A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
More than 10,000 people have died in the largest ever outbreak of the virus.But a study in the journal Science suggests there could be
even more deaths from other diseases because of the devastating impact
on the countries' vaccination programmes.
Experts said an increase in such infections was "likely".
There have been 24,350 cases of Ebola in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.Many healthcare facilities closed and the fear of Ebola meant people did not show up at those that remained.
It has had a knock-on effect on immunisation campaigns for measles, polio, TB and other diseases.
An international team of scientists tried to estimate the impact on measles protection.They ran detailed models assuming 75% of vaccination programmes had been disrupted.
The scientists estimated that 20,000 more people were becoming susceptible to measles every month.At the start of the outbreak they said there were 778,000
unvaccinated children and the total would increase to 1,129,000 after 18
months of the outbreak.
Their sophisticated predictions suggested this would translate to an
additional 100,000 measles cases, on top of the 127,000 that would be
anticipated in a pre-Ebola measles outbreak.
It could lead to 16,000 extra deaths, more than have died from Ebola, the team suggested.
Dr Justin Lessler, of Johns Hopkins University in the US,
said: "Measles in particular is known to show up during or after
humanitarian crises because it is so infectious.
"The addition of so many unvaccinated children to the already
considerable at-risk population significantly increases the likelihood
of a major measles outbreak."Measles is not the only health threat that has been made worse by
the Ebola crisis, and may not even be the most dire, but it is one we
can do something about."
Prof Jonathan Ball, of the University of Nottingham, told the
BBC News website: "The Ebola virus outbreak has put immense strain on
healthcare systems that were already stretched.
"It was always likely that we would see an upturn in other
diseases and infections as these creaking systems diverted attention to
fight the emerging Ebola virus epidemic.
"These are predictions, and not hard fact, but we shouldn't
be surprised if we see an upturn in measles, as we know that
immunisation is key to controlling what can be a very serious infection."The real lesson from all of this is the need to build better
healthcare systems and to overturn what are significant global health
inequalities."
Comments
Post a Comment