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Mpox emergency, inflation relief and a rolling Stonehenge mystery

 
Today's HEALTH story

WHO declares mpox a global health emergency

What happened
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday declared an mpox outbreak in Africa a "public health emergency of international concern." The highly infectious strain of mpox, formerly called monkeypox, has jumped from the Democratic Republic of Congo to a dozen other African countries.

Who said what
The spread and adaptability of this mpox strain is "very worrying," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. "A coordinated international response is needed to stop these outbreaks and save lives." The WHO last designated mpox a global emergency in 2022, when an outbreak affected nearly 100,000 people, "primarily gay and bisexual men, in 116 countries," The New York Times said. That outbreak killed about 200 people.

In the DRC, children "make up the majority of the 14,000 reported cases and 511 deaths so far" this year, NPR said. The global health emergency designation will unlock certain resources to help contain and neutralize this outbreak. But it's a "failure of the global community that things had to get this bad to release the resources needed," Michael Marks, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told The Associated Press. 

What next?
Declaring mpox a global health emergency is "intended to prompt member countries to begin preparing for the virus' appearance and to share vaccines, treatments and other key resources with poorer nations," the Times said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alerted American clinicians about the outbreak last week. 

 
 
Today's BUSINESS story

US inflation drops below 3%, teeing up rate cuts

What happened
U.S. consumer prices rose a modest 0.2% in June and 2.9% year-over-year, the Labor Department said Wednesday. It was the first time since March 2021 that inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), fell below 3%, solidifying expectations that the Federal Reserve will finally cut interest rates in September.

Who said what
This was the third straight month of cooling prices, providing the "clearest indication yet that inflation is heading back to normal levels from 40-year highs — without a recession," The Washington Post said. A 0.4% increase in housing costs accounted for 90% of the rise in overall prices, but gas is down from a year ago and all in all, "families and households are feeling long-awaited relief from price increases."

"It's a comforting report, both because it is going in the right direction and because it is not doing anything too dramatic,” George Washington University economist Tara Sinclair told The Associated Press. Investors, The Wall Street Journal said, "have already moved on from worrying about inflation to fretting about the job market."

What next?
The inflation data is "pretty much in line with what the Fed expected and hoped," Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative American Action Forum, told the Post. And it "essentially guarantees" a September rate cut "unless we get something really bizarre" before then. 

 
 
Today's SCIENCE Story

Stonehenge Altar Stone is from Scotland, study finds

What happened
The Altar Stone at the center of Stonehenge, long believed to have been hauled to southwest England from Wales, was actually transported more than 450 miles from northeastern Scotland, a team of geologists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. Archaeologists believe the six-ton sandstone megalith was "installed at Stonehenge during the second construction phase, around 2620 B.C. to 2480 B.C.," The New York Times said.

Who said what
The researchers, led by Welsh doctoral student Anthony Clarke at Australia's Curtin University, examined two slivers of the Altar Stone and determined it came from Scotland's Orcadian Basin. So it was either "dragged 500 miles or more overland by our Neolithic forebears, before the invention of the wheel," The Washington Post said, or it was "ferried via sea by Stone Age mariners," the theory favored by the researchers. 

The discovery suggests that "Neolithic Britain was a far more connected and advanced society than earlier evidence indicated," the BBC said. With stones from England, Scotland and Wales, Clarke said, "Stonehenge seems to be this great British endeavor involving all the different people from all over the island."

What next?
This "genuinely shocking" discovery will prompt archaeologists to dig into how the stone was moved "and, more intriguing, why," Robert Ixer, a University College London mineralogist who collaborated on the project, told the BBC. At this point, "your guess is about as good as theirs," the Post said, "which is why Stonehenge remains 'a wonder of the world.'"

 
 

It's not all bad

At 97, Merce Hershey has become a gym rat. After two years of workouts, she can rack-pull 92 pounds and overhead-press 35 pounds. Hershey has made leaps and bounds since her first visit to the Starting Strength Cincinnati gym, when she could only rack-pull 11 pounds and overhead-press 5 pounds. The great-grandmother of 14 was "just hoping to get stronger," she told "Good Morning America." Her "commitment" and "consistency" inspire the entire gym, said trainer Luke Schroeder.

 
 
Under the radar

The number of diabetic Americans suffering from complications that result in amputation has been on the rise. About 154,000 people with diabetes undergo amputation in the U.S. each year, said the American Diabetes Association's Amputation Prevention Alliance. And many of those amputations were preventable.

It's a "perfect storm of poor health and lack of medical guidance," Dr. Dean Schillinger, the founder of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, told The Guardian. And specific communities are more likely to be caught in that perfect storm. 

Studies have found that less affluent Americans with diabetes are more than four times more likely to have a limb amputated than wealthier Americans with diabetes. And Black and Latin American diabetics are four times more likely to need amputations than white Americans.

The rise of type 2 diabetes is a "deadly epidemic" that is "largely reversible with a low-carbohydrate diet," Neil Barsky said at The Guardian. Many Black patients are not getting the correct information about their diabetes from doctors early on, Dr. Richard Browne, a senior medical executive at Johnson & Johnson, said to ABC News. "Very often, their symptoms are ignored."

Medical professionals can be affected by "unconscious bias," which leads them to recommend amputation based on assumptions the patient might not return for care. But with the proper treatment, Dr. Browne said, patients can avoid amputations altogether.

 
 
On this day

August 15, 2021

The Taliban captured Afghanistan's capital city, Kabul, ending the Afghanistan War and bringing the country under Taliban control for the first time since 2001. In the three years since, the Taliban's rule has been marked by a reintroduction of religious laws and the gradual stripping away of women's rights.

 
 
TODAY'S newspaperS

"Annual U.S. inflation falls to a 3-year low," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says on Thursday's front page. The cooling inflation "tees up the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates," The Washington Post says. Consumers have been balking at higher prices, and some restaurant owners have been "tracking fewer visits and smaller checks," The Boston Globe says, looking at "what a night out says about the economy." The same day inflation hit its "lowest level since 2021," The Wall Street Journal says, food giant Mars agreed to buy rival Kellanova for nearly $30 billion, as "Big Food gets bigger." 

► See the newspaper front pages

 
 
Tall tale

Old fart

A judge in Birmingham, England, ruled that a manager passing gas on a younger coworker was a case of age discrimination. The manager, who is in his 50s, tooted on his 30-something colleague, then allegedly tried to scare him away from seeking promotion, saying, "If any of you youngsters get this job ... I will tell you to f--k off." The judge found the manager held animosity toward his "ambitious" younger workmate and the "comments were outside the realms of acceptable workplace banter."

 
 

Morning Report was written and edited by Theara Coleman, Nadia Croes, Catherine Garcia, Scott Hocker, Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Justin Klawans, Devika Rao, Rafi Schwartz and Peter Weber, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.

Image credits, from top: Geography Photos / Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Sha Hanting / China News Service / VCG via Getty Images; Matt Cardy / Getty Images; Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Shutterstock