Graves run short in Johannesburg

Courtesy of CNN.com

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) -- AIDS and a growing urban population are forcing South African officials to find new cemeteries and encourage families to bury several members in the same grave, Johannesburg city authorities said Wednesday.

Johannesburg's Alexandra township has no spare grave spaces while Soweto's Avalon cemetery sees more than 200 burials each weekend, City Parks spokeswoman Jenny Moodley said.

"There's a lot of pressure on the current infrastructure," she said. "A lot of people are saying we should cremate because in the future we don't want to have to pay large amounts in tax for the upkeep of cemetery spaces."

With thousands flocking to cities from impoverished rural areas of South Africa and its neighbors in search of work and more than 6.5 million of the country's 47 million people infected with HIV, demand would grow further, she said.

Every weekend, convoys of buses carrying mourners bring South African townships to a standstill as families bury their dead. Johannesburg City Parks, responsible for municipal graveyards, expects a 5 to 10 percent increase in deaths each year.

"We like to think it's mainly down to urbanization," she said, adding the municipality did not have firm data on causes of death.

African traditional beliefs put many off cremation, she said, so the city was also encouraging families to put several members in the same grave -- described as the "second burial" option -- to save space and pack as many corpses as possible into overcrowded sites.

"For each hectare, we can only do 2,000 primary burials," said Moodley. "If residents were willing to have second burials then we'd have an additional 1.5 million burial spaces across the city."

The opening of two large cemeteries on the outskirts of Johannesburg -- with an official population of around 4 million although some say it could be twice that size -- would almost double the city's burial capacity, she said, creating almost half a million new grave plots.

"That should be enough to last us another 30 to 40 years."

Seaweed Found in Fiji May Help Fight Cancer, AIDS

A type of seaweed discovered in Fiji could someday be used to fight bacterial infections, cancer, or even AIDS, researchers report.

The red seaweed species (Callophycus serratus) is found on shallow coral reefs along the South Pacific island's coastline. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers studying the plant have recently identified ten new molecular compounds that might be developed for pharmaceutical use.

Some of the natural compounds showed promise as antibacterial fighters—even against nasty strains that are resistant to antibiotics.

A compound dubbed bromophycolide A was also intriguing. It was able to kill human tumor cells by triggering "programmed cell death," a type of cellular suicide that is considered a promising lead in the development of new anticancer drugs.

"We're only at the test tube level so far," Julia Kubanek, a Georgia Tech biochemist involved in the study, explained in a press statement. "The next step is to discover how these compounds work and then to study them in a more complex model system."

Kubanek and colleagues reported several of the new compounds in the journal Organic Letters.

Seaweed-Based Drugs

If the seaweed does turn out to have pharmaceutical uses, it could prove a boon for the Fijian economy.

The research is part of a larger project funded by the National Institutes of Health that involves Georgia Tech, the University of the South Pacific, and Fijians from several coastal villages.

The initiative blends environmental conservation and economic development by promoting the growth of new reef rock. It also preserves the reef species that may yield future drug discoveries.

But it might take at least a decade before any seaweed-based drugs are available, if indeed any are possible.

Many potential roadblocks remain, including one common to cancer treatments. The high doses needed to effectively knock out pathogens may be so strong that they would harm patients, researchers say.

"We can cure cancer with a shotgun, so curing cancer is not the problem," explained Georgia Tech biologist Mark Hay. "Curing cancer without harming patients is a whole different thing that's very difficult to figure out.

"Many compounds have been found to have a negative effect on cancer cells, but almost none of them have gone to market because of adverse side effects that make them unusable.

"These [newly discovered] compounds might also have those kind of constraints, but the exciting thing is that they are a new structural class, so they have the potential, although it is only potential, to be useful with fewer side effects."

The compounds found in the seaweed are unique because they have a previously unknown type of carbon skeleton.

"It's very unusual," Kubanek explained in her press statement. "[The compounds] represent a new category of organic molecules. It's exciting as a biochemist to observe that living organisms have evolved the ability to synthesize such unique and exotic structures compared to other molecules typically produced by seaweeds."

Nature's Chemical Weapons?

The seaweed likely developed its unique germ-killing compounds to attack its predators and protect itself from disease.

Marine organisms can create molecules and compounds for reproduction, defense, and disease resistance. The compounds can deter predators by poisoning them, slowing their growth, sterilizing them, or even killing them outright.

"If you think about the different life forms on an ocean reef, for example, lots of organisms have structural defenses, but seaweed generally doesn't," said Paul Jensen of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

"These nice, fleshy plants are sitting out there, and you're wondering why something isn't eating them. … [There] are all kinds of organisms looking for something to eat. Some of them cause infection in marine plants. So why aren't all these seaweeds decomposing and becoming infected?"

It's difficult to isolate the role of chemical compounds in such resistance, Jensen said, but evidence suggests that they are very important in the plants' natural defenses.

"We're trying to understand how these organisms solve their own problems with these compounds," Georgia Tech's Hay said.

This may also help researchers find ways to create valuable medicines from the red seaweed and other reef species.

"There's some serendipity involved," Scripps Institution's Jensen said. "If you're looking at things that may be designed to kill bacteria in nature, there's a reasonable chance that they may work pretty well to kill bacteria in a clinical application."

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Police in Britain say they have charged the first person in connection with the July 21 attempted bombings of the London transport system.

Ismael Abdurahman, a 23-year-old man from Kennington, south London, was charged on Wednesday, under Section 38 of Britain's Terrorism Act 2000 with failing to report information about a terrorist act to police.

Police said Abdurahman would appear at Bow Street Magistrates Court Thursday morning.

Earlier Wednesday, a spokeswoman for Scotland Yard said investigators were looking at a number of people, including those already under arrest, to see if they knew about the attacks before they were planned or if they helped the suspected bombers hide after the incident.

They were also considering the issue of the fifth unexploded device that was found in Little Wormwood Scrubs Park in west London on July 23.

Scotland Yard said one man was released Wednesday, leaving 14 in police custody without charges, including three men suspected of carrying the bombs onto elements of the London transport system and another believed to have abandoned his bomb in Little Wormwood Scrubs.

A fifth bombing suspect, Hamdi Issac, has been charged with terrorism under Italian law in Rome, where he is also being held on a European Arrest Warrant from Britain.

One person was injured July 21 when the bombs, on three London Underground trains and a double-decker bus, failed to detonate properly.

Two weeks to the day earlier, suicide bombings on three trains and a bus killed 52 commuters and wounded more than 700 people.

Issac reportedly told Italian investigators the July 21 attacks were unconnected to the July 7 attacks and that the men who carried them out had no links to the terrorist group al Qaeda, which is believed to have been responsible for the earlier bombings.

Along with Issac, Yasin Hassan Omar, Ibrahim Muktar Said and Ramzi Mohammed are believed to have been the bombers. The name of the man believed to have left his bomb in the park is not yet known.

Also on Wednesday the Zambian government said it had signed an agreement with Britain to deport Rashid Haroon Aswat, a suspected al Qaeda operative believed to have facilitated or recruited the July 7 London transport bombers. Aswat, 30, will be sent to Britain soon, Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa said Wednesday.

MARADI, Niger (CNN) -- In a small village in southern Niger, hundreds of mothers gather with their hungry children hoping somebody will help them.

Hunger is nothing new in Niger. Every year there's a several-month gap. They call it the "hungry season," the time between when the crops have been planted and they're harvested. With the drought last year, the crops simply didn't come up, so that hungry season this year is longer and more intense than it's been.

That's why Niger is in crisis. Aid agencies say the severe food shortage has put some 3.6 million Nigerians at risk of starvation, most of them children.

Some of the worst cases aren't necessarily in the big cities in Niger; they're in smaller, outlying villages such as Maradi, which lies about 400 miles east of the capital, Niamey.

Relief groups come to these villages and offer screening. Mothers bring their children. The worst cases are brought back to the city, back to the hospital.

At one village screening, however, the crowds are simply too big.

It's a bit overwhelming when you first come to such a center because there are just so many people, so many mothers who have brought their children.

Not all of them are starving. Not all of them are severely malnourished. In fact, some of them look pretty healthy. They're smiling. But they know that there's food here. They know there's medical care. So they bring their children looking for help.

The village elders are trying to restore some semblance of order, but they're not having much luck. There are just too many people trying to get food for their kids.

The relief workers are going to cancel the program in this village for today because it's impossible to screen out the most-needy. They say they hope they're going to be able to come back the next day.

A few miles away, Medecins Sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders, is able to screen other children. They're weighed and measured. Some immediately receive milk. The worst cases wind up in the hospital.

It's not known how many children have died in Niger because of this year's severe food shortage, but relief agencies say there have been thousands.

Their deaths don't make headlines. Only their parents remember their names.

South Africa: Police Fire on Peaceful AIDS Protestors

Courtesy Human Rights Watch.com