Posts in category: Uncategorized

In the last few years, breast reduction procedures in the U.S. have become increasingly common. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, nearly 100,000 breast reduction procedures were performed in 2020.

Exposure to air pollution early in pregnancy—and even shortly before conception—increases a woman’s risk of developing gestational diabetes, according to a new USC study out in The Lancet Regional Health—Americas.

In the United States and other western countries, a form of esophageal and stomach cancer has risen dramatically over the last five decades. Rates of esophageal adenocarcinoma, or EAC, and gastric cardia adenocarcinoma, or GCA, are both highly fatal.

By BUUMBA CHIMBULU

PUBLIC actors need to improve policy frameworks and deploy concessional financing to target investment barriers for the private sector interested in climate financing.

This is according to Green Economy and Environment Minister, Collins Nzovu, who admitted the importance of the private sector in climate change investments and financing.

Mr Nzovu said the private sector had significant potential to meet Africa’s climate finance needs through the Nationally Determined Contributions. 

He said this a speech by Zambia’s Ambassador to Ethiopia, Rose Sakala, during the Ministerial Dialogue on Climate Finance in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia recently.

“The private sector has significant potential to meet Africa’s climate finance needs through the NDC.  Some private investment can come from existing flows towards climate action.

“To mobilise private finance, public actors need to improve policy frameworks and investments environment and deploy concessional financing to target investment barriers,” Mr Nzovu said.

He pointed out that different types of investors could be tapped, citing that African pension funds had US$700 billion in assets under management and that sovereign wealth funds had US$16.4 billion in assets under management.

He noted that Africa faced a difficult trade-off between prioritising its sustainable development and its efforts to meet climate obligations including the requirements under the Paris Agreement.

“The continent’s capacity to make a meaningful contribution to the goals of the Paris Agreement presupposes predictability, adequacy and sustainability in the provision of finance as provided for under the Paris Agreement which in practice has been hampered by inadequate provision of finance,” he said.

According to Mr Nzovu, the cost of achieving Sustainable Development Goal by 2030 in Africa was estimated at US$1.3 trillion a year.

He was concerned that domestic financing mechanisms alone were insufficient to meet the scale of interventions required to attain the 1.5/2 degrees Celsius temperature limit including meeting the rising cost of adaptation and losses and damages.

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Race-correction for spirometry, a type of pulmonary function test, is commonly done in medical institutions across the United States.

Gamma delta (γδ) T cells are a type of unique innate T lymphocyte that are considered to be among the best candidate cells for use in immunotherapy. However, owing to their rarity in the peripheral circulation and lymphoid organs, their precise role in regulating antitumor immune response remains more or less unclear.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the mental health of adolescents suffered to an extraordinary degree. To what extent school closures contributed to or even caused this crisis was so far largely unknown.

Over the past decade, much of the U.S. health care industry has begun omitting race when predicting and diagnosing disease, thought of as a way of reducing health disparities and curbing systemic racism in health care.

A new study from the School of Public Health at the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University estimates that almost half the Israeli population suffers from second-hand smoke (SHS) penetrating their homes, mostly from smoking neighbors. The study also found that only 1 of 4 families who suffer from smoke infiltrating their homes complain about it to the smoking neighbor, homeowner, or building committee.

Human Brain Project (HBP) researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Cologne (Germany) have uncovered how neuron densities are distributed across and within cortical areas in the mammalian brain. They have unveiled a fundamental organizational principle of cortical cytoarchitecture: the ubiquitous lognormal distribution of neuron densities.