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...
Two children have been paralyzed in the first polio outbreak in Europe for five years, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Both cases were in Ukraine where only half the children are fully immunized. It is likely large numbers of other children have also been infected without developing symptoms. The WHO said the risk of the virus spreading further in the country was "high" and that the outbreak needed to be rapidly controlled. One of the paralyzed children was four years old and the other just 10 months. Both were from south-western Ukraine near the border with Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland.
The outbreak started from the weakened form of the virus that is
used in vaccination. Sometimes it can mutate and start to spread if immunization levels are too low. "There are two cases of paralysis, but for sure they are not the only ones. That's one of the big dangers of the disease, there are a lot of asymptomatic cases." Wild polio leads to paralysis in one in every 200 infections, while the vaccine-derived strain tends to be milder.
The WHO is recommending that everyone visiting the region is fully vaccinated and that all residents and anyone staying for more than a month gets an extra dose of polio vaccine. The last cases in Europe were in Russia in 2010 when 14 people were paralyzed when a wild polio strain was imported from Tajikistan.
Comments
Post a Comment