Photo Credit: Associated Press

The tests raise ethical issues, but advocates say they are offset by the need to halt the dramatic growth in the disease. As many as 50 million people a year are infected with dengue, a 30-fold increase in the last 50 years. The disease causes 22,000 deaths each year, mainly among children, the World Health Organization says.

“Here you’re way out on the end of the risk-benefit spectrum,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. “It’s ethical to do it, but you have to go in with your eyes wide, wide open.”

The purpose of such a study, known as the “human infection” or “human challenge” model, is to see which viral strains cause mild dengue illness in people. The strains that make people sick are used to test potential vaccines and drugs, possibly leading to prevention and treatment of the disease.

The human-infection model is commonly used by researchers and drug and vaccine makers to study other diseases, like malaria, flu and infectious diarrhea. But the stakes are higher with dengue because there is no antiviral medication available to treat it.

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A robotic probe has landed on a comet, in an unprecedented moment for space exploration that could provide a trove of insights into what comets are made of and how they behave.

Photo Credit: ESA/NASA – SOHO/LASCO

Rocket scientists at the European Space Agency’s mission control here erupted in cheers, as they received the first signal that the probe that was released from the Rosetta spacecraft had touched down more than 300 million miles away from earth on the forbidding landscape of a small comet known as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

There were even more cheers, hugs and handshakes when other signals suggested it had done so safely.

Photo Credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA

The landing, first envisaged more than 20 years ago, marks the crowning moment of Rosetta’s decadelong cruise through the solar system to get up close and personal with a comet. During its 4 billion mile journey on a track to meet the comet, Rosetta bounced around the inner solar system like a cosmic billiard ball, circling the sun almost four times.

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Some potentially disturbing news out of Kenya: A statement signed by the 27 bishops of the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops alleges that the World Health Organization and UNICEF are injecting Kenyan women with a tetanus vaccine that has been laced with a hormone that causes miscarriages and renders some women sterile.

The bishops make it clear in their statement that they are not opposed to vaccines, but are instead troubled that there are several inconsistencies with this vaccination program (such as batch numbers and administration protocol), and that testing results have shown the presence of Beta-HCG hormone, which is not normally present in tetanus vaccines.

Dear Kenyans, due to the direction the debate on the ongoing Tetanus Vaccine campaign in Kenya is taking, We, the Catholic Bishops, in fulfilling our prophetic role, wish to restate our position as follows:

1. The Catholic Church is NOT opposed to regular vaccines administered in Kenya, both in our own Church health facilities and in public health institutions.

2. However, during the second phase of the Tetanus vaccination campaign in March 2014, that is sponsored by WHO/UNICEF, the Catholic Church questioned the secrecy of the exercise. We raised questions on whether the tetanus vaccine was linked to a population control program that has been reported in some countries, where a similar vaccine was laced with Beta- HCG hormone which causes infertility and multiple miscarriages in women.

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