Climate change, voracious beetles and disease are imperiling the long-term survival of a high-elevation pine tree that’s a key source of food for some grizzly bears and found across the West, U.S. officials said Tuesday.A Fish and Wildlife Service proposal scheduled to be published Wednesday would protect the whitebark pine tree as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, according to documents posted by the Office of the Federal Register.But the agency said it does not plan to designate which forest habitats are critical to the tree’s survival, stopping …

Affordable treatment will soon be available for children living with HIV in low- and middle-income countries thanks to an agreement between the global health agency UNITAID and the Clinton Health Access Initiative, or CHAI.The pediatric  treatment has been available in wealthy countries but out of reach for children in poor countries. A new agreement with two generic drug makers, Viatris and Macleods, will significantly lower the price. UNITAID and CHAI plan to roll out the first anti-retroviral treatments specifically designed for children next year in six African countries — Benin, Kenya, …

Members of a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee meet Tuesday to determine who should get inoculated first against the coronavirus once a vaccine receives final approval.The CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices wants to inform the public about its recommendation before a decision is announced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, committee chairman Dr. Jose Romero told CNN on Tuesday.The FDA is considering an emergency request from Pfizer to authorize the use of its vaccine. Moderna said Monday it also would apply for emergency use …

The European Union said Tuesday it could be vaccinating citizens against COVID-19 by the end of the month if medical officials grant emergency approval of two vaccines candidates.  European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen told reporters in Brussels EU member states are working on logistics for the distribution of millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccine and if all goes well, she said, “the first European citizens would be vaccinated by the end of December.”Her comments came as U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced they have …

Four years ago, governments around the world committed to achieving targets in testing and treating the vast majority of people with HIV to the point where the AIDS pandemic would end. The tools to do this have been available for 20 years. In 2010, the National Institutes of Health, under the leadership of Dr. Anthony Fauci, found that HIV-negative men whose partners were positive, significantly reduced their chances of becoming infected by taking a daily pill that combined anti-AIDS medication. This has become known as pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP. PrEP can now be given as an injection. And people with HIV can take a single pill that makes the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the blood undetectable. Under …

Joseph Varon, a doctor treating coronavirus patients at a Texas hospital, was working his 252nd day in a row when he spotted a distraught elderly man in the COVID-19 intensive care unit. Varon’s comforting embrace of the white-haired man on Thanksgiving Day was captured by a photographer for Getty Images and has gone viral around the world. Varon, chief of staff at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, told CNN he was entering the COVID-19 ICU when he saw the elderly patient “out of his bed and trying to get out of …

China has provided North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his family with an experimental coronavirus vaccine, a U.S. analyst said Tuesday, citing two unidentified Japanese intelligence sources. Harry Kazianis, a North Korea expert at the Center for the National Interest think tank in Washington, said the Kims and several senior North Korean officials had been vaccinated. It was unclear which company had supplied its drug candidate to the Kims and whether it had proven to be safe, he added. FILE – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks in Pyongyang, North Korea, …