Russia threatens to cancel Baikonur finance in 2016

Baikonur, an international spaceport, was built in 1955.

Russian Ministry of Finance are threatening to stop financing Baikonur cosmodrome in 2016, Izvestia newspaper reported Friday citing a source in Roscosmos.

An official from the Federal Space Agency was quoted as saying "In previous versions of draft budget for 2016 it was planned to allocate a $705 million (2.5 billion rubles) subsidy for Baikonur maintenance."

"The money was supposed to be spent on salaries and field maintenance. We asked for more. But when our representative in Ministry of Finance was shown the final draft there was zero."

According to the newspaper, this could mean the specialist teams at Baikonur will be left without financing.

The report also said that Ministry of Finance allegedly made the decision due to the construction of the new Vostochniy cosmodrome, which will now receive the money that previously went to Baikonur.

Baikonur, an international spaceport, was built in 1955. Russia leases Baikonur from Kazakhstan for $115 million annually. The current lease contract between the two countries expires in 2050.

Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (TB) treatment a Global threat

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria says that strains of tuberculosis with resistance to multiple drugs could spread widely and highlight an annual need of at least $1.6 billion in international funding for treatment and prevention of the disease.

Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of WHO, and Dr. Mark Dybul, executive director of the Global Fund, said that the only way to carry out the urgent work of identifying all new cases of tuberculosis, while simultaneously making progress against the most serious existing cases, will be to mobilize significant funding from domestic sources and international donors.

With the overwhelming majority of international funding for tuberculosis coming through the Global Fund, they said, it is imperative that efforts to raise money be effective this year. Growing alarm about the threat of multi-drug resistant TB, also known as MDR-TB, is making that even more pressing.

“We are treading water at a time when we desperately need to scale up our response to MDR-TB,” says Chan. “We have gained a lot of ground in TB control through international collaboration, but it can easily be lost if we do not act now.”

WHO and the Global Fund have identified an anticipated gap of $1.6 billion in annual international support for the fight against tuberculosis in 118 low- and middle-income countries on top of an estimated $3.2 billion that could be provided by the countries themselves.

Filling this gap could enable full treatment for 17 million TB and multidrug-resistant TB patients and save 6 million lives between 2014-2016.

“It is critical that we raise the funding that is urgently needed to control this disease,” says Dybul. “If we don’t act now, our costs could skyrocket. It is invest now or pay forever.”

Chan and Dybul spoke to the media in Geneva in advance of World TB Day on March 24, which commemorates the day in 1882 when Dr. Robert Koch discovered the mycobacterium that causes tuberculosis.

Read more on TB Research in the European Respiratory Journal

H1N1: UKs BMJ Report Extreme Doubts over Tamiflu results

Research published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has confirmed that the antiviral oseltamivir, is only effective in reducing by 1 day, the time people have symptoms. It also confirmed that there was no evidence that oseltamivir prevented the most fatal complications, pneumonia.

It comes after the Government and GPs failed to reach an agreement on the swine flu vaccination programme for under-fives, with health visitors and district nurses now set to be asked by local NHS managers to step in.

The BMJ research has questioned the validity of research from Roche, the pharmaceutical giant that makes Tamiflu.

More than a million courses of antivirals including Tamiflu have been given out to people across Britain since the start of the swine flu pandemic.

A review of 20 existing studies was carried out by a team led by experts from the Cochrane Collaboration, which last reviewed the evidence in 2005. Their updated study found Tamiflu "did not reduce influenza-related lower respiratory tract complications".

The drug was found to induce nausea while evidence of adverse reactions to the drug were "under-reported", they said.

Tamiflu was claimed to be effective in treating people preventatively, i.e. after they had come into contact with somebody who was infected, and shortened the length of symptoms in those with swine flu.

But the study criticised some of the evidence available and said Roche had not been able to "unconditionally" provide the information needed. As a result, the team dropped eight trials that were included in their earlier review because they were unable to independently verify the findings.

This leads to further speculation that the mass innoculation of peoples is commercially based, adding to the profits of the pharmaceutical companies, without there being sound medical evidence to back it up.

The power of the pharma lobbyists is such that this conspiracy to defraud the public has extended into the medical and political hierarchy and large incentives are being offered to executives, politicians and medical authorities that support the exploitation of this pandemic.

Russian Space Industry to grow by 18%

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Monday that the output of the national space industry in 2009 will increase by about 18%.

Despite difficulties caused by the global financial crisis, "financing of the space industry has always been and will remain sufficient," Putin said at a meeting on the development of defense-related industries.

"We expect space industry production growth in 2009 at about 18%," he said, adding that overall production growth in the defense industry would increase by up to 3.8%.

The prime minister also noted that the quality of production needs improvement.

"Despite all our efforts, many Russian-made spacecraft are not as advanced as their foreign equivalents... and the R and D work takes longer than planned," Putin said.

He urged improvements to production efficiency, and said priority projects must be tackled, including the Angara-family carrier rockets and the development of new communications, navigation and remote Earth sensing spacecraft.

Putin reiterated that in the past two years Russia's space industry enterprises have received and spent over 21 billion rubles ($609 million), and that half of those funds were allocated for technical upgrading of production facilities.

Appeal to Save the Mars Space flight Campaign: Give Generously

Humans could orbit Mars in the 2020s, says a panel appointed by the White House – but only if NASA's budget is boosted. At its current funding level, the agency will be unable to leave low-Earth orbit for at least the next two decades, according to a summary of the panel's report released on Tuesday.

Under President George W Bush, NASA was ordered to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. But in May, the Obama administration set up a panel of space experts to review the space agency's human spaceflight plans. The panel is led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine.

Though its final report is still being completed, on Tuesday the committee sent a summary of its findings to the White House and NASA. A final decision on NASA's future direction rests with the White House and Congress.

The summary contains a list of five possible ways forward for NASA's human spaceflight programme, without endorsing any particular one over the others.

One of those options, called the Flexible Path, would send astronauts to a series of increasingly distant destinations, starting with a mission to orbit the moon. A mission to an asteroid would follow later, and the plan would culminate in a mission to Mars, which the panel says could be achieved by the mid- to late-2020s.

To avoid breaking the bank, this option would delay development of any landing craft and other hardware needed to actually put astronauts on the planet's surface.