U.S. agriculture officials proposed changes Thursday to the federal program that helps pay the grocery bills for pregnant women, babies and young children that includes keeping a bump in payments for fresh fruits and vegetables allowed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The update also includes adding more whole grains, canned fish and non-dairy options to their shopping carts. The effort is aimed at expanding the number and type of healthy foods available to families who get assistance from the Agriculture Department’s program known as WIC, officials said.
The revisions would make permanent payments authorized by Congress during the COVID-19 pandemic that increased vouchers for fruits and vegetables to $25 a month for children ages 1 to 5 and to $49 a month for breastfeeding women.
“This increase in fruits and vegetables has really made it attractive for families to have their children in the program longer,” said Geraldine Henchy, director of the nonprofit Food Research and Action center, who applauded the changes. “Kids really love fruit.”
More than 6.2 million pregnant women, mothers, babies and young children participate in the program annually. The federal government pays about $5 billion a year to run the program, which is administered through states and other jurisdictions. The Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children provides vouchers to mothers and children who qualify and specifically lists the amount and types of food they can buy.
The proposed changes to WIC would also expand access to whole grains, encompassing foods from different cultures, including quinoa, blue cornmeal and teff, an ancient East African cereal grass. The plan also allows more non-dairy options, including soy-based yogurts and cheeses, and requires lactose-free milk to be offered.
More canned fish, such as tuna, would be available as well as easy-to-prepare canned beans, in addition to dried beans, officials said. The plan would also change the amount of infant formula provided to partially breastfed babies.
Increasing the voucher for fruits and vegetables to $25 a month during the pandemic has allowed Elizabeth Loya, 28, of Los Angeles, to encourage her 4-year-old daughter, Gisselle, to sample new foods.
“She tried Brussels sprouts and, two weeks ago, she tried asparagus,” Loya said. “She liked them.”
The proposed changes are based on a 2017 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and the national Dietary Guidelines for Americans. They’ll be evaluated after a three-month public comment period. ___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The head of Africa’s top public health institute is urging authorities across the continent to step up COVID-19 testing amid a concerning rise in new cases in some countries.
The continent of 1.3 billion people saw a 37% rise in new cases over the past week, Ahmed Ogwell, acting director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday.
Over the last four weeks there’s been an 11% rise in new cases, he said.
“COVID is still very much here with us and, in fact, when we look at the numbers we see that there are some member states that are actually going into a new wave and we are monitoring that closely,” he said. “When we have a clear analysis, next week we will be able to report to you if the new waves are holding or if those have been quickly brought under control.”
He did not mention which countries face a new wave of infections, but South Africa is one of them. Africa’s most advanced economy has been the most affected by COVID-19, the source of the bulk of confirmed cases and deaths.
COVID-19 has infected 12.1 million people across Africa’s 54 nations, accounting for 2% of cases globally, and at least 256,000 have died, according to figures from the Africa CDC.
Vaccination rates in Africa continue to be low, largely because of short supplies and also in part because of hesitancy among some. Only 25% of Africa’s people are fully vaccinated and under 3% have received booster doses.
Amid “this phenomenon we are seeing of numbers going up,” Ogwell said, national health authorities should focus on testing more people for COVID-19.
“When we see the numbers rising and the testing relatively low, it is an indication that we need to be careful in public,” he said. “And also we need to get ourselves vaccinated to avoid serious illness and even death when one is exposed to COVID. We know what we need to do.”
U.S. home births increased slightly in the pandemic’s second year, rising to the highest level in decades, according to a government report published Thursday.
Among almost 4 million births in 2021, nearly 52,000 occurred at home, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report showed. That’s up about 12% from 2020, following a 22% rise from 2019 to 2020.
Increases were seen across races and ethnicities, although home births were much less common among Hispanic women than others.
Elizabeth Gregory, the report’s lead author, said reasons for the increases are unknown, but they occurred when COVID-19 rates were high and vaccinations were either unavailable or not widely used. Other reports have shown that many people avoided hospital and doctor visits early in the pandemic.
Other possible reasons: Women lacked health insurance or lived far from a hospital and couldn’t make it there in time. Previous research suggests that about 1 in 4 home births are unplanned.
Jade Godbolt, of Dallas, had her second child at a birthing center in 2021, partly to avoid hospital risks of COVID-19 and to experience a more natural environment. The experience went so well that she and her husband chose a home birth for their third, a son born last month. They’d been working with a midwife but labor went so fast that the baby came before she arrived.
Godbolt, a 31-year-old beauty and lifestyle online content creator, says there were no complications and she and her son are doing well.
“I believed that my body could do what it was made to do and I wanted to be in the comfort of my home to do that,” she said.
Home births and other out-of-hospital births have been rising since around 2004, when they numbered close to 36,000, other data show. The increase coincided with a rise in non-hospital birthing centers.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that while home births typically involve fewer medical procedures than hospital births, they’re riskier. It advises against home births for certain situations including multiple births and among women who previously delivered via cesarean section.
“Hospitals and accredited birth centers are the safest places to give birth, because although serious complications associated with labor and delivery are rare, they can be catastrophic,’’ said Dr. Jeffrey Ecker, a former chair of the group’s committee on obstetric practice and chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital.
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Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Chinese authorities locked down a major university in Beijing on Wednesday after finding one COVID-19 case as they stick to a “zero-COVID” approach despite growing public discontent.
Peking University students and faculty were not allowed to leave the grounds unless necessary and classes were moved online on the main campus through Friday, a university notice said.
Beijing reported more than 350 new cases in the latest 24-hour period, a small fraction of its 21-million population but enough to trigger localized lockdowns and quarantines under China’s “zero-COVID” strategy. Nationwide, China reported about 20,000 cases, up from about 8,000 a week ago.
Authorities are steering away from citywide lockdowns to try to minimize the impact on freedom of movement and a sagging economy. They want to avoid a repeat of the Shanghai lockdown earlier this year that paralyzed shipping and prompted neighborhood protests. Revised national guidelines issued last week called on local governments to follow a targeted and scientific approach that avoids unnecessary measures.
That still locks down buildings and sometimes wider areas when cases are found. Protests broke out in the southern city of Guangzhou earlier this week in a densely built area that is home to migrant workers in the clothing industry. Videos posted online showed crowds pulling down barriers, though what exactly upset them was unclear.
Guangzhou, an industrial export hub near Hong Kong, reported more than 6,000 new cases in what is the nation’s largest ongoing outbreak. Other cities with major outbreaks include Chongqing in the southwest, Zhengzhou in Henan province and Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia region in the north.
In Zhengzhou late last month, workers fled their dormitories at a sprawling iPhone factory, some climbing over fences to get out. Apple subsequently warned that customers would face delays in deliveries of iPhone14 Pro models.
Chinese officials and state media have stressed that the government is fine-tuning but not abandoning what it calls a “dynamic” zero-COVID policy, after rumors of an easing sparked a stock market rally earlier this month.
China’s ruling party called for strict adherence to the hard-line “zero-COVID” policy Tuesday in an apparent attempt to guide public perceptions after regulations were eased slightly in places.
The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, said in an editorial that China must “unswervingly implement” the policy that requires mass obligatory testing and places millions under lockdown to try to eliminate the coronavirus from the nation of 1.4 billion people and the world’s second-largest economy.
That comes as China reported 17,772 new cases over the previous 24 hours and follows slight changes to quarantine and other anti-virus restrictions announced last week to reduce cost and disruption.
The major provincial capital of Shijiazhuang just outside Beijing has also reopened free testing centers after just one day of closure. The move to require residents to pay for tests underscored the growing economic cost the policy is inflicting on local governments.
Beijing has also closed some testing sites in recent days, but was reopening many on Tuesday. While case numbers remain relatively low in the city of more than 21 million, a recent increase has led to some restaurants and other businesses being forced to close and villages that largely house blue-collar workers placed under lockdown.
Some lockdowns on residential compounds and entire city districts remain in place around China, including in parts of the crucial southern financial manufacturing hub of Guangzhou and other cities whose industrial bases are closely tied to global supply chains.
Local party officials are under immense pressure to curb new outbreaks, but directions from the central government have lately become harder to gauge. China appears to be cautiously attempting to join the rest of the world while refusing to drop policies in which the party and leader Xi Jinping have deeply invested their authority and reputation.
Xi himself is in Indonesia for the Group of 20 summit this week after being absent from most global gatherings throughout the pandemic.
Xi met Monday with U.S. President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting and is expected to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit later in Bangkok.
Four German regions plan to scrap rules requiring people infected with the coronavirus to isolate at home, arguing that the pandemic has evolved and it’s time for a different approach.
The health ministry in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said Friday that the region and two of its neighbors, Bavaria and Hesse, as well as Germany’s northernmost state, Schleswig-Holstein, were working on details of new rules.
The ministry pointed to declining infections, effective vaccinations, a high degree of population immunity, milder illnesses and the example of countries such as Austria that have loosened rules.
Bavaria said its blanket isolation mandate would end Nov. 16. The state’s health minister, Klaus Holetschek, said in a statement that the time was right to give people more individual responsibility.
“The decision doesn’t mean that we will give free rein to infections,” he said. “People who test positive will in the future have to put on a mask outside their own apartment. And of course, the principle still goes that people who are sick stay at home.”
In Germany, decisions on coronavirus rules are largely a matter for the governments of the country’s 16 states. Measures have generally been coordinated nationwide since the pandemic started in 2020, though to varying degrees, and the states enjoy a great deal of autonomy.
The national disease control center currently recommends that states order five days of isolation for infected people.
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said the states’ decision was “an important mistake” that would lead to a patchwork of rules in Germany but federal authorities couldn’t prevent it.
“There is also no medical reason to dispense with an isolation mandate now,” he said. “We currently have about 1,000 COVID deaths per week; we probably face a heavy winter wave.”
In April, Lauterbach backed off a short-lived proposal to end mandatory isolation. He said at the time that the idea, which was intended to lighten the burden on local health offices, was a mistake and sent the wrong signal.
