slow | Common News Update

Mar122021 by adminNo Comments

North Korea sanctions slow, but don’t stop nuclear development, analyst says

World

March 12 (UPI) -- A former director at the International Atomic Energy Agency said international sanctions against North Korea worked to slow weapons development. Sanctions had a definite impact on Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program, but it has not stopped the Kim Jong Un regime from continued development, former IAEA deputy director general Olli Heinonen said, according to Voice of America's Korean service on Friday. Advertisement Heinonen also said economic embargoes had an indirect impact on the North's weapons program. Sanctions blocked sources of North Korean foreign currency earnings and hit the regime's exports. Those changes had an effect on state funding for the nuclear program, Heinonen said. While sanctions are not entirely ineffective, Heinonen said it alone does not prevent ...

Jan282021 by adminNo Comments

Experts: Slow COVID-19 vaccine rollout shows U.S. public health ‘disinvestment’

Health

Jan. 28 (UPI) -- Rollout of the available COVID-19 vaccines in the United States continues to be slow, due in part to "20 years of disinvestment in the country's public health infrastructure," experts said Thursday. As a result, entire segments of the population have been excluded from vaccination, particularly communities of color, as states scramble to develop their own vaccine rollout plans, public health expert Dr. Chris Beyrer said. Advertisement "Although we have two efficacious vaccines due to our very robust biomedical research infrastructure in the United States, our system to deliver these vaccines to the public is nowhere near as advanced," said Beyrer, a professor of public health and human rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "There is more demand th...

Jan62021 by adminNo Comments

Just 1% of Californians immunized amid slow vaccine rollout

Technology

LOS ANGELES -- The crush of patients with coronavirus is so severe in Los Angeles that on Tuesday they exceeded the normal capacity at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, which serves many Blacks and Latinos in America's largest county.The hospital in the south part of the city, which has a capacity of 131 patients, was treating 215 patients, 135 of them with COVID-19, said Jeff Stout, the interim chief nursing and operating officer.MLK is emblematic of what is happening at hospitals in Los Angeles, where a surge of coronavirus cases has overwhelmed medical staff, created a shortage of oxygen and led to a directive to ambulance crews to stop transporting patients they can’t revive in the field.Stout said the hospital was finalizing its crisis standards of care, which are guidelines ...

Nov102020 by adminNo Comments

Videos show why masks with exhalation valves don’t slow COVID-19 spread

Science

Nov. 10 (UPI) -- Masks with exhalation valves don't help slow the spread of COVID-19, according to new videos captured using the schlieren imaging system and a technique called light-scattering. Masks aren't so much a tool of self-preservation and individual protection as they are a social project. Their effectiveness relies on community-wide adoption and their benefits are shared. Advertisement Studies have shown that any one mask is only partially effective at blocking virus particles, but there is a synergistic effect when multiple people wear masks. However, new research published Tuesday in the journal Physics of Fluids suggests that synergy is undermined -- and the project to slow COVID-19 transmission through mask-wearing jeopardized -- when people sport masks with exhalation valve...

Oct262020 by adminNo Comments

Accessible healthcare could help slow climate change, reverse biodiversity losses

Science

Oct. 26 (UPI) -- To protect forests and vulnerable ecosystems, erect healthcare clinics. That's what nonprofit organizers did in Indonesia, where deforestation rates in neighboring Gunung Palung National Park declined dramatically during the first 10 years of the clinic's operation. The affordable healthcare clinic was set up in 2007 by a pair of nonprofits, Alam Sehat Lestari and Health In Harmony. Prior to the arrival of the clinic, the forests of Gunung Palung were shrinking annually as a result of uncontrolled illegal logging. Advertisement To curb the losses, the clinic offered discounted services to villages that enacted community-wide logging reductions and other conservation-minded reforms. Researchers described the clinic's environmental and public health successes in a new paper...