Unexplained Weight Loss Is Linked to Cancer

People who lose a significant amount of weight without dieting, exercise, or other lifestyle changes may also be at higher risk of some cancers, according to researchers who say a sudden drop may be an early indicator of the disease.

Those who spontaneously shed more than 10% of their body weight developed cancer at a rate of about 1,362 per 100,000 over a 12-month period, according to a study released Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association, while the rate of diagnosis among people who hadn’t recently lost weight without explanation was 869 per 100,000.

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While often seen as a positive step toward better health, a large drop in weight sometimes precedes a cancer diagnosis. Treating weight as an important vital sign may help doctors spot cancer earlier, when it’s more likely to be cured with available treatments.  

“Unexplained weight loss is where we say you should tell your doctor,” said Brian Wolpin, a medical oncologist at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and co-senior author of the study. It’s hoped to “help primary care physicians have a better sense of the spectrum of cancers that may be present in someone who has this unintentional weight loss.” 

Tumors of the esophagus, stomach, and pancreas were among the most elevated among people who had recently shed pounds without trying. This may be related to trouble or pain swallowing, symptoms of upper GI cancers that can make it hard for patients to get adequate nutrition.

The researchers analyzed data from the Nurses’ Health Study, a research effort that began almost 50 years ago at Harvard, and the all-male Health Professionals Follow-Up Study that began in 1986. The studies looked at the weight of 157,474 participants every two years over an average of 28 years, while screening for all cancer types. 

The overall risk of being diagnosed with cancer remained low at 3.2% among those who had experienced significant weight loss compared to 1.3% who had not. Many types of cancer including breast, brain, and melanoma, had no significant associations with recent weight loss, the researchers found.

“Weight is something that should be measured well,” in doctors’ practices, said Michael Rosenthal, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who helped write the study. “It should be a review of the weight as it has been charted over the last couple of years to see if there is a longitudinal decline that needs further evaluation.” 

source https://time.com/6587590/unexplained-weight-loss-cancer/

A Blood Test for Alzheimer’s Disease Is Almost Here

As the world’s population ages, health experts are bracing for higher rates of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s.

Finding new ways to diagnose the condition is more of a priority than ever, since new treatments work best earlier in the course of disease. But currently, the two primary ways to diagnose Alzheimer’s—PET imaging or a lumbar puncture—are either too expensive or invasive for most people, leaving too many cases undiagnosed.

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In a study published in JAMA Neurology, researchers report on a promising, more accessible test using blood, which could make more widespread screening and monitoring of the neurodegenerative condition possible. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden worked with ALZPath, a company that developed a blood-based Alzheimer’s test used in research studies, to determine how well the test measured up to the current gold standards of PET imaging and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) tests from lumbar punctures. The researchers analyzed scans or CSF and blood samples from nearly 800 people in three different patient populations in the U.S., Canada, and Spain.

In the comparison, the blood test performed as well as CSF in detecting Alzheimer’s—an encouraging finding, since CSF performs as well as PET scans in diagnosing the condition.

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“This test showed that blood and CSF performed exactly the same,” says Nicholas Ashton, associate professor of neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of the study. “The blood test performed excellently—it was almost 95% accurate—and in that regard, it could eventually replace CSF.”

The test measures a substance called phosphorylated tau, a protein that has emerged as a strong indicator of Alzheimer’s. Levels of phosphorylated tau tend to rise as clumps of amyloid protein, the hallmark of Alzheimer’s, begin to form in the brain, often years before symptoms of memory loss and cognitive decline occur. The blood-based test takes advantage of proprietary technology that makes it very sensitive to even low levels of the protein, which could make it a useful tool for screening for the disease.

Ashton says doctors in Sweden are beginning to incorporate the blood test into an overall program for diagnosing and managing Alzheimer’s. They are beginning to conduct a real-world study and collect blood samples to determine what proportion of patients, for example, could be reliably diagnosed from the blood test alone, and which might need additional confirmatory tests like CSF. “We hope that everyone who is suspected of having dementia could access this test, which reveals the underlying pathology of what might be causing their symptoms,” says Ashton.

If people do have Alzheimer’s, the blood test could also become a tool to identify patients who could benefit from the new anti-amyloid treatments, such as lecanemab, as well as help doctors monitor how well they are responding the medication. In order to qualify for the drug in the U.S., patients need to prove that they have amyloid in the brain, and a simple blood test could be a way to quickly identify those who might benefit. “Rather than wait for a CSF test or PET scan, everyone [who is suspected of having dementia] could at least get a blood exam to see if they are eligible for the drug or now,” says Ashton.

For now, the ALZPath test is available only for scientists to purchase for research studies through select partner labs. But later this month, doctors in the U.S. will be able to order the test for use with patients. (Some laboratory-developed tests performed by certain certified labs don’t require clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.) Andreas Jeromin, chief scientific officer of ALZPath, expects that in the next two to three years, large hospital and regional labs could start performing the test themselves as demand increases.

source https://time.com/6565140/alzheimers-blood-test-getting-closer/

Dwayne Johnson Granted Ownership of ‘The Rock’ Trademark as He Joins Board of WWE Owner

It is a name that has become almost synonymous with professional wrestling but its bearer, Dwayne Johnson, has never legally owned “The Rock.”

That will change under a new agreement with the WWE under which Johnson will also join the board of TKO Group, the sports and entertainment company that houses WWE and UFC.

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“The Rock” is a name is derived from Johnson’s father, WWE Hall of Famer Rocky Johnson, who was the first Black champion in WWE history (alongside partner Tony Atlas), according the WWE.

Johnson, a movie and wrestling star, has a business portfolio that includes production company Seven Bucks Productions, tequila brand Teremana Tequila, energy drink company ZOA Energy, Project Rock apparel brand and the United Football League.

“I’m very motivated to help continue to globally expand our TKO, WWE, and UFC businesses as the worldwide leaders in sports and entertainment — while proudly representing so many phenomenal athletes and performers who show up every day putting in the hard work with their own two hands to make their dreams come true and deliver for our audiences,” Johnson said in a prepared statement. “I’ve been there, I’m still there and this is for them.”

TKO Group Holdings Inc. says Johnson’s board appointment, effective Tuesday, reflects its “commitment to delivering long-term value and strong performance for shareholders through strategic growth initiatives across both UFC and WWE.”

Johnson began his wrestling career with WWE in 1996. The third-generation wrestler became famous for rivalries with wrestlers including “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Triple H and his finishing maneuver, The Rock Bottom, according to his biography on WWE’s website. He has won eight WWE championships, has a New York Times bestselling autobiography, “The Rock Says,” and starred in movies including “Fast X,” “Black Adam,” “Jungle Cruise” and ”Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.”

Johnson has recently appeared on World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.’s “Smackdown” and “Raw” television programs, with rumors swirling that he may compete at this year’s WrestleMania.

“I am thrilled to partner with Dwayne and welcome his immense talent to TKO’s Board,” TKO CEO Ariel Emanuel said in a prepared statement. “Dwayne brings an incredible track record of creating content and building globally recognized consumer brands, and he will play a key role in realizing our ambitions for TKO.”

TKO also announced Tuesday that Brad Keywell will become a board member. Keywell has co-founded and led multiple companies, including Groupon, Echo Global Logistics, MediaOcean, and Uptake Technologies, where he is currently founder and executive chairman.

The additions of Johnson and Keywell will increase TKO’s board from 11 to 13 members.

Shares of TKO Group surged nearly 10% before the market open.

source https://time.com/6565377/dwayne-johnson-the-rock-trademark-ownership-wwe-board/

Earth 2.0°C: How to Make Passing the 1.5°C Climate Change Threshold An Opportunity

Addressing the climate crisis will be difficult and demand focused attention and action. It is not a problem that will go away, and in fact a lot of new evidence shows that the world is heating and changing faster, weather-wise, than we expected just a few years ago. Many highly vulnerable populations and ecosystems already are facing the devastating impacts of climate change. While the COP28 meeting in Dubai late last year provided some glimmers of hope that the world’s countries can meaningfully respond to climate change, it is increasingly clear that the rise in global temperature will exceed the 1.5°C (2.7°F) threshold first defined as part of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Currently the earth has experienced approximately 1.15°C of heating above the 19th century baseline and will likely pass the 1.5°C level globally in the mid-2030s. The window of opportunity to forestall this event is about to close, as significant barriers including lack of financing and institutional capacity, and to say nothing of poverty, consumption, and lack of societal trust.

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While the challenges to address the climate crisis are great, several valuable opportunities to advance climate solutions lie well within our grasp. It is important that we collectively work to achieve the goals of what is called “climate resilient development,” and thereby simultaneously adapt to growing climate risks and incentivize opportunities to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Together, these two aims could tackle climate change while promoting economic advancement that is both sustainable and equitable. Equity is central to the process of transition. Whether it is industries and employees retooling for a green economy, or communities fearing loss of their neighborhood to flooding or climate gentrification, the evidence is overwhelming that the more equitable and engaged the decision-making process, the more likely the climate action will be successful.

Two other key areas of climate solutions are central to our everyday lives: the quality of life in our cities and towns, and enrichment of the natural world which surrounds and is infused within them. We are living in a profoundly urban century. Currently 56% of the world’s 8.1 billion live in urbanized areas, and almost all the global population growth expected in the next several decades will be in metropolitan areas. At the same time, these places drive approximately 70% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions and are where most economic activity takes place.

Through responsible and equitable planning, the urban (re)construction taking place now can integrate the latest climate solutions while also making our cities and towns better places to live and provide all with a higher quality of life. Fundamental to this achievement is protecting and more effectively using the services that nature provides human society. Nature-based solutions to climate change can’t address all our climate adaptation and mitigation challenges, but the data are strong that the more we can protect and enhance biodiversity and ecosystem function, the more benefits we can accrue in flood reduction, urban cooling, and air- and water-quality protection.

A key question is whether or not we can make such significant changes. Peering back into our own recent history, we find lots of stories of how we have done so. In a soon-to-be-published book, Cities and Environmental Change: From Crisis to Transformation, I document many examples of how seemingly overwhelming urban environmental crises were addressed through innovation. For example, by the mid-1950s air pollution had become a significant health and economic issue in the greater Los Angeles region. Within a decade transformative new air-pollution science, stakeholder coalitions, and governance institutions had been created and put into practice.

On a grand scale, the modernization of cities—while far from perfect—brought significant advances in drinking-water supply, sanitation, electrification, mass public transit, and recreation in many places. However, these developments were uneven, and today many cities, particularly in the Global South, are growing without the necessary infrastructure to adequately support the local population. Climate-resilient development is an opportunity to reduce or even eliminate these discrepancies.

The convergence of global climate change, rapid urbanization, and growing demands for economic and social equity create both an immediate imperative for action, and a rare opportunity to transform the present and create a better future. Successful solutions to past urban environmental crises can give us insights into how to best seize this opportunity: They show the importance of a flexible response where lived experiences, and the needs of multiple stakeholders are considered in policymaking.

Furthermore, we know that solutions should focus on securing the needed knowledge, financing, and decision-making capacity in advance, and being prepared to act when a window opens. Shocks like massive floods and disease outbreaks can become tipping points and bring attention to issues; but if emergent policies are to be effective and provide long-lasting solutions, they must also address underlying societal conditions, such as inequity and lack of trust in those in power due to a history of being cut out of the decision-making process.

Already, the world is full of small-scale climate-action success stories and other experiments that are making a difference. The historical evidence shows that to rapidly scale these up, we need to better monitor and evaluate these examples, bring in people and institutions from all levels of government, tap the incentive motives of the private sector, and address the concerns of those opposed to change. Even as the global community is failing the test of meeting the 1.5°C threshold, we have other resources to bring into the fight, and many of them are embedded in the history and culture of places and how we have addressed our past environmental crises.

source https://time.com/6565044/earth-2-point-0-climate-change/

Families of Hostages Held in Gaza Storm Israel’s Parliament Meeting Demanding Deal for Release

JERUSALEM — Dozens of family members of hostages held by Hamas stormed a committee meeting in Israel’s parliament Monday, demanding a deal to win their loved ones’ release, as European foreign ministers joined growing international calls for Israel to negotiate on the creation of a Palestinian state after the war.

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The developments showed the increasing pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has dug in on both fronts. He has insisted to the Israeli public that pursuing the devastating offensive in Gaza is the only way to bring the hostages home. At the same time, he has rejected the United States’ vision for a postwar resolution, saying he will never allow a Palestinian state.

The dispute over Gaza’s future — as the war rages with no end in sight — pits Israel against its top ally, the United States, as well as much of the international community. It also poses a major obstacle to any plans for postwar governance or reconstruction of the coastal territory, large parts of which have been left unlivable by Israeli bombardment.

In the most direct comments yet from Saudi Arabia, the kingdom’s top diplomat said it will not normalize relations with Israel or contribute to Gaza’s reconstruction without a credible path to a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu has vowed to continue the offensive until “complete victory” over Hamas and to return all remaining hostages after the Oct. 7 rampage in southern Israel that triggered the war. In that attack, some 1,200 people were killed and Hamas and other militants abducted around 250 people.

But more than three months into the war, Israelis are increasingly divided on the question of whether it’s possible to do both.

Around 100 hostages were freed under a weeklong cease-fire deal in November in exchange for the release of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Around 130 remain captive, but a number have since been confirmed dead. Hamas has said it will free more captives only in exchange for an end to the war and the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners. Netanyahu has ruled out such an agreement.

Anger has been growing among hostages’ families. Relatives of hostages, as well as other protesters, have set up a tent camp outside Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem and vowed to remain until a deal is reached to bring the rest of the captives home. Other protests have called for new elections.

On Monday, dozens of family members of the hostages stormed into a gathering of the Knesset’s finance committee, holding up signs and yelling, “You won’t sit here while they are dying there!”

“These are our children!” they shouted. “We can’t continue with any other agenda, we need to discuss only one thing right now!”

Some had to be physically restrained as they shouted at the lawmakers, and at least one person was escorted out. The meeting was briefly suspended but later reconvened.

Over 25,000 killed in Gaza

Israel’s offensive has killed at least 25,295 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than 60,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says around two-thirds of those killed were women and children.

Medics reported heavy fighting in the southern city of Khan Younis, saying dozens of dead and wounded people were brought to the city’s already overwhelmed Nasser Hospital. Families could be seen fleeing south, to areas already packed with hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

The Israeli military says it has killed around 9,000 militants, without providing evidence, and blames the high civilian death toll on Hamas because it positions fighters, tunnels and other militant infrastructure in dense residential areas.

Some 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes, seeking elusive shelter in the south as Israel continues to strike all parts of the besieged enclave. U.N. officials say 1 in 4 people in Gaza are starving as the fighting and Israeli restrictions hinder the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The war has also stoked tensions across the region, with Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen attacking Israeli and U.S. targets.NETANYAHU UNDER MOUNTING PRESSURE

Natanyahu, whose popularity has plummeted since Oct. 7, faces pressure from the U.S. to shift to more precise military operations and do more to facilitate humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The United States is also pushing him on its vision for postwar Gaza, calling for a reformed Palestinian Authority to govern the territory and for negotiations to start on a two-state solution. The authority currently governs pockets of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and was ejected from Gaza in 2007 when Hamas took power.

But Netanyahu’s governing coalition is beholden to far-right parties that want to step up the offensive, encourage the “voluntary” emigration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza and re-establish Jewish settlements there. Netanyahu has rejected the entry of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza and ruled out any Palestinian state, saying it would endanger Israel.

At a meeting about the war Monday in Brussels, European Union foreign ministers added their voices to the calls for a Palestinian state, saying it was the only way to achieve peace.

French Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Sejourne said Netanyahu’s rejection of statehood was “worrying. There will be a need for a Palestinian state with security guarantees for all.”

“Which are the other solutions they have in mind?” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said of Israel. “To make all the Palestinians leave? To kill them off?”

The comments late Sunday by Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, were notable because before the war, the U.S. had been trying to broker a landmark agreement in which Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel. In September, Netanyahu said Israel was on “the cusp” of a deal.

In an interview with CNN, host Fareed Zakaria asked: “Are you saying unequivocally that if there is not a credible and irreversible path to a Palestinian state, there will not be normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel?”

“That’s the only way we’re going to get a benefit,” Prince Faisal replied. “So, yes.”

When asked if oil-rich Saudi Arabia would finance reconstruction in Gaza, he said, “As long as we’re able to find a pathway to a solution … then we can talk about anything.”

“But if we are just resetting to the status quo before Oct. 7, in a way that sets us up for another round of this, as we have seen in the past, we’re not interested in that conversation.”

The Palestinians seek a state that would include Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, territories Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.

Israel views all of Jerusalem as its capital and the West Bank as the historical and biblical heartland of the Jewish people. It has built scores of settlements across both territories that are home to hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers. Peace talks broke down nearly 15 years ago.

source https://time.com/6565067/israelo-hostage-families-storm-parliament/

Will AI Take Your Job? Maybe Not Just Yet, One Study Says

Will artificial intelligence take our jobs? If you listen to Silicon Valley executives talking about the capabilities of today’s cutting edge AI systems, you might think the answer is “yes, and soon.”

But a new paper published by MIT researchers suggests automation in the workforce might happen slower than you think.

The researchers at MIT’s computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory studied not only whether AI was able to perform a task, but also whether it made economic sense for firms to replace humans performing those tasks in the wider context of the labor market.

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They found that while computer vision AI is today capable of automating tasks that account for 1.6% of worker wages in the U.S. economy (excluding agriculture), only 23% of those wages (0.4% of the economy as a whole) would, at today’s costs, be cheaper for firms to automate instead of paying human workers. “Overall, our findings suggest that AI job displacement will be substantial, but also gradual—and therefore there is room for [government] policy and retraining to mitigate unemployment impacts,” the authors write.

Tasks like analyzing images from diagnostic equipment in a hospital, or examining trays to ensure they contain the right items, are given in the paper as examples of the kind of “vision tasks” that today’s AI could feasibly achieve. But tasks like these are often so fragmented, the authors argue, that it is uneconomical to automate them.

“Even though there is some change that is coming, there is also some time to adapt to it,” Neil Thompson, the study’s lead author, tells TIME. “It’s not going to happen so rapidly that everything is thrown into chaos right away.”

Unless it does. The study only focused on computer vision AI—systems that are able to recognize and categorize objects in images and videos—rather than more flexible systems like multimodal large language models, of which OpenAI’s GPT-4 is an example. A recent study from OpenAI estimated that 19% of U.S. workers could see 50% of their workplace tasks “impacted” by GPT-4 level systems—a far higher estimate than the MIT researchers’ study that focuses solely on computer vision. A crucial question for the economy in the age of AI will be whether the MIT study’s findings apply to more “general” AI tools—ones that promise to automate most forms of cognitive labor that can be done behind a computer screen.

The MIT researchers found it can be expensive for companies to “fine tune” computer vision systems to make them suited for a specific, specialized task. While such an investment may make economic sense for the largest companies, it is often not cheaper for a small outfit that could simply retain a trained worker who already performs the task well. This dynamic is a key reason, according to the MIT paper, that not all tasks AI is capable of doing today are also economically viable to replace humans in. (The paper, submitted to the journal Management Science, has not yet been peer-reviewed.)

But it’s unclear whether this dynamic will carry over to language tasks. To “fine tune” a computer vision model to, for example, distinguish specific types of medicine bottle from one another to a 99.9% degree of accuracy, you would need to collect large quantities of labeled images of different medicines, which can be a costly and cumbersome process (even if low-wage workers in impoverished countries were drafted in to do it on the cheap). You would then have to pay the significant computing costs of fine-tuning an AI model on that large store of data.

Read More: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic

On the other hand, fine-tuning a cutting-edge language model to carry out a specific task can simply be a matter of giving it a detailed list of written rules. An OpenAI study from August last year found that GPT-4 was able to effectively carry out the task of content moderation on digital platforms after being fine-tuned using a detailed policy document and just a few labeled examples. Those findings suggest that large language models can be applied to a wide range of economic tasks far more quickly, and cheaply, than computer vision models.  

Fine-tuning for GPT-4 is still in a restricted beta mode, as OpenAI works to mitigate the significant safety challenges this level of customizability can present. But as OpenAI and its competitors begin allowing customers to fine-tune their most advanced models, the economy may begin to see levels of automation, or augmentation, that progress faster than the MIT study predicts.

“It is certainly plausible that customizing large language models may be easier than customizing computer vision systems and that this could lead to more adoption in the economy,” Thompson tells TIME. But, “so long as a small engineering team is needed to integrate the system into the company’s workflow, costs are still restrictive.”

source https://time.com/6565026/ai-job-replacement-mit-study/

An Unexpected Encounter At Davos Inspired My Call to Action For the Israeli Hostages

Something unusual and profound happened in Davos this year. I expected dynamic conversations on artificial intelligence, debates about global politics, and meetings with business and government leaders. True to form, those activities featured prominently during my time at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. However, there was one encounter I did not expect to have: a heart-wrenching discussion with four extraordinarily courageous Israeli women.

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Two of these individuals were themselves hostages in Gaza, the other two have loved ones still being held captive by Hamas. In an arena of power and influence, it was these humble and strong women who imparted upon me the greatest sense of urgency. They spoke as powerfully as any business titan or world leader. And then some.

Noam Peri grew up in Kibbutz Nir-Oz, a small, tight-knit farming village. Her 79-year-old father, an admirer of the arts, a dedicated family man, and a steadfast peace advocate, remains a hostage.

Nili Margalit was taken on October 7. As a nurse, she tended to the wounded among her fellow hostages. What she lacked in medical supplies, she made up for with her compassion. Now free, her heart remains with those who are still in captivity.

Moran Stela Yanai, a jewelry maker, attended the Supernova music festival to sell her wares and enjoy the camaraderie. Hobbling on an injured leg, a physical reminder of her ordeal, she bravely spoke through tears of the treatment she suffered at the hands of her captors.

Rachel Goldberg is the mother of Hersh, a 23-year-old man whose arm was blown off by grenades before he was taken hostage. She wears a homemade tag with the number of days Hersh has been held captive. When we met, that number stood at 103.

These women deserve to be heard. We must heed their call for the release of the hostages. All of us. They must have our active support, and not just for a day, but until all of the captives have been freed. There should be nothing political about this issue. This is about human decency. The hostages are in dire conditions—reports of food shortages, torture, and sexual abuse. As such, every minute counts.

I say this while recognizing the broader spectrum of sorrow and loss in this conflict, including the innocent families in Gaza, caught in the crossfire, who endure their own tragedies. What binds us as people should urge us to look beyond borders and divisions. This is call to action for our common humanity.

It is our moral duty, as global citizens, to take the necessary steps to help the hostages. To start, we can learn more about them. They are real, innocent people facing unspeakable cruelty.

As citizens of the digital generation, we have the opportunity to raise public awareness, calling for the release of all hostages using the hashtag #BringThemHomeNow. We must rally around those elected officials who are advocating to bring the hostages home. By participating in the democratic process—sending an email or calling our senators, representatives, and the White House—we can give a voice to the hostages.

Join Ms. Goldberg, just as I did in Davos, by wearing a piece of tape on your shirt, counting the number of days that the 136 hostages are still not home. As the devoted mom told me, it reminds the world of the inhumanity at play.

As a healthcare leader, I have a responsibility to stress the urgent need for hostages to gain access to medication. International organizations need unfettered access to assess the conditions of the hostages, so that they can receive the necessary care. Supporting the families of hostages, and of course, the hostages themselves, does not end when they are brought home; mental health services must be made available to those in need, for as long as necessary. 

The conditions for a return to calm and stability should be our priority. We owe it to the hostages to hold tightly to the hope that eventual peace, and the end to this cycle of violence, is within reach.

I will sign off with a question: Imagine if it were your loved one being held captive. What would you do?

source https://time.com/6564827/israeli-hostages-call-to-action-davos-encounter/