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A huge meteorite slammed into the southern African country of Namibia during prehistoric times. Now, pieces from that meteorite could be used as a natural catalyst to store energy from renewable sources. Scientists at a technology institute in Switzerland found that the meteorite’s composition is key to its effectiveness as a catalyst. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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In textiles, nothing has the impact of spider silk. These protein strands are stretchy and in some ways as strong as steel but without the weight. Scientists have been making artificial spider silk for years, with varying degree of success. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports some Swedish researchers have found a new way to spin the miracle fiber, and they make it look easy.
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the meeting of finance ministers of the G20 countries was a success Saturday despite the ministers not reaching agreement on trade protectionism.
“I will leave here confident that my colleagues and I are able to work in partnership to …foster and promote global growth and financial stability,” he said.
Citing President Donald Trump’s commitment to American companies and workers, Mnuchin pushed back on and effectively omitted a ban on protectionism from the joint statement released at the end of the summit.
Mnuchin did, however, say that the United States still believed in free trade.
“We believe in free trade, we’re one of the largest markets in the world, we’re one of the largest trading partners in the world,” Mnuchin said. “Having said that, we want to re-examine certain agreements,” he continued, speaking specifically about NAFTA.
Other world powers present played down any disagreement between the countries.
“It’s not true we are not agreed. It’s completely clear we are not for protectionism,” Wolfgang Schaeuble, finance minister of host country Germany, told reporters, though he did, without mentioning a country by name, say that “maybe one or the other important member state needs to get a sense of how international cooperation works.”
The G20 is a informal forum on economic cooperation between 19 countries plus the European Union. Representatives from the 19 countries and the EU will meet for a formal summit in July.
For some medical students, getting a yes or no Friday was more important than finding the right life partner.
Friday was “Match Day,” the annual day when medical students find out which U.S. medical institution has accepted them for a residency program. It is a competition, of sorts: 32,000 training slots are available for 42,000 applicants, according to this year’s data.
A residency, three to five years of practical experience and training in a student’s chosen medical specialty, is the next step after medical school, which in the United States generally means four years of postgraduate university studies.
Of those 42,000 applicants vying for residencies, all but about 6,000 are foreign nationals. And that is where their aspirations could collide with President Donald Trump’s latest executive order regulating immigration to the United States.
‘Extensive upheaval’
The National Residency Match Program (NRMP), a nonprofit group that organizes the matches between students and hospitals, said the new immigration order has had a substantial impact on its program. In its current revised form, the order bans citizens from six Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the U.S., at least temporarily.
“The consequences of the [January 27] executive order are far-reaching for match applicants, and the upheaval it is causing is extensive,” NRMP’s chair, Dr. Maria Savoia, and CEO Mona Signer said in a joint statement.
“The affected applicants have worked hard for many years to achieve their goal of becoming physicians,” the two medical-education experts said, “and they should not be denied that opportunity because of a blanket policy that does not consider the individual.”
U.S. courts have issued a restraining order preventing enforcement of the travel ban, pending further legal arguments, but NRMP says it is concerned that some immigrants or foreign medical students with valid visas will nevertheless be delayed or rejected at U.S. borders.
Holidays at home are not care-free
In addition, foreign medical students who travel to their home countries during holidays or breaks in their university studies fear they may not be able to return in time to take up their new residencies in the U.S. Such medical programs typically begin each year on July 1.
“U.S. training programs should be able to select applicants based on their excellent character and qualifications, without regard to nationality. Both applicants and programs benefit from an orderly process for entry into graduate medical education,” said Signer, who is a public health specialist, and Savoia. “The executive order disrupts that process very considerably.”
Hospitals and other medical institutions that offer residencies worry that foreign students they choose for the multiyear training programs will be unable to begin their studies on schedule, Signer said.
Medical residencies are sometimes known as internships, or first-year post-graduate studies, because they occur during a fledgling doctor’s first year of practical training alongside or under direct supervision of a fully qualified physician in one of 21 recognized medical specialties.
Is US becoming less welcoming?
Those who administer medical residency programs do not directly choose the candidates they would like to attract. Instead they rank applicants in order of preference. Under those conditions, Signer said, “It seems likely that residency program directors will be reluctant to rank J-1 visa applicants because they may not be able to enter the country to begin training.”
The U.S. State Department’s J-1 visa program offers foreign nationals an opportunity to come to the United States “to teach, study, conduct research, demonstrate special skills or receive on-the-job training for periods ranging from a few weeks to several years,” according to Cultural Vistas, a nonprofit American group that has been organizing international exchange programs since 1963.
The perception that the United States is becoming less welcoming to foreign nationals in the medical professions appears to be having an effect.
Fewer non-U.S. citizen “international medical school graduates,” or IMGs, submitted program choices for this year: 7,284 in 2017 vs. 7,460 in 2016. However, NRMP said more of these candidates (52.4 percent) were matched with institutions – the highest match rate since 2005.
Foreign physicians benefit all Americans
About 1,800 IMGs already enrolled in accredited residency and fellowship programs in the U.S. are impacted by the travel ban, according to Dr. Thomas J. Nasca, CEO of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
“These physicians are providing much needed medical care to a conservatively estimated 900,000 patients in urban, suburban and rural communities across the country annually. They are a valued and welcomed group of colleagues,” he wrote in a statement.
“Many communities, including rural and low-income areas, often have problems attracting physicians to meet their health care needs. To address these gaps in care, IMGs often fill these openings. These physicians are licensed by the same stringent requirements applied to U.S. medical school graduates,” the chief executive officer of the American Medical Association, Dr. James Madara, wrote last month.
“The medical education community must support all international medical graduates and their families during these difficult times,” NRMP’s statement said.
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Washington’s National Zoo hired its first animal nutritionist 30 years ago. Since then the zoo has been preparing specific, well-balanced meals for each animal, provided by volunteers and food preparation teams. For Yahya Barzinji, Elizabeth Cherneff reports.
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In a medical emergency, an ambulance with a qualified medical team on board can be a lifesaver. But in Nepal, this service is rare if not nonexistent. To help provide the best possible medical emergency services, a team of doctors from Stanford University in California spent 12 weeks training four dozen medical technicians in Kathmandu. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Each day in the United States hundreds of thousands of yellow-painted buses carry millions of children to schools and back home. Scientists at the University of Maryland are developing algorithms that can help transport students more efficiently. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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In Greece’s grinding economic crisis, a home for abused children is now taking in those whose parents are struggling to feed them.
It is perhaps the darkest sign of economic devastation in Greece, where traditionally strong family ties are starting to crumble after years of depression.
A quarter of Greece’s workforce is unemployed and a quarter of its children live in poverty, according to United Nations figures, forcing parents to depend on grandparents for handouts.
But pensions too have been cut a dozen times.
In Athens, the Model National Nursery, set up a century ago for orphans of war, can hardly keep up with the number of parents turning to it for help. Unable to cover their basic needs, parents leave their children in the home all week.
Iro Zervaki, its head, says at least 40 children are on the waiting list, four times as many as a couple of years ago.
The home sleeps 25 in a bare room with rows of beds draped in blue blankets, and lacks the staff and funds to increase capacity, she said. Most places are for abused children.
Dozens of other children, all aged two to five, come in daily, but the days away from their parents are long.
“We had incidents where children even attempted to leave, to run away, to go to their mother,” Zervaki said.
In the buzzing playground, a little girl tugged the social worker’s blouse and yelled: “Miss! When will I go to my mum?” “They can’t tell the days apart so every day they ask: ‘Is it Friday?'” Anthoula Zarmakoupi, the social worker, said. “They know mum will pick them up at the weekend.”
But sometimes even that was not possible, she said. “We have children whose parents are homeless so it’s very difficult for them to even collect them for the weekend.”
For the home too, brighter days seem as far away as ever.
State funding has been cut and covers just half of the staff’s wages. The home depends on donations for food and clothes, and Zervaki says it is hard to tell if she will be able to make next month’s payments.
“It doesn’t look like tomorrow will be any better,” she said. “It will take some years. I hope not too many.”
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It could be a Hollywood screenplay. Juliana Armelin and her husband Paulo Siqueira decided to radically change their lives in 2010, quitting jobs in Sao Paulo’s financial sector and moving to a farm seven hours away to start growing coffee.
Seven years later, they clinched for a second consecutive year Brazil’s most prestigious coffee award, beating hundreds of established producers in a country that has exported coffee for more than 200 years.
“I would never imagine we could reach this status in such a short period,” Siqueira told Reuters on Friday after the couple received the annual award from Italian roaster Illy.
“I used to say that we don’t have a story on coffee, but only some chapters so far,” said Armelin.
The couple met during college, graduating in engineering from Brazil’s top ranked university, USP. They spent some years together in the United States getting Master of Business Administration degrees at the University of Chicago before starting careers in Sao Paulo.
Armelin is a former Mckinsey & Company consultant, while Siqueira held positions as a fund manager at Credit Suisse and boutique investment firm Vector Investimentos.
They ended up in the coffee business due to Armelin’s father, who decided to start producing the beans.
“I helped him in the research and started to like the idea.
We already had thoughts at running something together,” Armelin said.
After studying the possibility, they bought a 210-hectare (518 acres) farm in the municipality of Ibiá in a coffee-producing region known as the Cerrado Mineiro, in Minas Gerais state.
“It was an old cattle ranch, only pasture,” Siqueira recalled. They planted the first trees in 2011, collected the first beans two years later and had their first full harvest in 2015. Within a year, they received the first award.
The couple’s farm is a state-of-the-art facility. The fields are 100 percent irrigated, with a fully mechanized harvest. The washed arabicas are put to dry in raised beds to avoid contact with the soil, which could affect the flavor.
“We studied a lot, talked to a lot of people who knew how to produce high quality coffee and we did everything they said we should,” said Armelin. “Some people used to say that we were nerds that went to coffee production. And we used to say, ‘yes, we are.'”
The Terra Alta farm was chosen for aspects like the plentiful availability of water and its flat terrain to allow for mechanization.
The couple used as much government-backed credit as they could to buy all the equipment. “We have debt for the rest of our lives,” said Armelin, smiling.
The farm today exports 80 percent of its production, which varies from 10,000 to 13,000 60-kg bags per year. Many deals are done directly with gourmet coffee sellers in the United States.
Siquiera said the coffee community in the Cerrado region has always been very receptive, despite their unusual background.
But the couple stops short of recommending their experience to others.
“Even if you have the money, it really is not easy. Growing coffee requires extreme dedication,” Armelin said, adding that she takes care of the financial details while her husband likes to be out in the fields.
But they have no regrets. “We like this a lot. We will probably be coffee growers for the rest of our lives,” she said.
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Airbnb expects to maintain its rapid growth in Africa this year and double its customer numbers to 1.5 million, its Chief Executive Brian Chesky and regional head told Reuters on Friday.
The number of people using the online room rental service on the continent rose by 143 percent to about 765,000 guests in 2016 from the year before, said Nicola D’Elia, the firm’s Africa and Middle East chief.
“If you just look at 2017, it’s going to double, you will have 1.5 million people at the end of this year,” added D’Elia.
Airbnb CEO Chesky confirmed that the California-based company expected to double African customer numbers this year.
“Certainly that would be the forecast,” he said in an interview in Cape Town, adding: “This is literally just the beginning. It [Africa] is still relatively under-penetrated.”
Chesky said the company had 77,000 homes across Africa – out of its 3 million globally – but that it could easily have “hundreds of thousands” in a continent that’s home to over a billion people.
The 77,000 homes represented an increase of 95 percent from 2015 to 2016, the company said.
South Africa, which was an early adopter of Airbnb, is the top-ranked country in Africa in terms of listings and visitors, who mainly come from the United States, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands.
The top five cities in Africa are Cape Town, Marrakesh, Johannesburg, Nairobi and Casablanca, although listings are found in diverse locations from St Helena island in the south Atlantic Ocean to Freetown in Sierra Leone, and even a smattering in Somalia.
Chesky, who described Africa as “an incredibly exciting emerging market for travel”, was speaking to Reuters in Langa, Cape Town’s oldest township where he put in an appearance to surprise graduates from an Airbnb training program.
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As deaths from painkillers and heroin abuse spiked and street crimes increased, the mayor of Everett took major steps to tackle the opioid epidemic devastating this working-class city north of Seattle.
Mayor Ray Stephanson stepped up patrols, hired social workers to ride with officers and pushed for more permanent housing for chronically homeless people. The city says it has spent millions combating OxyContin and heroin abuse – and expects the tab to rise.
So Everett is suing Purdue Pharma, maker of the opioid pain medication OxyContin, in an unusual case that alleges the drugmaker knowingly allowed pills to be funneled into the black market and the city of about 108,000. Everett alleges the drugmaker did nothing to stop it and must pay for damages caused to the community.
Everett’s lawsuit, now in federal court in Seattle, accuses Purdue Pharma of gross negligence and nuisance. The city seeks to hold the company accountable, the lawsuit alleges, for “supplying OxyContin to obviously suspicious pharmacies and physicians and enabling the illegal diversion of OxyContin into the black market” and into Everett, despite a company program to track suspicious flows.
“Our community has been significantly damaged, and we need to be made whole,” said Stephanson, who grew up in Everett and is its longest-serving mayor, holding the job since 2003.
He said the opioid crisis caused by “Purdue’s drive for profit” has overwhelmed the city’s resources, stretching everyone from first responders to park crews who clean up discarded syringes. The lawsuit doesn’t say how much money the city is seeking, but the mayor says Everett will attempt to quantify its costs in coming months.
Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma says the lawsuit paints a flawed and inaccurate picture of the events that led to the crisis in Everett.
“We look forward to presenting the facts in court,” the company said in a statement.
Purdue said it is “deeply troubled by the abuse and misuse of our medication,” and noted it leads the industry in developing medicines with properties that deter abuse, even though its products account for less than 2 percent of all U.S. opioid prescriptions.
In 2007, Purdue Pharma and its executives paid more than $630 million in legal penalties to the federal government for willfully misrepresenting the drug’s addiction risks. The same year, it also settled with Washington and other states that claimed the company aggressively marketed OxyContin to doctors while downplaying the addiction risk. As part of that settlement, it agreed to continue internal controls to identify potential diversion or abuse.
While numerous individuals and states have sued Purdue, this case is different because Everett is getting at the results of addiction, said Elizabeth Porter, associate law professor at the University of Washington.
She thinks Everett may have a shot at winning, though it will have to overcome some legal burdens, including showing that diverted OxyContin from rogue doctors and pharmacies was a substantial factor in the city’s epidemic.
Stephanson said he was “absolutely outraged” after the Los Angeles Times reported last summer it found Purdue had evidence that pointed to illegal trafficking of its pills but in many cases did nothing to notify authorities or stop the flow. That newspaper investigation prompted the city’s lawsuit.
In response to the newspaper’s reporting, Purdue said in a statement that in 2007, it provided LA-area law enforcement information that helped lead to the convictions of the criminal prescribers and pharmacists referenced by the Los Angeles Times. The company also pointed to court documents that showed a wholesaler alerted the Drug Enforcement Administration about suspicious activity at a sham clinic noted in the newspaper’s story.
Still, Everett contends Purdue created a market for addicts that didn’t exist until the company let its pills flood the streets.
The region saw two spikes in overdose deaths: first from OxyContin and other opioid painkillers in 2008 and then, after the drug was reformulated in 2010, a spike from heroin as people switched to a potent but cheaper alternative, officials said.
The city contends Purdue’s wrongful conduct fueled a heroin crisis in Everett. Between 2011 and 2013, nearly one in five heroin-related deaths in Washington state occurred in the Everett region.
In response to the drug epidemic, Everett last year began sending social workers on routine patrols with police officers. Sgt. Mike Braley says the community outreach and enforcement team strikes a balance between enforcement and connecting people to addiction treatment, mental health and other services.
“We understand that we can’t arrest our way out of problems that addiction is causing our city,” Braley said.
Sometimes it takes many follow-ups and hours of handholding to get people help. On their first stop one morning, Braley and his team check under a street overpass, a popular hangout for addicts. They find plenty of needles, drug packaging and mounds of garbage but none of the people they had encountered there recently.
They swing by a woody vacant piece of city property to follow up with a homeless man who told social workers he was on a housing list. He previously was reluctant to talk but opens up this time.
Social worker Kaitlyn Dowd offers to check on the man’s housing status with a local nonprofit provider and then punches her number into a cellphone he recently got.
“You can call me, and I have your number,” she tells him.
Social worker Staci McCole said they come across many cases where highly functioning residents were introduced to opiates or heroin.
“So many of these people – somehow it’s taken a hold of them, and their lives now have forever changed,” she said.
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday it had awarded $100 million to upgrade Flint, Michigan’s drinking water infrastructure to address a crisis that exposed thousands of children to lead poisoning.
The grant to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality will enable the city to “accelerate and expand” its work to replace lead pipes and make other improvements, according to the EPA. Estimates of the upgrade’s cost range from $200 million to $400 million.
Friday’s announcement made the disbursement official. Last year, Congress passed and former president Barack Obama signed the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act to allocate $100 million to aid Flint.
$31.5 million to be paid immediately
The EPA’s state revolving funds, which Congress can allocate to help with cleanup efforts, were one of the few programs that the Trump administration did not slash in its proposed budget for the agency.
“Flint’s water infrastructure as part of our larger goal of improving America’s water infrastructure,” said a statement from agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.
The EPA will make $31.5 million immediately available for lead pipe replacements and upgrades, and Michigan will provide a $20 million required match.
The remaining $68.5 million will come after the city and Michigan complete additional public comment and technical reviews.
“Today we have good news for families in Flint who have already waited far too long for their water system to be fixed,” said a statement from U.S. Senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, and Congressman Dan Kildee, all Michigan Democrats.
Flint mayor meets Trump
Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, also a Democrat, said the funds would help the city reach its goal of replacing 6,000 pipes this year. She met briefly with President Donald Trump on Wednesday.
In January, 1,700 Flint residents filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Michigan, saying the EPA failed to warn them of the dangers of the toxic water or take steps to ensure that state and local authorities were addressing the crisis. The plaintiffs seek $722 million in damages.
Midwestern politicians are worried about the elimination in the proposed U.S. budget of funding for an effort to clean up the Great Lakes, from which some states draw their drinking water.
Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager when it switched its water source to the Flint River from Lake Huron in April 2014. The more corrosive river water caused lead to leach from pipes and into the drinking water.
The city returned to its original water source in October 2015.
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Zander Dejah, 25, pays $1,900 a month rent to live in a downtown San Francisco house with at least 40 other people, many of whom sleep in bunk beds.
Dejah is a resident of The Negev, a communal living space that styles itself as a home for millennial tech workers to brainstorm ideas, write code and create apps, even if they have to share toilets and bathrooms with dozens of others.
Houses like The Negev, located in a neighborhood known as “SoMa” or South of Market, have cropped up around San Francisco as an influx of young professionals, many of whom are tech workers, have faced the city’s notoriously high rents and apartment shortages. It has three floors and roughly 50 rooms, filled with bunk beds, beer bottles and laptops, according to residents.
Dejah, born and raised in New York, graduated last year with a degree in computer science and math from McGill University.
Unemployed, he moved to California six months ago and found his room at The Negev on Craigslist.
“I thought New York was expensive,” said Dejah, who quickly landed a job as a virtual reality engineer at consulting firm moBack. “It’s basically an extension of college. We sort of live in a frat house.”
The home is certainly filled with parties on weekends, but the residents make sure to sit down every Sunday for a communal dinner, akin to a traditional family gathering.
While some say communal housing provides a solution for many first-time workers fresh out of college, such housing also has created its share of controversy. Housing advocates have complained that this new dorm-like style of living has pushed up rents and forced longtime residents to move out.
Alon Gutman, who co-founded a company called The Negev and began leasing the building on Sixth Street in 2014, said, “We have never made somebody move out of that building,” adding that his tenants pay 30 percent to 50 percent less than others in the neighborhood.
“We are trying to solve the housing crisis and increase density in a positive way.”
The Negev company runs nine communal properties, three of which are in San Francisco. The others are in Austin, Texas, and Oakland, California.
The Negev properties, generally in run-down, low-income neighborhoods, are restructured to accommodate a large number of tenants, Gutman explained.
Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco, said housing problems have arisen because occupants leave buildings being converted to communal homes and cannot afford to move back in or the space is no longer suitable for them.
“The Negev house takes affordable housing and makes it unaffordable,” said Sherburn-Zimmer. “All they’ve done is take away housing from people who had it and loved it and pushed them out to make a quick buck.”
Kumar Srikantappa, 31, who also pays $1,900 a month for a single room at The Negev, said he chose the house because of the social experience. After eight months there, the software engineer for Oracle Corp said he would soon be ready to live elsewhere.
“I met a bunch of friends, and I just want to move on to another location and into a bigger place,” he said. “It’s time.”
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Malawi has started registering new cases of cholera in areas bordering Mozambique, one week after the government in Malawi warned of a cholera outbreak in the neighboring country.
The disease — an acute diarrheal infection caused by eating food or drinking water contaminated with a bacterium — affects children and adults, and can kill within hours if left untreated.
Malawi last registered cholera cases in 2015, but now health authorities in Malawi say they have found new cases at a health center in Nsanje district bordering Mozambique.
“So far we have 11 suspected cases, all in Ndamera health center,” said Alexander Juwa, the district health officer in Nsanje. “Here we did what we call a Rapid Diagnostic Testing, and it came out positive. We have set up a treatment unit there, and nobody has died.”
Juwa said they haven’t confirmed whether the outbreak is a spillover from Mozambique, because none of the cholera patients had contact with anyone from there.
“When we did a follow-up of the cases, it appears communities have clean water supplies,” Juwa said, “but probably we are suspecting issues to do with food preparation and food handling that might have caused the problem.”
Media reports in Mozambique say cholera has infected more than 1,200 people, killing two this month.
The outbreak is believed to have been triggered by Tropical Cyclone Dineo, which hit the country last month.
In Zimbabwe, the health ministry says it has detected three suspected cases of cholera in Chipinge district, which borders Mozambique.
“The area where the cases have been reported is adjacent to the border, where there is an influx of people coming from Mozambique,” said Aldrin Musiiwa, the deputy minister of health. “There are cases of cholera which have been reported in the adjacent Manica province of Mozambique.”
Meanwhile, the governments of Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe are urging people to practice safe hygiene to prevent further spread of the disease.
Sebastian Mhofu contributed to this report from Harare.
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Thousands of HIV-negative Kenyans will for the first time be placed on daily antiretroviral medication, or ARVs, in a bid to avert new infections.
The new program seeks to lower the country’s HIV transmission rate to individuals who face a substantial risk of contracting HIV, such as rape victims and HIV-negative drug users.
The head of the National AIDS and STI Control Program (NASCOP), Martin Sirengo, said the measure will be rolled out in April and will involve the use of Pre-exposure Prophylaxis, or PrEP.
“We are introducing PrEP to a selected population, not to everyone, and this selected population includes, for instance, HIV-negative partners in a discordant relationship, where the other partner is positive,” Sirengo said. “Anyone who comes and gives a history of repeated sexually transmitted infections, anyone who comes for repeated PrEP medication, that tells us they are at risk of getting HIV,” will be eligible, he said. “We are also recommending PrEP to anyone who has multiple sexual partners.”
Drugs are very effective
If taken daily, the drugs have a success rate of preventing HIV infection of more than 96 percent, according to pilot studies conducted in Kenya by NASCOP and the Partners Prevention Program between 2013 and 2016.
“Only four out of the over 1,500 [tested] got infected [with] HIV, which means prep is highly effective to the tune of over 96 percent or more,” Sirengo said. “And, when we look at the four that got positive, we actually realized they were not adhering to the treatment.”
Kenya becomes the second country in Africa, after South Africa, to roll out PrEP. However, it is widely used in developed countries.
Some aren’t so sure
Some are still skeptical about the drug.
Esther Atieno is a commercial sex worker. She says she prefers to use alternative methods.
“I don’t think many people will use it,” Atieno said. “There is no one who likes to take medication every day. The condom is the best protective method because it is not something you use every day like the daily pill.”
Drugs free in public facilities
Sirengo agrees that users should combine PrEP with other preventive interventions, like use of condoms and male circumcision to further reduce the risk of acquiring HIV.
The cost of the treatment is between $500 to $800 a person per year, but it is expected NGOs and other partners will subsidize the treatment.
The drugs will be free in all public facilities, but those who seek treatment in private health facilities will have to purchase the drugs for $60-$100 per annual treatment.
Sirengo says trained health workers will assess who qualifies for this treatment.
It is anticipated that the drug will avert many new infections in Kenya, reported to have the fourth-highest HIV infection in the world. An estimated 1.5 million Kenyans are said to be living with the virus.
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Australian scientists, working with counterparts in Myanmar, are hoping to reduce Myanmar’s high death toll from snake bites in rural communities, especially among vulnerable populations facing inadequate emergency care.
The official toll from snake bites in Myanmar is 600 deaths a year out of some 13,000 cases among a rural population dependent on rice harvesting for a living. But rice paddy fields and rice stacks lure rats and mice, and in turn draw snakes, the most venomous being the Russell’s vipers and cobras.
But the hopes for survival are often challenged by long distances from emergency care, with poor roads and infrastructure between snake bite victims and life-saving medical treatment.
Chen Au Peh, a renal specialist at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in South Australia, said speedy access to emergency medical treatment is crucial.
“So all these factors accumulate to a long delay between bite and administration of an anti-venom. So to help them, we have to help them produce more anti-venom, to get the anti-venom to where it’s required to help them keep the anti-venom in the refrigerator and to help the health professionals,” Peh said.
Lifestock also affected
The project has also involved ensuring higher survival rates of horses used in the production of the anti-venom after being injected with snake venom. High mortality rates were evident among the horses due to anemia, nutritional problems and veterinary practices. Changes in practice included learning the skills developed by Myanmar horse handlers.
“In the last 10 months the average horse mortality is something like six or seven per month – compared to 50 per month – and this is very good news not only for horses but for human patients who may need the anti-venom. The more horses that survive the month, the more vials of anti-venom you can produce,” Peh said.
As a result, production of anti-venom has risen sharply to 100,000 vials from 60,000 vials.
The team’s work, part of a $1.77 million effort begun in 2014 with support from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and working with Myanmar’s Ministries of Industry and Health, is focused on the northern city of Mandalay, a region that faces an estimated 700 to 800 snake bite victims each year.
The Australian team, which includes Afzal Mahmood, a senior lecturer in public health at the University of Adelaide and Julian White, a world renowned toxicologist from the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide, is working with specialists in Myanmar and local partners on guidelines, protocols and standard operating procedures for the health sector.
Real numbers higher
Mahmood said a recent survey indicated the rate of snake bites was considerably higher than official figures.
“It is not a new phenomenon, it happens because many people do not reach the health system where recording takes place. Some people get treated by the traditional healers; some may die without actually reaching the health system and some may suffer and get healed,” Mahmood told VOA.
But he said the program has succeeded in boosting the skills among the local medical and non-medical community.
“We have produced revised guidelines for the doctors [and] some diagnostic tests, and the training of some 200 health care providers,” he said.
The work has reached about 150 villages with local community meetings targeting around 7,000 people to promote awareness of snake bite treatments.
The goal, the scientists said, is to shorten the time to treatment by providing solar powered refrigerators near to local communities with supplies of anti-venom.
Mahmood says the challenges go beyond the initial treatment.
“Psychological issues post-bite [affect] not only the person but the family themselves suffer. It’s a very life-changing experience,” he said.
Victims of snake bites are among Myanmar’s poorest. They often face long periods of hospitalization, leaving families facing high medical bills, often equivalent to several months of real earnings as they struggle to meet hospital and transport expenses, even those receiving subsidies.
To ensure the project is sustainable, its goal is to provide a model that can be applied elsewhere in Myanmar.
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Foreign tourism to the United States, which supports millions of American jobs, is slowing, possibly because President Donald Trump sought controversial travel restrictions on some Muslim-majority nations. Online searches for flights to the United States are down in most major nations, not just those hit by restrictions. Jim Randle reports some travel experts say the push to restrict immigration is making some foreign tourists and students wary of visiting.
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What’s the largest organ in the human body? It’s skin, of course. Ask any doctor about its role in protecting what’s inside us from all kinds of trouble. That’s why it’s such a big deal that university scientists in Spain have learned how to manufacture what they say is fully functional human skin with a 3-D printer. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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What’s the largest organ in the human body? It’s skin, of course. Ask any doctor about its role in protecting what’s inside us from all kinds of trouble. That’s why it’s such a big deal that university scientists in Spain have learned how to manufacture what they say is fully functional human skin with a 3D printer. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Carmakers and suppliers gave widely differing timelines Thursday for the introduction of self-driving vehicles, showing the uncertainties surrounding the technology as well as a split between cautious established players and bullish new entrants.
Chipmaker Nvidia, facing direct competition with the world’s top chipmaker after Intel’s $15 billion deal to buy Mobileye, an autonomous driving technology firm, this week, gave the most optimistic predictions.
Chief Executive Jens-Hsun Huang said carmakers may speed up their plans in the light of technological advances and that fully self-driving cars could be on the road by 2025.
“Because of deep learning, because of AI [artificial intelligence] computing, we’ve really supercharged our roadmap to autonomous vehicles,” he said in a keynote speech to the Bosch Connected World conference in Berlin.
Germany’s Bosch, however, the world’s biggest automotive supplier, gave a timetable as much as six years longer to get to the final stage before fully autonomous vehicles, and declined even to forecast when a totally self-driving car might take to the streets.
Technology, liability among hurdles
Progress is fraught by issues including who is liable when a self-driving car has an accident, bringing down the costs of sensor technology and guarding against hacking.
“Of course, we still have to prove that an autonomous car does better in driving and has less accidents than a human being,” Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner told a news conference.
Nvidia has applied its market-leading expertise in high-end computer graphics to the intense visualization and simulation needs of autonomous cars, and has been working on artificial intelligence — teaching computers to learn to write their own software code — for a decade.
“No human could write enough code to capture the vast diversity and complexity that we do so easily, called driving,” Huang said.
Together with Bosch executives, Huang presented a prototype AI on-board computer that is expected to go into production by the beginning of the next decade. The computer will use Nvidia’s processing power to interpret data gathered by Bosch sensors.
Degrees of autonomy
On the way to fully self-driving cars, levels of autonomy have been defined, with most cars on the road today at level two, and Tesla ready to switch from level four to five — full autonomy — as soon as it is permitted.
Level three means drivers can turn away in well-understood environments, such as highway driving, but must be ready to take back control, while level four means the automated system can control the vehicle in most environments.
Independent technology analyst Richard Windsor wrote this week that he doubted automakers would have autonomous vehicles leaving factories by a typical self-imposed deadline of 2020, mainly because the liability issue was unresolved.
“This is good news for the automotive industry, which is notoriously slow to adapt to and implement new technology as it will have more time to defend its position against the new entrants,” he wrote.
But Nvidia’s Huang said he expected to have chips available for level three automated driving by the end of this year and in customers’ cars on the road by the end of 2018, with level four chips following the same pattern a year later.
That is at least a year ahead of the plans of most carmakers that have an autonomous-driving strategy.
BMW says market will decide
The head of autonomous driving at BMW told the conference the luxury carmaker was on its way to deliver a level three autonomous car in 2021, but could produce level four or five autonomous cars in the same year.
“We believe we have the chance to make level three, level four and level five doable,” he said. He told Reuters the decision on which levels to release would depend in part on the market, and that cars with more autonomy might first be produced in small batches for single fleets.
Bosch said it saw level three vehicles being released with its on-board computer at the end of the decade, and level four driving not before 2025.
Uber, Baidu and Google spin-off Waymo are testing self-driving taxis, while carmakers including Volvo, Audi and Ford expect to have level four cars on the road by 2020 or 2021.
Nvidia’s Huang predicted those plans would speed up: “In the near future, you’re going to see these schedules pull in.”
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Each year, aspiring tech entrepreneurs from all over the world head to the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, to prove their worth. VOA reporter Tina Trinh met with the latest wave of tech disrupters to learn what it takes to stand apart from the competition.
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With uncertainty over economic policy direction in the United States, Southeast Asian economies appear less reliant on U.S. monetary decisions, with analysts saying China’s influence is likely to keep growing in the region.
On Thursday, a sign of the region’s greater financial independence came as most regional markets failed to follow a .25 basis point rise in interests rates set by the U.S. Federal Reserve. But China, Hong Kong and Singapore did raise interest rates.
London based analysts at Capital Economics said for most emerging economies in Asia, local factors rather than the actions of the U.S. central bank will determine interest rate policy.
Beijing’s growing influence has come as Asian economies have stepped up trade with China, whose growing presence was highlighted after the U.S. withdrawal earlier this year by U.S. President Donald Trump from the 12 nation Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).
The TPP had been a key policy platform under former President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia to extend U.S. influence in the region.
Thai economist Somphob Manarangsan said China’s One Belt One Road’ policy to boost links with China’s growing economy will increase the momentum of regional economic integration.
“From now on China may move more actively to this region [Southeast Asia]. China is the real sector based economy [of manufacturing] as you know, so they have to have greater integration of the supply chain and value chain, and it can replace the greater uncertainty of the U.S. market,” Somphob told VOA.
Growing regional influence
As China’s economy becomes more influential economically in the region, the country’s social and political influence will also increase, he said.
Uncertainty over U.S. economic policy towards the Asia region, and especially in trade, followed election campaign comments by President Trump, to adopt a tougher stance on trade with China, accusing Beijing of acting as a “currency manipulator.”
Somphob said protectionist U.S. economic policy would result in countries in Asia facing a “tough struggle” with any major fallout in bilateral relations with China having a significant impact across the region.
“It will be relatively serious. As we know that China is one of the major regional supply [chains]. So that means that directly or indirectly it’s going to affect the ASEAN economy considerably,” he said, with the impact also on Japan and South Korea.
Southeast Asia’s trade ties with China have been growing over the past decade, especially intermediate goods to China that are then exported to major international markets, such as the U.S.
In a commentary, Asian Development Bank (ADB) senior economist, Cyn-Young Park, says the growth of emerging East Asian economies’ has been “underpinned by dynamic growth in China.”
Regional impact
A shift in the U.S. market’s role has been evident as Southeast Asia’s exports to the U.S. have fallen from 50 percent of total exports in the 1990s to around less than 29 percent today.
But Park also warned any global shock would have a major impact on the region’s economies.
“Emerging East Asia has become more, not less, integrated with the global economy and as a result the impact of a global shock, whether related to trade or financial markets, has become greater,” he said.
Pavida Pananond, a professor of business studies at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, said steady economic growth over recent decades has strengthened economies due to a growing middle class.
“And that’s why the shifting focus of the regional integration in Asia, or its regional focus, is not solely because of the Trump policies but it is the changing dynamics in the economic power that has been taking place over a few decades,” Pavida said.
“The rising power of the consumer in Asia is becoming more important. China is growing. China is now the major trade and investment destination to and from ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations],” she said.
Protectionism gaining ground
The World Bank, in a report, warned the region’s economies of “heightened policy uncertainty in advanced economies,” especially Europe and the U.S. amid growing support for trade protection.
“Rising political opposition to trade has contributed to a post [2008] crisis high in new trade restrictions in the past year,” the Bank said.
“The imposition of trade barriers by major trading partners would disproportionately affect the relatively more open economies of East Asia and Pacific,” it said.
The bank added that a “faster than expected slowdown in China would have sizable regional spillovers.”
But Capital Economics analysts say the U.S. administration appears less confrontational on the issue of trade relations with China than feared.
“The threat to label China a currency manipulator on [President Trump’s] first day in office failed to materialize, talk of an across the broad tariffs have been dropped, while growing question marks over a proposed border-adjusted corporate tax,” Capital Economics’ Gareth Leather said.
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Under the Trump administration, there will likely be challenges for the U.S. tech industry when it comes to attracting foreign talent.
But it’s never been a better time to start a company, said Dave McClure, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
“The general trend for start-ups under Trump or anyone else is still fantastic,” according to McClure, who was interviewed on stage this week at South by Southwest, the tech, music, gaming and film conference and festival in Austin, Texas.
McClure is a founding partner of 500 Startups, a global venture capital seed fund firm. Since its inception in 2010, the firm has invested in more than 1,500 technology companies in more than 60 countries.
It also takes investors, start-up founders and Silicon Valley executives on several tours each year – dubbed “Geeks on a Plane” – to burgeoning high-growth technology markets. Its next trip will be later this month to four cities in Africa — Lagos, Nigeria; Accra, Ghana; Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa.
Some aspects of 500 Startups’ work have become more uncertain since President Donald Trump took office, such as whether the firm can bring foreign entrepreneurs to the United States, as it does for its four-month seed program, McClure said. The United States is “shooting ourselves in the head by limiting immigration,” he said.
But when McClure looks out across the world, he sees entrepreneurship as a global phenomenon not relegated just to U.S. tech industry hubs or even hot spots such as China and Western Europe.
One sign of whether a region has the potential to take off is whether there are large investors beyond those offering an entrepreneur initial funding. Another sign is whether there have been successful “exits,” which can be when a company is bought by a larger firm or has a successful public offering.
Some countries might tout their number of entrepreneurs or point to high tech industrial parks as signs of a growing innovation ecosystem. But McClure looks at another measurement – the number of venture capitalists per capita. The United States and China have the most venture capitalist per capita, he said, whereas countries such as Brazil and Mexico have just a handful.
But as the U.S. government helped plant the seeds of Silicon Valley, foreign governments can step in and help a region’s start-up culture take root, he said.“Get that cycle going,” he said. “And that’s what gets the cycle going in other parts of the world.”
As for people interested in investing globally, by all means, write the checks, he said. The key is patience.
“If you are going to do international investing, you have to do it for the long haul,” McClure said. “You need to wait three to five years before it takes off.”
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Africa’s rising youth population is outpacing available jobs in the public and private sectors, leaving would-be workers vulnerable to exploitation, terrorism and human rights abuses. Nigerian entrepreneur Tony Elumelu believes the solution to Africa’s unemployment problem is for the private sector to lead and drive growth, a philosophy he calls “africapitalism”. He was on a two-day working visit to Ghana.
The president of Coca-Cola, Central, East and West Africa, Kelvin Balogun, says almost 50 percent of graduates churned out by universities in Africa each year do not find jobs.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates the youth unemployment rate in sub-Saharan Africa is nearly 12 percent. A World Bank report in 2016 said nearly half, (48 percent) of Ghanaian youth are unemployed. Analysts blame the country’s poor macroeconomic performance and a surge in population growth for the problem.
African leaders have committed to reduce poverty in the continent to below 20 percent by 2030, but the entrepreneur Tony Elumelu said this cannot be achieved if entrepreneurs are not empowered.
Elumelu believes the solution to unemployment is his ‘africapitalism’ philosophy- a concept in which the private sector leads and transforms development in Africa.
Elumelu says African entrepreneurs must partner to create more jobs for its youth. VOA caught up with him after he gave a lecture to students at the University of Ghana.
“Partnerships don’t work well in Africa and we must address this because collective effort is better than singular effort,” said Elumelu. “From my experience I think trust is very important. So alignment of interest is key panacea for addressing partnership failures in Africa.
VOA: And africapitalism is the solution?
Elumelu: “Africapitalism is the solution because (of) Africans coming together from (the) private sector perspective to address the development of our continent. Africans realizing that (there is) no one but us to develop Africa. Africans realizing that saving our monies abroad is not the solution. We need to let our governments know that what is good for private sector is good for the society.”
In Accra, John Amoah Kusi, enrolled in a master’s degree program in business at the University of Ghana, hoping to be more employable. But if a job doesn’t come his way Kusi says he’ll go back to school again.
“One other option is trying to look for PhD programs outside Ghana or probably in Ghana,” said Kusi. “It’s not just about the jobs. Yes, I want to get the experience but . . .
VOA: So if the job doesn’t come you’ll further your education?
Kusi: “Sure.”
VOA: And you’re certain that with the PhD you’ll get a job?
Kusi: “That’s a high possibility.”
Parry Allotey, a freshman at the University of Ghana, is also worried about not finding a job after graduating.
“I feel very worried because being unemployed is not a good thing,” said Allotey. “So I think going for leadership roles or you can go for internship or your masters. Like doing something that would make you look solid (for work).”
In Ghana, the unemployment problem was worsened by four years of interrupted electricity supply, which resulted in the loss of thousands of existing jobs and closure of many businesses.
