MALNUTRITION: SOUTH SUDAN: Clement John Kandang, “We can’t bring more goods because of the mines”

BENTIU, 29 November 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Hannah McNeish/IRIN
Clement John in his shop in Bentiu
Violence in Sudan’s breadbasket border states such as South Kordofan has blocked food to South Sudan since just before it gained independence in July. In the new nation’s northern states such as Unity, heavily mined roads have compounded the problem of closed trade routes. Clement John Kandang, 43, who sells sorghum, the state’s staple food, in the capital Bentiu, told IRIN that massive price hikes as shortages increased meant many people were going hungry.
“Prices have gone up because the border has been closed and there are no trips between north and south. Before, we were being supplied by the north.
“It cost 130-150 South Sudanese Pounds [about US$40] for a sack of sorghum; now it’s 400-450 [about $120].
“Right now, things are becoming expensive and some people cannot afford to buy and the business is slowing down.
“Sugar, sorghum, flour and salt are the most expensive things in the market, and you can’t find fruit or vegetables. Meat and eggs are expensive too - it’s [affected] everything, just everything.
“Some of the people are now staying home, begging their relatives to assist them as they can’t afford to buy.
“Things are very expensive because of the separation of the countries and taxes. Things are being imported secretly, and when they [illegal tax collectors] get you on the way, they are charging you half the price you bought the item for from the north, meaning you will not get any profit.
“The landmines are a very big threat to people because all the routes are being blocked. Although we were smuggling things in, now we can’t bring more goods because of the mines. They end up hitting the vehicles on the way and we can’t bring in more goods.
“I grow food myself but due to unsuitable rains, even the crops that grow in the garden, did not harvest well.”
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94328

POVERTY: Cambodia's Disabled Fight Poverty, Inequality

Catherine Wilson : 28 March 2011


Landmine explosions/casualties still affect thousands

Cambodia remains littered with millions of unexploded devices left over from 30 years of civil war, the brutality of the Khmer Rouge and conflict with Vietnam.
The government itself believes that as many as 2 percent of the country's 14.7 million people are disabled with landmine casualties a significant proportion.
Poung Mai, who lost both legs when he stepped on a landmine, is one of those victims. He and Chhum Sopheap, who has suffered from polio, are seated on the ground in the midday sun next to the ticket kiosk inside the entrance gates to the National Museum in Phnom Penh with a basket of books to sell, each one carefully wrapped in plastic to lessen the inevitable damage from perpetual sun and dust.
They are among more than 60,000 physically disabled in Cambodia who struggle against poverty, discrimination, unequal access to education and employment and an under-funded and under-resourced state support system.
Cambodia is one of the poorest and most landmine contaminated countries in the world and the challenge of achieving economic inclusion, education and rehabilitation of the disabled is considerable. Numerous demining organisations, such as the Cambodian Mine Action Center, are steadily working to clear the country of millions of unexploded bombs and ordnances in rural regions, especially in the northwest close to the border with Thailand.
With 80 percent of the population residing in rural provinces, the prevalence of landmines has significantly reduced access to agricultural land, forests and water resources, and led to one of the highest rates of disability in the world as people in farming communities are maimed and killed as they go about their daily lives.
According to the Cambodia Mine Victim Information System (CMVIS), there were 286 landmine casualties in 2010, an increase on the 244 reported in 2009 and 271 in 2008, with 15 new casualties in January this year. It estimates that since 1979 there have been 63,821 mine casualties, which corresponds to 39 landmine deaths and injuries every week for 31 years, with about 44,000 survivors.
Poung Mai is from Prey Khmoa village in Prey Veng province where his family were rice farmers.
"During the civil war in Cambodia, the government [Khmer Rouge] arrested me and I was made to work in forestry, woodcutting," he said, "and then I stepped on a landmine." He was 28 years of age when both legs were amputated.
"After I stepped on the landmine, it was difficult," he continued, "I went around begging everywhere, at the market, to feed my family."
Poung has seven children. In 1990 he was removed by authorities to a center that provided food and shelter, but no prospect of livelihood. He subsequently left and found his way to Phnom Penh, where he continued to beg until he joined the Angkor Association for the Disabled in 2009, an organization of people with disabilities founded by Sem Sovantha, who suffered double amputation by a landmine, to provide shelter and training to members and campaign against discrimination.
Chhum Sopheap, also from Prey Veng province, came to Phnom Penh in 1997, sleeping on the streets until he started selling books at the National Museum in 2007.
Both say that the very small income they earn from selling books, on average $4.00 per day, enables them to rent a room and leave behind homelessness, which is often accompanied by alcoholism, mental ill-health, hunger and disease. Belonging to a disabled organization has also marginally improved their experience with the public, they say.
"When they are not with an association," Sem Sovantha explained, "there is a problem with the authorities. When they have an association, people will accept them and talk to them."
However, negative social attitudes and discrimination toward the disabled, such as physical harassment, social ostracism and economic exclusion, remain widespread.
Chhum claims that he mostly receives a positive response from visitors and tourists at the National Museum, "but the official in the area is not so happy about us, because he thinks it is not appropriate for us to be selling to tourists."
Local tour guides also attempt to dissuade visitors from being patrons.
"The customer would like to buy," Chhum explains, "but the customer believes the tour guide when he says ‘no, no', because at another shop the tour guide will get a commission."
According to a 2009 ILO report, "People with disabilities are among the most vulnerable groups in Cambodian society. They lack equal access to education, training and employment. While many workers with disabilities have considerable skills, many have not had the opportunity to develop their potential."
The Cambodian government introduced a Law on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of People with Disabilities in 2009 to support the right to employment without discrimination, and in the same year adopted a National Plan of Action for Persons with Disabilities, including landmine survivors, in order to better address needs and provide services. The stated priorities of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation include strengthening and expanding welfare and rehabilitation services for the disabled, but, according to the Cambodian Disabled Peoples Organization, lack of human and financial resources has hindered real progress toward these goals, although the work of NGOs has resulted in the provision of more vocational training courses.
"Social acceptance and social attitudes toward disabled people and landmine amputees can be improved step by step through the Royal Government having a Disability Law and National Plan for persons with disability," a CDPO spokesperson said, "The problem in Cambodia is that we have the laws, but no budget to implement them."
In the meantime, Chhum Sopheap and Poung Mai strive to sell their books, many of which are biographies and stories of Cambodians, like themselves, who have struggled through the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge era and are determined to not only survive, but live to see a better future.
http://khmernz.blogspot.com/2011/03/cambodias-disabled-fight-poverty.html

TUBERCULOSIS: Tanzania: half of all cases were missed, adding to a large death toll

Tristan Pollock




Credit: Wikimedia


One of the most difficult problems with tuberculosis is detecting it. In 2007, for example, half of all cases in Tanzania were missed, adding to a large death toll. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.7 million people die of tuberculosis yearly. One organization, launched in 2008, has an unusual solution: use 18-inch-long “HeroRATs” to sniff out the disease in samples provided by TB clinics. In Tanzania, HeroRATs have identified over 1,600 tuberculosis-positive samples (read: patients) where the diagnosis was initially missed by microscopy tests at local laboratories. This represents a 30 percent increase in the detection rate. The rats are remarkably accurate.
The HeroRATs idea was devised by Bart Weetjens, a Buddhist monk and the founder ofAPOPO, an organization that researches, develops and deploys rat-detection technology for humanitarian purposes. The other half of APOPO’s work is mentioned in its name, a Dutch acronym meaning Anti-Personnel Land Mines Detection Product Development. Similar to tuberculosis detection, where rats identify positive patients by sniffing sputum samples, rats trained to detect land mines are trained with TNT-tainted soil beginning at four weeks old. When a rat chooses correctly it is rewarded with food. As training progresses, rats learn to detect trace amounts of TNT in real, but deactivated, landmines buried at the HeroRAT landmine training field in Tanzania. Before receiving HeroRAT status and working in real minefields, each rat must ace a rigorous series of accredited APOPO tests and certifications by the National Institute of Demining in the respective country that the HeroRAT will be working.
Since beginning mine-removal operations in 2006, HeroRAT teams — humans and rats side-by-side — have returned over 2.1 million square meters of land to the Mozambique population, removing over 1,100 mines. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines reports that over 73,576 casualties worldwide from 1999 to 2009 were land-mine related, and in 2007 there were 5,426 recorded casualties, with nearly a fifth of them in 24 African countries.
The need for a worldwide low-cost highly effective solution to both land mines and tuberculosis detection is apparent and Weetjens hopes to fill that void, “APOPO is now standardizing our HeroRATs technology to enable large scale deployment and significantly increase the impact of of our humanitarian action. This will include expanding our operations to new countries as well as researching new scent-detection applications for our HeroRATs.”
http://news.yourolivebranch.org/2011/03/18/hero-rats-sniff-out-tuberculosis-and-land-mines-in-africa/