Reuters World News - Nipah virus fears, killer cough syrup, AI on Capitol Hill and US inflation

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

India rushes to contain a deadly Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala. How lax testing in India fuelled a wave of deadly cough syrup poisonings. Tech CEOs in Capitol Hill talk AI and what US inflation data means for you. Plus, The Bat Lands special podcast and a special report into Bat Lands. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, India rushes to contain an outbreak of the deadly NEPA virus. Tech Titans talk regulation on Capitol Hill. How lax testing of cough syrups fueled a wave of poisonings. And Mexico's Congress hears, we're not alone in the universe. It's Thursday, September 14th. This is Reuters World News, with everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. every weekday. I'm Kim Vinal in London. We start in India, where authorities in the southern state of Kerala have shut schools,

offices and public transport to stop the spread of the rare but deadly NEPA virus. Rubem Nair is in Delhi. So Rupam, how has the Nipa virus spread? So authorities in Indian state of Kerala are still trying to identify that how did this virus, the deadly virus, spread in? in some parts of the state, which is largely densely forested area. In the past, there have been cases in the same region where it spread from fruit bats, animals, and even excreta, which was found on certain fruits that got spread from people to people. How worried should the rest of the world be about this outbreak?

At this juncture, authorities are saying that they've got things absolutely under control. In the last 48 hours, about 700 people have been tested. Results are still awaited. And we have had so far two deaths and three people who have tested positive for the virus. A Reuters investigation earlier this year identified parts of Kerala as one of the places most at risk globally for outbreaks of bat viruses. You can check out that story and a special Reuters World News podcast which goes with it in the description to today. show. Now for the other headlines making news around the world. Authorities in Libya fear an outbreak of disease as bodies wash ashore and decompose under the rubble

after a devastating flood in the city of Durner. Abdul Menam Al-Qaithi, the mayor of the city, called for specialists to help recover corpses and said the death toll could reach 20,000. You know, I considered my age and the fact that at the end of a second, second term I would be in my mid-80s. And I think it's time for guys like me to get out of the way and have people the next generation step forward. Senator Mitt Romney there announcing he will not seek re-election in 2024. And a strong suggestion from the 76-year-old that Donald Trump, who is 77, and Joe

Biden, who is 80, should do the same. Relief in the suburbs of Philadelphia after convicted murderer, Donalo Cavalcante, is finally apprehended. Cavalcante's prison break two weeks ago triggered a massive manhunt involving hundreds of police and a battery of drones and helicopters. In the end, he was caught under some bushes by a police dog named Dioda. A luxury cruise ship remained stranded in a remote part of Greenland after a fishing trawlers attempt to free it failed. The ocean explorer has been stuck in the mud in the Alpfjord National Park since Monday, with 26 people on board.

A jaw-dropping moment in Mexico's Congress, Jaime Mausson, a journalist and long-time UFO enthusiast, presents lawmakers with what he claims are the remains of extraterrestrial beings. The appearance of the two tiny shriveled bodies was the centerpiece of Mexico's first congressional event on UFOs. The U.S. Labor Department released its latest consumer price index figures. And to decode them, we're joined now by Howard Schneider. Howard, what are the August numbers telling us? Well, so the top line number really was a return to

kind of the battle days of last year, the 6.6% increase month to month, which is a lot. That annualizes out to over 7% a year, and it's reminiscent of what was happening last summer when the Fed was really concerned that inflation was becoming unmoored. However, underlying that, most of that was driven by gasoline prices, which really wobble around a lot. They went up a lot this summer. Underlying inflation did come down on a year-on-year basis from 4.7% to 4.3%, though the month-to-month rate did tick up a little bit. Now, what does this all net out to? Nets out to, as beneficiaries have said, this is going to be a bumpy path back to 2%. It's probably not enough on its own to make them shift anything about what's going to happen next week when everyone expects them to keep rates on hold.

Probably also, though, is going to leave them to keep in play another rate hike later in this year, at least have the option of that to pencil it in in their next set of projections. Whether they cash that in in November and actually hike rates again or not, really is going to depend on data in the meantime. A lot of economists think that this is a bit of a curveball in August and that the general inflation trend is down. I think the consequences of AI going wrong are severe. We have to be proactive rather than reactive. That's Tesla CEO Elon Musk after meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to talk about regulating artificial intelligence. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sunda Pichai

also attended the closed door forum. I think this meeting may go out on history as being very important for the future of civilization. So, no pressure. David Shepidson is on Capitol Hill. So David, what happened at this hearing? Behind closed doors, the senators heard from about two dozen of the world's biggest tech companies and former CEOs and largely agreed on the need for regulations. Then they spent most of the rest time talking about the pluses, minuses of AI and how the government ultimately is going to regulate it. It's easy to say you support regulation.

It's a lot more messy to actually come up with a framework that everybody agrees with. So what might that look like? Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, we want on the one hand to get Congress to impose safeguards to address the potentials about deepfakes and election security and personal privacy involving AI. But in their hand, he and others see this technology as potentially game changer for the United States. And it also wants to set rules so that the United States can basically kind of start.

set the regulatory landscape for the rest of the world. But in terms of actual legislation mandating regulation with teeth, it's really hard to see that happening this year. For hundreds of parents in Gambia, Uzbekistan, and Cameroon, attempts to soothe a child's cough or fever ended in their worst nightmare, the deaths of their children. Reuters reporting has found that lax testing of cough syrup made in India, fueled a global wave of poisonings. Some drug makers couldn't prove they even tested their products. Jennifer Rigby is one of the reporters who dug into the deaths. So cough syrups are made with a syrupylase called propylene glycol. And that's used in cough syrups, you know,

all around the world. And then at some point in making the cough syrups, this substance was either substituted for or contaminated with a substance which is poisonous, which is normally used in car brake fluid and things like that, a substance that humans can't take, but it's very similar and it's also cheaper. Some of the same Indian manufacturers, just a few years earlier, were implicated in the deaths of a dozen children in India. Children like two-year-old Anirut, whose mother, Vina Kumari, watched him die of kidney failure in January 2020. After giving him cough syrup, she says, was toxic. Reuters' reporting showed that it was unclear if that medicine had gone through the required testing.

My colleague Krishna Das in India has interviewed a lot of the drug makers involved in this. And in a lot of cases, they've said this is not our fault or this is not true. But really, a lot of them have denied that there was wrongdoing on their part. In India, the health ministry, the office of the Prime Minister and the Drug Regulator, the Central Drug Standard Control Organisation, none of them responded to request for comment. Since the waiver poisonings that went were abroad last year, there's been more of an effort from the Indian government to tackle this and to crack down. But since August, the authorities have inspected 162 drug factories

and they found possible violations of some kind in 143 of them, which is nearly 9 and 10. That's it for today's episode of Reuters World News. We'll be back with our daily headline show on Friday. To make sure you know what's going on in your world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player

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