📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Top African Health Official Blasts Trump Administration’
Last week, officials at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) announced that health authorities in Guinea-Bissau had moved to halt a controversial study which would have used unvaccinated infants as lab rats. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), however, insisted the trial was still on.
That wasn’t all US health authorities had to say. In a bizarre outburst, the HHS told Futurism that the Africa CDC was a “fake and powerless organization,” and insisted that it was “not a reliable source” for information. During a press meeting on Thursday, director-general of the Africa CDC Jean Kaseya hit back.
“Let me tell you: we are not an NGO,” Kaseya said defiantly. “We are not a UN organization. We are the convening power in Africa. The mandate [is] given to us by all 55 African heads of state and government.”
“People can meet in the US, people can meet in Europe,” Kaseya continued, likely referencing leaked emails between HHS officials and Danish researchers to push the vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau. “If we are not there, they are wasting their time.”
Kaseya also made it clear that no government has the right to impose experiments on the people of Guinea-Bissau.
“Africa CDC is respecting and supporting the sovereignty of the country,” the official continued. “It’s not Africa CDC that will say, ‘this clinical trial will take place or not.’ It’s not any other international body that will come to say, ‘this clinical trial will take place or not.’ It’s not a foreign country that will come and say, ‘this one will take place.’ It’s the sovereignty of the country.”
Though the HHS evidently thinks it has the power to push dangerous vaccines experiments on African countries, the reality isn’t so simple. According to the Africa CDC’s guidelines, any vaccine trial that doesn’t receive a written authorization from the country’s National Medicines Regulatory Authority is illegal. Likewise, it must have approval from the National Ethics Committee, as well as a local institutional review board at each site where the trial is to take place.
On top of all that, any trial must also have explicit approval from the country’s Ministry of Health — granting officials in Guinea-Bissau the power to functionally veto any experiment the government doesn’t support.
Kaseya emphasized the importance of exercising sovereignty over African public health. “Our vision is not coming from Western countries,” he said. “Our vision is coming from Africa, shaped by African leadership, based on African realities.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Abdulhammad Babatunde, a doctor and global health researcher in Nigeria, said that it’s “very important to fund research that Africans actually want.”
“Africans want to solve Africa’s problems, not satisfy the curiosity of the funders,” Babatunde said, referring to the HHS, which announced the $1.6 million funding package for the study in December.
Once up and running, the vaccine trial would have given 7,000 newborn children a vaccine for hepatitis B, while 7,000 more infants in the control group wouldn’t receive the vaccine.
As the Guardian notes, nearly one in five adults and 11 percent of children in Guinea-Bissau have hepatitis B — which carries a significant risk for debilitating illness and death. In such a health environment, there’s no justification for purposefully leaving infants unvaccinated for any length of time.
“This is not acceptable,” Babatunde told the paper. “To prevent things like the Tuskegee study and others, the control group has to get the standard of care, and the intervention group should get [potentially] better care.”
Asked whether the HHS’s comments would affect future collaboration with Africa CDC, Kaseya said he’s putting the strange episode behind him.
“I was briefed that they don’t know anything about any statement against Africa CDC,” he said. “I could tell you about a statement that could be somewhere, made by someone. But officials from HHS just yesterday — senior people — said they don’t know anything about the statement. I trust them, I’ve closed the chapter.”
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The post Top African Health Official Blasts Trump Administration’s Plans for Human Experimentation in Africa appeared first on Futurism.
🔗 Sumber: futurism.com
📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Mind Blowing James Webb Photo Shows Star Crumbling Into D
A new image taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provides an astonishingly close up look of a dying star crumbling into gas and dust — as well as a morbid preview of the fate that could eventually befall our Sun.
Taken with the Webb’s NIRCam infrared instrument, the image shows the inner ring of a luminous, expanding cloud of hot material that was exuded by a star that shed its outer layers to become a dense core called a white dwarf, which is now in the middle of blasting the billowing cloud with ionizing radiation.
Zoom out, and you may recognize the cosmic scene as the famous Helix Nebula, known for its resemblance to the “Eye of Sauron” from the “Lord of the Rings” saga. Located 650 light years away, the iconic object is specifically what’s known as a planetary nebula, but this classification is a misnomer: such nebulas have nothing to do with planets, and everything to do with stars. The white dwarf was once a moderately massive star like the Sun. At the end of its life, it puffed out and became a red giant, before casting off its shell and exposing its depleted core.
All that material it shed doesn’t vanish into thin air. When animals die on Earth, they decompose and replenish the environment with nutrients, and a comparable process plays out with stellar deaths, only at a scale that could swallow the inner solar system, and over the course of millions of years. The nebula seeds the cosmos with heavier elements forged in the star and other materials crucial for forming future planetary star systems around other suns.
A mosaic of these cosmic-nutrient-giving interactions can be seen in the Webb image, in which the faint blotches of blue indicate the hottest gases, while the yellower, cooler regions contain hydrogen and pockets of dust clouds where complex molecules can form, according to NASA.
The Helix Nebula contains a solitary white dwarf. But these stellar remnants are often found in binary pairs that provide a formidable spectacle in their own right. If the white dwarf’s companion orbits too closely, the dense core can start stripping material from the other star. Once enough of it accumulates on the white dwarf’s surface, it explodes in an epic thermonuclear blast called a nova. These can be even more luminous than nebula, but are shorter lived.
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The post Mind Blowing James Webb Photo Shows Star Crumbling Into Dust appeared first on Futurism.
🔗 Sumber: futurism.com
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