War-torn Yemen to get cholera vaccines as death toll mounts.
A spokesman for the World Health Organization said Wednesday that it didn’t initially want to publicize last week’s decision because questions remain about when and how the doses could reach the neediest people in a country sliced up along front lines and grappling with a nearly-collapsed health system.
WHO said the 1 million doses for Yemen were approved on June 15 by the International Coordinating Group, which manages vaccine stocks and includes the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance along with WHO.
Berkley said the doses could help slow the spread of the disease as part of a broader strategy to contain it.
Above all, the response will require access and information campaigns in the hardest-hit areas.
For the vaccination campaign, the needs will include access to people in affected areas; "cold-chain facilities" because the vaccines require refrigeration; trained health workers; and "mobilization activities to prepare the communities to accept the vaccine," the agency said.
"Without treatment for malnutrition, more people will fall ill. And a child who survives cholera will be even further malnourished," he said.
Experts say that proper estimates of cholera cases are hard to come by in Yemen, and many cases could involve acute watery diarrhea, which has similar symptoms.
According to WHO, an estimated 1.4 billion people who live in countries where cholera is endemic are at risk of the disease each year.
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Fendercare Marine Ghana supports two communities with boreholes.
Mpohor Dominase (WR), June 21, GNA – Nana Kwampong Aboah II, Krontihen of the Mpohor Traditional area, has expressed concern about the high pollution of water sources in the Mpohor District.
He said the activities of illegal miners in the area has resulted in the pollution of all the water bodies making it very difficult for them to access potable water.
Nana Aboah II said this when Fendercare Marine Ghana Limited in collaboration with Bayfield oil services, handed over two newly installed manual boreholes to the Obrayebona and Dominase communities in the Mpohor District of the Western Region.
Nana Aboah II said in the past they could swim, fish and drink water from the rivers in the area but that the situation has changed and they cannot even get water to drink not to talk of fishing or swimming.
He expressed his gratitude to the two companies for the donation which, he said, would go a long way to help address the water situation in the area.
Nana Aboah II said the two communities would continue to collaborate with Fendercare Marine Ghana in all aspects of the development of the district.
Mr Noah Agbebor, General Manager of Fendercare Marine Ghana, handing over the facilities, said the provision of the boreholes was the company’s Social Corporate Responsibility effort towards the two communities.
He said as part of their corporate responsibility effort the company over the past two months has donated footballs to 24 schools in the Kentan traditional area to promote sporting activities.
He said the structures of the 30 year-old school leaks badly with very weak walls which poses a high risk to the students.

TANZANIA: New Water Project Brings Clean Water to More Than 3,000 Poor and Homeless Youth.
(MissionNewswire) Through donor support, Salesian Missions, the U.S. development arm of the international Salesians of Don Bosco, was able to assist Salesian missionaries at the Kinyerezi Children’s Center in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to provide youth access to clean water.
Nearly one-third of the country is arid to semi-arid and people not living near one of the three major lakes that border the country have difficulty accessing water.
According to UNICEF, more than 250,000 children are orphaned yearly by the disease.
Many children who have lost one or both of their parents turn to the streets for survival.
Salesian missionaries operate four Salesian centers in Dar es Salaam that provide education, workforce development programs, health services and assistance to street children.
Many of the center’s structures and programs are still in development, and this clean water project will ensure youth have access to clean water they need.
Once it was completed, youth in the program, as well as those living in the surrounding communities, were able to enjoy clean, fresh water.
This water project in Tanzania and others around the globe ensure communities have the water they need, and children can remain in school focused on their studies.” Almost one third of people in Tanzania live in poverty, according to UNICEF.
While the country has seen some economic growth in tourism, mining, trade and communication, the number of Tanzanians living below the poverty line has marginally increased due to rapid population growth.

Auma opens Dubai service centre to support Gulf growth.
DUBAI, UAE – Electric actuator manufacturer AUMA has opened a Sales and Service Centre in Dubai to help strengthen its presence in the Gulf Region.
Located in the Jebel Ali free trade zone, the new AUMA Middle East FZE office will become the hub for all AUMA’s activities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman and North Africa.
The Dubai office is affiliated to the AUMA Actuators Middle East subsidiary in Bahrain, which was founded in 2008.
The Bahrain office will continue to support customers and agents in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, and also serves as the regional training centre.
AUMA’s new Sales and Service Center in Dubai comprises modern offices, a workshop for valve integration, training facilities, and the company’s central spare parts stock for the MENA region.
The team includes some experienced AUMA experts who previously operated from AUMA’s Bahrain office.
The company has supplied its products to a wide range of major projects including plants for seawater desalination, water treatment, power generation, and oil and gas production, storage and processing.
As the office is in a free trade zone, shipment of goods is much easier; we can very quickly deliver actuators and spare parts to customer sites.
And we are much closer to our customers, we can provide even more comprehensive support to valve makers, consultants and EPC contractors who all have offices in Dubai.” ### Read more Australian pipeline project improves operations with high-precision actuators ACE Technician certification scheme to boost actuator standards in control industry

Freshwater from salt water using only solar energy.
This scaled-up test bed of NEWT’s direct solar desalination technology uses carbon black nanoparticles that convert as much as 80 percent of sunlight energy into heat.
The desalination system, which uses a combination of membrane distillation technology and light-harvesting nanophotonics, is the first major innovation from the Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), a multi-institutional engineering research center based at Rice University.
NEWT’s "nanophotonics-enabled solar membrane distillation" technology, or NESMD, combines tried-and-true water treatment methods with cutting-edge nanotechnology that converts sunlight to heat.
Distillation has been used for centuries, but it requires complex infrastructure and is energy inefficient due to the amount of heat required to boil water and produce steam.
An emerging technology for desalination is membrane distillation, where hot salt water is flowed across one side of a porous membrane and cold freshwater is flowed across the other.
By adding low-cost, commercially available nanoparticles to a porous membrane, NEWT has essentially turned the membrane itself into a one-sided heating element that alone heats the water to drive membrane distillation.
Li, the leader of NEWT’s advanced treatment test beds at Rice, said the water production rate increased greatly by concentrating the sunlight.
For example, if you need 20 liters per hour, and the panels produce 6 liters per hour per square meter, you would order a little over 3 square meters of panels."
Established by the National Science Foundation in 2015, NEWT aims to develop compact, mobile, off-grid water-treatment systems that can provide clean water to millions of people who lack it and make U.S. energy production more sustainable and cost-effective.

Wastewater infrastructure projects in Orillia, Ontario receive approval.
that ensures Canadians and their families have access to modern, reliable water and wastewater services that meet their needs.
These investments safeguard the health and well-being of residents, protect waterways and preserve local ecosystems, while also laying the foundation for new economic opportunities to strengthen the middle class across the province.
Officials announced that a new project in Orillia has been approved under the Government of Canada’s Clean Water and Wastewater Fund.
The provincial government is providing up to 25 percent of funding for this project — over$700,000 of total eligible costs, and the City of Orillia will fund the remaining costs of the project.
"Investing in water and wastewater treatment infrastructure is essential to maintaining a healthy environment and providing access to clean, reliable drinking water," said Marc Miller, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities.
"The Government of Canada is working with provinces, territories and municipalities across the country to support important projects like the one in Orillia, which ensure that Canadian communities are healthy and sustainable now and for years to come."
Tertiary treatment and process optimization at the wastewater treatment center are required to ensure the city meets its new compliance limits for phosphorus entering Lake Simcoe.
In addition to these projects, over $14 million in federal funding and over $7 million in provincial funding for 73 water and wastewater projects will benefit 36 other communities across Ontario.
Learn more atInfrastructure Canada.

Town of Okotoks, Alberta, enhances water sustainability and improves worker safety with smart metering technology.
"Many of our meters were outdated," said Chris Radford, infrastructure and operations director, Town of Okotoks.
"We needed an upgrade and opted for a solution that would allow us to detect abnormal water usage sooner, supporting water conservation efforts in real-time."
To better manage and monitor its customers’ water consumption rates, Okotoks worked with EPCOR Water Services to deploy the Sensus Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) solution.
Comprised of Sensus iPERL® water meters and the FlexNet® communication network, the technology has enabled the town’s staff to gain a more accurate view of water consumption data for more than 8,400 residential and commercial properties.
"It provides more insight into water consumption trends," said Radford.
For EPCOR technicians, the AMI solution provides added safety benefits.
Looking ahead, the Town of Okotoks has big plans for the AMI solution, including launching a portal to help customers take the future of the town’s water sustainability initiatives into their own hands.
Learn more at sensus.com.
With its October 2016 acquisition of Sensus, Xylem added smart metering, network technologies and advanced data analytics to its portfolio of solutions.

New solar technology promises safe drinking water in a compact off-grid footprint.
Many desalination plants use distillation processes, which require heating water to boiling temperature and harvesting the purified water vapors, or reverse osmosis, in which strong pumps suck energy to pressurize the liquids.
A newer option, membrane distillation, reduces the energy inputs by using saltwater heated to lower temperatures flowing on one side of a membrane while cold freshwater flows on the other.
Enter the researchers of the Rice University-based multi-institutional Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT).
When a lens is used to concentrate the sunlight striking the membrane panels, up to 6 liters (over 1.5 gallons) of clean drinking water can be produced per hour per square meter of panel.
The technology can be applied as well to cleaning up waters with other contaminants, which might give the NESMD wide applicability in industrial situations, especially where power infrastructures are not readily available.
The only question remaining is: will the US still be committed to developing these leading edge technologies?
The press release on this breakthrough notes: "Established by the National Science Foundation in 2015, NEWT aims to develop compact, mobile, off-grid water-treatment systems that can provide clean water to millions of people who lack it and make U.S. energy production more sustainable and cost-effective.
NEWT, which is expected to leverage more than $40 million in federal and industrial support over the next decade, is the first NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) in Houston and only the third in Texas since NSF began the ERC program in 1985.
NEWT focuses on applications for humanitarian emergency response, rural water systems and wastewater treatment and reuse at remote sites, including both onshore and offshore drilling platforms for oil and gas exploration" The National Science Foundation wasn’t mentioned in Trump’s original ‘skinny budget’ in March but is tagged with an 11% cut in the more fleshed out version released in May, certainly less severe than the 31% cut to EPA or 18% redlined at the National Institutes of Health.

New solar technology promises safe drinking water in a compact off-grid footprint.
Many desalination plants use distillation processes, which require heating water to boiling temperature and harvesting the purified water vapors, or reverse osmosis, in which strong pumps suck energy to pressurize the liquids.
A newer option, membrane distillation, reduces the energy inputs by using saltwater heated to lower temperatures flowing on one side of a membrane while cold freshwater flows on the other.
Enter the researchers of the Rice University-based multi-institutional Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT).
When a lens is used to concentrate the sunlight striking the membrane panels, up to 6 liters (over 1.5 gallons) of clean drinking water can be produced per hour per square meter of panel.
The technology can be applied as well to cleaning up waters with other contaminants, which might give the NESMD wide applicability in industrial situations, especially where power infrastructures are not readily available.
The only question remaining is: will the US still be committed to developing these leading edge technologies?
The press release on this breakthrough notes: "Established by the National Science Foundation in 2015, NEWT aims to develop compact, mobile, off-grid water-treatment systems that can provide clean water to millions of people who lack it and make U.S. energy production more sustainable and cost-effective.
NEWT, which is expected to leverage more than $40 million in federal and industrial support over the next decade, is the first NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) in Houston and only the third in Texas since NSF began the ERC program in 1985.
NEWT focuses on applications for humanitarian emergency response, rural water systems and wastewater treatment and reuse at remote sites, including both onshore and offshore drilling platforms for oil and gas exploration" The National Science Foundation wasn’t mentioned in Trump’s original ‘skinny budget’ in March but is tagged with an 11% cut in the more fleshed out version released in May, certainly less severe than the 31% cut to EPA or 18% redlined at the National Institutes of Health.

Access national parks with pass.
Still, it would have been even better had I been eligible for the National Park Service’s Senior pass, which costs $10 and gets you lifetime free admission – often by the carload – at National Parks and most of the various military parks, monuments, memorials, seashores and other varieties of sites overseen by the National Park Service.
The Senior Passes, along with other kinds of passes, are available but currently are taking up to six weeks to process.
This park is truly impressive.
Granted, it’s a time when lots of other folks are visiting the park but it’s also time for the Summer 2017 Living History Program, when reenactors put on their period uniforms and portray the day-to-day life of a typical Civil War soldier of the time.
Tours of the house are rarely offered, however.
The National Park Service’s historic fortification, just over five hours by car from Atlanta, has vivid thrice-weekly, five-times-a-day demonstrations of historic weaponry, including cannons.
While that’s an exciting prospect that you might want to wrap into a multiple-day visit, the launches can cause a shutdown of Canaveral National Seashore parking lots so be sure to check that out at the Seashore’s NPS website.
Canaveral National Seashore’s nearby sister site Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge is immediately adjacent to the Kennedy Space Center and is also great for animal watching.
A National Park Service Senior Pass gets you onto Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge’s Black Point Wildlife Drive for free.