Disease eradication: polio and guinea worm
The world continues to inch towards the eradication of two more diseases. The number of Guinea worm cases continues to decline. According to the latest WHO bulletin, in January through September 2011, there were 1,008 cases of dracunculasis reported, compared [...]
An effective malaria vaccine!
This is amazing – a (partially) effective vaccine for malaria. The full scholarly article on the Phase 3 clinical trial is here. In short, the vaccine reduced the incidence of malaria amongst vaccinated children by about half. It’s not a [...]
Libya: The politics of the ‘endgame’
As the Revolution in Libya appears set to succeed, a number of notions have become instant common wisdom, the most prominent of which is that “we” somehow have a responsibility to ensure that Libya does not become another Iraq.
Robots now cheaper than Chinese labourers
It seems that the giant IT assembler Foxconn is seeking an alternative to paying its workers more – and the solution is more robots.
Starving masses not actually starving?
A provocative piece from Foreign Policy magazine by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo claims that “global hunger” is fundamentally mischaracterized: Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? … What we’ve found is that [...]
Rinderpest eradicated
I’d never heard of rinderpest, and I come from cattle country. And, absent human malevolence, the world will never hear of rinderpest again. Absent any cases for a decade, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization will, on June 28th, adopt [...]
The endless cycle of asylum seeker politics II
Sometimes it’s worth waiting a few days to let one of the Gillard government’s “solutions”, or better, attempts to stem political criticism by “doing something” unravel, rather than jumping to judgement. The problem here, of course, is that the instant [...]
Egypt, events and ideology II
Writing in The Guardian, Gary Younge makes an excellent point about responses to the Egyptian revolution among Western leaders: “Egypt proved that our leaders see freedom as a question of strategy, not principle”. I think Younge is right to circle [...]
Redrawing the political map in Africa
What is the largest country in Africa, geographically?
Multiple agendas at Cancún, not all benign
Saudi Arabia has complained that Cancún was lousy with NGO representatives and hence they had to waste time talking to them. The Saudis, of course, aim to see that Cancún does not result in any diminution of the use of [...]
Cancún half way
That image is courtesy Climate Progress where Joe Romm points out that the beaches are washing away. One can also easily imagine why there may have been traffic problems. (See also here.) While there is plenty of material around on [...]
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