AFP UK

Climate change and collectors of rare plants are decimating succulents in South Africa, government researchers said Wednesday, warning hundreds of these rugged species are at risk of extinction. 

Succulents growing in the country’s semi-arid regions are experiencing unprecedented rates of decline following a rapid rise in global demand for collectable plants driven by Asia, according to the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), a government research body. 

“Over the past three years plant material confiscated from plant traffickers by law enforcement agencies has increased annually by over 250 percent,” the institute said in a statement. 

SANBI said more than 200 succulents — typically thick, fleshy plants that retain water to survive dry weather conditions — have been added to an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of threatened species, which was updated last week.  

Unique species growing in the Succulent Karoo — a region shared between South Africa and Namibia which includes some of the world’s most biodiverse desert and semi-desert areas — are particularly sought after, it said.

The plants are often sold on social media, it added.

“People buying these plants, most of them don’t realize that they’re breaking the law,” said Craig Hilton-Taylor, who heads the IUCN’s Red List unit.

“They’re completely ignorant or naive about illegal plant trade… they just think, ‘Oh, that’s a nice thing to buy for my house or my garden’,” he said. 

Global warming is also contributing to the decline, the institute said. 

The region has suffered from a prolonged, severe drought over the past decade. 

This has taken a toll on many species in the region, including the critically endangered giant quiver tree. Its population is set to decline 90 percent by 2080, SANBI said. 

“A combination of illegal collection, long-term droughts related to climate change, and ongoing land degradation as a result of livestock overgrazing and mining are creating a devastating storm causing unprecedented loss of biodiversity in the world’s richest desert ecosystem,” it said. 

An antibiotic taken after sex without a condom can drastically reduce the rate of three bacterial STDs among high-risk groups, data from a clinical study showed Wednesday.

The research was presented at the 24th International AIDS conference in Montreal, where it was hailed as a major development.

“This has the capacity to change the guidelines” on clinical practice, Steven Deeks, an HIV expert at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who was not involved in the study, told AFP.

Doxycycline reduced rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia by more than 60 percent among men who have sex with men (MSM), and also appeared highly effective against syphilis, but there weren’t enough cases to reach statistical significance.

The trial was halted early because researchers found the drug was undeniably working and it would have been unethical to continue testing.

The study comes amid rising rates of these diseases, particularly among MSM, whose use of condoms has declined since the advent of effective HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) pills.

A previous trial by French researchers, which used doxycycline as a post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), showed it was effective against syphilis and chlamydia among MSM, but not for gonorrhea.

For the new study, researchers recruited around 500 people, mostly MSM but also some transgender women and gender diverse people, at sites in San Francisco and Seattle.

Some were taking HIV PrEP, while others were living with HIV.

In both of the groups, around two-thirds received doxycycline, while a third did not. They were followed to monitor their outcomes every three months.

The pill, dosed at 200 milligrams, was given within three days of exposure. Participants could continue to take it as needed depending on how much sexual contact they were having.

The intervention reduced the incidence of STDs by 62 percent in the group living with HIV, and 66 percent in the group on HIV PrEP.

Side effects were mild and adherence levels remained high.

“We now have two studies that support the use of doxycycline as PEP in men who have sex with men,” study lead Annie Luetkemeyer of UCSF told reporters at the AIDS conference.

“I really think we’re at a place where we need to think very strongly about rolling this out and how to incorporate this into guidelines.”

She stressed, however, that right now the data supports the treatment as targeted intervention among high risk groups that have a high prevalence of STDs — not everyone.

More study is also needed to better understand the potential impacts on antibiotic resistance, the authors said.

Researchers want to know if it could increase resistance from STDs — which is thought more possible for gonorrhea than chlamydia and syphilis — from so-called “bystander” bacteria that live on the body and in the throat.

They also want to probe the potentially disruptive impact on the gut microbiome.

Influential British scientist James Lovelock, famed for his Gaia hypothesis and pioneering work on climate change, has died at the age of 103, his family announced Wednesday.

The legendary scientist’s family said in a statement that Lovelock died Tuesday on his 103rd birthday as the result of complications from a fall.

“To the world he was best known as a scientific pioneer, climate prophet and conceiver of the Gaia theory,” it said, noting he was also a “loving husband and wonderful father with a boundless sense of curiosity”.

Responding to the news Mary Archer, chair of the Science Museum Group’s board of trustees, described him as “arguably the most important independent scientist of the last century”. 

“Jim Lovelock was decades ahead of his time in thinking about the Earth and climate and his unique approach was an inspiration for many,” she added in a statement.

In the 1970s, Lovelock came up with the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a single, self-regulating super-organism made up of all its life forms, which humans are destroying.

The notion was at first ridiculed by his peers but helped to redefine how science perceives the relationship between our inanimate planet and the life it hosts.

Lovelock became known as a prophet of climate doom.

With his 2006 book “The Revenge of Gaia”, he issued a terrifying warning: if humankind failed to radically curtail greenhouse-gas emissions, there would, quite literally, be hell to pay.

“We have left it far, far too late to save the planet as we know it,” Lovelock told AFP in 2009.

Pixie-like and unfailingly polite, Lovelock spent much of his career as a self-described “independent scientist”, but the price for freedom was a lack of institutional backing.

Lovelock’s ideas were often at odds with conventional wisdom, ahead of their time or, in the case of climate change, unbearably grim. 

In a 2020 interview with AFP, he warned that the world had lost perspective in responding to the coronavirus, and should focus on a far more formidable foe: global warming.

“Climate change is more dangerous to life on Earth than almost any conceivable disease,” he said. 

“If we don’t do something about it, we will find ourselves removed from the planet.” 

Born in 1919, Lovelock grew up in south London between the two World Wars, and studied chemistry, medicine and biophysics in the UK and the US.

As his brilliance emerged, he was quickly drafted by Britain’s National Institute for Medical Research, where he worked for 20 years.

In the 1950s, he invented the machine used to detect the hole in the ozone layer.

In the early 1960s, NASA lured him to California to investigate possible life on Mars.

With another NASA scientist, he analysed the atmosphere on the planet, looking for a chemical imbalance and gases reacting with each other, which would hint at life.

They found nothing, putting a dampener on hopes of finding life on Mars.

Scientists now think that Earth’s nearest neighbour may once have been warm and wet and possibly have supported microbial life.

AIDS researchers announced on Wednesday that a fourth person has been “cured” of HIV, but the dangerous procedure for patients also battling cancer may be little comfort for the tens of millions living with the virus worldwide.

The 66-year-old man, named the “City of Hope” patient after the Californian centre where he was treated, was declared in remission in the lead up to the International AIDS Conference, which begins in Montreal, Canada on Friday.

He is the second person to be announced cured this year, after researchers said in February that a US woman dubbed the New York patient had also gone into remission.

The City of Hope patient, like the Berlin and London patients before him, achieved lasting remission from the virus after a bone marrow transplant to treat cancer.

Another man, the Duesseldorf patient, has also previously been said to have reached remission, potentially bringing the number cured to five.

Jana Dickter, an infectious disease specialist at the City of Hope, told AFP that because the latest patient was the oldest yet to achieve remission, his success could be promising for older HIV sufferers who also have cancer.

Dickter is the lead author of research on the patient which was announced at a pre-conference in Montreal but has not been peer reviewed.

– ‘I am beyond grateful’ –

“When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, like many others, I thought it was a death sentence,” said the patient, who does not want to be identified.

“I never thought I would live to see the day that I no longer have HIV,” he said in a City of Hope statement. “I am beyond grateful.”

Dickter said the patient had told her of the stigma he experienced during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

“He saw many of his friends and loved ones become very ill and ultimately succumb to the disease,” she said.

He had “full-blown AIDS” for a time, she said, but was part of early trials of antiretroviral therapy, which now allows many of the 38 million with HIV globally to live with the virus. 

He had HIV for 31 years, longer than any previous patient who went into remission. 

After being diagnosed with leukaemia, in 2019 he received a bone marrow transplant with stem cells from an unrelated donor with a rare mutation in which part of the CCR5 gene is missing, making people resistant to HIV.

He waited until getting vaccinated for Covid-19 in March 2021 to stop taking antiretrovirals, and has been in remission from both HIV and cancer since.

Reduced-intensity chemotherapy worked for the patient, potentially allowing older HIV patients with cancer to get the treatment, Dickter said.

But it is a complex procedure with serious side effects and “isn’t a suitable option for most people with HIV”, she added.

Steven Deeks, an HIV expert at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the research, said the “first thing you do in a bone marrow transplant is you destroy your own immune system temporarily”.

“You would never do this if you didn’t have cancer,” he told AFP.

– ‘Holy Grail’ –

Also announced at the AIDS conference was research about a 59-year-old Spanish woman with HIV who has maintained an undetectable viral load for 15 years despite stopping antiretroviral therapy.

Sharon Lewin, president-elect of the International AIDS Society which convenes the conference, said that it was not quite the same as the City of Hope patient, because the virus remained at a very low level.

“A cure remains the Holy Grail of HIV research,” Lewin said.

“We have seen a handful of individual cure cases before and the two presented today provide continued hope for people living with HIV and inspiration for the scientific community.”

She also pointed to a “truly exciting development” towards identifying HIV in an individual cell, which is “a bit like finding a needle in a haystack”.

Deeks, an author of the new research also presented at the conference, said it was an “unprecedented deep dive into the biology of the infected cell”.

The researchers identified that a cell with HIV has several particular characteristics.

It can proliferate better than most, is hard to kill, and is both resilient and hard to detect, Deeks said.

“This is why HIV is a lifelong infection.”

But he said that cases such as the City of Hope patient offered a potential roadmap towards a more broadly available cure, possibly using CRISPR gene-editing technology.

“I think that if you can get rid of HIV, and get rid of CCR5, the door by which HIV gets in, then you can cure someone,” Deeks said.

“It’s theoretically possible — we’re not there yet — to give someone a shot in the arm that will deliver an enzyme that will go into the cells and knock out CCR5, and knock out the virus.

“But that’s science fiction for now.”

Botswana has become the second nation in the world, after Eswatini, to reach a landmark UN goal towards eradicating AIDS, researchers said Wednesday, in what health experts hailed as “stellar results”.

The country has met the so-called “95-95-95” target on HIV diagnosis, treatment and viral suppression several years early, according to a study published ahead of a global conference on the disease. 

About one in five people in Botswana live with the virus — one of the highest rates in the world — according to the UN AIDS agency (UNAIDS). 

The agency wanted 95 percent of HIV-positive people to know their status, 95 percent of those diagnosed on medication and 95 percent of those under treatment to show signs that the virus is being suppressed in their blood by 2025. 

But the study led by Botswana’s health ministry found the country had already met or surpassed all three thresholds, with a 95-98-98 score. The global average in 2020 was 84-87-90, UNAIDS says.

“Botswana is making historic new progress against HIV,” Sharon Lewin, president-elect of the International AIDS Society (IAS), told a virtual press briefing presenting the results.

The country is “well positioned to end its HIV epidemic by 2030. To put it simply, these are really stellar results.”

Madisa Mine, the study’s lead author and a Botswana government virologist, said the results were encouraging.

“We have translated a hopeless situation into a situation where now there is hope,” he said.

Now both the government and people on medication could look forward to Botswana one day becoming an AIDS-free country, Mine added.

That was a far cry from when he started working on the disease two decades ago, and it seemed the nation was “facing extinction” due to the high number of infections. 

– ‘Doable’ –

The paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a journal, was based on interviews and blood tests from more than 14,000 people aged 15 to 64.

Another southern African country, the small landlocked kingdom of Eswatini, became the first country to reach the UN target in 2020, UNAIDS says.  

UNAIDS deputy executive director Matthew Kavanagh said Botswana’s progress was down to a series of factors, including government investment and the rapid adoption of self-testing. 

In 2002, Botswana became the first African country to offer free anti-retroviral drugs, which help contain the virus and prevent it from infecting others. 

And in 2019 the country of 2.3 million people decriminalised same-sex relationships — something that Kavanagh said “has helped to get more and more people into care”.

Botswana showed it was possible to rein in the disease, IAS president Adeeba Kamarulzaman said. 

“It’s not an easy feat. But what it shows is, it is doable with investment and political commitment, as well as communities working to deliver the needed services,” she told AFP from Montreal ahead of the 24th International AIDS Conference, which opens in the Canadian city on Friday. 

Globally, about 38 million people, including almost two million children, were living with HIV in 2020, and more than 600,000 died from AIDS-related illnesses, according to UNAIDS.

Eastern and southern Africa are the worst affected regions, accounting for more than half of all cases. 

France is on track to experience its driest July on record, the national weather service said Wednesday, with drought-like conditions leading to increasingly severe water restrictions around the country.

“The month of July will very likely be the driest July ever recorded since 1959,” spokesman Christian Veil from Meteo-France told AFP.

On average, just eight mm (0.3 inches) of rain fell across the country from July 1-25, less than the previous low of 16 mm which was clocked in 2020, he said.

“We’re in a very difficult situation even though we’re only at the end of July,” he said, saying soil humidity was at record lows and many trees were losing their leaves prematurely. 

Farmers across the country are reporting difficulties in feeding livestock because of parched grasslands, while irrigation has been banned in large areas of northwest and southeast France due to water shortages.

The flow of the river Loire for example, which empties into the Atlantic in northwest France, has fallen by a quarter since the start of July.

On the eastern river Rhine, which forms the France-Germany border, commercial boats are having to run at a third of their carrying capacity in order to avoid hitting the bottom because the water level is so low.

A total of 90 out of 96 administrative regions in mainland France have water restrictions of some sort, a record number, according to the environment ministry.

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed at least five people in the northern Philippines Wednesday, toppling buildings and shaking high-rise towers more than 300 kilometres (185 miles) away in the capital Manila.

The shallow and powerful quake struck the mountainous and lightly populated province of Abra on the main island of Luzon at 8:43 am (0043 GMT), the US Geological Survey said.

Shallow earthquakes tend to cause more damage than deeper ones. This one left more than a hundred people injured across the hilly region, triggered dozens of landslides, damaged buildings, and knocked out power.

“We felt really strong shaking. We started shouting and rushed outside,” said university student Mira Zapata in the San Juan municipality of Abra, which took the full force of the quake.

“Our house is OK but houses down the hill were damaged.”

As buildings shook and walls cracked in the municipality of Dolores, people ran outside, Police Major Edwin Sergio told AFP.

“The quake was very strong,” Sergio said, adding that windows of the local market were broken.

In Bangued, the provincial capital of Abra, a 23-year-old woman was killed after a wall fell on her, police said. At least 78 were injured in the province.

A video posted on Facebook and verified by AFP showed cracks in the asphalt road and ground in Bangued.

“Some of the buildings here show cracks,” police chief Major Nazareno Emia added. “Power was cut off and internet as well.”

Two construction workers in the nearby landlocked province of Benguet died in separate incidents, police said. 

Another person was killed when boulders smashed into the building site where he was working in Kalinga province, police said. Six other workers were injured.

Police said an elderly woman in Suyo municipality in Ilocos Sur province suffered fatal injuries after she was buried by a landslide while out walking.

In Vigan City, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Ilocos Sur, centuries-old structures built during the Spanish colonial period were damaged, police said.

– Ring of Fire –

The Philippines is regularly rocked by quakes due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

Wednesday’s quake was one of the strongest recorded in the Philippines in years and was felt across swathes of Luzon island, the most populous in the archipelago.

It was followed by nearly 300 aftershocks, the local seismological agency said. Several of the subsequent quakes measured from magnitude 4.7 to 5.2, according to USGS.

Residents and office workers in Manila were evacuated from high-rise buildings.

“I grabbed money and our belongings and then I went out with my parents,” said Christina Gonzales, 19, after fleeing a city hotel. 

Verified video footage posted on Facebook showed the Bantay Bell Tower in the popular tourist destination of Vigan partially crumbling.

Two visitors suffered minor injuries from falling debris, an official said.

Other buildings in the city were also damaged. 

“We can’t rule out the possibility of another strong earthquake,” said Renato Solidum, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, whose family stronghold is in the north, said he would delay visiting the region to avoid causing disruption.

He urged people to remain in emergency shelters until their homes have been checked for damage.

Military personnel have been deployed to Abra to help with rescue operations.

At least 58 landslides have been reported, Interior Secretary Benjamin Abalos said.

National disaster agency spokesman Mark Timbal said road-clearing operations were under way. There had been no reports of damage to local dams. 

In October 2013, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Bohol Island in the central Philippines, killing more than 200 people and triggering landslides.

Old churches in the birthplace of Catholicism in the Philippines were badly damaged. Nearly 400,000 were displaced and tens of thousands of houses were damaged. 

The powerful quake altered the island’s landscape and a “ground rupture” pushed up a stretch of ground by about three metres, creating a wall of rock above the epicentre. 

In 1990, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in the northern Philippines created a ground rupture stretching over a hundred kilometres.

Fatalities were estimated to reach over 1,200, with major damage to buildings in Manila.

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed at least four people in the northern Philippines Wednesday, toppling buildings, and shaking high-rise towers more than 300 kilometres (185 miles) away in the capital Manila.

The shallow but powerful quake struck the mountainous and lightly populated province of Abra on the main island of Luzon at 8:43 am (0043 GMT), the US Geological Survey said.

Shallow earthquakes tend to cause more damage than deeper ones. This one left more than a hundred people injured across the hilly region, triggered dozens of landslides, damaged buildings, and knocked out power.

“We felt really strong shaking. We started shouting and rushed outside,” said university student Mira Zapata in San Juan municipality of Abra, which took the full force of the quake.

“Our house is ok but houses down the hill were damaged.” 

As buildings shook and walls cracked in the municipality of Dolores in Abra, people ran outside, Police Major Edwin Sergio told AFP.

“The quake was very strong,” Sergio said, adding that windows of the local market were broken.

“Vegetables and fruits sold in the market were also disarranged after tables were toppled.”

In Bangued, the provincial capital of Abra, a 23-year-old woman was killed after a wall fell on her, police said. At least 62 people were injured in the province.

A video posted on Facebook and verified by AFP showed cracks in the asphalt road and ground in Bangued.

“Some of the buildings here show cracks,” police chief Major Nazareno Emia added. “Power was cut off and internet as well.”

Two construction workers in the nearby landlocked province of Benguet died in separate incidents, police said. 

Another person was killed when he fell off a building site in the mountains of Kalinga province, where eight people were also injured, police said. 

In Vigan City, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the province of Ilocos Sur, centuries-old structures built during the Spanish colonial period were damaged, police said.

– Ring of Fire –

The Philippines is regularly rocked by quakes due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

Wednesday’s quake was one of the strongest recorded in the Philippines in years and was felt across swathes of Luzon island, the most populous in the archipelago.

It was followed by nearly 300 aftershocks, the local seismological agency said. Several of the subsequent quakes measured from magnitude 4.7 to 5.2, according to USGS.

Residents and office workers in Manila were evacuated from high-rise buildings.

“I grabbed money and our belongings and then I went out with my parents,” said Christina Gonzales, 19, after fleeing a city hotel. 

Verified video footage posted on Facebook showed the Bantay Bell Tower in the popular tourist destination of Vigan partially crumbling. 

Two visitors suffered minor injuries from falling debris, an official said.

Other buildings in the city were also damaged. 

“We can’t rule out the possibility of another strong earthquake,” said Renato Solidum, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, whose family stronghold is in the north, said he would delay visiting the region to avoid causing disruptions.

He urged people to remain in emergency shelters until their homes have been checked for damage.

Military personnel have been deployed to Abra to help with rescue operations.

At least 58 landslides have been reported, Interior Secretary Benjamin Abalos said.

National disaster agency spokesman Mark Timbal said road-clearing operations were underway. There had been no reports of damage to local dams. 

In October 2013, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Bohol Island in the central Philippines, killing over 200 people and triggering landslides.

Old churches in the birthplace of Catholicism in the Philippines were badly damaged. Nearly 400,000 were displaced and tens of thousands of houses were damaged. 

The powerful quake altered the island’s landscape and a “ground rupture” pushed up a stretch of ground by about three meters, creating a wall of rock above the epicentre. 

In 1990, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in the northern Philippines created a ground rupture stretching over a hundred kilometres. 

Fatalities were estimated to reach over 1,200 and caused major damage to buildings in Manila.

An animal market in China’s Wuhan really was the epicenter of the Covid pandemic, according to a pair of new studies in the journal Science published Tuesday that claimed to have tipped the balance in the debate about the virus’ origins.

Answering the question of whether the disease spilled over naturally from animals to humans, or was the result of a lab accident, is viewed as vital to averting the next pandemic and saving millions of lives.

The first paper analyzed the geographic pattern of Covid cases in the outbreak’s first month, December 2019, showing the first cases were tightly clustered around Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. 

The second examined genomic data from the earliest cases to study the virus’ early evolution, concluding it was unlikely the coronavirus circulated widely in humans prior to November 2019.

Both were previously posted as “preprints” but have now been vetted by scientific peer review and appear in a prestigious journal.

Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, who co-authored both papers, had previously called on the scientific community in a letter to be more open to the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak.

But the findings moved him “to the point where now I also think it’s just not plausible that this virus was introduced any other way than through the wildlife trade at the Wuhan market,” he told reporters on a call.

Though previous investigation had centered on the live animal market, researchers wanted more evidence to determine it was really the progenitor of the outbreak, as opposed to an amplifier.

This required neighborhood-level study within Wuhan to be more certain the virus was “zoonotic” — that it jumped from animals to people.

The first study’s team used mapping tools to determine the location of most of the first 174 cases identified by the World Health Organization, finding 155 of them were in Wuhan.

Further, these cases clustered tightly around the market — and some early patients with no recent history of visiting the market lived very close to it.

Mammals now known to be infectable with the virus — including red foxes, hog badgers and raccoon dogs — were all sold live in the market, the team showed.

– Two introductions to humans –

The study authors also tied positive samples from patients in early 2020 to the western portion of the market, which sold live or freshly butchered animals in late 2019.

The tightly confined early cases contrasted with how it radiated throughout the rest of the city by January and February, which the researchers confirmed by drilling into social media check-in data from the Weibo app.

“This tells us the virus was not circulating cryptically,” Worobey said in a statement. 

“It really originated at that market and spread out from there.”

The second study focused on resolving an apparent discrepancy in the virus’ early evolution.

Two lineages, A and B, marked the early pandemic. 

But while A was closer to the virus found in bats, suggesting the coronavirus in humans came from this source and that A gave rise to B, it was B that was found to be far more present around the market.

The researchers used a technique called “molecular clock analysis,” which relies on the rate at which genetic mutations occur over time to reconstruct a timeline of evolution — and found it unlikely that A gave rise to B.

“Otherwise, lineage A would have had to have been evolving in slow motion compared to the lineage B virus, which just doesn’t make biological sense,” said Worobey.

Instead, the probable scenario was that both jumped from animals at the market to humans on separate occasions, in November and December 2019. The researchers concluded it was unlikely that there was human circulation prior to November 2019.

Under this scenario, there were probably other animal-to-human transmissions at the market that failed to manifest as Covid cases.

“Have we disproven the lab leak theory? No, we have not. Will we ever be able to know? No,” said co-author Kristian Andersen of The Scripps Research Institute.

“But I think what’s really important here is that there are possible scenarios and they’re plausible scenarios and it’s really important to understand that possible does not mean equally likely.”

The WHO’s technical lead for Covid, Maria Van Kerkhove, welcomed the studies’ publication in a tweet on Tuesday.

“(It is) critical we continue to study the origins of the #COVID19 pandemic to ensure that we are better prepared to prevent and mitigate future outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics,” she said.

Beachgoers in the Japanese region of Fukui have been warned to stay away from a displeased dolphin accused of biting swimmers, with officials urging visitors to “watch from afar”.

Beach attendants at the seafront in the central region on Wednesday set up a device that emits ultrasonic frequencies in a bid to repel the cantankerous creature, the city said.

A sign has been put up warning dolphin fans not to touch the animal.

Local media said at least 10 incidents involving dolphin bites have been recorded by attendants at the beach since it officially opened for the summer on July 9.

A local official told AFP that Fukui’s fire department has been called over two incidents, both involving men in their 40s who were swimming near the local beach.

Injuries have been minor so far, but local authorities have warned of “potentially severe wounds”. 

“Dolphins tend to be considered cute, but if you approach wild dolphins carelessly, you might get bitten and injured,” Fukui prefectural police cautioned in a Twitter post Monday.

“If you spot any, don’t go near them,” the police said, citing the case of a man who was bitten on the hand on Sunday. 

The city believes the series of attacks are the work of single dolphin, which was first spotted near shore at a different beach in April, Masaki Yasui, an official from the tourism promotion department, told AFP. 

“We understand that there are certain body parts where dolphins don’t like to be touched, like the tip of its nose and its back fin,” Yasui said.

He said videos posted on Twitter showed beachgoers had been trying to touch the dolphin in those areas. 

“We encourage visitors to watch the dolphin from afar if they come across it,” the official said.