U.N. decision on smallpox put off
UNITED NATIONS, May 24 (UPI) -- A U.N. decision about whether to destroy existing samples of smallpox held in Russian and U.S. labs has been postponed for another three years, officials said.
"There has been a lot of discussion around the smallpox issue," officials of the World Health Organization said. "Three years from now, we will resume the discussion."
There has been increasing international pressure for the remaining stocks held in a Russian government laboratory near Novosibirsk and at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta be destroyed, due to fears of the stockpiles falling into the wrong hands or being used as biological weapons, Medical News Today reported Tuesday.
The United States has argued the live smallpox strains must be maintained for ongoing research into vaccines against the disease, eradicated from the world more than 30 years ago.
The research would be shared with other countries, said Nils Daulaire, director of the Office of Global Health Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Daulaire is also the U.S. representative on the WHO's executive board.
Many nations signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention that committed the signers to not develop or use them, but rumors abound of many nations possessing them.
North Korea is suspected of having its own stockpile of smallpox viruses, Medical News Today reported.
Micronesia in legal challenge to emissions
PALIKIR, Micronesia, May 24 (UPI) -- The Pacific island state of Micronesia says it has begun a legal challenge to plans to expand a coal-fired power plant in the Czech Republic, 3,700 miles away.
Low-lying Micronesia is at risk from rising sea levels and claims potential environmental damage from greenhouse gas emissions and resultant global warming threatens the archipelago's survival, the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported Tuesday.
Experts in international law said the case could set a precedent as countries more at risk from climate change take action against major carbon emitting countries.
If the expansion of the Prunerov II plant goes forward, it will become one of Europe's largest coal-fired power stations and the largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions in the Czech Republic.
The 600 islands of the Micronesia chain in the western Pacific already suffer regular flooding, extreme weather events and destructive tidal surges as a result of rising sea levels and the warming oceans, its government says.
Any major new coal-fired project would further threaten the future of the nation, it says.
"The very real impacts of climate change are happening on our disappearing shores," said Maketo Robert, Secretary of the Department of Justice and the Attorney General of the Federated States of Micronesia. "This legal tool demonstrates that nations on the front line of climate change are now supported by, and must prepare to invoke, the international law in making meaningful and more effective inputs into energy decisions."
Many areas of Micronesia, including at least one of the nation's four international airports, lie little more than 3 feet above sea level.
Book: British royalty ate human flesh
DURHAM, England, May 24 (UPI) -- British royalty ate human flesh as a medical treatment until the end of the 18th century, says a book on medicinal cannibalism.
"Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires," a book by Richard Sugg of Durham University, says well-off and well-educated people in Britain and Europe swallowed parts of the human body, including flesh, blood and bones, as medicine, the Daily Mirror reported last week.
"Along with Charles II, eminent users or prescribers included Francis I, Elizabeth I's surgeon John Banister, Elizabeth Grey, countess of Kent, Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis, William III, and Queen Mary," Sugg said.
The history of medicinal cannibalism raised a number of ethical questions, he said.
"Quite apart from the question of cannibalism, the sourcing of body parts now looks highly unethical to us," he said. "In the heyday of medicinal cannibalism, bodies or bones were routinely taken from Egyptian tombs and European graveyards.
"Not only that, but some way into the 18th century one of the biggest imports from Ireland into Britain was human skulls. Whether or not all this was worse than the modern black market in human organs is difficult to say."
Judge: Plutonium lab project can carry on
ALBUQUERQUE, May 24 (UPI) -- A New Mexico judge has ruled work on a proposed Los Alamos plutonium lab can continue, dismissing a lawsuit by environmental activists.
The suit has sought to halt the project while new environmental studies are completed, but U.S. District Judge Judith Herrera ruled in Albuquerque that an analysis being completed by the National Nuclear Security Administration is sufficient to satisfy federal law.
Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, which filed the suit, said the group was "disappointed" but had not made a decision on a possible appeal.
"We are still assessing our options," Mello told the Albuquerque Journal Monday.
Los Alamos National Laboratory and federal officials say the multibillion-dollar building, which is not expected to be completed until 2020, is needed for scientists working with plutonium and other radioactive materials that are used in nuclear weapons.
Critics argue that as the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons declines, the building, which would enable the manufacture of new nuclear weapons, is not necessary.
