POVERTY: MIGRATION: Too many migrant children locked up

JOHANNESBURG, 21 March 2012 (IRIN)

 Photo: Masoma Mohammadi/IRIN
“Detention, even for a short time, has a very toxic effect on children” (file photo)

Arun*, a refugee from Myanmar, was just eight when he was arrested by immigration authorities in Malaysia and taken to a detention camp where he spent five months separated from his mother and six-year-old sister.
“I got one small bowl of food a day. We were never allowed to go outside. In the night I had to give massages to some of the men,” he told researchers from the International Detention Coalition (IDC) which has spent the last two years collecting testimonies from refugee, asylum-seeker and irregular migrant children about their experiences of detention in 11 different countries around the world.
By the time IDC’s researchers interviewed Arun, he and his family had been released but his sister was too traumatized to eat, and she and her mother cried as Arun spoke about being detained.
“Detention, even for a short time, has a very toxic effect on children,” said Jeroen Van Hove, coordinator of the IDC’s campaign to end the immigration detention of children, which was launched on 21 March at the 19th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been signed by every country in the world with the exception of the USA and Somalia, states that detention of children be used "only as a measure of last resort, for the shortest appropriate period of time and taking into account the best interests of the child".
However, according to the IDC, an umbrella organization with more than 250 member groups working in 50 countries, as the use of migration-related detention has increased globally, so too has the detention of migrant, asylum-seeker and refugee children. They estimate there are tens of thousands of children in detention every day and hundreds of thousands every year.

Australia
In Australia, one of the few countries to regularly publish statistics on the numbers of children in immigration detention, there were 1,079 children in custody in January, just under half of them in prison-like facilities in remote locations such as Christmas Island. Following public pressure, Australia’s immigration minister made a commitment in October 2010 to remove most children from locked detention by June 2011.
According to Sophie Peer, campaign director for ChilOut, a local group advocating the release of all children from Australia’s immigration detention centres, the minister has kept to that commitment by a very slim margin, but the process by which children are selected for transfer to community-based accommodation where they are allowed to live a relatively normal life, remains unclear.
“It seems to us completely arbitrary,” she told IRIN, adding that the youngest child remaining in a detention facility is an unaccompanied seven-year-old who has been locked up for nine months.
When we interview the children, the overwhelming words are that they feel helpless and hopeless
She described the conditions in the detention centres, with their lack of educational and recreational facilities, as “completely inappropriate for children”. The centres’ often remote locations also make regular visits from lawyers and organizations like ChilOut prohibitively expensive.
“When we interview the children, the overwhelming words are that they feel helpless and hopeless,” said Peer. “They ask us, ‘What have I done wrong?’ To which our answer is, ‘Nothing’.”
She added that many of the children suffered from mental health issues: "We’re seeing self-harm on an almost daily basis.”
Research from numerous studies cited in a new report by the IDC, has found that immigration detention of children "has profound and far-reaching implications for their development and physical and psychological health". The longer children are detained, the more likely they are to suffer from mental health problems including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, but there is evidence that even short-term detention has negative impacts on children.

Thailand, USA
In Thailand, detention periods for migrant children can be as long as five years. Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and, under its immigration law, refugees and asylum-seekers living outside camps are subject to arrest and detention regardless of their age.
“Those who cannot go back to their country or who can’t be settled in third countries are kept [in detention] indefinitely,” said Veerawit Tianchainan, founder and director of the Thai Committee for Refugees Foundation (TCR), which has been negotiating with the country’s immigration bureau since 2010 for the release of asylum-seekers and refugees with children. In June 2011, they had their first major success with the release of 96 Ahmadi refugees and asylum-seekers, including 40 children, into accommodation paid for by TCR through its Refugee Freedom Fund.
Although no official figures are available, Tianchainan estimates that 100 children remain in Bangkok’s International Detention Centre where children are separated from parents of the opposite sex, conditions are over-crowded and unhygienic, and schooling is available only two days a week.
“Some of them are really desperate,” he told IRIN. “After six months they look terrible because of the conditions inside and the poor quality and variety of food.”


The USA has taken steps to improve its treatment of migrant children in detention but still averages around 9,000 unaccompanied minors a year in custody with the conditions they are kept in varying from “detention-like facilities” to well-run shelters with fewer restrictions on movement, according to Michelle Brané, director of the detention and asylum programme at the Washington DC-based Women’s Refugee Commission.
Officials complain that the average length of stay for such children, many of whom are teenagers fleeing abuse or gang violence in Mexico and Central America, has increased in recent years because of the amount of checks required before they can be released to family members, sponsors or foster families. “It’s striking a balance between detention and protection and making sure they’re safe,” said Brané, adding that unaccompanied children, in particular, are extremely vulnerable to exploitation.
The focus of the IDC’s campaign also goes beyond encouraging countries to release children from immigration detention to recommending what kind of arrangements children should be released into.
Drawing on best practices from countries such as Belgium and Japan, the IDC’s five-step model includes assigning guardians to unaccompanied migrant children or caseworkers to those with families, and placing them in community settings while their immigration status is determined. Key to the model is the goal of protecting children’s rights and best interests.
“Treating them humanely outside of detention is a big element,” said IDC’s Van Hove, “but also making sure they understand what is happening to them and that all options haven’t been exhausted for legalizing their stay.”
Brané is hopeful the IDC's campaign will put a global spotlight on the detention of migrant children. "Most people around the world don't realize that children are being detained in these conditions," she said. "My hope would be that seeing this raised at an international level will encourage governments to move on it."
*Not his real name
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95115/MIGRATION-Too-many-migrant-children-locked-up

POVERTY: Developing countries hardest hit by wildfires

BANGKOK, 28 June 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Johann G. Goldammer, GFMC
Slash and burn methods pose a significant risk

Wildfires burn several hundred million hectares of vegetation around the world each year and appear to be growing in number and extent, but their impact on developing countries is particularly worrying, experts say.
Subsistence or impoverished populations can find it much more difficult to recover from a serious wildfire. “Fires affecting developing countries impact the livelihoods of people much more than those in wealthy and `insured’ countries,” said Johann Goldammer, director of the Global Fire Monitoring Centre (GFMC) in Germany. “A small fire in a developing country may cause much more havoc than it would in a wealthy country.”
Fires used for slash-and-burn agriculture and as a common method of clearing land in developing countries - and important to their economies - pose a significant risk, experts say. “More and more we are seeing pastoral fires get out of hand… We need to do more to educate and inform people about fire risks,” said Pieter van Lierop, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) forest officer and one of 10 contributors to a new global assessment of “mega-scale fires”.
The assessment - by FAO and presented at the 5th International Wildland Fire Conference in May - examined recent fire disasters in Israel, Russia, Australia, Botswana, Greece, the USA, Brazil and Indonesia, and found that humans negligently or intentionally were to blame for causing the fires.
Most fires are unmonitored and undocumented so the full record of wildfires around the globe is incomplete.
However, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) international disaster database, EMDAT-CRED estimates that 2,000 people have been killed and US$49 billion lost in 339 major fires worldwide since 1970, making them among the world’s costliest disasters.
“It appears that fire activity, or total land area burned each year, is increasing in many global regions, for many different reasons, including climate change, changes in vegetation, and changing impacts of people,” said Bill de Groot, scientist and team leader with the Canadian Forest Service. “We are concerned about disaster fires, or wildfires that cause loss of life, property, or livelihood.”
Weather, wind and terrain conditions all contribute to fire risk, but humans started most of the past decade’s wildfires.

Recent examples
In 2008, after an unusually wet rainy season led to more abundant grass (a fire fuel source), fires lit by humans spread along the dense grassland savannah of Ghanzi, Botswana. For 50 days the fire burned over 3.6 million hectares of tribal grazing land and national park, considerably disrupting a fragile local economy dependent on indigenous thatch collection and tourism.
In 1998, hundreds of intentionally lit fires for large-scale land-clearing for pulp and palm oil plantations, spread out of control destroying 9.7 million hectares of forests in Indonesia’s Kalimantan Province, and emitting 700 million tons of greenhouse gases.
In the same year, land-clearing fires in Brazil’s Roraima State - exacerbated by limited road access, severe drought and strong winds - burnt out of control for over 30-days, destroying 11,000 hectares of forest.

Managing land, educating people
Both developing and developed countries struggle to suppress such large-scale fires which often cross land ownership boundaries and require the involvement of different jurisdictions of police, fire and emergency services.
“Simply investing in mechanized firefighting is not a solution. The deeper issues are land use and changes in fire policy and practice,” said Steve Pyne, an environmental historian and professor at Arizona State University.
The FAO report lauds Australia’s use of the controlled burning of shrubs to prevent the spread of wildfires in the southwest of Western Australia which is at high risk of fire, but in many developing countries, which lack the technology or infrastructure to carry out such pre-emptive action, prevention has to be done at grassroots level.
“Environmental education would go a long way to improving awareness of fire in forest and agriculture,” said José Carlos Mendes de Morais, pre-fire specialization chief with Brazil’s National Forest Fire Prevention Centre, who studied the Roraima fires.
“We are trying to work with the national governments and local communities to establish community-based fire management programmes,” said FAO’s Van Lierop, adding that appropriate attention to prevention at the local level was critical.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=93072

TUBERCULOSIS: Australia: Refugees in Darwin infected with tuberculosis

Myles Morgan :  Jun 6, 2011
The Northern Territory Centre for Disease Control says tests have shown almost a third of recently arrived refugees in Darwin have latent tuberculosis.
In three years of testing to 2009, the centre found 146 people had the infection.
It means they had been exposed to tuberculosis and could become infectious later in life.
Dr James Trauer from the Centre for Disease Control says it is important those who could become infectious are identified.
"Probably the most important part of managing TB on a public health level, and protecting the public from TB, is identifying people who are infectious and treating them appropriately," he said.
"The second most important thing to do after that is to screen people who might become infectious later."
Tuberculosis (TB) is a highly contagious disease that spreads through the air like a common cold.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), people infected with TB bacilli will not necessarily become sick.
The WHO says one-third of the world's population is currently infected with the TB bacillus.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/06/3236636.htm

TUBERCULOSIS: Australia: Fear clinic closure poses TB threat to Australia

Andree Withey and Charmaine Kane : Jun 10, 2011

A north Queensland university's head of medicine says the closure of tuberculosis (TB) clinics in the Torres Strait, off far north Queensland, will put the Australian population at risk.
Queensland Health is in the process of closing the clinics, which are used to treat Papua New Guinea nationals who cannot access treatment in that country.
Professor Ian Wronski, from James Cook University, says tuberculosis is a re-emerging disease and the closure of the clinics is likely to see it spread into Australia.
"Bit by bit it will re-establish in the Torres - it may well be there now," he said.
"Naturally people in PNG move in the Torres Strait and people in the Torres Strait move in the Cape and we'll see tuberculosis re-establish itself in Australia.
"About 25 per cent of multi-drug resistant TB in Australia actually comes from the PNG border.
"They're very hard to treat and there's one that's extremely difficult to treat.
"We're going to see multi-drug resistant forms grow in number and percentage."
State Health Minister Geoff Wilson says he is talking to the Federal Government about re-establishing funding for the clinics.
Queensland Liberal National Party (LNP) health spokesman Mark McArdle says the distance between PNG and the Torres Strait islands is smaller than people realise.
"With a dinghy and an outboard motor, you can cross from one to the other," he said.
"This could be a very serious situation and we need to get a hold of this very quickly, otherwise it could be a disaster down the track."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/10/3240493.htm

POVERTY: Australia: Third of Queensland 'at risk of poverty'

From: AAP May 24, 2011
SPIRALING cost of living pressures mean a third of all Queenslanders, if not more, are living in poverty or dangerously close to it, a new report warns.
The Queensland Council of Social Service (QCOSS) report, which was released today, calls on governments to ensure safety nets for at-risk households are adequate.
The report cites the latest poverty statistics, from the 2006 census, which said 10 per cent of Queenslanders were living blow the breadline with another 20 per cent precariously close to it.
But there's been no fresh data on poverty since then, and QCOSS says the real figure could be much higher, in the wake of the global financial crisis and in the face of soaring bills for basics including electricity.
QCOSS president Karyn Walsh says the figure in a nation as prosperous as Australia is alarming.
"Low income people are really struggling just with the essentials," she told AAP.
"The increase in electricity prices, the increase in housing affordability, the increase in food. They're all constantly going up and people are juggling between whether they have the electricity on or have food on the table."
The report looks at different types of hypothetical households, based on the experiences of real ones, and the pressures they face.
Those households are a single parent one with two children, an unemployed single person, and a working family, with the highest income of the three households belonging to the working family at $66,000 per annum.
Manager of Low Income Consumer Advocacy for QCOSS, Linda Parmenter, said they have estimated that about 35 per cent of households earn that amount or less.
"But whether you're struggling is going to depend on things such as your household size, whether or not you own your home, it's very difficult to put an exact figure on it," Ms Parmenter said.
"Certainly the households we have in our report are not rare."
Ms Parmenter said the $66,000 figure is under the median household income and includes government benefits and if you are in a four person family "that doesn't stretch very far".
She said that family could just get by providing there were no sudden changes affecting the income like a reduction in working hours, sickness or an essential item breaking down.
But for the other two households Ms Parmenter said "getting by" is not achievable.
"So our single parent household is about $28 in deficit each week and our unemployed single male is about $25 in deficit each week."
Ms Parmenter said QCOSS's estimates are conservative, so many may be worse off.
She said the other point QCOSS had tried to make in the report is that even though CPI growth has not been all that high, essential items have gone through large cost increases.
"If you're a low income household you're only buying essential items each week ... you can't defer paying for food and rent and so on."
Ms Walsh called on the Bligh government to use the report as a catalyst for reviewing concessions for at-risk households, to ensure the support they're receiving is adequate.
"Australia has always prided itself on having a safety net and it's vital that government keep an eye on how that's working," she said.
"Certainly, we're saying this is an opportunity for the Queensland government to do an independent review of the concession framework and look at appointing a minister or parliamentary secretary dedicated to cost of living issues."
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/third-of-queensland-at-risk-of-poverty/story-e6frf7jx-1226061913874

POVERTY: Australia: allocates $4.8b in foreign aid budget, up nearly $500 million

Padraic Murphy May 10, 2011
AUSTRALIA'S foreign aid budget will increase by almost $500 million next year in a bid to tackle extremism and reduce the numbers of refugees fleeing violence and poverty in the world trouble spots.
The mammoth $4.8 billion aid budget will go towards new schools in Indonesia as well as anti-violence and health programs across the third world.
And Pakistan – where Osama bin Laden lived for years under the noses of authorities - will receive $92.8 million next financial year.
Tell Treasurer Wayne Swan what you think - Live chat from 10am PLUS discuss the Budget with Opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey from 11.30am
Taxpayers will pay the scholarships of 50 Pakistanis to study in Australia as well as for upgrades to eye hospitals in the country.
Other countries to receive large aid packages include PNG ($482.3 million), Indonesia ($558.1 million) and the Solomon Islands ($261.6 million).
The aid budget was $4.4 billion in 2009-2010 but is expected to grow by at least $1.9 billion over the next four years.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said most of the extra funding would be spent in Indonesia and the Pacific.
"I am committed to enhancing the transparency of our aid program. When people are able to access information, they are better able to hold those who are managing their money.... to account," Mr Rudd said.
The government said 6 per cent, or $251 million of its aid budget will be spent "on climate change and environmental activities.
"The money will be spent on initiatives to slow carbon growth in Australia's region The government is also funding 300,000 secondary school places in Indonesia and building 2000 schools as part of a campaign to "assist around 1500 Islamic schools to achieve higher accreditation and operate to a higher education standard".
"Reducing poverty is also in our national security and national economic interest. Poverty breeds instability and extremism in our region and globally and creates conditions that lead to more refugees," Mr Rudd said.
"It is for these humanitarian, national security and economic reasons that the government is committed to increasing our aid to 0.5 per cent of our gross national income by 2015-16," Mr Rudd said.
The government has also committed $10.5 million to win Australia a non-permanent seat on the UN security council that will include extra bureaucrats in New York and Canbera and "additional funding for small posts".
Budget papers also show DFAT's expense measures, including AusAid and border security will explode from $55.6 million last financial year to $909.9 million by 2014-15.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special-reports/australia-allocates-48b-in-foreign-aid-budget-up-nearly-500-million/story-fn8melax-1226053511863

POVERTY: National drought policies wanted

11 May 2011 (IRIN) -


 Photo: UNDP: Droughts remain a hidden risk

Few countries have the right policies in place to manage the impact of droughts, which over the last century have claimed millions of lives, says the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2011 (GAR 2011). But this could be about to change.
Mannava Sivakumar, director of the Agricultural Meteorology Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), who contributed to the chapter on droughts in the GAR 2011, wants countries to develop their own policies to tackle a climate event that remains poorly understood.
“A national drought policy will not only institutionalize the need for effective monitoring and setting up of early warning systems, it will empower a poor farmer affected by a drought to demand safety nets to protect him,” said Sivakumar.
Australia was so far the only country that had put in place a national drought policy to reduce risk “by developing better awareness and understanding” of droughts and the underlying causes of vulnerability of the communities exposed to them.
Risk identification and early warning are the priority areas identified by the Hyogo Framework of Action, a 10-year global policy approved by countries in 2005 to reduce disaster risks.
Whenever a natural hazard event such as a drought occurs, governments and donors have followed the set format of impact assessments, response, recovery and reconstruction, with little attention to risk management to “reduce future impacts, and lessen the need for government intervention in the future”, Sivakumar pointed out.
“The ultimate goal [of a national drought policy] is to create more drought-resilient societies,” he said. A drought policy would make it mandatory to provide safety nets such as insurance, and would sit well with developing countries' climate change adaptation plans. Droughts are expected to become more intense and frequent as the impact of climate change unfolds.
Arid events have affected more lives than any other single physical hazard. The GAR 2011 highlighted a range of problems in dealing with droughts, the biggest being that they are poorly understood. “You cannot say with a certainty when a drought begins or when it ends”, said Sivakumar.
This has been partly due to the limitations of the indices used to measure dry periods. In 2010, countries decided on the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which could alert them to the onset of a drought two to three weeks after it started and prompt them to plan relief.
The SPI uses average rainfall over a period of at least 30 years as a variable to develop an early warning scale. A drought begins when the SPI is continuously negative for two to three weeks, and ends when the numbers turn positive.
Most nations have enough meteorological stations to measure rainfall. “There are very few countries that have problems with data, such as Somalia, which has been dealing with years of conflict,” said Sivakumar, but there are plans afoot to get Somalia, who is a member of the WMO, to set up automated weather stations.
To develop a national drought policy, the factors that heighten risk, increase vulnerability and broaden exposure need to be identified. As there are no credible global drought risk models, the GAR 2011 commissioned case studies around the world to identify some of the drivers that could turn a drought hazard into a disaster.
Climate variability and change, poverty, increasing demand for water as more and more people move to urban areas, bad management of soil and water; and weak or ineffective governance are among the factors that can escalate risk.
One of the most interesting examples of inappropriate management of soil and water presented in the report was Saudi Arabia’s policy in the 1970s to become self-sufficient in wheat production. By the early 1990s it had become the world’s sixth largest wheat producer, but this success came at a price - it drained the country’s aquifers, considerably expanding its exposure to risk. The policy was abandoned and Saudi Arabia now intends to depend completely on imported wheat by 2016.
WMO plans to hold a series of meetings of experts during 2011, ahead of a high-level summit on national drought policy in December 2012.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=92676

MALNUTRITION: science’s last hope may be locked inside Syria's forgotten wild plants.

March 2011by Fiona MacDonal
The world is facing starvation as climate change disrupts food production and the population booms and science’s last hope may be locked inside Syria's forgotten wild plants.

 Credit: Fiona MacDonald
The grounds at the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA).

In the midst of a red, rocky stretch of land in the northeast of Syria, hundreds of rows of wheat brace themselves against a hot, dry wind. The plants are separated into small square plots by grassy pathways, ensuring no genetic material is transferred between sets.
At first glance, the dry, yellow crops look identical – they’re the only signs of life for kilometres around. But, in fact, they couldn’t be more different.
Some have grown tall and straight, while others are too wild and ‘hairy’. Some haven’t yet produced seeds, while others are ready to be harvested. Many couldn’t take the heat while a few thrived.
And these differences will determine what many populations will be eating in the next 10 to 20 years, and could decide how many people go hungry as Earth’s population grows.
“We’re looking for the crops that show both heat resistance and high yield,” says Francis Ogbonnaya, a wheat breeder with the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), 30 km south of Aleppo, Syria.
While each plot is genetically different, all of the crops are the result of an arranged marriage between a wild Syrian wheat-relative (which exhibits heat resistance) and a domestic wheat crop from Sudan – a country that loses millions of dollars in crop yield annually due to extreme heat.
When it comes to finding plants that can handle the heat, Ogbonnaya is in the right place. Temperatures in Aleppo exceeded 40˚C almost every day during the 2010 Northern Hemisphere summer. Sometimes, it edged above 46˚C.
Those accustomed to rigorous lab controls may wonder how parameters can be controlled in such a wild environment: what if there’s a cold snap?
“That is one thing we never have to worry about here,” laughs Ogbonnaya, who formerly worked in Australia and continues to collaborate with Australia’s Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) to develop wheat strains suited to the harsh climate.
In the middle of the Arabian desert, it’s not just heat resistance that scientists are searching for: here the crops that will help civilisation survive on a rapidly changing planet are being put to the test.
Researchers have come from all over the world to create crops for the future: wheat that is resistant to drought and salinity, chickpeas that repel fungus and crops with significantly higher yields.
Genetically superior plants couldn’t come sooner – a perfect storm of obstacles is bearing down upon farmers, says Kenneth Street, an Australian agriculturalist and genetic resource scientist at ICARDA. The world’s population continues to grow rapidly, and is estimated that it could hit 10 billion by 2050. And as it is, we can’t feed the mouths we have: in 2010, almost one in seven people on the planet were malnourished.
The problem is not only that we have more mouths to feed, but the fact that everything we need to grow food – water, land, fertiliser – is running out at an alarming rate, stresses Street.
According to the United Nations, the world needs to double its output of food by 2050 in order to avoid global mass starvation; other estimates suggest a four-fold yield boost is needed. But – in line with his brazen and honest nature – Street warns that, the way things are looking now, we’ll be lucky to maintain our current rate of production.
“There’s climate change, our phosphorous is running out, most of the world’s water basins are being sucked dry – those are the three big ones. Then we’ve got competition between biofuels, as well as the problem that modern agriculture is heavily reliant upon fossil fuels – the U.S. alone uses one trillion litres of oil a year to make nitrogen fertiliser. What happens when the oil runs out? We’re also losing something like six billion hectares a year to land degradation, so you add all those things up and it’s scary.”
Climate change in particular is a concern for farmers and agricultural scientists, as it changes entire ecosystems at an unnatural rate – and crops can’t keep up.
It also alters the entire pest and insect game for plants, as species and diseases that were once confined to the tropics expand their reach to affect the rest of the world, adds Street. “I’m glad I’m going to be a really old bastard by the time this storm hits.”
To make matters worse, modern eating habits are becoming increasingly unsustainable. A November 2003 paper in The Journal of Nutrition by Cristopher Delgado of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC concluded that, by 2020, developing countries will eat 107 million tonnes more meat than they did in the late 1990s.
Given it can take over 50,000 L of water to produce 1 kg of beef (compared to around 1,000 L for 1 kg of wheat), this is going to increase pressure on already stressed resources.
The increase in output that we need to feed the growing world has been achieved before during the ‘green revolution’ that began in the early 1940s and continued into the late 1970s.
Led by the late Norman Borlaug, the agriculturalist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for a lifetime of work to feed the hungry, the movement involved rapid increases in wheat yield thanks to improvements in fertiliser, irrigation and breeding techniques. By the end of the 1970s, output in regions such as India had almost doubled – while using the same amount of land.
However, this increase was achieved by deploying weapons which today are less plentiful. “We only increased wheat yield with a lot of inputs – irrigation, fertiliser. We’ve now reached a plateau,” says Muhammad Imtiaz, senior chickpea breeder at ICARDA.
Without being able to increase inputs, the only hope is to improve the crops, says Imtiaz – making them work more efficiently and adapting them to better suit the region they will feed. And the only way to do this without genetically modifying organisms is to create new varieties containing the genes from the ancestors of domestic crops.
And this brings us back to Aleppo. Despite the barren terrain today, some 11,000 years ago Aleppo and most of northern Syria was part of the verdant Fertile Crescent – the region from which modern agriculture emerged. It was here that the eight Neolithic founder crops – emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, flax, chickpea, pea, lentil and bitter vetch – were first cultivated. And it was here that early humans realised that hunting and gathering might not be the best use of their time, so downed their spears and decided to bring the food to them.
It was in this region that early humans learnt to grow and harvest food – a movement known as the Neolithic revolution. In the thousands of years that followed, humanity changed greatly – and so did the plants we fed on.
In the beginning, agriculture wasn’t overly successful. To ensure they had enough to eat, early farmers chose plants that grew quickly and provided the most food. Through this selective breeding, modern crops were born. And they have served us well.
Yet, buried within the hundreds of thousands of plants that our ancestors didn’t pick (for one reason or another) are genes that have helped these wild plants survive in one of the harshest regions on the planet, enduring droughts, salinity and temperatures ranging from –12˚C to 50˚C. These genes now hold the hopes of scientists around the world and may offer a way to boost the output of regular crops. But thanks to the increasing focus on fewer and fewer higher-yield plants in modern agriculture, these genes – which could well be our saviours in the decades ahead – are fading into the background.
“Over the last 100 years, we’ve lost about 80% of our agricultural biodiversity,” says Street. “What a lot of people argue is that all the useful biodiversity has been captured within modern crop plants. But when you’ve got all the new disease and changes in the ecosystem, you don’t know what is going to come up and what useful biodiversity is there.”
A major part of Street and his team’s work at ICARDA is to go out and collect as many seeds of ancient species as possible and screen them for useful genes – a process that was shown in the 2008 Australian Broadcasting Corporation-screened documentary, Seed Hunter, of which Street was the star.
Usually not one to put himself in the limelight, he was willing to bring attention to a cause he has dedicated his life’s work to. “The whole point of the documentary was us trying to ‘make seeds sexy’, and bring awareness to the problem of diversity loss in crops.
“We rely on too few species – there are something like 20,000 edible species in the world, and we rely on four. And if we’re going to maintain that system, we’re going to need that biodiversity to help the crops evolve.”
Of course changes to ecosystems and new diseases occur regularly, and plants have survived these pressures for hundreds of years, adds Street.
But now the crops that we rely on are genetically uniform compared to their wild relatives and don’t have the capacity to adapt beyond the conditions they were bred for, he says.
“And things are changing so quickly, our crops can’t respond in one generation to the changes. Basically, we have to drive the evolution of our crop plants artificially.”
This process is similar to an online dating service; it collects as many candidate members as possible and then creates the most fruitful matches it can from within the membership.
Even with human intervention, the process is long and slow. First, a scientist needs to select and grow seeds that might display a desirable trait, which can range from flood resistance to the ability tolerate a disease.
This in itself is harder than it sounds. There are approximately six million types of seed contained in more than 1,300 genebanks around the world. Just looking for wheat seeds involves scouring well over 500,000 different seedtypes around the world.
Usually, scientists are given either a random selection of seeds or a core collection – which represents a small selection of seeds housed in the seed bank, and is selected to provide the greatest amount of genetic diversity. The scientists then test these seeds to check whether they do indeed display the required trait. On average less than 10%, if any, do. Once a seed has been found that displays the desired trait, things are still just as tricky.
You can’t just give these to farmers, as they’re still wild and may have one desirable trait, such as pest resistance, but no other desirable ones, such as the ability to produce a high yield. So then comes the lengthy process of incorporating the trait from the wild plants into a modern variety. This is the stage that Ogbonnaya and his team are at with their heat-resistant crops. And it takes years.
Even getting the crops to breed can be a nightmare – and for some species, impossible. Scientists use the plants’ own methods of fertilisation, but they do the dirty work themselves, usually using tweezers and forceps.
Then, it can take up to 10 generations to combine the useful traits from each parent in a way that creates the best crop possible. Basically, this involves breeding out all the ‘junk’ genes that are transferred from the wild relative along with the useful ones. When a new variety is finally created, it is shipped off around the world for local breeders to optimise it for their region and then distribute it to the farmers.
ICARDA has provided many such strains to Australia with great success, such as cereal crops that are resistant to fungal diseases called ‘rust’ and have saved the industry A$289 million a year. “Generally, it takes 10–12 years to develop one variety of crop,” says Imtiaz.
When food is a matter of life or death, this isn’t always an amount of time that can be afforded. Researchers at ICARDA are currently trying to speed up the process.
Street is starting at the beginning, and trying to ensure that the seeds provided by seed banks have a higher likelihood of containing the desired trait – saving both time and money.
The program, known as the Focussed Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS), could improve the likelihood of finding the trait farmers want from 10% to 80%.
“FIGS could revolutionise the way we approach gene banks,” says Street. The premise of FIGS is not to give researchers the most amount of genetic diversity, but to give them the specific trait they are looking for by examining the environment from which the seed was collected.
“For example, if we’re looking for a drought resistant crop, we’re going to look in low rainfall environments in which the seasonal rainfall is highly variable - this type of environment may have forced local populations to evolve towards physiological drought tolerance,” says Street.
But it gets much more specific than that. In the past, farmers needed crops that would withstand boron toxicity; a trait that FIGS correctly deduced would be found in marine origin soils along the Mediterranean cost.
FIGS has also been responsible for finding the first evidence of Russian wheat aphid (Syrian Biotype) and Sunn pest resistance in bread wheat pests that cost farmers millions of dollars a year in lost yield.
Of course, this isn’t the only place where the process can be sped up. Molecular biology has the potential to revolutionise the creation of new crop strains – and already has in some cases.
Genetic markers for traits are common in crops such as wheat and barley, and these allow researchers to confirm that what they’re looking for is in fact present in a plant – removing a lot of the guess work and cutting procedures that would usually take three months down to a week, says Imtiaz.
While the markers for wheat and barley are available to speed up the process, other crops, which are equally vital to food security, haven’t been able to keep up due to lack of investment. Chickpeas, for example – which Imtiaz works on – have only just begun to have their genetic markers identified.
Despite the tiny funds attributed to them, legumes are a crucial part of the future of our food systems, and a severely underrated one, according to Imtiaz – another ICARDA researcher who works closely with the GRDC and University of Western Australia to provide improved chickpea strains.
“People talk about food security, but wheat cannot sustain people on its own. If you plant just wheat, then productivity will go down and your soil will be continuously degraded,” says Imtiaz.
The other way to get improved crops to farmers faster is the one that no one readily wants to talk about: genetically modified organisms (GMOs). None of the crops produced by ICARDA are genetically modified, and yet there are contained labs set up on the site and introductory work being carried out, in case the process ever becomes more accepted.
The scientists are preparing for good reason – GMO technology could take the 12-year process of creating a new crop strain down to as little as a year or two, according to Imtiaz.Creating GMOs involves manipulating an organism’s genetic material by a method that doesn’t occur in nature – for example, by using bacteria to transfer an appropriate gene from one organism to another.
In agriculture, this often involves taking a gene and incorporating it into a modern crop. This can provide a number of beneficial traits without the need for the lengthy breeding process. And it won’t only shorten the procedure, it will open up avenues for a range of traits that can’t be incorporated into modern crops the traditional way.
This includes creating crop strains using genes not only from different plants, but also different organisms.
Examples include the CSIRO taking an insect-resistant gene from wheat and using it to create a strain of genetically modified cotton that has reduced cotton pesticide use by over 80% in Australia.
This ability would be a major benefit for chickpeas: out of the eight or so wild chickpea species, only two can be bred with domestic varieties. The other wild species could hide many desirable traits, says Imtiaz; but without GMO technology, we will not be able to harness their benefit.
About 134 million hectares of farmland worldwide are currently used to grow genetically modified crops – including cotton, rice and corn.
But in the public mind at least, there are still significant concerns about the technique’s safety, both to people and the environment.
After reviewing extensive research, the World Health Organisation currently does not find genetically modified food a threat to human health, but scientists accept the reality that people still worry about the long-term effects.
Imtiaz understands the concerns, but feels GMOs will only ever play a specific – yet crucial – role in agriculture. “GMO technology will never replace normal breeding – you’re only going to use GMO when you don’t have any other way of getting the trait.”
Street agrees, but thinks that eventually people will have to come to accept GM as a normal facet of modern agriculture. “I’m all for organic agriculture,” he stresses.
“But if we’re going to maintain the agricultural system we have, then we are going to have to bring yields to unprecedented levels using whatever tools are at our disposal or just say, ‘OK all these masses of people are going to die, we don’t have enough food and we don’t feel comfortable using certain technologies’.
We’ve got in our toolbox stuff that can integrate genes from, say, a bacterium, into crop plants, so that they’re not eaten by insects.
Should we do that? It’s OK for us to sit back and say it’s messing with nature, but what do we tell a farmer in Africa when half his crops get destroyed by an insect that’s moved down [due to] climate change?”
Ogbonnaya is of the same view: “If we can ensure that people can have nutritious food, then we should do it if it’s safe.”
Overall it seems the researchers agree that GM should only be used as a last resort – and that we are quickly approaching that juncture. “My primary drive is seeing people who have had drought just for one year go starving – thinking I can contribute to alleviating poverty by ensuring everyone has food on the table,” says Ogbonnaya.
It’s ironic that the salvation of millions from starvation in the decades ahead rests on wild plants previously ignored or tossed aside by humanity.
But knowing that they have endured frosty nights, days of 46˚C and batterings of sandy, hot winds – not just this year, but in the thousands of years since the Fertile Crescent’s desertification – suggests that they might just be able to help. Hopefully, we’ll find them in time.
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/4207/full

TUBERCULOSIS: Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) statement

23 Mar 2011
World Tuberculosis Day (24 March) gives us an opportunity to take stock of our progress in tackling a disease that kills nearly two million people each year, mostly in developing countries.
In Australia, we don't often think of tuberculosis as a major disease. However, in 2009 it killed 1.7 million people around the world.
It is also a major health issue in our region – in 2009, 55 per cent of all new tuberculosis cases were in Asia and the Pacific.
To tackle this problem, AusAID is supporting tuberculosis control programs and surveillance efforts in Kiribati, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. These programs are showing good results.
In Kiribati, Australian support has contributed to a major decrease in tuberculosis cases from 745 in 2007 to 294 in 2010.
Australia is working with the Government of Papua New Guinea to minimise cross-border tuberculosis transmission between northern Queensland and Papua New Guinea's Western province, through support for laboratories, surveillance and training.
Australia is cancelling up to $75 million in debt owed by Indonesia over six years so they can invest $37.5 million in tuberculosis programs approved by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Australia has also pledged $210 million over the next three years (2011-13) to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. To date, programs supported by the Global Fund have provided tuberculosis treatment for 7.7 million people worldwide, including 2,200 people in the Pacific.
Globally, we are making progress, with mortality and infection rates declining - but the disease continues to be a serious health issue.
People living with HIV are particularly susceptible to contracting tuberculosis and emerging multi-drug resistant tuberculosis poses a major threat to efforts to halt the disease. AusAID supports the World Health Organisation, which is leading efforts to address these problems.
We know there is a big task ahead but tuberculosis is preventable and it is curable.
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/JARD-8F87HA?OpenDocument

TUBERCULOSIS: Share your bong -- get tbc!

PEOPLE who share bongs to smoke marijuana may be at risk of contracting pulmonary tuberculosis, Australian medical researchers say.

Research to be presented at the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand conference in Perth on Monday suggests a link between active TB cases and shared bongs - water pipes commonly used in marijuana smoking.
Dr Michael Hayes and Dr Susan Miles from the Department of General Medicine at Calvary Mater Hospital in Newcastle conducted the research, centred on three recent TB cases in the Hunter-New England area of NSW.
Dr Hayes said the three young patients were regular or heavy cannabis users and more recently a fourth person in the region with similar characteristics had been diagnosed with TB.
TB is caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which can be contracted by breathing in air droplets coughed from an infected person.
In Australia, about 1000 people are infected with TB each year, while globally an estimated 1.7 million people die from the disease annually.
Dr Hayes, who is also a specialist in the respiratory and sleep unit at the John Hunter Hospital in NSW, said the incidence of TB in the non-indigenous Australian-born population was historically low.
He said although the three initial cases were not related, there was concern about the high rate of positive contacts among people who had shared bongs with the active cases.
Close contacts of the three patients were tested for latent TB and more than 30 showed positive results, Dr Hayes said.
If the contact had shared a bong with the active case, there was a six-fold increased risk of being positive, he said.
"Smoking marijuana is a cough-provoking activity and it is usually conducted in a confined environment that is conducive to the spread of the organism.
"While there is no conclusive proof that TB has been spread by bong smoking, there is sufficient reason to suggest an association between this activity and the spread and severity of the disease."
He said greater awareness of the issue was needed among health professionals and the general public, particularly those who may be at risk through bong smoking.
But Dr Hayes said the risk of TB was just one of the minor risks associated with marijuana use.
"The other health problems associated with long term marijuana use are quite clear and well laid out.
"It does cause lung disease and heavy use does cause psychiatric problems."
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/bongs-linked-to-tuberculosis-by-researchers/story-e6frf7jx-1226031971601

TUBERCULOSIS: Australian zoo says no risk to visitors after elephant diagnosed with tuberculosis

Deborah Smith : February 5, 2011


 No danger ... Pak Boon with her calf, Tukta. Photo: Anthony Johnson

ONE of Taronga Zoo's elephants, Pak Boon, which gave birth to a calf three months ago, has been diagnosed with tuberculosis.
The zoo's senior vet, Larry Vogelnest, said the 19-year-old Asian elephant had no symptoms but tested positive in a routine, three-monthly laboratory screen for the bacterial disease, which is relatively common in elephants.
The zoo's seven other elephants have tested negative. Pak Boon is on drugs to kill the bacteria.
 Dr Vogelnest said it was likely she had been infected in Thailand before coming to Australia four years ago, and the disease had remained dormant and undetectable. ''Now it has reactivated, and I think in her case it was almost certainly because of the birth of her calf.''
Reactivation in pregnancy was a common scenario in women with latent disease, he said.
Dr Vogelnest said the elephant, which is still on display, posed no risk to visitors.
''TB is not a highly contagious disease. They would have to be in very close contact with her for hours to be at any risk.''
Zoo staff, however, are taking precautions such as wearing masks to do trunk washes for TB tests and preventing Pak Boon blowing water out of her trunk near people. She has not been separated from her group, as this would cause her stress.
About one-third of the world's human population is thought to be infected with TB but only about 4 to 10 per cent of people develop active disease.
Pak Boon was diagnosed in December and was probably infected by a person. The strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis she has accounted for about a third of human cases in Thailand, Dr Vogelnest said.
It is not one of the deadly drug-resistant strains causing concern around the world. However, she will need treatment for up to a year and the three types of drugs she is being given could cost as much as $50,000. With her weight of about 3000 kilograms, she would need a considerable amount drugs, Dr Vogelnest said.
In the US between 1994 and 2006, 33 Asian elephants, or about 12 per cent of the species in that country, tested positive for TB, according to Elephant Care International.
To test for active TB, an elephant's trunk is washed out with saline solution three times in a week and this ''spit'' is cultured in a laboratory to see if bacteria are present. A newer test that detects antibodies in blood is also being used at Taronga.
Asian elephants are endangered, with as few as 34,000 left in the wild. Pak Boon, which means morning glory flower in Thai, had a 120-kilogram female calf in November, which was named Tukta, meaning doll.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/zoo-says-no-risk-to-visitors-after-elephant-diagnosed-with-tuberculosis-20110204-1agw8.html

MALNUTRITION: Argentine farmers halt grain sales

17 Jan 2011 Strike over export curbs rekindles a dispute that helped drive global grains prices to record highs three years ago.


Soybean group Acsoja has estimated that production would fall by 13 per cent as a result of water shortages [EPA]
Argentine farmers have halted sales of wheat, corn and soy in a strike over export curbs, rekindling a dispute that helped drive global grains prices to record highs three years ago.
The seven-day protest by growers, which started on Monday, could fuel supply concerns just as dry weather linked to the weather phenomena La Nina worsens the outlook for soy and corn production.
Farmers in Argentina, one of the world's biggest food suppliers, have been at odds with the government for years over export curbs aimed at taming inflation and guaranteeing affordable supplies of everyday staples.
They say the system of wheat and corn export quotas lets millers and exporters pay farmers low prices, and have urged the government to scrap the caps.
"These distortive, interventionist measures have been repeated for several harvests in recent years," Hugo Biolcati, leader of the Argentine Rural Society, said when the country's four farming groups announced the strike last week.
The protest is bad news for Christina Fernandez, the president, nine months from the October election in which she is widely expected to seek re-election.
The wave of farmer strikes that began in March 2008 over a tax hike on soy exports battered her popularity, hit Argentine asset prices and disrupted grains shipments at the height of the soy harvest.
However, the impact of this week's protest on grains prices will likely be muted because soy and corn harvesting has yet to begin.

La Nina effect
Government officials condemned the farmers for calling another strike, even warning of possible flour shortages, although Julian Dominguez, the agriculture minister, acknowledged wheat farmers' problems.
The government is taking steps to ensure mills and exporters paid fixed local wheat prices to farmers and punish those that did not.
Dominguez advocated an even stronger state role in the country's multibillion-dollar grains trade during a weekend newspaper interview.

La Nina
La Nina is a weather phenomena causing abnormal cooling of the central and eastern Pacific.
Generally, La Nina will mean that parts of the world that normally experience dry weather will be drier and parts with wet weather will be wetter.
La Nina translates from Spanish as "The Little Girl" and is meteorologically the opposite of the El Nino.
La Ninas occur on average every three to five years and will typically last for up to 12 months.
"What the grains trade needs in Argentina is the presence of the state in the market - going back to the model of the Federal Grains Agency or National Grains Board, a body made up of the grains exchanges, the state, the co-operatives, that can ensure the market works for farmers," he was quoted as telling Tiempo Argentino newspaper.
Low rainfalls began worrying the agriculture industry in December in response to La Nina diminishing rain over Argentina. Weather fluctuations have helped lift corn and soy prices close to their record highs of 2008 in recent weeks.
Soaring prices are good news for farmers, but the parched soils are worrying farmers across Argentina's famous Pampa plains.
Argentina is the world's leading exporter of soyoil and soymeal and the third-largest global supplier of soybeans. It is also a major wheat supplier and the second-largest corn provider.
Soy exports brought in $12.98bn in 2009, accounting for 23 per cent of total export earnings.
But this year, soybean group Acsoja has estimated that production would fall by 13 per cent as a result of water shortages.
La Nina, which affects weather patterns across the Asia-Pacific region and in particular the amount of rainfall, is threatening to expand drought in the Americas while bringing more devastating rains to Australia, according to the US Climate Prediction Centre.
La Nina-inspired rainfall has pushed Australia into recording its third wettest year on record in 2010 while causing drought in grain-growing areas of the southern US as well as in Brazil and Argentina.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/01/20111175129401574.html

TUBERCULOSIS: tuberculosis among Indigenous people in Australia

It is almost certain that Indigenous people did not suffer from tuberculosis prior to 1788 [3]. There was evidence of a high prevalence of TB among the first Europeans to arrive in Australia, however, and it is likely that the disease was soon transmitted to Indigenous peoples. There is little evidence of TB having a major impact on Indigenous people until around the middle of the 19th century, after which time it became the leading cause of death for those living in the more settled parts of the country [4]. For Indigenous people living in more remote parts of Australia, TB did not have a major impact until much later [5].

By the mid 20th century, the disease had spread to Indigenous communities in all parts of the country, but its impact was still somewhat variable [5]. The rate in the non-Indigenous population declined from the mid 20th century, partly due to a highly successful national TB campaign (1948-1976) [6]. The persisting impact of TB on Indigenous people has been attributed to the poor living conditions and malnutrition experienced by Indigenous people, compounded by chronic chest diseases and alcohol use [4] [7] [8].

Tuberculosis in recent years
TB is considered to be well under control in Australia with one of the lowest rates in the world. Notifications of TB among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have declined slightly, but they still remain much higher than those in the Australian born population [9].
There were 1,142 new cases of TB notified in 2006, but 969 (85%) of these were for people born outside Australia [9]. Of the 173 new cases involving people born in Australia, 33 (19%) were identified as Indigenous and 140 (81%) as non-Indigenous. The number of new cases of TB among Indigenous people in 2006 was slightly more than the number in 2005 (27), but less than those in previous years [10] [11] [12] [13].
In view of the relatively small numbers of cases and the year-to-year variations in numbers, the following comparison of TB incidence among Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian-born people considers new cases for the five-year period, 2002-2006. In that period, there were 174 new cases of TB notified among Indigenous people and 711 among non-Indigenous Australian-born people [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]. Almost one-half of the new cases among Indigenous people were reported by the Northern Territory (83 cases) and around one-quarter by Queensland (45 cases) (Table 1). The Australia-wide crude incidence rate of 7.2 cases per 100,000 population for Indigenous people was almost 10 times the rate of 0.7 per 100,000 for non-Indigenous people. The crude incidence rate was highest for the NT (28 cases per 100,000 population).
This comparison underestimates the true difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people because of differences in the age structures of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations - after adjusting for these differences, the incidence rate for Indigenous people was 14 times that of non-Indigenous people (Table 2). The incidence of TB is higher for Indigenous people than for non-Indigenous people across all age groups, with rate ratios being highest for the 45-54 years and 55-64 years age groups.
http://www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/infectious-conditions/tuberculosis/reviews/our-review

MALNUTRITION: Donors have been urged to provide nutritious food aid to help fight malnutrition among children.

A sick and displaced woman watches as her malnourished infant sleeps at a health clinic run by the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Holland in Kerfi, a site for thousands of displaced Chadians some 50 kilometres south of the eastern town of Gos Beida, June 10, 2008. MSF have urged donors to provide nutritious food aid to help fight malnutrition among children
By LUCAS BARASA
 October 15 2010
Medicins San Frontieres (Doctors without borders) launched the campaign at a function attended by two MPs and other stakeholders at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre on Thursday evening.
Currently, it said only 1.7 percent of food aid addressed nutrition.
MSF said donors should cease in-kind donations and instead provide cash to finance food aid interventions based on medical needs and at a cheaper cost.
“This is particularly true for the US for whom such a shift could save approximately $600 million-close to double the global amount estimated to focus on malnutrition in any given year,” MSF said in a statement.
It regretted that the current food aid by major donors, Japan, US and Australia lacked necessary vitamins and minerals for children's growth.
The organisation called for the signing of a petition to pressurise the food donors to change their policy and provide adequate food for young children.
It accused the major donors of double standards saying food donated as relief, including maize, was not consumed by children in their countries
http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/1033366/-/view/printVersion/-/7i959w/-/index.html

MALARIA: Australia Defence Force Experience

We report here a retrospective analysis of all malaria cases in military personnel reported to the Australian Defence Force (ADF) Central Malaria Register from 1998 to 2007.
A total of 637 cases of malaria were notified affecting 487 individuals. Of these 85.9% (547) were infected with Plasmodium vivax malaria and 10.2% (65) with P. falciparum malaria. The majority of cases were from Timor Leste (78.5%, 501/637). Malaria attack rates of 0.9% (369/40 571), 1.1% (52/4776) and 0.4% (20/5345) were seen in Timor Leste, Bougainville and the Solomon Islands, respectively. The median period following departure from a malarious country to presentation of P. falciparum was 17 d (range 1–47 d) and for a primary presentation of P. vivax malaria was 86 d (range 1–505 d). Increasing the dose of primaquine from 22.5 mg daily to 30 mg daily for 14 d for radical cure of P. vivax malaria reduced the failure rate from 46.6% (35/75) to 9.4% (17/181) in subjects returning from Timor Leste.

Malaria remains a serious problem for ADF soldiers deploying to malarious areas, particularly the incidence of relapsing vivax malaria and the tolerance of these vivax strains to primaquine.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B985R-4YWJHV9-1&_user=10&_coverDate=06%2F30%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d368db0726ce19fa3fe99019b4513580&searchtype=a

POVERTY: We're scoring some wins in poverty battle

Norman Gillespie
September 9, 2010
The fight is not futile, with new figures showing the poor are faring better.
'SOME people are rueing these floods but others are really thankful,'' a Benalla resident said after last weekend's deluge. He was referring to the devastation caused by the floods, but also reflecting the excitement felt by many at the end of the dry spell that has devastated parts of rural Victoria for most of the past decade.
Natural disasters, such as Victoria's floods, the earthquake in New Zealand and further abroad in Pakistan, cause great torment. Loved ones are injured or even die, homes are destroyed and lives are turned upside down. The psychological scars can cause long-term problems. The rebuilding is not just physical - it is often an equally difficult mental challenge.
The destruction in New Zealand and Victoria is lamentable, but it pales into insignificance compared with the devastation Pakistan is facing. Up to 20 million people are affected by the floods there. The equivalent of our total population has lost loved ones, homes, businesses, crops and, in many cases, their hopes for the future.
Yet amid the disaster, for some a new light is shining. Dan Toole, UNICEF's regional representative for south Asia, saw this when he visited the affected area in the midst of the crisis. ''One moment of hope - school has started in one camp and about 180 children are sitting and learning on the first day. The class includes many small girls who are in school for the first time.''
Crises bring great sadness, but they can also bring hope. We saw this in Aceh following the damage wrought by 2004's Boxing Day tsunami. After almost 30 years of a brutal civil conflict, Acehnese independence fighters were locked in a seemingly interminable struggle with the Indonesian military.
The tsunami brought great pain to many in Aceh, where more than 168,000 people died. But it also forged a path for an unlikely peace that still holds.
UNICEF's Progress for Children report, released this week, reveals that the situation for the world's children is improving although the statistics are still shocking.
In 1990, up to 30,000 children under five were dying every day due to the impacts of poverty. This is one of the most urgent crises facing humanity and to turn it around is one of our greatest challenges.
In 2000, the world signed up to the 15-year action plan to halve poverty and set up the Millennium Development Goals.
Australia has refocused its aid program around the goals and it is having a real impact. In East Timor in 1990, more than 180 of every 1000 children born would not see their fifth birthday. That number has now almost halved to 93.
It is an incredible achievement, but still means that almost one in 10 East Timorese children will not live to see their fifth birthday. By 2015, we want that figure to drop to 61, a goal that is far from reality. Things are getting better but we still have a lot more work to do.
As data improves, we are seeing, too, that the improving statistics also hide an important new understanding. The divide between the rich and poor in developing countries is growing.
Children from the poorest quintile in developing countries are more than twice as likely to die before reaching their fifth birthday.
More than 84 per cent of the 884 million people who lack access to clean drinking water are in rural areas, and children from rural areas and poorer families are less likely to attend school.
What we also now know is that a $1 million investment in reducing under-five mortality in poorer countries would avert at least 60 per cent of these deaths.
These statistics tell us that we need to better target our aid to the poorest and most underprivileged in poorer countries. With an equity-based approach, millions more lives can be saved. By providing simple and cost-effective interventions to the most vulnerable communities, it is possible to provide children, including girls, with education, immunisations against preventable diseases and access to clean water.
The 8 million children affected in the current flooding in Pakistan are among the poorest in the world. Their parents are mostly subsistence farmers or running small businesses, living hand to mouth.
As we deal with the crises in our communities here in Australia and new opportunities are born from them, the floods in Pakistan provide an opportunity, too. Once the acute needs of the people affected are met, we can look at the longer-term structural inequities and offer these people and their children a hand up to a better life.
The challenges to build a more equitable society in which we live by our commitments to the Child Rights Convention are great. Yet we can and are achieving them. A fairer world is not only possible - it is becoming a reality.

Norman Gillespie is the chief executive of UNICEF Australia.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/were-scoring-some-wins-in-poverty-battle-20100908-1519a.html

POVERTY: AUSTRALIA'S aid budget for Burma

August 7, 2010
AUSTRALIA'S aid budget for Burma will increase an unprecedented 67 per cent this financial year, to nearly $50 million.
Historically, Burma's political isolationism has meant it receives little international development aid - the least, in fact, of all the world's poorest countries.
"Half of Burma's almost 50 million people live in extreme poverty," the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, told Parliament this year.
"But at around $4 per head per annum, international aid to Burma is less than a 10th of that received by Cambodia and a 16th of that received by Laos."
Australia does not give money directly to the Burmese government. Instead, funds are invested through United Nations agencies or other non-government organisations already working in the country.
Australia's aid budget in Burma will focus on health, Mr Smith said, including training midwives and nurses, building ponds and wells for drinking water and funding treatment programs for malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.
And, for the first time this year, the federal government will offer 10 scholarships for Burmese postgraduates to study in Australia.
The US is wrestling with a new policy of engagement with Burma, but there has been no movement from the Obama administration towards lifting sanctions against the junta.
Australia will also continue its embargoes in defence and finance and travel restrictions on senior regime members.
"Until we see significant change from Burma's authorities, the Australian government will maintain a policy of targeted financial sanctions," Mr Smith said.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/aid-targets-25m-in-extreme-poverty-20100806-11oj9.html

TUBERCULOSIS: Debt2Health Australia, Indonesia

Officials from Australia, Indonesia and the Global Fund just announced an agreement that will boost support to Indonesia’s tuberculosis control programs.
The Debt2Health agreement helps redirect money from servicing debt to improving public health. Australia will cancel AUD$75 million of Indonesia’s debt and Indonesia will put half of this amount into national programs to fight tuberculosis through the Global Fund. These additional resources will be particularly useful as Indonesia has the world’s third highest rate of tuberculosis.
http://www.one.org/blog/2010/07/16/debt-swap-agreement-will-help-indonesia-fight-tuberculosis/

MALARIA: Australia

In Australia there hasn’t been a major outbreak of malaria since World War II when servicemen returned from Papua New Guinea, and Australia has been officially malaria-free since 1981. While some cases do exist, they are brought in by travellers returning from sub-tropical locations and are often treated and harmless.
This is not the case around the world. Today malaria kills almost 1 million people each year, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. It accounts for 16 per cent of all under-five deaths in Africa, third only to neonatal causes and pneumonia.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/fight-against-malaria-a-test-on-the-road-to-ending-global-poverty-20100426-tmx8.html