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UN – United Nations News

May 10th, 2023

1 in 3 children overweight in the European region: WHO report

A new World Health Organization (WHO) report on obesity levels in Europe shows that roughly one in three primary school-aged children is living with obesity or are overweight, and this is only set to rise further. The WHO European Regional Obesity Report 2022 was launched by the spouses of 16 European leaders and Heads of State, in the Croatian capital. Childhood obesity data for WHO’s European Region paints an alarming picture. “Our children are increasingly growing up in environments that make it very difficult for them to eat well and be active. This is a root cause of the obesity epidemic,” said Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe. “As societies and countries, we have so far failed to reverse the rising rates of childhood obesity, and that’s why WHO/Europe is here in Croatia, at the invitation of Professor Milanović, spouse of the President, to galvanize political support for this truly insidious public health crisis before it becomes even more difficult to address.” Based on current trends and looking exclusively at obesity in the WHO European Region, which covers 53 countries across Europe and Central Asia, the World Obesity Atlas 2023 published by the World Obesity Federation, projects that between 2020 and 2035, there will be:

• a 61% increase in the number of boys living with obesity,
• a 75% increase in the number of girls living with obesity,
• with a total 17 million boys and 11 million girls aged 5-19 living with obesity in the region in 2035.
• Issues involving being overweight and obesity across all age groups are projected to cost
the WHO European Region $800 billion annually, by 2035.

WHO European Region has identified three specific actions to counter current projections and help prevent this silent epidemic from getting worse: prevention is better than cure: efforts to reduce childhood obesity must start early, right from pregnancy and early childhood. Prevention needs to focus on good nutrition at all stages of a child’s life. Prevention efforts are also needed in homes, schools, and the wider community. Regulating the food and beverage industry: the most effective policies to tackle childhood obesity include imposing a tax on sugary drinks, requiring clear front-ofpackage labelling, and restricting marketing of unhealthy foods to children. Promoting physical activity: this includes better urban design and transportation policies, physical activity in the school curriculum and extra-curricular activities, and clear messaging to support active lifestyles throughout the life course.

Adapted from: 1 in 3 children overweight in the European region: WHO report. UN – UNITED NATIONS NEWS. Release date: May 10th, 2023. Available at: https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136547. Access on May 30th, 2023.

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An old drug offers a new way to stop STIs

July 11, 2023 5:04 AM ET
By Will Stone

A promising line of attack against sexually transmitted infections puts a cheap and widely available medication to a new use. The treatment – a form of post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP – is a dose of the antibiotic doxycycline taken in the hours immediately after sex which works to extinguish an STI before it leads to symptoms or spreads to others. A growing body of research shows using doxycycline in this way can substantially lower the risk of contracting three of the most common bacterial STIs – chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. Called doxy-PEP, the preventative treatment has instilled enough confidence that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention plans to roll out guidance later this summer to give doctors and public health departments a roadmap for how to offer it. While doxy-PEP will not be recommended for everyone, including most women, and the implications for antibiotic resistance need to be closely monitored, experts say its potential to curb the rising rates of STIs cannot be ignored. “Our efforts to control STIs for the last 50 years have not succeeded,” says Dr. Edward Hook, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University Alabama, Birmingham. “It’s time to do something different.”

(Disponível em: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/07/11/1186501244/doxycycline-prevent-std-doxy-pep?ft=nprml&f= 103537970. Acesso em: 11 set. 2023.)

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On the surface, there is little to distinguish the Woolf Social Club from any other hipster hangout in Seoul, South Korea. Customers perch on wooden stools at formica tables, tapping on laptops while they sip their coffee. Records and cds line the walls, soft jazz trickles from speakers. On the white wall above the bar, in big black letters, is the statement: “More dignity, less bullshit”.

It is only on closer inspection that you realise this is more than just another coffee shop. On the mugs are cartoon drawings of Virginia Woolf, an angry wolf roaring from her shirt. A bookshelf contains South Korean feminist novels and works of self-help (titles include “Lessons on Being Unmarried”) alongside “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir and “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. On the wall is a poster for an exhibition of feminist art at a nearby gallery.

“I wanted a space for like-minded women to meet and talk,” says Kim Jina, a 47-year-old former advertising executive and politician who founded the café six years ago. Kim was inspired by Woolf’s dictum that in order to write fiction, a woman needed “five hundred [pounds] a year and a room with a lock on the door”. That is, financial independence and a place to think. The café’s casual vibe is deliberate: she wanted to avoid creating barriers to entry for women who were merely curious, rather than fully committed to the movement. Besides, she adds, “If I limited myself to feminist customers, I could never make a living.”

South Korea, even its trendy capital, is a difficult place to be a woman. The wage gap between the sexes is the highest in the rich world. Traditional expectations about gender roles, beauty standards and the way women should conduct themselves remain pervasive. “Misogyny surrounds you so naturally that you barely even notice it,” says Kim. “I had no role models, so my idea of how a successful woman should be came straight from ‘Sex and the City’.” For much of her 20s and 30s, she spent most of her money on make-up and expensive handbags, partying every weekend and dreaming about meeting her version of Mr Big, the rich, smooth-talking love interest of the show’s main character, Carrie.

“I never worried about misogyny because I thought being sexually attractive was a form of power,” says Kim. “But eventually I realised that men with real power don’t wear make-up and expensive dresses.” Her epiphany came when she was passed over for promotion in favour of a male colleague. “My boss said, ‘He needs it more than you because he has a wife and a child to take care of,’ and I realised that I had been wrong to think that all I needed to do was work hard and be good at my job.”

Kim’s burgeoning feminism crystallised in the summer of 2016, after a woman was murdered in a public toilet in an upmarket part of Seoul. The killer initially claimed that he had done it because he had been ignored by women. “I lived right around the corner, and I thought: that could have been me,” says Kim. Like many other women, she was upset by media coverage that ignored the misogynist motives for his crime and blamed it entirely on his mental-health problems.

The murder prompted South Korean women to come together, initially in online communities, and discuss how to fight back against sexism. Then they took to the streets. In 2018 there was a series of protests against the widespread practice of recording illegal footage of women by hiding small cameras in public toilets or changing rooms.

Kim founded the Woolf Social Club in 2017. “I thought, we talk to each other on the internet, but it would be good to have a physical space in which to do that,” she says. “If you walk around Seoul, you see all these cafés aimed at couples, where women look pretty and lower their voices. I wanted a space where they could raise them.”

[Fonte: Lena Schipper. “Virginia Woolf is inspiring South Korean feminists”. In: The Economist, 09/05/2022, www.economist.com/1843/2022/05/09/virginia-woolf-is-inspiringsouth-korean-feminists. Adaptado. Data de acesso: 27/08/2023.]

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Read Your Way Through Salvador

By Itamar Vieira Junior and translated by Johnny Lorenz. July 19, 2023.

I was born in Salvador, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, and lived in the general vicinity until I reached the age of 15. But it was when I left that I really came to know my city. How was I able to discover more about my birthplace while traveling far from home? It might sound rather clichéd but, I assure you, literature made this possible: It took me on a journey, long and profound, back home, enveloping me in words and imagination.

To understand the formation of our unique society and, consequently, the cityscape of Salvador, one should read, before anything else, "The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom and Islam in the Black Atlantic," by João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes and Marcus J.M. de Carvalho. Rufino was an alufá, or Muslim spiritual leader, born in the Oyo empire in present-day Nigeria and enslaved during his adolescence. "The Story of Rufino" is an epic tale, encapsulating the life of one man in search of freedom as well as the history of the development of Salvador itself, a place inextricably linked with the diaspora across the Black Atlantic. Another book for which I have deep affection is "The City of Women," by the American anthropologist Ruth Landes. It offers an intriguing perspective, focusing on matriarchal power in candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian sacred practice, and revealing how the social organization of its spiritual communities reverberates across the city.

If you want to feel the intensity of life on the streets of Salvador, these two books, both by Amado, are indispensable: "Captains of the Sands" and "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands." The first is a coming-of-age story in which we follow a group of children and adolescents living on the streets and on the beaches around the Bay of All Saints. Written more than 80 years ago, the book was banned and even burned in the public square during the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas in the first half of the 20th century. As a portrait of Salvador, it is still relevant and reveals our deep inequalities. "Dona Flor and her Two Husbands" is one of Amado's most popular novels, translated into more than 30 languages and adapted many times for theater, cinema, and television. The book is a kind of manifesto for a woman's liberation. Dona Flor possesses great culinary talent, and oppressed by a patriarchal society, finds herself divided between two men, one being her deceased husband. While the novel captures the daily life of the city in the 1940s, it is also a wonderful guide to the cuisine of Salvador, with its African and Portuguese influences.

I invite readers to travel into the interior of Bahia, many hours by car from Salvador to the region known as the Sertão, whose name translates loosely to "backwoods." Two books can also transport you there, and they are sides of the same story: "Backlands: The Canudos Campaign," by Euclides da Cunha, and "The War of the End of the World," by Mario Vargas Llosa.

"Backlands" is one of the most important works in the history of Brazilian literature. It is a journalistic telling that introduces us not only to the brutal War of Canudos, but also to the intriguing landscape of the Sertão, a place so full of contradictions. In his writing of the conflict, da Cunha tells the story of the genesis of the tough sertanejo: a mythic, cowboyesque figure of the drought-stricken, lawless interior. "The War of the End of the World" is an essential epic that amplifies the narrative of "Backlands," bringing a more imaginative, creative aspect to the story of Antônio Conselheiro, the spiritual leader of a rebellion, and of the multitude that followed him to their deaths.

[Fonte: "Read Your Way Through Salvador". In: The New York Times, 19/07/2023, .Adaptado, Data de acesso: 01/09/2023.]

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    More children have died of leukaemia since large soya plantations have gradually replaced cattle farms in parts of Brazil, suggesting that pesticide exposure could be involved. However, the number of deaths is low and the exact cause hasn’t been determined.

    Over the past two decades, parts of the Amazon have experienced a 20-fold expansion of soya farming, with previously cleared cow pastures converted into croplands. In the Cerrado, a vast savannah region which neighbours the Amazon, such farming has tripled.

    Southern Brazil has a long-standing soya farming industry, with a transition in land use taking place more recently in the north and centre of the country. Brazil overall uses more pesticides than anywhere else. While carrying out agricultural research in the Amazon, Marin Skidmore at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign heard local people talking about a recent rise in childhood cancers, with previous research linking pesticide exposure to childhood leukaemia. “I wanted to see whether this phenomenon that I was hearing about on the ground would really bear out in the data,” she says.         Skidmore and her colleagues collected information about deaths due to lymphoid leukaemia in children under 10 years old – who usually develop a form of the condition called acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) – between 2004 and 2019 in rural areas of the Cerrado and Amazon, covering about 1.75 million square kilometres.

    Healthcare workers in these places don’t necessarily report all lymphoid leukaemia diagnoses to government databases, says Skidmore. The researchers therefore focused on deaths, which were well documented, she says.

    They compared that information with data about land use and the location of people’s homes relative to water sources and paediatric oncology centres.

    The team found that for every 10 per cent increase in land used for soya farming, there were an additional 0.4 lymphoid leukaemia-related deaths of children under 5 years old per 10,000 people and an additional 0.21 such deaths for children under 10 per 10,000 people. A statistical analysis indicates this wasn’t a chance finding. Death rates were higher in areas more than 100 kilometres away from a paediatric oncology centre. This makes sense, since ALL in particular is “a highly treatable cancer”, says Skidmore. Looking specifically at children who were born after the soya farming surge began in 2004, approximately half of the 226 deaths due to lymphoid leukaemia may not have occurred without the growth of that industry, she says.

    Critically, the team found that lymphoid leukaemia-related death rates were especially associated with living downstream from a soya farm, which suggests the children, or their mothers during pregnancy, may have been consuming pesticide-laced water. Previous research has linked pesticide exposure during pregnancy to cancer in infants.

    The results don’t prove that pesticides from soya farming caused the deaths, but “I buy it”, says Pablo Menéndez at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. Nevertheless, the number of lymphoid leukaemia-related deaths is very low overall, he says.

    Chensheng (Alex) Lu at Southwest University in Chongqing, China, says that while the correlation between the deaths and the soya farming expansion seems clear, the cause isn’t definite. If the results are confirmed in further research, this will underline the importance of government-regulated pesticide policies, says Skidmore. These could include training protocols for anyone applying pesticides and access to competent healthcare to ensure early diagnoses and accessible treatment, especially for rural populations, she says.

    Agricultural intensification, via widespread pesticide use, is probably going to be part of global food security strategies, says Skidmore, who is “not advocating for a wholesale stop to these inputs”. “I think, safety first – making sure public health is taken care of as we see potentially more intensification happening in regions that are potentially under-resourced or haven’t seen these types of chemicals in the past,” she says.

New Scientist. 2 November 2023. Adapted.