female_factor
CRISPR: Can gene-editing help nature cope with climate change?
The new technology may have missed out on this year's Nobel prize, but its potential to shape the planet is growing by the day.
By India Bourke
Follow @@india_bourke
PRINT HTML
Could an ingenious new technology save humanity from its greatest act of planetary self-harm? It may sound like something out of a science-fiction script. But as a new gene editing technology called CRISPR-Cas9 takes rapid steps toward clinical testing in humans, some are asking if it can also help the world cope with a warming climate.
The CRISPR technique has revolutionised scientists' ability to manipulate DNA. Mice with muscular dystrophy have already been healed by the process. A trial in China plans to use it to treat sexually transmitted human papilloma virus (which can in some cases lead to cervical cancer). Designer babies, a cure for cancer and an answer to antibiotic resistance are all possible future outcomes, scientists say. But there is another possible future use - it could bring extinct animals back from the dead.
The acronymn stands for “Clustered Regularly Interspace Short Palindromic Repeats”, which is a description of the defining feature of a system that bacteria use to fight infection. Kind of like the natural world’s version of cut-copy-and-paste, a molecule guides a protein, called Cas9, to the targeted gene sequence in a strand of DNA, then snips the sequence out. By repurposing this system for use in plants, animals and humans, scientists are now able to edit genes faster and more efficiently than ever before.
CRISPR also holds the potential to pass these genetic changes on down through the generations and make them permanent. As this excellent RadioLab podcast episode explains, the technology is capable of performing what it known as a "gene drive". This is when scientists make sure an altered gene is inherited at a higher rate than through natural reproduction alone.
It can thus be used to create - or wipe out - entire features from a species. Want modified mosquitos that are incapable of carrying malaria to out-breed their natural cousins? Scientists have already demonstrated this is possible in the lab.
So what are the downsides? Imagine a scenario where blue-eyed designer babies are given gene drives, and you can start to see some of the ethical issues involved. Not to mention the risks of accidentally mutating non-target genes, or of manipulated organisms developing evolutionary resistance, or the unforeseen impacts that removing one species’ genetic trait might have on the rest of an ecosystem.
Yet while the risks of deploying CRISPR are very real, so too are the risks posed to the natural world by climate change. The burning of fossil fuels is pushing up global temperatures and bringing about a mass extinction event that will have disastrous consequences for biodiversity - not to mention human food chains.
Many species are already evolving on their own: the skulls of alpine chipmunks have changed shape due to climate pressure, while the genetics of pink salmon are adapting to favour earlier migrations. But not all will be able to successfully adapt. According to the Living Planet Index, the world will lose two-thirds of wild animals by 2020.
Some scientists are starting to think that CRISPR-Cas9 could perhaps help stave off this collapse - just as we rely on traditional engineering to provide a new, clean-energy infrastructures, so we might use bio-engineering to build ecosystems capable of withstanding more volatile weather and warmer seas.
Coral reefs, for instance, could be saved from rising sea temperatures by gene editing, says the molecular biologist Rachel Levin.
Warming oceans are already resulting in a breakdown of the symbiotic union between coral animals and the billions of photosynthetic microbes called Symbiodinium that inhabit them and make their food. When its too warm for the Symbiodinium to photosynthesize, the coral expel them from its system. However, if they don’t return, the coral host will eventually die.
Writing in Frontiers of Microbiology, Levin proposes using CRISPR to prevent this breakdown. Rare strains of Symbiodinium can survive in warmer waters, and the relevant genes could be copied and transplanted into the Symbiodinium strains from temperate regions.
Crops for human consumption could also benefit from the same process. The genes from wild tomatoes that can thrive on shorter daylight hours could be transplanted into commercial varieties, plant scientist Professor Zach Lippman told The Cold Spring Harbour laboratory. This means the latter could then continue to be grown successfully in cooler, northern latitudes.
The similarities with more conventionally genetically modified organisms (GMOS) are striking here - but so are the differences. GMOs introduce entirely foreign DNA sequences from other organisms to create variants that would not be found in nature, whereas CRISPR’s gene-editing is more akin to conventional breeding methods.
“We’re not making hugely mutant things,” Levin told the Smithsonian Magazine, of the gene editing plans for coral. “All we’re trying to do is give them an extra copy of a gene they already have to help them out.”
The technology clearly still has a long way to go before it is effective in tackling the impacts of climate change on any kind of scale. It even missed out on this year’s round of Nobel prize - pipped by research into the mechanisms behind sleep rhythms.
But if evolution’s story is one of relentless adaptability, then CRISPR may just be humanity’s opportunity to give a nature a fighting chance.
Keep reading...Show less
Small changes, big impact: How to reduce waste in your daily life.
Fed up with how government and business are responding to a waste crisis that pollutes the planet and stokes climate change, concerned individuals are increasingly taking the matter into their own hands.
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Each person on the planet produces more than 1 kg (2.2 lb) of waste every day, and that number is expected to increase in the next 15 years, according to the World Bank.
Fed up with how government and business are responding to a waste crisis that pollutes the planet and stokes climate change, concerned individuals are increasingly taking the matter into their own hands.
During Zero Waste Week, here are ways you can reduce your impact on the environment:
* Ditch plastic straws: In the United States alone, 500 million plastic straws are used each day, according to campaigners.
Straws are often too small to be recycled and are among the worst polluters of beaches and can end up trapped in turtles’ stomachs.
But single-use, plastic straws can easily be replaced with stainless steel or glass reusable models.
* Carry a reusable water bottle and coffee cup: Every minute, one million plastic bottles are bought around the world, according to data obtained by the Guardian.
Recycling rates are low, and campaigners say at the current pace, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.
A reusable water bottle and coffee cup can save money - many coffee chains such as Starbucks offer discounts for customers who come in with their own cup.
* Use a reusable shopping bag: Last week, Kenya joined more than 40 other countries that have banned, partly banned or taxed single use plastic bags, including China, France, Rwanda, and Italy.
Many bags drift into the ocean, strangling turtles, suffocating seabirds and filling the stomachs of dolphins and whales with waste until they die of starvation.
Many supermarkets now offer alternatives such as reusable plastic bags, canvas or cotton bags.
* Start composting: When sent to landfills, food scraps release methane, a gas more potent than carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming.
With composting, which requires a small countertop bin and can be done in apartments, food waste is turned into nutrient-rich soil that can be used to grow flowers, trees or food.
* Switch to reusable sanitary products: A woman who menstruates will use thousands of sanitary products in her lifetime - with a majority using sanitary pads, which are mostly made of plastic, or tampons.
Researchers estimate that 20 billion pads, tampons and applicators are sent to landfills every year in North America.
But the number of alternatives is growing, and includes silicon menstrual cups and reusable pads.
* Quit smoking: cigarette butts are the most commonly discarded item worldwide, and they are considered toxic waste, damaging water supplies and making their way into the food chain. Cigarette butts are not biodegradable and are made of small pieces of plastic.
Reporting by Anna Pujol-Mazzini
Keep reading...Show less
People in Oman asked not to drink from plastic bottles kept in sun.
Residents in Oman have been warned not to leave plastic water bottles out in the sun by the Muscat Municipality, which is running a campaign on the adverse health effects of chemicals from plastic bottles leaching into the water stored inside them.
Oman
|
Viral
|
Global
|
Motoring
|
Food
|
Celebrity
|
Sport
Al Ahlia Insurance’s IPO subscribed by two-and-a-half times
Oman’s leading killer
180 migrants cross border
Are fuel subsidies about to be introduced?
99 expats deported from Oman
Oman
Omanisation
|
Tourism
|
Education
|
Environment
|
Health
|
Government
|
Transport
|
Science
|
Heritage
12 shops closed, 3kg meat destroyed by municipal agency in Oman
Oman transport: Bus routes to connect to hospitals in Muscat
Oman's cyber gatekeepers blocked nearly 280 million attacks in 2016
Intermittent rain expected for some parts of Oman
Browse this shopping mall in Oman online
OmanPride: Takaful volunteering group attends to the needs of the poor in Sohar
OmanPride: Maithri, providing to the needy in Nizwa
Shabab Oman II: Representing Oman’s heritage and tradition
OmanPride: His Majesty has done wonders for the Sultanate
OmanPride: Basmat Amal's efforts to help orphans around Muscat
World
GCC
|
Middle East
|
India
|
Pakistan
|
Americas
|
Europe
|
Asia
|
Africa
China marks 70 years of Inner Mongolia's founding, activist complains of curbs
Hong Kong closes 13 beaches as stinking, congealed palm oil washes ashore
Police arrest 17 in Australia, Dubai, Netherlands drug raids
Saudi-led coalition denies targeting family home in Yemen
NRIs in US welcome Indian government decision to extend proxy voting
Business
Personal Finance
|
Aviation
|
Energy
|
Markets
|
Property
|
Retail
|
Banking
|
Economy
|
Technology
Greek GDP statistics gaps prompt suspension of flash data
Topaz awarded $100 million Dragon Oil contract
Commonwealth Bank scraps CEO bonus over money-laundering allegations
China stocks edge up as investors shrug off weak trade data
Egypt expects five IPOs before year-end
Sports
Oman
|
Football
|
Cricket
|
Tennis
|
Motorsport
|
Olympics
|
Hockey
|
Athletics
|
Golf
|
Sailing
|
More sports
Cricket: Balanced England can win Ashes, says Faf du Plessis
Football: Thin Chelsea squad must steer clear of injuries, says Cahill
Football: Man City's Guardiola hopeful of Gundogan return next week
Football: Arsenal's Theo Walcott hails 'absolute tank' Sead Kolasinac
Cricket: Australia captain Smith cool on O'Keefe's hopes of recall
Opinion
Facebook fights fake news
Kenya's herders swap livestock for chillies as drought bites
The new socialism of fools
Asia’s evolving security order
What makes a human?
Technology
Oman technology: Ever evolving WhatsApp
Times Digital Download: Sleeping Dogs
5 steps to a smart home
Oman technology: How to build an online audience
Oman technology: Jurassic Watch - A 150-million year heritage on your wrist
Lifestyle
Wellness
|
Motoring
|
Dining
|
Entertainment
|
Family
|
Property Times
|
Travel Leisure
|
Culture
|
Photography
Oman dining: Perfect pairing
Oman dining: 5 kitchen hacks
3 simple homemade yoghurt dip recipes
Sidharth Malhotra keen on turning producer
Always wanted to be a part of true stories, says Diana Penty
This Weekend
|
Food
|
Style
|
Recreation
|
Travel
This week's events in Muscat
This week's entertainment news
15 best hair care tips and tricks
A peek inside Oman's medical rehabilitation centre
Try archery at Anantara Resort Jabal Akhdar
Oman
Health
People in Oman asked not to drink from plastic bottles kept in sun
August 7, 2017 | 11:07 PM By Gautam Viswanathan / gautam@timesofoman.com
Photo -Muscat MunicipalityPeople in Oman asked not to drink from plastic bottles kept in sun
Sharelines
Residents in Oman have been warned not to leave plastic water bottles out ...
People asked #nottodrink from #plasticbottles kept in sun
Muscat: Residents in Oman have been warned not to leave plastic water bottles out in the sun, as this could cause cancer.
“For your health, avoid keeping and storing drinking water under the sun,” tweeted the Muscat Municipality, which is running a campaign on the adverse health effects of chemicals from plastic bottles leaching into the water stored inside them. Dr. Sajeev Bhaskar, a general practitioner at the Al Lamki Polyclinic, highlighted the effects this could have on people.
“These bottles may have the ISO mark of approval, but just because they have that, doesn’t mean it is always safe to drink because sometimes, they are not stored properly,” he explained. “Plastics contain a highly carcinogenic compound called Bisphenol A, which is commonly used for bottled water and leaches into it water at a certain temperature.”
“Bisphenol A stimulates prostate cancer cells and causes tissue changes that resemble the early stages of breast cancer in both mice and humans,” he added. “Higher levels of Bisphenol A in humans have also been associated with ovarian dysfunction. If at all you do need to keep bottles of water in your car, please store them in glass bottles.”
Dr. Basheer, an internist and diabetologist at the Badr Al Sama’a Hospital, also agreed with the need to exercise caution when it came to storing water in the sun.
“In the long-term, plastics in water can cause cancer,” he revealed. “While long-term exposure is definitely dangerous, it is also very common to suffer from lung diseases in the short-term. It is very dangerous to keep plastic bottles in your cars and in places that have direct exposure to sunlight.”
Always cover
“It is common for those who are involved in field work to keep their bottles in the sun, but this is dangerous,” added Basheer. “If they are working outdoors, it is better to cover these bottles with a cloth, so that sunlight does not directly penetrate them. These provisions must be made by the company that is sending workers into the field, and ideally, they should be provided with a cooler to store their drinks.”
Oman’s Public Authority for Consumer Protection (PACP) also weighed in on the matter. “The World Health Organisation (WHO) suggests 1,000 ppm (parts-per-million) or less,” they tweeted, in response to queries about safe toxin levels in drinking water, adding, “In bottled drinking water, this should be between 100 and 600ppm.”
Raids carried out by PACP have led to caches of improperly stored water in the past. This July, according to the authority, “the Department of Consumer Protection in Al Dakhiliyah Governorate recently destroyed, in cooperation with the Municipality of Izki, a quantity of bottled mineral water containers, because they did not comply with the standard specifications.”
“Drinking water bottle boxes were found packed and stored in unhealthy storage conditions, and samples were taken for examination,” added the PACP spokesperson. “The results of the examination by the Food Control Laboratory of the Directorate General of Regional Municipalities and Water Resources in Al Dhakhiliyah showed that the product does not conform to the reference standard, and there was a change in taste and smell due to storage conditions.”
“The Public Authority for Consumer Protection calls upon all merchants and suppliers to abide by the provisions of the Consumer Protection Law and its executive regulations to avoid legal accountability,” he added.
Keep reading...Show less
How Trump signed a global death warrant for women.
With one devastating flourish of the presidential pen, worldwide progress on family planning, population growth and reproductive rights was swept away. Now some of the world’s poorest women must count the cost.
Six months ago, one powerful white man in the White House, watched by seven more, signed a piece of paper that will prevent millions of women around the world from deciding what they can and can’t do with their own bodies.
In that moment, on his very first Monday morning in office, Donald Trump effectively signed the death warrants of thousands of women. He reversed global progress on contraception, family planning, unsustainable population growth and reproductive rights. His executive order even has implications for the battle against HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.
Rarely can the presidential pen have been flourished to such devastating effect. The policy it reintroduced will shut health clinics in Uganda and HIV programmes in Mozambique; it will compel women from Nepal to Namibia to seek out deadly back-street abortions.
“It is an unprecedented attack on women’s rights – it goes much deeper than abortion,” said Ulla Müller, president and CEO of EngenderHealth, a leading advocacy organisation.
“Girls are kicked out of school if they get pregnant. They are very often forced to marry the fathers. Very often they have to live in their in-laws’ house, where they have to do unpaid labour. It is a violation of women’s rights. We need to see this as a gender issue and very much as a power issue.”
Tewodros Melesse, director general of the the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which stands to lose as much as $100m, said the US move “seeks to restrict the rights of millions of women. It asks us as a health provider, to stop providing services which are entirely legal in countries through our members – where some of the most poorest women, depend on them.
“The human cost of the gag rule will have a long and fatal legacy.”
Like so many far-reaching American policies, Trump’s executive order is enshrouded in complexity to the point where it seems almost designed to confuse.
The order reinstated the Mexico City policy (so called because it was first signed at the International Conference of Population in Mexico City, in 1984). Under this policy, any NGO outside the US seeking American funding for family planning has to pledge it will not carry out abortions anywhere in the world, even with its own money. Such organisations must agree not to talk to women about a termination, nor lobby governments to liberalise their policy on abortion.
Current Time 0:00
/
Duration Time 1:14
Loaded: 0%
Progress: 0%
Mute
What is the ‘global gag rule’, and why does Trump support it?
US aid has never been used to fund abortion services (it is forbidden, by law). This is a ban on speaking about abortion – a restriction on free speech which the First Amendment does not permit within the US. For this reason, the rule became known as the global gag.
Trump’s version of the policy has massively expanded its reach. It is no longer just international family planning organisations that must agree not to “perform or actively promote abortion”. Every global health organisation that accepts US funding now has to sign the same clause. Anyone working to fight HIV, get vaccines or vitamins to children, or prevent Zika or malaria is facing a stark and unprecedented choice: sign, or lose all funding from the biggest aid donor in the world.
I believe that President Trump doesn’t give a hoot about any of these issues
Jon O'Brien, president, Catholics for Choice
As much as $10bn (£7.7bn) of global health funding hangs in the balance. Among those who will lose money if they refuse to sign up to the anti-abortion orthodoxy are the two big international family planning organisations, Marie Stopes International (MSI) and the IPPF. But for the first time, global NGOs such as Save the Children, WaterAid and the International HIV/Aids Alliance are also targeted.
The effects will be felt most keenly in the tiny, frontline clinics run by small NGOs struggling to help women and children in crowded townships, refugee camps and remote rural villages. There are no abortion doctors in such places (in most African countries, abortion is banned unless the woman’s life is in danger). These clinics instead offer contraceptive injections and condoms for those who would struggle to feed numerous children. But they also treat children for malaria and malnutrition and their mothers for HIV. This integrated care is now under threat.
But that’s not all. Trump has also decided to stop funding the UN Population Fund, which does hard and heroic work, reaching some of the most oppressed women in the world in refugee camps and war zones, as well as getting contraception to the remotest parts of the planet. In 2016, the US gave the organisation $69m in core funds and for its humanitarian response work.
And deep budget cuts to foreign aid under Trump include a proposal to axe every cent for overseas family planning, currently $600m a year.
The triple blow is already being felt by some of the world’s poorest women.
Take Nigeria, a country with one of the world’s fastest growing populations. The average woman there has more than five children. MSI predicts that because of Trump’s “global gag rule”, there will be an additional 660,000 abortions in Nigeria over the next four years, with 10,000 women dying as a result.
“This is going to be really huge,” said MSI country head Effiom Effiom of the US decision to pull funding. “They’ve been key in strengthening healthcare. It’s their funding that allowed us to reach 500,000 women in the past three years. Who will bridge that gap?” he asks.
It’s a question that bothers Sakina Sani as well. She has two children already and knows she cannot afford many more. She is grateful to a family planning clinic in northern Nigeria for furnishing her with a contraceptive implant that will enable her to plan out her family for the next four years. But after that, she’ll be on her own.
Sakina Sani, a mother of two, receives a contraceptive implant
Sakina Sani, a mother of two, has a contraceptive implant – known informally among young Nigerians as a ‘tattoo’ – placed in her arm. Photograph: Ruth Maclean for the Guardian
“I’d have to have more children,” she admits. “All I could do is pray harder for God to help feed them.”
Across the continent, in Uganda, her experience is replicated by Dausi Mukwana, 26, who had the first of her four children at the age of 14. An injectable contraceptive called Sayana Press and a tireless healthworker called Aisha Mugoya have belatedly given her control over family planning. But this is now in jeopardy: funding will dry up in the coming weeks.
“The number of maternal deaths will increase as the number of pregnancies increases, and the number of abortions is going to increase,” said Dr Moses Okilipa of Reproductive Health Uganda, a branch of the IPPF, which refuses to sign up to the Mexico City policy.
Dausi Mukwana, 26, a rural Ugandan, receives a contraceptive called Sayana Press
Dausi Mukwana, 26, a rural Ugandan, receives a contraceptive called Sayana Press. Photograph: Juozas Cernius/for The Guardian
The glaring paradox is that the global gag policy doesn’t even work. “The gag rule contributes to the very thing it purportedly seeks to reduce: the frequency of abortion,” said a report in June from the Guttmacher Institute, a US research organisation focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Evidence shows that when the gag is imposed, unwanted pregnancies and abortions go up.
Banning abortions and forcing NGOs not to offer any counselling or advice about them drives desperate women to the back-street abortionists and witch doctors.
Advertisement
Hardline opponents of abortion don’t understand this; they don’t believe it or don’t care. At Trump’s right elbow when he signed the order was Mike Pence, a born again Christian. Trump is not religious, but some of his most influential advisers are – and the choice of Pence as his running mate brought on board the religious right. The new, improved global gag is their reward.
“I believe that President Trump doesn’t give a hoot about any of these issues one way or the other,” said Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice. He pointed out that Trump’s closest advisers include a significant number of ultraconservative Catholics. Kellyanne Conway has been a prominent anti-choice campaigner for decades, he said, claiming in interviews that “unborn babies can feel pain at 20 weeks” (a view that the evidence does not support). Steve Bannon, chief strategist and Sean Spicer, White House press secretary, are both conservative Catholics. Katy Talento, a health policy aide on the Domestic Policy Council, recently published an article alleging that “chemical birth control causes abortions and often has terrible side effects, including deliberate miscarriage”, a claim about the pill that is not supported by scientists.
And then there is Pence. At the Republican National Convention in Ohio last July, he called himself “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order”. Born into an Irish Catholic Democrat-voting family in Indiana, he found God at a Christian music festival in Kentucky in 1978. He was still a Democrat in 1980, when he voted for Jimmy Carter, but his views started to shift to the right at college and he became a big admirer of Ronald Reagan’s “common sense conservatism”. By 1988 he was running for Congress as a Republican. He lost but won a seat in the House of Representatives for Indiana in 2000.
In his 2000 Congressional campaign, he urged that the Ryan White Act, which provides funds for HIV treatment for the poor, should only be renewed if the money was “directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behaviour”.
As governor of Indiana in 2015 he made national headlines when he signed into law a bill that was interpreted as permitting discrimination against LGBT people in the state. Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, restaurants, hotels or shops would be able to cite a religious objection to serving gay customers. Pence was photographed signing the bill into law in March 2015 surrounded by monks and nuns in habits. A number of large businesses spoke out against the law, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and in the face of an outcry, Pence made revisions.
Opponents of the anti-abortion law signed by Mike Pence protest outside the Indiana State House in July 2016
Opponents of the anti-abortion law signed by Mike Pence protest outside the Indiana State House last July. Photograph: Mykal McEldowney/AP
His opposition to abortion has been solid. In October 2015, he awarded $3.5m of Indiana state funds to a charity called Real Alternatives, which promotes sexual abstinence and counsels pregnant women wanting an abortion to have the baby. Then, in March 2016, Pence brought in one of the toughest state abortion laws in the US. Abortion on the grounds of foetal abnormality, including Down’s syndrome, would be banned. All women wanting an abortion would be required to have an ultrasound examination, where they would see the foetus on the monitor, at least 18 hours before the termination. The harsher aspects of this law were stayed by the courts, but the US by now understood Pence was willing to fight the most controversial battles on behalf of the religious right. As Rolling Stone put it in January: “When Trump needed a VP nominee with a career-long reputation for being virulently pro-life to balance his own abortion flip-flops, Mike Pence was the answer to all his political prayers.”
Advertisement
The day after the inauguration, 500,000 people attended the Women’s March on Washington on 21 January, to voice disgust at Trump’s past sexual behaviour and fear for the future of women’s reproductive rights. Days later, Pence became the first vice-president in history to attend the annual anti-abortion March for Life, held for the past 44 years on or near the anniversary of the historic judgement of Roe v Wade. Thousands of anti-abortion activists were bussed to the National Mall in Washington DC, some holding pictures of the foetus in the womb, others waving banners. “Trump loves the bump” was one. “We voted to make America pro-life again”, said another. A third read: “We hear your silent cries”.
“It is no coincidence that the first right cited in the US Declaration of Independence is the right to life,” Conway told the crowd, to cheers. But it was Pence who made the real impact. Trump had sent him to address this gathering, he said. Life, Pence said, “is winning again in America”.
Fighting back
The most devastating impact of the policy is on the big providers of family planning, IPPF and MSI, whose clinics all over the world will be stripped of US funds because they offer abortions in countries where it is legal to do so (in the UK, Marie Stopes provides terminations on behalf of the NHS). In developing countries, they partner with local NGOs, funding clinics where women may go for a contraceptive implant or injection but often for other healthcare too, such as an HIV test or cervical cancer smear. All of this is at risk.
MSI received $30m from USAid last year, which was 17% of its total funding. It is working to raise funds from other sources, but the gap will be hard to fill. Hardest hit will be services in Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Sahel. These are places where MSI has been running substantial programmes with USAid funding. In Madagascar, 40% of women get their contraception from MSI.
IPPF has about $100m annually in US funds but, after the last global gag, it deliberately invested nearly half the money in HIV services, decreasing its exposure in case another Republican president came in. Trump’s extension of the Mexico City policy to all forms of healthcare means they stand to lose the lot. Among programmes under threat unless alternative sources of funding can be found are HIV treatment in the Caribbean, clinics testing for Zika across Latin America, and help for displaced people in Colombia.
“We have become much more of an integrated service provider. We’re trying to be a one-stop shop that takes you from the start of life to the end of life,” said Matthew Lindley of IPPF, who support fragile health systems in impoverished and war-torn countries.
“If we had USAid funding, we would have expected to avert 6m unintended pregnancies,” said Megan Elliott, vice-president for strategy and development at MSI. “Because we can’t avert them, we believe there will be an additional 2m abortions. Because they are in restricted environments, the majority of those women will be getting a backstreet abortion where they won’t be properly cared for and certainly won’t get proper contraception to prevent a further unwanted pregnancy.”
Isabella Lövin
In a picture widely seen as a parody of Trump signing the global gag order, Isabella Lövin, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, is flanked by female colleagues as she signs a bill. Photograph: Johan Schiff/EPA
Last time the gag rule was in force, between 2001 and 2008, USAid stopped supplying contraceptives to NGOs in 16 developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, many of which had very high rates of HIV. Guttmacher cites Lesotho, where one in four women were HIV-positive, and which got no US support at all for family planning or contraceptive supplies under George W Bush. In 13 other countries, USAid cut off support to the leading family planning organisation. The Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia suffered a 24% budget cut and had to reduce its services.
Advertisement
The fightback began in March. She Decides was the idea of the Dutch trade and development minister Lilianne Ploumen, who was backed by the Belgian, Swedish and Danish governments. A fundraising conference attracted representatives from 50 governments and raised €181m.
That’s a drop in the ocean, they acknowledge, but the campaign to persuade more governments, philanthropists and the private sector to step up with cash continues. Earlier this month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which also funds work at the Guardian) announced it would increase its funding for family planning by 60%, with an extra $375m over the next four years.
Chris Hohn, a hedge fund manager, started the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which makes grants for projects to improve children’s health in poor countries. Concerned about the harmful effects of pregnancy on so many adolescent girls, which can result in a baby suffering from stunting and malnutrition, his Fund is giving MSI $10m.
Millions of women have been given control over their bodies and their futures. Millions of girls have been able to stay in school and have hopes of a career. But the edicts of the Trump administration, rooted in an ideology that says the lives of women count for less than the life of a foetus, have set the world back years.
The gag meanwhile extends far beyond the world of NGOs. Western officials who don’t want to fall out with the Trump White House are silent. Those who work at the Department for International Development do not want to criticise their colleagues at USAid, who themselves are privately wringing their hands over a policy that will undo much of their good work on behalf of women and girls.
Further afield, the 30-year-old woman with 10 children she can’t feed or send to school, and the 14-year-old made pregnant by her uncle, can’t be gagged.
They have no voice at all.
Ruth Maclean in Maiduguri, Nigeria, and Liz Ford in Mbale, Uganda, contributed to this report
Keep reading...Show less
Green China: In pursuit of rebuilding as 'an ecological civilization.'
Capitalizing on failures of U.S. leadership, China is emerging as a potential ‘great green power’ of the 21st century.
Cribb, Julian | June 13, 2017 | Leave a Comment Download as PDF
ADB Investment Brings Cleaner Energy to the People's Republic of China | Image by the Asian Development Bank | Flickr | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Capitalising on failures of U.S. leadership, China is emerging as a potential ‘great green power’ of the 21st century.
With an estimated 4000 people choking to death daily in the pall of fossil fuels that overhangs China’s industrial cities, the demand for clean-up action is imperative. [i]
It isn’t just the air. Nearly two thirds of the country’s groundwater and a third of its surface water are rated by China’s Environment Ministry as too polluted for human contact [ii] – and water scarcity menaces many of China’s largest cities, as well as the food supply. [iii]
Then there’s climate change, imperilling the giant nation’s food systems and flood-prone regions. There’s the still-booming trade in endangered animals and plants for Chinese medicine [iv], the relentless creep of the deserts in the north and west [v], the notorious ‘cancer villages’ [vi] coupled with soaring rates of ‘lifestyle’ diseases – stroke, cancer, diabetes, heart disease – stemming from an increasingly industrial diet and unhealthy cities. And those recurrent food poisoning scandals.
However, there is also growing evidence that the PRC Government is meeting the challenge of too-rapid development head-on. This began with the re-ignition by Premier Xi Jinping in 2013 of a 2007 plan to rebuild China as ‘an ecological civilization’. [vii] Dismissed at the time by some observers as sloganeering, the idea of a Green China has been steadily gathering force, propelled by mounting concern among its newly-affluent citizens who don’t want a prosperity that is going to cost them their lives – and also by the huge economic returns to be reaped.
Like most industrial giants before it, China is attempting massive clean-up and reform of the dirty industrial systems that built its present economic success. In so doing it is simultaneously erecting the launch pad for its next phase of economic expansion, restoring its cultural pride and seeking to relieve the anxiety of its rising middle classes over their health and wellbeing. It’s a work in progress, but progress is the operative word.
On the opposite side of the Pacific, by shocking contrast, an American President is throwing open his country’s revered National Parks to oil drillers, shredding the environmental laws that shield Americans’ health and safety, giving industry unbridled licence to pollute and befoul, sabotaging world and national climate progress, creating unhealthier school lunches for America’s children, making abysmal national healthcare worse and gagging government websites that warn citizens about these things.
While China suffers the pangs of over-development, grapples with endemic corruption and attempts to rein in the buccaneer industrialists who poison and pollute in the name of profit, the dream of a Green China is very much alive. Consider the following:
In the tussle for pole position in the booming market for electric cars China has already elbowed America into second place. In 2016 it reported putting 352,000 new electric vehicles on the roads, compared with 159,000 in the US, with plans for 3 million units a year by 2020. [viii] It is planning to flood the market with tiny, $5000, low-speed electric vehicles (LSEVs) and is the world leader in electric buses. For the rev-heads, China recently unveiled the world’s fastest electric car, the NIO EP9, capable of speeds up to 312km/h.
In renewable energy China occupies a comfortable position as world market leader. At home, its 400 manufacturers have turned out 77 gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity, with plans for a further 100 GW in the coming three years. By 2030 the sun may provide 20% of its energy needs. [ix] But China isn’t just cleaning up its own power sector: through soaring exports it has driven world solar prices down by 80 per cent, thrusting American exporters into second place and materially helping the planet to clean up its act and combat climate change.[x]
Last year China added 23 GW of the total of 55 GW of windpower installed worldwide. [xi] Its target is for 26% of its national energy needs to come from the wind by 2030. At the same time, it has cancelled more than 100 coal-fired power plants that were planned or under construction, and announced plans to close over 1000 coal mines.
By such measures China has claimed leadership in the tussle for a share of what the New York Times estimates will be a $6 trillion global market for clean technologies by 2030.[xii]
With the Trump Administration’s decision to abdicate its climate responsibilities, China has scented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to assert world policy leadership also, as National Geographic recently noted. [xiii] “The Paris Agreement is a hard-won achievement,” President Xi Jinping told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. “All signatories should stick to it instead of walking away from it, as this is a responsibility we must assume for future generations.” Following Trump’s exit notice, China has reaffirmed its intention of being a committed climate actor and its willingness to forge agreements with individual U.S. states.[xiv]
At the consumer health end of the spectrum China is responding to a global cancer pandemic which is being exacerbated by pollution and industrial toxins in food. New Scientist reports the PRC has taken a world lead in gene therapy using the new CRISPR technology to treat lung, cervical, breast, prostate, colon, kidney and throat cancers. [xv]
The smoggy concrete vista of the modern Chinese city may soon be shrouded in green, as cities like Nanjing adopt the Italian-inspired ‘vertical forest’, tree-clad skyscrapers which suck pollution out of the air and replace it with oxygen.[xvi] In Shanghai a 100-hectare urban farming development seeks to solve the compound challenges of food insecurity, employment and a fresh, healthier diet for urban Chinese.[xvii]
And in a bid to overcome the disastrous state of its fresh water, the PRC is halfway through an $11 billion plan to ‘massively reduce’ pollution, restore water quality and aquatic life and, hopefully, make its seven great river systems run clear again. [xviii]
China still has a long way to travel before it becomes the ecological civilization of Xi Jinping’s vision – but all the indicators are there of serious intent. Driving it forward, says British scholar David Tyfield, is a deep-seated yearning to restore Chinese eminence among human civilizations, lost to the West more than two centuries ago. “China’s grand project of ‘ecological civilization’ is so important in contemporary domestic politics that the environment will likely be seen as (its) trump card for some time yet,” he says. [xviv]
Holding it back is the fragility of central control expressed in the ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ of Chinese political structures, and the PRC’s own evident internal vacillation over which path to take: conventional military gorilla – or a green economic ‘soft power’.
Either way, the fate of China will influence the fate of humanity at large in the 21st Century. And that fate will be so much better for all if this vast civilization opts for “Green China”.
Sources:
Keep reading...Show less
Floating hospitals treat those impacted by rising seas.
In parts of Bangladesh, flooding makes it impossible to build permanent hospitals. But that doesn’t mean people can’t get healthcare.
It may sound like science fiction, but for many Bangladeshis, their only hope for treatment is on a floating hospital. And by day they may send their kids to floating schools. These are just a few of the ways they are adapting to the effects of climate change.
"Bangladesh is actually learning to adapt to climate change faster than any other country in the world because the impacts are happening here and we’re having to deal with them out of necessity," says Saleemul Huq, director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is low lying and the most densely populated country in the world—putting a strain on its limited resources. The Bay of Bengal that lies to the south of the country has long been a generator of cyclones. But as the temperature of the seas rises, these storms have gotten more frequent and more intense.
Three major rivers and a vast number of rivulets drain the plains of the country. All this water carries more silt and sediment than any other river system on Earth. Some of this sediment accumulated to form floating islands, particularly in the Brahmaputra River—which at certain points is over 18 miles wide. Called chars in Bangla, these floating islands are extremely fertile. So they are inhabited by a number of farming families, most of them poor.
These chars form and disintegrate every few years.
"Bangladesh does not have many rocks. So the river banks and islands, they’re always moving," says Runa Khan, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit group Friendship, which works to improve the lives of the char people.
The fleeting nature of the chars makes it impossible for the government to build any permanent structures on them, like a school or a hospital. And officials are hesitant to build on other land in the area because the climate is changing, the seas are rising, and nothing feels permanent. So Friendship built a hospital on a boat, to at least bring primary and secondary healthcare to the islands.
After receiving a grant worth more than $750,000 from the Emirates Airline Foundation, Friendship named the twin-hulled vessel the Emirates Friendship Hospital (EFH). The Rangdhonu Friendship hospital serves the coastal belt in the south.
The foundation covers the salaries of the staff that work in the Emirates floating hospital, so they can offer treatment for free.
Saiffudin Akhtar, a resident medical officer on the EFH, says they anchor the ship in a location that is best accessible to the char people, who live in more than 400 islands. The staff then meet with local leaders to let them know of the services being offered. On the days I visited the ship, there was a two-day cataract surgery camp.
A record with patients' names and mobile numbers is kept on board the EFH. The hospital staff do their best to follow up with patients from time to time. They also offer them boat rides from their chars to the hospital. The ship covers a few hundred miles and can treat abouta 60,000 patients a year. On board are two operating suites, two eight-bed wards, a pathological lab, an x-ray machine, pediatric and gynecological units, and dental and ophthalmological rooms.
The voyages have led the medical staff to encounter high rates of cervical cancer in the chars. According to the World Health Organization, roughly 12,000 new cervical cancer cases are diagnosed each year in Bangladesh. Nearly half of these result in death.
Masuma, a paramedic on the EFH, says the reasons for the high rates on the chars, in particular, are varied and include child marriage and improper use of contraceptives.
Musammad Noor Begum, a twenty-two-year-old mother—who tested positive in a preliminary cervical cancer screening test—says one of the primary reasons for child marriage is poverty. "The parents cannot afford to send their child to school. And so when a proposal comes from a good house they think it is best to give [their daughter's] hand in marriage," says Noor Begum.
The lack of access to healthcare and education drives women to give birth at home, often at the hands of an unqualified neighbor who neither knows the right timing or the position to deliver babies. Masuma also says that tugging on the child while the mother is birthing leads to the loosening of the uterine muscles, resulting in uterine prolapses.
"Whenever we go to the char area we usually see malnourished women with one or two babies on their laps. They have thin, emaciated bodies and you can just see—these are the people [who need help]," says Akhtar.
With rising seas, the lives of these already vulnerable populations have only gotten harder.
"What has happened with the changing climate is [storms and flooding] that used to happen once a year are now coming five times a year," says Runa Khan. “And they cannot adapt to that.”
This story was reported with a grant provided by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.
Keep reading...Show less
This Price is not right.
President-Elect Donald Trump would have been hard-pressed to pick someone more frightening than Rep. Tom Price, the Republican from Georgia, to direct the Department of Health and Human Services.
This Price Is Not Right
Donald Trump has tapped U.S. Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Women, the LGBT community, and the poor will suffer.
12.02.2016 / BY Judy Stone
JOIN THE DISCUSSION SHARE
PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump would have been hard-pressed to pick someone more frightening than Rep. Tom Price, the Republican from Georgia, to direct the Department of Health and Human Services. After all, Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the outgoing governor of Indiana, have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and its protections for women, the LGBT community, and poor people. Price will undoubtedly work to fulfill those goals.
Both Price and Pence have long-standing histories of extremist views about women’s health needs. They are rabidly anti-abortion, even in the case of serious fetal abnormality or risk to the mother’s health. Price currently enjoys a 0 percent rating from Planned Parenthood and a 100 percent rating by the National Right to Life Committee.
In Indiana, two women of color were imprisoned for fetal losses under Governor Pence’s fetal homicide law. Price and Pence both believe that life begins at the moment of conception. Pence even wants miscarried fetuses to be buried or cremated, although spontaneous miscarriages commonly occur early in pregnancies. Both Indiana and Texas have passed such laws.
In 2012 Price told ThinkProgress that there’s “not one” woman who doesn’t have access to birth control. In fact, a Hart research survey commissioned by Planned Parenthood found that 55 percent of women aged 18 to 34 reported trouble affording this necessity. If his claims were true, why would more and more U.S. women — 20.2 million as of 2014 — need publicly funded family planning services?
Many women rely on Planned Parenthood for family planning and screening for breast and cervical cancer, HIV, and sexually transmitted diseases. The triumvirate has repeatedly called to defund the group, which serves almost 3 million people, although they provide essential services not covered elsewhere. This vindictive stance is driven by ideology, not science — and certainly not sound policy. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that defunding Planned Parenthood would cost taxpayers $130 million over 10 years due to costs of unintended pregnancies. Further, if curbing abortion rates is the goal, why cut contraceptive benefits and promote inaccurate, ineffective, abstinence based “education?”
Laws criminalizing abortion don’t work. Instead, they drive patients to seek dangerous alternatives to safe abortion. I’ve seen sepsis from abortion; I hope never to again. A recent study showed that the abortion rate per 1,000 women fell from 46 in 1990 to 27 in 2014, largely due to the increasing availability of effective contraceptives.
Yet access to contraceptives is likely to be one of Price’s first targets, as he described a requirement for making contraceptives available as “a trampling of religious freedom and religious liberty in this country.” Other “essential services” (now provided by Planned Parenthood) include screening and counseling for domestic violence, screening for diabetes during pregnancy, breastfeeding counseling and equipment, screening for HPV and HIV, and one preventive care visit annually. These benefits weren’t made on a whim — instead, the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine recommended that these preventive services should be covered without cost sharing, and the Health Resources and Services Administration adopted the recommendations. There is concern that the new administration may be able to rewrite the regulations according to the dictates of their fundamentalist ideology, against sound public health and scientific advice. This could be done by administrative fiat without Congressional approval or through attempts to repeal the ACA.
Currently, maternity care is mandated under the ACA. But Price’s cynically named alternative, the “Empowering Patients First Act,” eliminates all the current essential health benefits guaranteed by that legislation. Insurers could choose to not cover maternity benefits, and could again deny women coverage because of pre-existing conditions, which in the past have included yeast infections and even domestic violence. Insurers could resume the inequality of “gender rating,” or charging women much higher rates than men.
Women of color are at special risk of suffering from funding cuts, as they already face greater health disparities. For example, African-American women have a four-fold higher death rate during childbirth than white women, and higher deaths from breast cancer as well. Latinas and Vietnamese women have higher rates of cervical cancer. Native American women are 2.4 times as likely to develop diabetes than white women. The ACA is critical to addressing the health disparities in these groups and among low-income communities.
Price and Pence demand constitutional protections for unborn persons from the moment of conception on. But this flies in the face of a woman’s autonomy, relegating her to being viewed only as an incubator for embryos and fetuses. Women could again be forced to have medication or surgeries against their will, or be imprisoned for doing anything that might harm the fetus. The woman’s own survival would be valued less than even a nonviable fetus.
WHILE PRICE AND PENCE claim a religious belief in the sanctity of an unborn child’s life, their concern seems to evaporate once that child is born. Both voted repeatedly against public health funding, including the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. Price has advocated for state, rather than federal control of some Head Start programs, and he wants to cut assistance for families or people struggling with disabilities.
Price opposed the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act and both he and Pence oppose nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community. Refusal clauses they support basically would allow discrimination against a wide array of people, trumping civil rights in the name of religious beliefs.
If they attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act without any viable alternative, the wealthy white troika risks rebellion as their base awakens to the reality of a future of insurmountable medical bills and no safety net. Trump lost the popular vote by at least 2.5 million votes. Add the nearly 5.5 million white people who Paul Krugman estimates just voted themselves out of health care and the 55 million women who risk losing their preventive care, and Trump will surely face growing opposition to his draconian plans.
While it’s only a fantasy on my part at this time, maybe if our fears about the destruction of healthcare in this country come to pass, women will take a lesson from the Greek playwright Aristophanes, whose heroine Lysistrata persuaded the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges until their husbands and lovers negotiated an end to the Peloponnesian War. In this war — which is over women’s health, dignity, and rights — the stakes are clear.
The head of the Department of Health and Human Services has a moral responsibility to care for all people. Based on his track record, Price — an orthopedic surgeon himself, as well as a Christian — seems poised to make basic health care more difficult for millions of women and children. That would make a mockery not just of a doctor’s obligation to do no harm, but also the tenets of his own faith, which call for care and compassion for those in need.
Dr. Judy Stone is a Maryland-based physician specializing in infectious disease, and she is a frequent contributor to Forbes.
Keep reading...Show less
ORIGINAL REPORTING
MOST POPULAR
CLIMATE
