-7 would have to weigh at least 121 pounds. The normal weight BMI range is around 18.5 to 25.


Fines, jail time

The law would enforce fines of up to $79,000 US for any breaches, with up to six months in jail for any staff involved, French Socialist Party legislator Olivier Veran, who wrote the amendments, told newspaper Le Parisien.

The bill’s amendments also propose penalties for anything made public that could be seen as encouraging extreme thinness, notably pro-anorexia websites that glorify unhealthy lifestyles and forums that encourage eating disorders.

In 2007, Isabelle Caro, an anorexic 28-year-old former French fashion model, died after posing for a photographic campaign to raise awareness about the illness.

Some 30,000-40,000 people in France suffer from anorexia, most of them teenagers, said Veran, who is a doctor.

In 2013, designer Hedi Slimane was chastised for casting shockingly thin male models at an Yves Saint Laurent show in Paris. It was not immediately clear whether France's proposed legislation would apply to male models as well.

Cudos for France if they get on-board with this legislation. Cudos especially to Italy, Spain and Israel for having done it two years ago. US - what about you?