The planet has a bit of a waste problem. Every year, at least 200 million tons of raw sewage goes untreated. This is an environmental and health crisis. But one enterprising startup in Kenya is turning all that waste into fuel. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Day: August 10, 2017
Many indigenous populations suffer from high rates of viral hepatitis, and are 2 to 5 times as likely as the surrounding general population to contract it. But efforts to eliminate the diseases have begun to show promise, some researchers say.
Globally, 71 million people have hepatitis C and 257 million have hepatitis B. The viruses cause inflammation of the liver and can lead to cirrhosis and, especially with hepatitis C, liver cancer.
Most cases come from contact with infected blood, drug use, tattoos with unclean needles, or sexual transmission. Before the screening of blood in 1992, blood transfusions were a frequent source. The infection also can pass from a mother to her newborn child.
At the World Indigenous People’s Conference on Viral Hepatitis this week in Anchorage, Alaska, scientists reported on the problem and the efforts to solve it, including one of the first efforts to eliminate hepatitis C from a population.
Reasons for high rates of infection
Homie Razavi and Devin Razavi-Shearer, epidemiologists from the Polaris Observatory, examined why infection rates were so high among indigenous communities. In Canada, hepatitis B rates were five times higher than the general population, and hepatitis C, three times higher. In Australia, indigenous people were four times as likely to contract hepatitis B and three times as likely to contract hepatitis C.
The researchers said the rates were likely because to “disproportionately high rates of poverty, injection drug use, and incarceration in indigenous populations. This, in combination with the lack of access to health care and prevention measures, greatly increases the risk and thus prevalence of hepatitis C.”
But great progress is being made. In the 1980s, vaccination programs began to cut infection rates of hepatitis B.
Dr. Brian McMahon, director of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, told the conference that new surveys have shown that the disease has been virtually eliminated in young indigenous people in Alaska.
Eliminating infection
Jorge Mera, director of infectious diseases for Cherokee Nation Health Services in Oklahoma, reported on an effort there to eliminate hepatitis C.
“Of the people we think have hepatitis C in the community, we’ve treated one-third of them,” he told VOA, “and that’s pretty good for a program that we started two years ago.”
That program is the first effort in the United States, and one of the first in the world, to attempt to wipe out the virus. Treatments for hepatitis C have improved dramatically over the past decade, making these efforts possible.
Mera said there are many programs around the world in the planning stages, and he pointed to a number of things those programs can learn from the Cherokee Nation’s effort.
“Most of the patients that we’re detecting positive are coming in through the urgent care and emergency department,” he said, “so if you have limited resources, these are areas that I would focus on.”
Health officials in the Cherokee Nation are screening everyone between the ages of 20 and 69. This effort includes screening people during dental appointments.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended screening older adults, but Mera said there were high rates of hepatitis infection in people in their 20s and 30s. He suggested that others setting up elimination programs first determine the prevalence of infection in their respective communities before deciding whom to screen.
He said history has led to high rates of hepatitis in indigenous populations.
“When you have a population that has been oppressed or traumatized for centuries due to the nature of how the Western colonization process developed, those are factors that may lead substantial portions of that population to seek some relief in nonconventional ways like intravenous drug use,” Mera said.
Preventing transmission is crucial to eliminating hepatitis C, Mera said. One way to combat transmission, he said, is to legalize and expand needle exchanges and opiate-substitution programs.
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Facebook on Wednesday made its biggest move to date to compete in the television market by expanding its video offerings with programming ranging from professional women’s basketball to a safari show and a parenting program.
The redesigned product, called “Watch,” will be available initially to a limited group in the United States on Facebook’s mobile app, website and television apps, the company said.
The world’s largest social network added a video tab last year, and it has been dropping hints for months that it wanted to become a source of original and well-produced videos, rather than just shows made by users.
Reuters reported in May that Facebook had signed deals with millennial-focused news and entertainment creators Vox Media, BuzzFeed, ATTN, Group Nine Media and others to produce shows, both scripted and unscripted.
Daniel Danker, Facebook’s product director, said in a statement Wednesday: “We’ve learned that people like the serendipity of discovering videos in News Feed, but they also want a dedicated place they can go to watch videos.”
Facebook said the shows would include videos of the Women’s National Basketball Association, a parenting show from Time Inc and a safari show from National Geographic. Facebook is broadcasting some Major League Baseball games and that would continue, the company said.
Eventually, the platform would be open to any show creator as a place to distribute video, the company said.
The company, based in Menlo Park, California, faces a crowded market with not only traditional television networks but newer producers such as Netflix and Alphabet’s YouTube as well as Twitter and Snap.
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China and Malaysia broke ground on Wednesday on a $13 billion rail project linking peninsular Malaysia’s east and west, the largest such project in the country and a major part of Beijing’s Belt and Road infrastructure push.
The planned 688-km (430-mile) East Coast Rail Link will connect the South China Sea, large parts of which are claimed by China, at the Thai border in the east with the strategic shipping routes of the Straits of Malacca in the west.
It is among the most prominent projects in China’s controversial Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to build a modern-day “Silk Road” connecting the world’s second-largest economy by land corridors to Southeast Asia, Pakistan and Central Asia and maritime routes opening up trade with the Middle East and Europe.
“The ECRL is indeed yet another ‘game changer’ and a ‘mindset changer’ for Malaysia as it will significantly cut travel time to and from the east coast of the peninsula,” Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said at the ceremony halfway along the route in Kuantan, which faces the South China Sea.
For China, the project is another expansion of its soft power in Malaysia, which also lays claim to some disputed South China Sea islands, and is critical for China’s geopolitical and strategic interests.
“The China government has attached great importance to the China-Malaysia relations and has always considered Malaysia a dear neighbor and trustworthy partner who is committed to seeking mutually beneficial cooperation and common development in the country,” Chinese State Councillor Wang Yong said at the ceremony, heading up a 100-strong delegation in Kuantan.
Najib said the project would be financed with an 85 percent loan from China Exim Bank and the balance through a “sukuk” Islamic bond program managed by local investment banks.
The project is being built by China Communications Construction Co. Ltd.
Beijing has repeatedly come to the rescue of Najib over the last year, as he sought foreign investment that would help him pay off a massive debt piled up by scandal-plagued state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).
Najib has announced a spree of infrastructure projects in the last few months, many funded by China, as he builds up momentum for a general election that he has to call by mid-2018.
A Nomura research report last month said foreign direct investment inflows from China into Malaysia surged by 119 percent in 2016 and continued to grow at 64 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2017.
The growing closeness to China has raised eyebrows among Najib’s opponents who have argued that the country has become too reliant on Chinese funds.
But Najib dismissed the concerns in a speech on Tuesday, saying turning away from Chinese FDI made “no economic sense.”
There have been protests in Sri Lanka and Thailand over the Belt and Road initiative. A planned rail link through Thailand hit some resistance with what critics said were Beijing’s excessive demands and unfavorable financing.
But Thailand’s cabinet last month approved construction of the first phase of a $5.5 billion railway project to link the industrial eastern seaboard with southern China through landlocked Laos.
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The extreme volatility of Venezuela’s exchange rate has the crisis-hit country’s shop owners hurriedly marking up their merchandise and consumers balking at the higher price tags.
Just last week, the bolivar currency fell around 70 percent on the black market, according to DolarToday, the opaque U.S.-based website that dictates the black market rate.
Although the currency roared back this week to around 10,387 bolivars to the U.S. dollar, prices for often imported products have already been adjusted, heaping more hardship on Venezuelans who often earn only a handful of dollars per month.
“How is it possible that I bought rice a few days ago at 8,000 bolivars, which was already expensive, and now it’s at 17,000,” said housewife Senovia Gonzalez, 64, standing in a line to buy food in the Paraguana Peninsula that juts out into the Caribbean.
The monthly minimum wage in Venezuela is 97,531 bolívars, or not even $1 per day on the parallel exchange rate, making it the lowest in Latin America despite President Nicolas Maduro’s frequent increases. To that is added a 153,000-bolivar food ticket.
His unpopular socialist government has dispatched inspectors to try to contain the price hikes with fines, but that strategy has been largely ineffective in the midst of an economic crisis with triple-digit inflation, recession, and food and medicine shortages.
“If we do not adjust prices, we have to close, fire employees, work for someone else or leave the country,” said Victor Moreno, a seller of home appliances at a mall in Paraguana.
The opposition-controlled parliament said Wednesday that inflation in the first seven months of the year was 248.6 percent. The Central Bank has not published official figures for almost two years, when numbers began to worsen.
Many Venezuelans are horrified at the weakening bolivar, which has lost well over 99 percent of its value in the last three years. Social media users promoted the hashtag #worktoeat this week.
‘Speculators’ threatened with jail
Maduro blames an “economic war” waged by U.S.-backed coup plotters seeking to bring him down. He has threatened to jail “speculators” who raise prices.
Critics say decade-old currency controls and excessive money printing contribute to inflation and a weakening exchange rate.
But with the government increasingly short of dollars to supply the currency control system, more imports are obtained using the black market rate.
In the first half of the year, about 25 percent of all imports were made by private companies using the black market, according to local consultancy Ecoanalitica.
That means Venezuelan prices are even more sensitive to changes on the black market.
“Prices are reacting with aggressive speed,” said the head of Ecoanalitica, Asdrubal Oliveros.
“Not only shop owners, but all the economic actors in the country see that although the rate has strengthened again, it is not sustainable in the long term and in a month will weaken again,” he added.
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