Andy Dick was arrested on Wednesday in Orange County, California on charges of alleged felony sexual battery after an adult male claimed the actor and comic sexually assaulted him.
Video of the arrest on Captain Content’s RV‘s live stream shows several Orange County Sheriff’s Deputies speaking with Dick, 56, before walking him to their vehicles, continuing the conversation and eventually cuffing him and taking him away.
Dick and a group of live streamers have been living at the site in RVs for some time now, according to the outlet. Sheriff’s deputies were reportedly seen searching Dick’s RV after he was placed into custody. They also requested the male victim’s pants as evidence, according to TMZ.
This isn’t the first time Dick, who starred in Road Trip and the sitcom NewsRadio, has been accused of inappropriate behavior. He has a long history of it, something he readily admitted to The Hollywood Reporter in 2017, joking, “My middle name is ‘misconduct’.” The comment came after Dick was fired from the film Raising Buchanan over sexual misconduct claims.
(NEW YORK) — Since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide, advocates and opponents of abortion rights have argued over how safe abortion is, how it’s performed and even where the public stands on whether it should be legal.
Now, the Supreme Court may be set to overturn the landmark 1973 decision, according to a leaked draft opinion initially reported by Politico last week.
Ahead of the final decision, which is expected in either June or July, ABC News spoke to public health experts about five common myths surrounding abortion and what the statistics actually show.
Myth: Most abortions happen in-office
Data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research group focusing on sexual and reproductive health, showed at-home medication abortions, not in-office procedures, make up most abortions in the U.S.
Drugs for medication abortions were first developed in the late 1970s as an alternative, non-surgical, form of abortion in which someone takes two pills to end a pregnancy.
The first pill is mifepristone, which was authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000. It works by blocking the hormone progesterone, which the body needs to continue a pregnancy.
This causes the uterine lining to stop thickening and to break down, detaching the embryo. The second drug, misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, causes the uterus to contract and dilates the cervix, which will expel the embryo.
In the U.S., the drugs are approved up to 10 weeks’ gestation, although the World Health Organization says they can be taken up until the 12-week mark.
As of 2020, medical abortions account for 54% of abortions performed in the U.S., up from 24% a decade ago, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Otherwise, patients can get an in-office procedure, including, in earlier pregnancy, one in which suction is used to empty the uterus. Contrary to beliefs that abortion is a prolonged procedure, most take less than 10 minutes, according to Planned Parenthood.
Patients may choose to have an in-office procedure rather than a medication abortion for many reasons, including the availability of abortion appointments, Dr. Evelyn Nicole Mitchell, an obstetrician and gynecologist with Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California, told ABC News.
“By the time [some women] see a provider, it’s past the nine- or 10-week mark, and the only option at that point is surgical abortion,” she said.
Myth: Many abortions happen in the second and third trimester
According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published in November 2021, 629,898 abortions occurred in the U.S. in 2019, the latest year for which data is available.
Of those abortions, the overwhelming majority occurred before 13 weeks’ gestation, which is the beginning of the second trimester.
The CDC report found 79.3% of abortions in 2019 were performed at 9 weeks’ gestation or earlier. What’s more, nearly all abortions in 2019 occurred at or before 13 weeks’ gestation, at 92.7%.
The report also showed from 2010 to 2019, abortions performed later than 13 weeks’ gestation was either at 9% or lower. Just 1% of abortions were performed after 20 weeks.
Public health experts told ABC News the majority of women who have abortions in the second trimester largely fall into one of two groups.
One group is made up of pregnant people who come from backgrounds with traditionally less access to health care, such as living in rural areas or being of lower socioeconomic status, according to Mitchell.
The other group is made up of those who choose to have an abortion because of diagnoses the fetus will be born with severe disabilities, or because their own health is in jeopardy.
“By the 15th week or so, many women are fully committed often to having that pregnancy,” said Dr. Paula Tavrow, a professor of community health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health. “And then they may get dire news such as there are fetal abnormalities, or it might impair their health or well-being in some way to continue with the pregnancy.”
Myth: Abortions are more dangerous than childbirth
Two women died following complications from legal-induced abortions in the U.S. in 2018, the latest year for which data is available, according to the CDC’s Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System.
Between 2013 and 2018, the CDC reported the national case-fatality rate was 0.41 abortion-related deaths per 100,000 legal abortions.
This represents a nearly 8-fold decrease from the case-fatality rate of 3.2 deaths per 100,000 legally induced abortions in 1972, the year before abortion was legalized nationwide, according to a CDC report at the time.
“So long as abortions are performed in a clean environment with properly trained people, they’re extremely safe,” said Tavrow.
By comparison, an analysis showed pregnancy and childbirth are far more dangerous in the U.S.
Over the same period, the mortality rate was 17.35 pregnancy-related deaths among mothers per 100,000 live births. Causes of death included cardiovascular conditions, sepsis, hemorrhaging and embolism.
“By the nature of getting pregnant, someone automatically puts themselves into a higher risk category,” said Dr. Deborah Bartz, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston. “It is absolutely false to claim it is equally safe or even more risky to have an abortion” than to continue with a pregnancy.
Experts said the risk with abortions occurs when they are performed unsafely, with the World Health Organization stating unsafe abortions are a “leading cause” of maternal deaths worldwide.
Myth: Abortions have only risen since Roe v. Wade was decided
Following the decision of Roe v. Wade, legal abortions in the U.S. did increase from a rate of 16.3 per 1,000 women, reaching its peak in the early 1980s before falling.
“Abortion temporality spiked because it was now safe, but the rate of abortion has really decreased,” said Tavrow.
As of 2017, the rate of legal abortions sits at 13.5 per 1,000 women, the lowest rate ever recorded, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The experts said the rate has decreased due to several reasons, including greater access to contraceptives as well as more birth control methods with higher efficacy rates.
Additionally, the Guttmacher Institute noted, abortion rates have declined as births and pregnancies have fallen overall in the U.S.
Myth: Majority of Americans support the end of Roe v. Wade
Despite the Supreme Court being poised to overturn or severely gut Roe v. Wade, most Americans believe just the opposite should happen.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in advance of the leaked draft opinion found 58% of U.S. adults said abortion should be legal in either all or most cases.
By comparison, just 37% of adults said they believed abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
What’s more, 70% of those polled said the decision on whether a woman can have an abortion should be left to the woman and her doctor while 24% said it should be regulated by law.
More than three-quarters of adults said abortion should be legal when the pregnancy is a result of rape or when a woman’s life is threatened by continuing the pregnancy.
(NEW YORK) — Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic over two years ago, people have reported lingering effects of COVID-19, including hair loss.
Dr. Jennifer Ashton, a board-certified OBGYN and ABC News’ chief medical correspondent, is among them, experiencing lingering hair loss after testing positive for COVID-19 in January.
“Now that it’s just over three months, roughly, later is really when I started to notice a major change,” Ashton said. “The two things that I noticed were loss of volume, really really like almost nothing for me to hold onto when I put my hair up in a ponytail, and then breakage.”
Ashton, who was vaccinated and boosted when she tested positive for COVID-19, has shared her hair loss journey on Instagram, where commenters thanked her for bringing awareness to the issue.
According to Ashton, it’s estimated that over 20% of people who have COVID-19 experience some form of hair loss.
Here are some questions answered about COVID-related hair loss, from why it happens to how it can be treated:
Why does COVID-19 hair loss happen?
It is not uncommon for people to experience noticeable hair loss a few months after recovering from a high fever or an illness, according to the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD).
While researchers are still looking into exactly how having COVID-19 can impact a person’s hair, the early research shows that the virus somehow infects and affects hair follicles, according to Ashton.
Hair follicles anchor hair into the skin, and each one goes through three phases: The anagen phase, when the hair grows; the catagen phase, when hair growth slows and the follicle shrinks; and the telogen, or shedding, phase, when old hair falls out and new hair begins to grow.
While most hair loss, or hair shedding, occurs in the telogen phase, COVID-19-related hair loss appears in the anagen phase, when the hair is beginning to grow, according to Ashton.
“This is relevant because it affects what the timeline is by which someone could start to notice hair loss following COVID-19,” Ashton said. “Hair loss after COVID can begin as early as 18 to 47 days after infection.”
With the more common type of hair shedding, telogen effluvium, most people start to see shedding two to three months after an illness, according to the AAD.
Is anyone more susceptible to COVID-19 hair loss?
The risk factors for COVID-19 hair loss are still unknown, and there is also no known way to specifically prevent this type of hair loss, according to Ashton.
“We don’t know yet who is more at risk,” she said. “It does appear that if you experienced more severe COVID-19, you are more likely to experience this, but you can experience this with mild COVID-19 illness as well.”
Does COVID-19 cause permanent hair loss?
Ashton said it remains to be seen whether hair loss due to COVID-19 is permanent.
She added that it looks “promising and encouraging” that most people will see hair regrowth and correction.
“We still don’t know what percentage breakdown will regain, or regrow, their hair, but the bottom line is it takes time,” Ashton said, noting that people should expect a timeline for regrowth of anywhere from three months to one year.
What are treatment options for COVID-19 hair loss?
While there are no known ways to prevent hair loss with COVID-19, there are many ways to treat it, according to Ashton.
She recommends first “resting your hair,” which means taking a break from stressors like heavy-handed brushing and pulling and not using tools like hair dryers and curling and straightening irons.
Ashton said that, for her, resting her hair also means wearing more hats and headscarves.
“I just think it’s super easy,” she said. “No one cares how dirty your hair is. No one cares what your hair looks like.”
Ashton also recommends limiting the use of hair products that contain alcohol as an ingredient because alcohol will dry out hair further. Instead, she recommends using a hair mask product, or going more natural by using coconut oil or olive oil to moisturize the hair.
Ashton has also been wearing hair extensions occasionally but stresses those can damage hair further.
“They can pull on your hair and actually forcibly detach your hair, so dermatologists are very kind of cautionary before they recommend that any woman use hair extensions,” she said. “I am experimenting with them, but we’ll see. I don’t foresee them as too heavy in my rotation.”
After her consulting with her dermatologist, Ashton said she began supplementing her diet with a protein powder to increase her daily protein intake, which will help lessen hair breakage.
While there are many supplements on the market promoting hair regrowth, Ashton said that, from a scientific standpoint, it’s unclear if those supplements get results any different than simply adding a daily prenatal vitamin or multivitamin to your diet.
And finally, Ashton stressed the importance of checking with a medical provider to rule out other medical causes of hair loss, like thyroid function.
Young Thug is now facing seven more felony charges.
The new charges, according to jail records, include possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and possession of firearm during commission of a felony.
The new charges come after Young Thug, born Jeffrey Williams, was among 28 individuals included in a 56-count grand jury indictment on Monday. The counts include conspiracy to violate the RICO Act, murder, armed robbery, and participation in criminal street gang activity. All of the people named in the indictment are alleged members and associates of Young Slime Life, or “YSL,” which is described in the indictment as “a criminal street gang that started in late 2012” in Atlanta and which “claims affiliation with the national Bloods gang.”
In a statement to ABC News Monday night, Williams’ attorney, Brian Steel, said Williams “has committed no violation of law, whatsoever. We will fight this case ethically, legally and zealously. Mr. Williams will be cleared.”
Atlanta rapper Gunna, born Sergio Kitchens, is also named in the indictment and surrendered to authorities at around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, according to ABC Affiliate WSB TV.
Young Thug is now facing seven more felony charges.
The new charges, according to jail records, including possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and possession of firearm during commission of a felony.
The new charges come after Young Thug, whose was born is Jeffrey Williams, was among 28 individuals included in a 56-count grand jury indictment on Monday. The counts include conspiracy to violate the RICO Act, murder, armed robbery, and participation in criminal street gang activity. All of the people named in the indictment are members and associates of Young Slime Life, or “YSL,” which is described in the indictment as “a criminal street gang that started in late 2012” in Atlanta and which “claims affiliation with the national Bloods gang.”
In a statement to ABC News Monday night, Williams’ attorney, Brian Steel, said Williams “has committed no violation of law, whatsoever. We will fight this case ethically, legally and zealously. Mr. Williams will be cleared.”
(HELSINKI) — Finland’s leaders on Thursday said the country would apply to join NATO “without delay.”
“Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay,” President Sauli Niinistö and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement. “We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.”
Leaders in both Sweden and Finland had been expected to announce their positions on joining NATO this week, as the war in Ukraine continues to have unintended consequences for Russia by potentially pushing two more of its neighbors to the transatlantic alliance.
Finland’s decision to apply for NATO membership is a threat to the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, Russia’s presidential press secretary, said on Thursday.
“Another enlargement of NATO does not make our continent more stable and secure,” Peskov told reporters.
Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs Ann Linde said on Thursday that Finland’s leaders had delivered an “important message,” adding that her country “will decide after the report from the security policy consultations has been presented.”
Sweden’s ruling party is expected to announce its position on May 15. Finland’s parliament is expected to debate the issue and then vote a day later.
The Scandinavian countries have long held neutral status when it comes to European conflict. Finland became a neutral country after the Second World War, while Sweden has resisted military alliances long before that.
Yet fears that Russia could do to other non-NATO countries what it has done to Ukraine has sparked a rapid shift in public opinion in both countries, one of which, Finland, shares an 830-mile land border with Russia.
Both could be on the cusp of joining NATO. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has publicly said the Nordic countries would be welcomed into the alliance.
Ahead of any official announcement from both countries for NATO membership, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed mutual security assurances in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
NATO’s expansion would be yet another unintended consequence for Russia, as they continue to be met with fierce resistance in Ukraine and a more united West than their intelligence assessments anticipated. Part of Russia’s security demands ahead of the invasion in Ukraine included reverting NATO forces to 1997 positions.
Since NATO was founded in 1949, the alliance has expanded to include 30 member countries, including three former Soviet republics, and the inclusion of Sweden and Finland would further expand the alliance’s influence in the Arctic and in the areas around Russia.
Stoltenberg said just days ahead of the invasion “if Kremlin’s aim is to have less NATO on Russia’s borders, it will only get more NATO. And if it wants to divide NATO, it will only get an even more united Alliance.”
This prediction now appears to be coming true — although Peskov last month said that NATO is a “tool sharpened for confrontation” and it is “not an alliance that ensures peace and stability” when asked about Sweden and Finland. Experts say the expansion will be evidence of yet another strategic blunder on Russia’s part.
Even as public opinion has shifted, there are still those who oppose NATO membership for the Nordic countries, fearing it would lead to increased tensions with Russia.
“I’m afraid that NATO membership will increase actually the tensions in the Baltic Sea region and also will increase the tensions in Finland, especially regarding the eastern border,” Veronika Honkasalo, one of the few members of Finland’s parliament who doesn’t believe the country should join, told ABC News.
Furthermore, there are concerns that Sweden and Finland could be vulnerable to Russian attacks during the application process, though State Department spokesperson Ned Price moved to reassure both countries last week, saying: “I am certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.”
However, polling reported in both countries appears to show a significant majority are in favor of NATO membership.
“[Putin] has for years said Finland and Sweden joining is a red line,” Charly Salonius-Pasternak, lead researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, told ABC News. “He’s managed to drive both Finland and Sweden towards NATO. So I think a massive miscalculation for him, but I think a positive thing for the rest of Europe.”
“It’s very clearly the population that changed its opinion in, say, six months, radically so,” he said, adding that the shift in public opinion had a snowball effect into Sweden, as fears grew about what could happen without the umbrella protection of NATO membership as the war in Ukraine continued.
“Now Russia has gone so far that joining NATO seems to be the only genuine solution here,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — What was once unthinkable — is now a reality.
One million Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to an announcement made Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy.
“Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them,” Biden said in a statement. “As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember.”
The president plans to order flags to half-staff in remembrance.
Over the last two years, the deadly virus has kept the nation tightly in its clutch, with wave after wave of the virus washing over with only relatively brief respites in between.
“This unthinkable tragedy will forever appear in the history books,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D. an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
The loss of one million lives is a reality that is still difficult for many to comprehend, and to accept. In some respects, the death toll remains hidden from view.
Experts said the statistic, however massive, does not fully capture the magnitude of the human tragedy.
“It’s one thing to talk about numbers, but then to realize that each one of those numbers represents a grandparent or a spouse or someone with their own unique story that we’ve lost. Already over a million of those stories in you know, in this country alone — it really is a tragedy and a tragedy, in many ways, of unprecedented proportions,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.
But the impact of the deaths extends far beyond the total number of deaths. An analysis published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that nine million family members — mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings and children — may be grieving the loss of a loved one killed by the virus.
Making sense of the numbers
The staggering number of deaths due to COVID-19 is now equivalent to the population of San Jose, California — the 10th largest city in the U.S.
“If you were to tell people that an American city had been wiped off the face of the earth, people would be shocked and horrified. But since this has been a kind of a gradual burn over two years, we’ve gotten so used to hearing the headlines and so tired of having to deal with a pandemic. That sense of horror and devastation has been lost,” Dowdy said.
COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2021, following heart disease and cancer, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The number of Americans lost to COVID-19 also continues to dwarf the number of deaths from influenza. Between Oct. 1, 2021, and Apr. 30, 2022, the CDC estimated that there have been around 3,600 – 10,000 flu deaths. In the same time frame, more than 280,000 Americans have reportedly died from COVID-19.
Racial and ethnic minorities in the country have also faced increased risk of testing positive, requiring hospitalization and dying from COVID-19. According to federal data, adjusted for age and population, the likelihood of death because of COVID-19 for Black, Asian, Latino and Native American people is one to two times higher than white people.
Many experts believe that the current COVID-19 death count could already be greatly undercounted, due to inconsistent reporting by states and localities, and the exclusion of excess deaths, a measure of how many lives have been lost beyond what would be expected if the pandemic had not occurred.
A recent report from the World Health Organization also found that globally, estimates show there were nearly 15 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 — more than double the official global death toll count of 6.2 million confirmed virus-related deaths.
‘I really don’t think people understand’
It has been more than two years since Pamela Addison lost her husband, Martin, a healthcare worker, to COVID-19, in the very early days of the pandemic in April 2020, but the grief is still raw.
“The day he died, I was stunned and in shock, and I was thrown into this new life,” Addison said. “I know that [my two young kids] were going to miss a lifetime of moments with their dad.”
After the loss of her husband, the 38-year-old New Jersey teacher found herself a single mother to the couple’s two young children, Elsie, then 2, and Graeme, then 5 months old, overnight.
Martin, a speech pathologist at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey, was just 44 when he became ill with the virus in late March of 2020. Within a matter of weeks, Martin was hospitalized and on a ventilator, and despite numerous interventions and efforts, Martin succumbed to the virus just over a month after he developed his first symptoms.
“Knowing that I wasn’t there when my husband died, I never saw him again after he left that door … that’s something that I will carry with me forever,” Addison said. “I said goodbye on FaceTime and I didn’t even know it was going to be the last time I loved him… I wasn’t able to have a funeral for my husband, and I really don’t feel like people understand just how difficult it is to grieve.”
The loss has deeply impacted the couple’s two young children, who still frequently talk about their father and their longing to hug them.
“I felt so unprepared to make [my daughter’s] pain go away,” Addison said.
A few months after the death of her husband, in an effort to find a community of others who could be experiencing the same grief as she had, Addison founded the Young Widows and Widowers of COVID-19 on Facebook, which now includes hundreds of members.
“When I lost Martin, it was this sense of loneliness,” Addison explained. “Knowing that other people experienced that same sort of inability to be there with their loved one … it gives me some comfort to know that I’m not alone… there are so many people grieving a loss to COVID-19.”
‘A myriad of outcomes that would not have resulted in a million deaths’
In the early days of the pandemic, former President Donald Trump predicted that the U.S. COVID-19 death toll would be “substantially” lower than the initial forecasts suggested.
“The minimum number was 100,000 lives, and I think we’ll be substantially under that number. … So we’ll see what it ends up being, but it looks like we’re headed to a number substantially below 100,000,” Trump said in April 2020.
Similarly, at the onset of the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, in his most pessimistic scenario, did not envision the possibility that the number of Americans dead from the virus could ultimately be so staggeringly high, telling CNN in late March 2020 that preparing for one million to two million Americans to die from the coronavirus is “almost certainly off the chart.”
“Now, it’s not impossible, but very, very unlikely,” Fauci said.
The uncertainty of the federal response in the early days of the pandemic has come under repeated scrutiny from public health experts, who say more should have been done to keep the virus at bay.
“To imagine where we were just over two years ago, we lacked the clarity, the preparation and really the political will to properly respond to a viral threat that would bring the world to its knees,” said Brownstein.
On average, more than 300 Americans still dying of COVID-19 every day
Although COVID-19 death rates are significantly lower than they were in the winter of 2021, when more than an average of 3,400 Americans were dying from the virus every day, the death toll is still averaging more than 300 a day, according to federal data.
“We would not tolerate that sort of burden or mortality from a preventable disease in any other situation, and we shouldn’t be tolerating that for COVID-19 either — just because we’ve been dealing with this for a long time,” Dowdy said.
Since the onset of the pandemic, older Americans have largely borne the brunt of the COVID-19 deaths, despite having higher vaccination rates than the overall population. Overall, people over the age of 65 years old account for more than three-quarters of virus-related deaths in the U.S, according to federal data.
More than 90% of seniors have been fully vaccinated, and about two-thirds have received their first booster shot. However, despite high vaccination rates in older populations, in recent months, during the omicron surge, 73% of deaths have been among those 65 and older.
There has also been an increasing rate of breakthrough deaths among the vaccinated, an ABC News analysis of federal data shows.
In August of 2021, about 18.9% of COVID-19 deaths were occurring among the vaccinated. Six months later, in February 2022, that proportional percent of deaths had increased to more than 40%.
Comparatively, in September 2021, just 1.1% of COVID-19 deaths were occurring among Americans who had been fully vaccinated and boosted with their first dose. By February 2022, that percentage of deaths had increased to about 25%.
Health experts said that the risk to the elderly population and waning immunity re-emphasizes the urgency of boosting older Americans and high-risk Americans with additional doses. And it brings into focus once again the deeply political battle over vaccines.
“Even as we hit this unthinkable milestone, the country is still massively divided on the reality of this pandemic and the tools we have to combat it. Not only do these safe and effective vaccines remain hotly debated but so do masks, a non-invasive tool widely recognized as basic personal protection,” said Brownstein.
Sally Hayden/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — In northern Kenya’s drought-stricken Turkana County, a group of children carried sacks of palm fruit atop their heads as they walked across the parched earth back to their tiny village.
They walk more than 20 miles to gather the small, bulbous fruit from the African oil palm several times a week. It will be their breakfast, lunch and dinner. One of the children, Ekiru, said the last time he ate something other than palm fruit was when a goat died of starvation and his village divided up the carcass.
“There is nothing else,” Ekiru’s grandmother, Nakaleso Lobuin Nipayan, told ABC News. “When the palm fruit go away, we will die.”
Famine is just around the corner for many others here. Up to 20 million people across the wider Horn of Africa region could go hungry this year as delayed rains exacerbate extreme drought amid soaring prices of food and fuel as well as a shortfall in humanitarian aid, according to the World Food Programme, the food-assistance branch of the United Nations.
“If they don’t receive assistance, we will see them go into something we call severe acute malnutrition,” Lauren Landis, WFP’s country director for Kenya, told ABC News. “And there’s the threat of death.”
According to a report released Wednesday by the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, the number and duration of droughts have increased 29% globally since 2000. While droughts represent just 15% of the world’s natural disasters, they took the largest human tool — approximately 650,000 deaths from 1970 to 2019. This year, more than 2.3 billion people face water stress, while almost 160 million children are exposed to severe and prolonged droughts, according to the report.
The report, entitled ”Drought In Numbers, 2022,” warned that unless action is stepped up, an estimated 700 million people will be at risk of being displaced by drought by 2030; an estimated one in four children will live in areas with extreme water shortages by 2040, and droughts may affect over three-quarters of the world’s population by 2050.
Following several consecutive poor rainy seasons, the Horn of Africa is facing what’s been described as its worst drought since 1981. Aid workers fear the outcome will be deadlier than the severe drought that affected all of East Africa between 2011 and 2012, claiming the lives of an estimated 260,000 people.
In Kenya, the drought has been declared a national emergency. Between 80% and 90% of reservoirs and dams are drying up in Turkana, Kenya’s largest and northwesternmost county. It is also one of the hottest and driest. The communities here can no longer survive on farming, fishing or livestock.
ABC News traveled to Turkana County with the International Rescue Committee in early May. At an IRC-run hospital within a refugee camp in the rural town of Kakuma, cases of malnutrition have increased four-fold in recent months. The refugees had fled their homes in neighboring countries and crossed into Kenya — considered one of the richest East African economies — only to find little food or water.
“People [are] coming from all over the region thinking that they can find safety and nourishment in Kenya,” Dr. Sila Monthe, who works at the Kakuma refugee camp, told ABC News. “[But] Kenya is in a drought and can’t really support all of these people.”
The hospital’s pediatric wing is reaching capacity, with currently an average of 20 admissions per day, according to Monthe. Many of the children being treated here exhibit the telltale signs of severe malnutrition, with some even too weak to cry.
“People have been dying just trying to get to the hospital,” Monthe added.
Although the success rate of the pediatric wing’s stabilization ward is consistently above 85%, Monthe said that means 15% of the patients — mostly young children — still die.
“Because they are so malnourished, the whole body shuts down,” she told ABC News. “That includes the digestive tract, so they’re usually unable to digest food.”
The situation in the Horn of Africa has also been compounded by the fallout from a war on another continent, thousands of miles away.
Since Russian forces invaded neighboring Ukraine in February, the cost of grain, fuel and fertilizer has skyrocketed worldwide, worsening hunger crises. Many countries in East Africa rely on Russia and Ukraine for a significant percentage of these agricultural commodities, according to data collected by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
The Kenyan government also raised the price of petroleum products for March, April and May, citing the conflict in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the cost of WFP’s local food basket — the minimum food needs per family per month — has increased by 23% in the past year, driven in part by the Ukraine war.
Back in Ekiru’s village, near the town of Lorugum, he and his grandmother smashed palm fruit against rocks to extract the fibrous, faintly sweet flesh.
“This normally will sustain them until God remembers them,” the grandmother, Nipayan, told ABC News, noting that she has “never seen” a drought as “bad “as this.
Thunderclouds suddenly rolled in overhead and it began to pour with rain.
“I feel happy,” said Ekiru, whose name means “rain” in the Turkana language.
But the sporadic and localized rainfall is not enough, even as it triggers a deluge in Ekiru’s village.
“We were hoping that this rain will be good enough to be able to pull out some of the population out of the situation they were in,” Shashwat Saraf, the International Rescue Committee’s regional emergency director for East Africa, told ABC News. “But this rain also feeling and being below average will actually result in catastrophic consequences for the population.”
“We are talking about lives of millions of people in the region,” he added, “and I think we cannot say in words in terms of what it means for those individuals and families that are impacted by this crisis.”
One of the goats belonging to Ekiru’s family died during the recent heavy rain, providing them with a rare meal other than palm fruit. They once owned 20 goats, but now only have eight.
More than three million livestock have died in the Horn of Africa amid the ongoing drought, according to WFP. In Kenya alone, more than one million livestock deaths have been reported across several northern counties, including Turkana, “majorly as a result of starvation and diseases,” according to the National Drought Management Authority’s bulletin for April.
“Animals will die,” Ekiru’s grandmother told ABC News, “and eventually the entire family will starve.”
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Wednesday’s sports events:
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL
INTERLEAGUE
Philadelphia 4, Seattle 2
Atlanta 5, Boston 3
St. Louis 10, Baltimore 1
AMERICAN LEAGUE
NY Yankees 5, Toronto 3
Oakland 9, Detroit 0
Tampa Bay 4, LA Angels 2
Kansas City 8, Texas 2
Cleveland at Chi White Sox 2:10 p.m. (Postponed)
Houston at Minnesota 1:10 p.m. (Suspended)
NATIONAL LEAGUE
Pittsburgh 5, LA Dodgers 3
Cincinnati 14, Milwaukee 11
Miami 11, Arizona 3
San Francisco 7, Colorado 1
Chicago Cubs 7, San Diego 5
Washington 8, NY Mets 3
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION PLAYOFFS
Milwaukee 110, Boston 107
Memphis 134, Golden State 95
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE PLAYOFFS
NY Rangers 5, Pittsburgh 3
Florida 5, Washington 3
Calgary 3, Dallas 1
WOMEN’S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
Atlanta 77, Los Angeles 75
Chicago 83, New York 50
Phoenix 97, Seattle 77
Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Several homes were destroyed in Southern California Wednesday night as the Coastal Fire continued to spread.
At least 20 homes were burned down in Laguna Niguel and the fire had reached approximately 200 acres, according to the Orange County Fire Authority, which said it had “60 different types of resources battling the flames.”
Evacuation orders have been issued for Coronado Pointe Drive, Vista Court and Via Las Rosa in the Pacific Island area, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said. Voluntary evacuations are in place for Laguna Beach residents in the Balboa Nyes, or Portafina, neighborhood.
OCFA Chief Brian Fennessy said late Wednesday there are no reports of civilian or firefighter casualties. The crews fighting the blaze are starting to get a better handle on the fire and “great progress” is expected into the night and coming days, Fennessy said.
The cause of the fire is unknown and an investigation is underway, according to the fire chief.
Fennessy said the fire started quickly and moved upslope over steep terrain, proving a challenge for hand crews to access. With fuels beds throughout the West being so dry, blazes like the Coastal Fire will “be more commonplace,” he said, adding that when winds couple with dry fuel, “fire is going to run on us.”
Strong winds were blowing embers into the attics of homes making it hard for firefighters to extinguish the blazes, as fires were jumping from house to house within the neighborhood, which is full of multimillion-dollar homes.
Laguna Niguel is south of Laguna Beach and about 25 miles down the coast from Huntington Beach.
