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A new study based on fossilized footprints suggests a prehistoric relative of modern crocodiles walked on two hind legs. The study, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, describes how ancient fossilized footprints discovered in South Korea had originally been thought to belong to a pterosaur — a flying dinosaur — that had been walking on two legs. But further analysis of the prints suggests that they actually belonged to a bipedal crocodile, a creature that walked on two legs because it was semi-adapted to land. This is the first evidence from this time period of a bipedal crocodylomorph, a branching, diverse group of animals that includes crocodilians and their extinct relatives. The researchers named the new species Batrachopus grandis.  The footprints were 18 to 24 centimeters long, suggesting that the creatures’ bodies were almost 3 meters long. They seem to have been left only by the back limbs, showing a clear heel-to-toe walking pattern. The well-preserved fossils, discovered in South Korea’s Jinju Formation, date to the lower Cretaceous period, which spanned 145 million to 105 million years ago. A 2015 study describes at least one instance of a bipedal crocodylomorph believed to have lived in the southeastern U.S. state of North Carolina 230 million years ago.
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The Trump administration Friday finalized a regulation that overturns Obama-era protections for transgender people against sex discrimination in health care. The policy shift, long sought by the president’s religious and socially conservative supporters, defines gender as a person’s biological sex. The Obama regulation defined gender as a person’s internal sense of being male, female, neither or a combination. LGBTQ groups say explicit protections are needed for people seeking sex-reassignment treatment, and even for transgender people who need medical care for common conditions such as diabetes or heart problems. Behind the dispute over legal rights is a medically recognized condition called “gender dysphoria” — discomfort or distress caused by a discrepancy between the gender that a person identifies as and the gender at birth. Consequences can include severe depression. Treatment can range from sex-reassignment surgery and hormones to people changing their outward appearance by adopting a different hairstyle or clothing. Many social conservatives disagree with the concept. Women’s groups say the new regulations also undermine access to abortion, which is a legal medical procedure. FILE – President Donald Trump speaks during a round-table discussion with law enforcement officials, June 8, 2020, at the White House in Washington.”No one should fear being turned away by a medical provider because of who they are or the personal health decisions they have made,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center, raising the threat of a court challenge. The ACLU has also said it would sue to overturn the Trump rule. Under the Obama-era federal rule, a hospital could be required to perform gender-transition procedures such as hysterectomies if the facility provided that kind of treatment for other medical conditions. The rule was meant to carry out the anti-discrimination section of the Affordable Care Act, which bars sex discrimination in health care but does not use the term “gender identity.” Roger Severino, head of the Health and Human Services Department unit that enforces civil rights laws, has said transgender people continue to be protected by other statutes that bar discrimination in health care on account of race, color, national origin, age, disability and other factors. For the Trump administration it’s the latest in a series of steps to revoke newly won protections for LGBTQ people in areas ranging from the military to housing and education. The administration also has moved to restrict military service by transgender men and women, proposed allowing certain homeless shelters to take gender identity into account in offering someone a bed for the night, and concluded in a 2017 Justice Department memo that federal civil rights law does not protect transgender people from discrimination at work.  The proposed new rule would also affect the notices that millions of patients get in multiple languages about their rights to translation services. Such notices often come with insurer “explanation of benefits” forms. The Trump administration says the notice requirement has become a needless burden on health care providers, requiring billions of paper notices to be mailed annually at an estimated five-year cost of $3.2 billion. 
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The U.S National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports global temperatures for the month of May 2020 are tied with May 2016 as the warmest on record.In its monthly Global Climate Report released this week, NOAA said the 10 warmest Mays – in terms of land and ocean surface temperatures – in the 141 years since records have been kept, have occurred since 1998. The report also says the last seven Mays, dating back to 2014, have been the warmest on record.  NOAA says last month marked the 44th consecutive May, and the 425th consecutive month in which temperatures were higher than at this time a century ago.The agency reports the areas with the biggest departures from average temperatures included northern and southeastern Asia, northern Africa, Alaska, the southwest contiguous United States, and the northern Pacific Ocean, where readings were at least 1.5°C above the 1981-2010 average.NOAA says May 2020 was also the warmest on record for global land-only surface temperatures at 1.39°C above the 20th century average of 11.1°C (52.0°F).  The 10 highest May global land-only surface temperature departures have occurred since 2010.
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Survivors of COVID-19 are donating their blood plasma in droves in hopes it helps other patients recover from the coronavirus. And while the jury’s still out, now scientists are testing if the donations might also prevent infection in the first place.  
Thousands of coronavirus patients in hospitals around the world have been treated with so-called convalescent plasma  — including more than 20,000 in the U.S. — with little solid evidence so far that it makes a difference. One recent study from China was unclear while another from New York offered a hint of benefit.
“We have glimmers of hope,” said Dr. Shmuel Shoham of Johns Hopkins University.
With more rigorous testing of plasma treatment underway, Shoham is launching a nationwide study asking the next logical question: Could giving survivors plasma right after a high-risk exposure to the virus stave off illness?
To tell, researchers at Hopkins and 15 other sites will recruit health workers, spouses of the sick and residents of nursing homes where someone just fell ill and “they’re trying to nip it in the bud,” Shoham said.  
It’s a strict study: The 150 volunteers will be randomly assigned to get either plasma from COVID-19 survivors that contains coronavirus-fighting antibodies or regular plasma, like is used daily in hospitals, that was frozen prior to the pandemic. Scientists will track if there’s a difference in who gets sick.
It if works, survivor plasma could have important ramifications until a vaccine arrives — raising the prospect of possibly protecting high-risk people with temporary immune-boosting infusions every so often.
“They’re a paramedic, they’re a police officer, they’re a poultry industry worker, they’re a submarine naval officer,” Shoham ticked off. “Can we blanket protect them?”Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 7 MB480p | 10 MB540p | 13 MB720p | 22 MB1080p | 44 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioThe new coronavirus has infected more than 7 million people worldwide and killed more than 400,000, according to official tallies believed to be an underestimate. With no good treatments yet, researchers are frantically studying everything from drugs that tackle other viruses to survivor plasma — a century-old remedy used to fight infection before modern medicines came along.
The historical evidence is sketchy, but convalescent plasma’s most famous use was during the 1918 flu pandemic, and reports suggest that recipients were less likely to die. Doctors still dust off the approach to tackle surprise outbreaks, like SARS, a cousin of COVID-19, in 2002 and the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, but even those recent uses lacked rigorous research.
When the body encounters a new germ, it makes proteins called antibodies that are specially targeted to fight the infection. The antibodies float in plasma — the yellowish, liquid part of blood.  
Because it takes a few weeks for antibodies to form, the hope is that transfusing someone else’s antibodies could help patients fight the virus before their own immune system kicks in. One donation is typically divided into two or three treatments.  Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 3 MB480p | 5 MB540p | 4 MB1080p | 9 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioAnd as more people survive COVID-19, there are increasing calls for them to donate plasma so there’s enough of a stockpile if it pans out. In addition to traditional infusions, donations can be combined into a high-dose product. Manufacturer Grifols is producing doses of that “hyperimmune globulin” for a study expected to start next month.
Convalescent plasma seems safe to use, Dr. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic reported last month. His team tracked the first 5,000 plasma recipients in a Food and Drug Administration-sponsored program that helps hospitals use the experimental treatment, and found few serious side effects.
Does it help recovery? A clue comes from the first 39 patients treated at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Researchers compared each plasma recipient to four other COVID-19 patients who didn’t get plasma but were the same age, just as sick and being given the same amount of oxygen. People who received plasma before needing a ventilator were less likely to die than non-plasma recipients, said Dr. Sean Liu, the study’s lead author.  
“We really tried to target patients who were early in their course, preferably within the first one to two weeks of their disease,” Liu said.
“Being a doctor during this time, you just feel helpless,” Liu added, stressing that more rigorous study was needed but he was glad to have tried this first-step research. “Watching people die is, it’s heartbreaking. It’s scary and it’s heartbreaking.”
But results of the first strictly controlled study were disappointing. Hospitals in the hard-hit Chinese city of Wuhan were comparing severely ill patients randomly assigned to receive plasma or regular care, but ran out of new patients when the virus waned.  
With only half of the 200 planned patients enrolled, more plasma recipients survived but researchers couldn’t tell if it was a real difference or coincidence, according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week.
The real proof will come from ongoing, strict studies that compare patients assigned to get either survivor plasma or a dummy treatment.
Further complicating the search for answers, COVID-19 survivors harbor widely varying levels of antibodies. And while researchers want to use what Hopkins’ Shoham calls “the high-octane stuff,” no one knows the best dose to test.
“About 20% of recovered patients and donors have very strong immunity,” estimated Dr. Michele Donato of Hackensack University Medical Center, who is studying how long they retain that level of protection.
Those are the people researchers want to become repeat donors.
“It’s, I think, our job as humans to step forward and help in society,” said Aubrie Cresswell, 24, of Bear, Delaware, who has donated three times and counting.  
One donation was shipped to a hospitalized friend of a friend, and “it brought me to tears. I was like, overwhelmed with it just because the family was really thankful.”
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The ongoing separatist conflict in Cameroon’s western regions has created a growing humanitarian emergency that has affected close to two million people.  Humanitarian experts say those displaced by the fighting need help resettling, but also psychological support.  A clinic in Cameroon’s capital provides rare trauma therapy for those affected, as Moki Edwin Kindzeka narrates in this report by Anne Nzouankeu in Yaoundé.
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India reported nearly 11,000 new cases of COVID-19 in a 24-hour period Friday. The surge of 10,956 new coronavirus infections puts the massive South Asian nation in fourth place, surpassed only by the U.S., Brazil and Russia in the number of cases. India’s has 297,535 of the world’s total 7.5 million COVID-19 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. is leading the world count of infections with more than two million, Brazil has more than 800,00 and Russia has more than 510,000. Vaccine prospects
A U.S. biotechnology company says it will make the first widespread tests of a possible coronavirus vaccine next month.Moderna is working with the U.S. National Institutes of Health in developing a COVID-19 vaccine. The company said Thursday the vaccine trial will begin with 30,000 volunteers. Some will get the actual vaccine, and others will get a placebo.A Chinese biotech firm, Sinovac, also plans to test its vaccine next month, on 9,000 volunteers in Brazil. Brazil will also be the testing ground for a vaccine being developed by Britain’s Oxford University. The Trump administration is working with private labs in what it calls “Operation Warp Speed,” which hopes to have 300 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine ready to go by January.But experts say there’s never any guarantee a vaccine will work or, if it does, will offer more than a few months of protection.Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 9 MB480p | 12 MB540p | 15 MB720p | 27 MB Embed” />Copy Download AudioEconomic hit
Another major study forecasts millions sinking into extreme poverty because of the coronavirus pandemic.A report by the United Nations University says the economic fallout could plunge 395 million people into conditions in which they are forced to live on $1.90 a day or less – the definition of extreme poverty.A separate World Bank report this week put that number between 70 million and 100 million people. “The outlook for the world’s poorest looks grim unless governments do more and do it quickly and make up the daily loss of income the poor face,” one of the U.N. report’s authors, Andy Sumner, said. “The result is progress on poverty reduction could be set back 20-30 years and making the UN goal of ending poverty look like a pipe dream.”  The U.N. report says South Asia – India in particular – will see the largest number of people sinking into extreme poverty, followed by sub-Saharan Africa. Experts are appealing to economically powerful nations, such as the United States, to forgive the debts of developing countries that would take a stong hit from the pandemic. FILE PHOTO: The headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, May 18, 2020.We need WHO, Fauci says
The U.S. top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said the World Health Organization isn’t perfect, but the world needs it.“It certainly has made some missteps, but it has also done a lot of good,” Fauci told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Thursday. “I would hope that we could continue to benefit from what the WHO can do at the same time that they continue to improve themselves. I’ve had good relationships with the WHO, and the world needs the WHO.”President Donald Trump announced last month that he is pulling the United States out of the WHO, accusing it of being dominated by China and letting China “mislead the world” on the coronavirus. The U.S. is by far the largest donor to the WHO.Fauci told the CBC that when the outbreak began in December in Wuhan, some Chinese scientists were “not able to express” their concerns about human-to-human transmission in a clear way, leading the WHO to downplay the risks. Fauci did not elaborate on what he meant by the inability express those concerns. “There may have been things that would have been done sooner both in China and outside China,” Fauci said. “The original reports were that this was a dominant animal-to-human spread.”With the number of U.S. cases surpassing the 2 million mark, according to Johns Hopkins University, and the number of new cases appearing to rise, Fauci said it is still possible for the U.S. To avoid a second wave through mass testing.WATCH: VOA Interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can
download this video to view it offline.Download File360p | 40 MB480p | 57 MB540p | 59 MB720p | 116 MB Embed” />Copy Download Audio
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