The recent South By South West Festival is showcased the world’s latest technologies – some in development and others already on the market. VOA’s Arturo Martinez was there and brings us highlights from the Interactive Innovation Awards.
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The University of Southern California each year hosts the African Economic and Development Summit, bringing delegations of African business leaders, government officials and others to network with their counterparts in the U.S. But this year, the African summit has no Africans. All were denied visas. Michelle Quinn reports from Los Angeles.
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Animal testing has become problematic in the past few decades. Animal rights activists have uncovered numerous instances of animal cruelty, and it’s also expensive to keep animal test subjects, especially if they’re treated humanely. But how else can pharmaceutical companies test the effectiveness, and safety of their products, some of which could save thousands of lives? The answer to that problem may be wriggling in a laboratory petri dish. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Fifty thousand Haitians will have access to quality health care for the first time after a modern new hospital opened Monday in the isolated and impoverished Cotes-de-Fer region.
The Bishop Joseph M. Sullivan Center for Health will serve those who, until now, had to travel for hours on rough roads for treatment.
The new hospital is a project of the nonprofit charity Catholic Medical Mission Board. The U.S.- based group Mercy Health contributed $2 million for construction costs.
“With active involvement of the community and an emphasis on training and knowledge sharing, the health center will strengthen the local health system in a long-term and sustainable way,” said CMMB’s director in Haiti, Dr. Dianne Jean-Francois.
Along with an emergency room and pharmacy, the new hospital will give pregnant women a place to deliver their babies, along with postnatal and pediatric care.
The hospital also has plans for expansion for dental and ophthalmology clinics.
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Cutting-edge technologies — from drones to data collected by taxi drivers — are becoming key weapons in the global battle to improve land rights and fight poverty, experts said Monday.
Advances in earth observation, digital connectivity and computing power provide an array of information, from detailed topographical maps to transportation use, that was previously unimaginable, geospatial experts said at a World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty.
The information collected can be instrumental to helping establish property records and land titling systems in countries where there is no formal ownership or land-use documentation.
Drones help map Africa
Survey-mapping drones may look like toys but are powerful machines having a huge impact on land-use planning in Africa, said Edward Anderson, a senior World Bank disaster management expert.
High-quality, high-resolution images taken by drones in Zanzibar identified nearly 2,000 new buildings in one 12-month period alone, he said.
The mapping exercise, budgeted at $2 million in 2005, was completed at a tenth of the price by local university students operating the small, light, unmanned drones, Anderson said.
“Coastal zones are developing and urbanizing so quickly, waterside areas are being developed into hotels, residential properties,” he said.
“Until now, there was no way of quantifying this change and making comparisons,” Anderson said.
Massive growth exposed
While more than 87 percent of the land mass of Europe is mapped at a local level, such maps exist for only about 3 percent of the entire African continent, he said.
A project using drones in Mauritania, a country twice the size of France but with a population of less than four million, has allowed authorities to document the massive growth of cities such as its capital, Nouakchott, said University of Arizona professor Mamadou Baro.
Originally established in 1959 with fewer than 5,000 residents, Nouakchott is the largest city in the Sahara and home to more than 1.5 million people.
“This is placing huge pressure on social infrastructure and chaos in the development of the city,” Baro said. “Drones are very helpful in attempting to manage and track this kind of enormous growth.”
Private companies that collect data as part of their businesses are being encouraged to share with state planning authorities as well, said Holly Krambeck, a World Bank transport planning expert.
Taxi drivers track roads
GPS data collected by taxi drivers is helping to design plans for infrastructure and roads in countries such as Brazil and in North Africa, she said.
The shared data comes through agreements with technology companies such as Grab that operates ride-hailing and logistics services apps in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.
Using technology can also help identify new sources of tax revenue, experts said.
In Tanzania, improved mapping data revealed that up to two-thirds of properties in secondary cities were not on the tax rolls, they said.
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An experimental anti-malaria vaccine has been developed that protects against more than one strain of the malaria parasite that causes the mosquito-borne illness.
The vaccine, tested by principal investigator Kirsten Lyke and colleagues, is called PfSPZ and uses whole, live weakened early versions of the most common form of malaria Plasmodium falciparum (P. Falciparum), called sporozoites.
This early form of the parasite is what’s first injected into humans by an infected mosquito.
By using the entire sporozoite in the vaccine, the immune system responds to more of the parasite, according to Lyke.
15 healthy adults tested
A study of the vaccine conducted by Lyke and colleagues, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, enrolled 15 healthy adults who were assigned to receive three doses of the vaccine over several months.
Nineteen weeks after receiving the final dose, the volunteers were exposed to bites of mosquitoes carrying one strain of parasite from Africa.
A second group of six controls that was not vaccinated also got exposed to the mosquitoes. They showed signs of malaria and were promptly treated.
Nine of 14 vaccinated participants, or 64 percent, showed no signs of infection after exposure.
Of the nine, six participants were selected and exposed to a different strain, 33 weeks after the final immunization.
This time, five of the six were protected against this second strain, according to Lyke.
‘Great’ is not good enough
“Which is great, but not good enough,” said Lyke. “I mean, you don’t want to take a vaccine that’s going to give you a two out of three chance of being protected. So we have to improve on that and get it up to as close to 100 percent as we can. But at least we’ve established that we can get very high protection in six months and we’re seeing cross-strain protection.”
The agent would offer broader protection against a disease that kills mostly young children in sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the World Health Organization, 212 million people were infected with the mosquito-carrying parasite in 2015, and 429,000 died.
There are four types of malaria parasite that typically infect people. The most common and deadly is Plasmodium falciparum, which goes through a number of life-cycle stages during which the parasite evolves into a different form.
That is what makes it difficult to develop a vaccine.
Multiple strains a problem
The problem is further complicated by the fact that P. falciparum can mutate and develop into multiple strains.
Lyke said this is particularly true in Africa, in places where the disease is common.
“The falciparum malaria that is so endemic, there’s a lot of genetic change that occurs because it’s so prevalent in the population. And that contributes to different strains of the falciparum malaria so that you know any vaccine that we’d want to introduce we would want to make sure that it broadly covers multiple different strains of falciparum malaria,” Lyke said.
Clinical trials of the early vaccine, produced by the company Sanaria, also are going on in Africa, including in Burkina Faso, Kenya and Bioko Island off of Africa’s west coast.
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The World Bank reports Africa will receive the bulk of the $75 billion the International Development Association, or IDA, will spend to finance life-saving and life-changing operations over the next three years mainly in 30 of the world’s poorest, most fragile countries.
The IDA is a part of the World Bank which supports anti-poverty programs in the most poor developing countries through long-term, no interest loans.
The World Bank reports the African region will receive $45 billion of the $75 billion allocated for development purposes. It says other recipients will include small Pacific island states threatened by climate change and fragile countries in the Western Hemisphere, such as Haiti.
The fund, which runs from July 1 through June 30, 2020, also will support specific development projects in 82 additional fragile states, including Guinea, Nepal, Niger, and Tajikistan.
Axel van Trotsenburg, vice president for Development Programs at the World Bank, says the aid package will make a huge difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. For example, he says it could deliver essential health and nutrition services for up to 400 million people.
“We will or expect to train up to 10 million teachers to benefit 300-plus million children. We intend to immunize between 130 and 180 million children… and would undertake investments that could improve the access to improved water resources for up to 45 million people,” he said.
Long-term and emergency assistance
While IDA is largely focused on supporting long-term development projects, it does have provisions for helping people in crisis situations. Van Trotsenburg tells VOA that IDA has just announced a $1.6 billion support package for emergencies, with critical support going for famine relief in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, and northern Nigeria, where an estimated 20 million people are at risk of famine.
“The financial support will be a combination of recently approved operations that we have been in the last six, eight months that were already started to target, for example, the north of Nigeria to the remaining resources that are still available in our crisis response window,” he said.
Van Trotsenburg says IDA still has about $360 million left over from development projects executed over the past three years. He says that money will be used for famine relief.
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Tanzania has announced a plan to send 500 doctors to Kenya after a doctors’ strike paralyzed health services in the neighboring country for months. Kenyan doctors, however, say the government should not hire any foreign doctors but instead employ the more than 1,000 trained physicians who are unemployed.
Tanzanian President John Magufuli announced the plan to dispatch the doctors after a recent meeting in Dar es Salaam with a visiting Kenyan delegation that included Kenya’s health cabinet secretary, Cleopa Mailu.
Mailu said this was a deal that would benefit both countries.
“We have so many government health centers that need doctors,” said Mailu. “Yes, we have doctors in our country; we recently had a doctors’ strike and one of their reasons for their strike was that there were not enough doctors to attend to patients. The doctors were spending a lot of hours attending to the patients.”
Doctors from public hospitals in Kenya went on strike last December to demand a pay raise and improved working conditions for physicians and patients.
A deal struck by the doctors’ union and the government opened the way to negotiations that ended the 100-day-old strike.
According to Mailu, it is because of the doctors’ demands that the push to recruit foreign physicians was realized.
“There is so much work and we will continue looking for more doctors; we will continue negotiations with the government to see if they will provide us with more doctors so that we can strengthen our health services here in Kenya,” said Mailu.
Dr. Elly Nyaim of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board says the move may not have been clearly thought out.
“As per the World Health Organization recommendation, we still have a shortage even with the ones we produce from our universities, that state actually cuts across the entire East Africa… so Tanzania is actually even worse off than we are in terms of the doctor-patient ratio,” said Nyaim.
The physician’s union says Kenya currently has 1,400 doctors who have not been absorbed into the workforce.
Low doctor-to-patient ratio
According to the World Health organization, the Tanzanian doctor-to-patient ratio stands at 1 doctor for every 20,000 patients. In Kenya, it’s 1 doctor for every 16,000. The recommended doctor-patient ratio is one to 300.
“It would be very unfortunate that you are actually exporting when you do not have enough yourself; it should not be done at the expense of denying qualified Kenyans positions because you are bringing foreigners,” said Nyaim.
In a press briefing held after the meeting with the Kenyan delegation, Tanzania’s president welcomed the new deal with the Kenyan government.
“By good luck our friends have said they will pay good salaries and the payment will be in dollars. They will be given accommodation and security,” said Magufuli.
Health Secretary Mailu says the Tanzanian doctors will start working in Kenya in April and will be given two to three-year contracts.
And he says there are plan underway to also hire doctors from Cuba.
There was bad news for the United Nations last week, as President Donald Trump announced he is seeking a 28 percent budget cut for diplomacy and foreign aid, which includes an unspecified reduction in funding to the United Nations and its agencies. VOA’s U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer reports that the potential cuts come as the U.N. is struggling to cope with an unprecedented number of conflicts, approaching famines and the effects of climate change.
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Would you drink beer made from toilet water?
The brewers at one popular brewery in California are betting you would.
Stone Brewing of San Diego unveiled a new beer made from water that “comes from the toilet,” according to ABC 10 News in San Diego.
Granted, the water for the brew, called Full Circle Pale Ale, is not made from water directly from the toilet, but it does use recycled water from the Pure Water San Diego program, the channel reported.
At the unveiling of the new beer Thursday, San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer called the beer “delicious,” while Stone’s senior manager of brewing and innovation, Steve Gonzalez, said it was among the best pale ales the brewery he has ever made.
Gonzalez told News 10 drinkers would “get some caramel notes, some tropical fruit notes. It’s a very clean tasting beer.”
According to News 10, some attendees at the unveiling were a little sceptical of the beer, but after a taste, they were converted.
“[I thought] that it would have an off taste or be something different to it … it’s outstanding,” Shane Trussell said.
The beer is not yet available to the public, but the brewery said it would be soon.
The Pure Water San Diego program aims to supply one-third of San Diego’s water supply through recycled wastewater.
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China, the world’s third-largest bond market accounting for $9 trillion in debt instruments, has started the process of opening up to foreign investors. Two major investment banks, including Citigroup, have announced plans to join the fray and several others are expectantly watching the unfolding situation.
It’s not a sudden desire to liberalize, but pressure from shrinking foreign capital inflows and expanding outflows that has motivated Beijing’s communist leaders into this new and uncertain path.
“China’s purpose is to attract capital inflows from investors needing RMB [Chinese yuan] assets for their portfolio,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, economist with the Peterson Institute of International Affairs. “This will also help to stabilize RMB exchange rate.”
China has suffered some serious loss of capital because of uncontrolled outflows and a recent decline in its foreign direct investments, which saw a drop of 9.2 percent in January. The country also suffered its first trade deficit in three years last month.
To overcome the situation, Beijing recently allowed overseas investors to hedge their currency risks at the local derivative market. This partially opened the doors to foreign players who saw currency risk as a major deterrent in the Chinese bond market.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang threw in a sweetener in mid-February, saying the government would launch a trial program to connect the bond market in mainland China with Hong Kong, which is the base of operations for a large number of foreign investors. The bond connect will make it easier for Hong Kong-based investors to access domestic Chinese instruments without leaving the city.
“I see that as a part of China of becoming a major player and becoming an important destination for financial investors, ” Lourdes Casanova, Director of Emerging Markets Institute at Cornell University’s SC Johnson School of Management, said.
International currency
This move is also meant to promote the use of RMB as an international currency.
“These efforts indicate that China wants to assert its economic, business and financial power with all the inherent advantages and risks,” Casanova said.
The past few weeks have seen Bloomberg Barclays become the first major index provider to include Chinese yuan bonds in its global offerings. Citigroup has announced plans to embed China bonds into its bond market benchmark WGBI-Extended. JPMorgan Chase & Co., another index maker, said it is evaluating the entry of China markets into its JPMorgan Global Emerging Market Bond Index.
This is not surprising because the RMB, or the Chinese yuan, is now part of the International Monetary Fund’s coveted special drawing-rights basket.
“There are global investors who wish to shadow the IMF SDR basket, and needs RMB exposure,” Kirkegaard said.
At present, foreign investments account for just about $120 billion, or 1.33 percent, of China’s bond market. But the situation is expected to change soon as investment banks and index makers have started the process of measuring steps before entering the market in a big way.
Given China’s role as the second-biggest economy, it is natural for Chinese investors to want Chinese bonds in their portfolio, Casanova said. In fact, foreign investors face fewer challenges in China’s bond market compared to what they are up to in other emerging markets, she said.
“Yes, there are many doubts, there are many doubts in many countries. I am European, I am from Spain, there are doubts about the viability of the euro. In the U.S. there are other types of worries,” she said adding, “That’s why also for the international investors, China is not as risky as it used to be.”
Casanova said, “The risk of default is minimal given the amount of Chinese reserves and the risk related to currency swings are also much less than, let’s say, Argentina, which has been issuing debt recently.”
Doubts and challenges
But foreign investors will have to tread carefully because it is not easy to seriously analyze credit risk in China where the markets are not transparent and there is not much information available about issuers and major buyers of debt instruments, he said.
“Their [foreign investors’] willingness to invest will be dependent on the implicit government guarantee against default… foreign investors won’t be able to seriously analyze credit risk in China,” he said.
Casanova sees the situation differently. She points out there are risks in most markets across the globe, and international investors will choose what suits them best.
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Only 17 snowy miles from the Canadian border, Katie Bushey’s most basic needs are met by traveling health aides who come into her home to change her diapers, track her seizures, spoon-feed her fettucine Alfredo and load her wheelchair into the shower.
But that’s only if someone shows up.
Bushey, 32, who lost her vocal and motor skills shortly after birth, is one of more than 180,000 Medicaid patients in New York who are authorized to receive long-term, in-home care, the most in the state’s history. But there are increasingly too few aides to go around, especially in remote, rural areas.
When there aren’t enough aides for Bushey — over a recent two-day stretch there were workers for only four of the 26 hours of care for which she is authorized — her mother must stay home from her job at an elementary school, forgoing a day’s wages and scraping her savings to pay the bills.
Minimum wage
It’s a national problem advocates say could get worse in New York because of a phased-in, $15-an-hour minimum wage that will be statewide by 2021, pushing notoriously poorly paid health aides into other jobs, in retail or fast food, that don’t involve hours of training and the pressure of keeping someone else alive.
“These should not be low-wage jobs,” said Bruce Darling, executive director at the Center for Disability Rights. “We’re paying someone who gives you a burger the same as the person who operates your relative’s ventilator or feeding tubes.”
There are currently 2.2 million home health aides and personal care aides in the U.S., with another 630,000 needed by 2024 as the Baby Boomer generation ages, according to the nonprofit research and consulting group PHI. New York state employs about 326,000 home health workers but is predicted to need another 125,000 by 2024.
For now, home health aides in New York state earn an average of about $11 an hour, though wages are lower in upstate regions. Advocates say the system needs a complete overhaul that focuses on higher pay, worker retention and finding methods of compensation beyond what is provided through Medicaid.
Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has committed nearly $6 billion in funding for home health care reimbursements in coming years as the agencies transition to the $15 minimum wage.
Statewide initiative
The state’s health department has said it is developing an initiative to attract, recruit and retain home health workers.
New York lawmakers have held hearings on the issue, and both the Senate and Assembly have so far included language in their budgets that would review and restructure how the state transfers Medicaid dollars to the providers, agencies and workers with the aim of providing workers and hours where they are needed most.
Other states are grappling with how to address the dwindling workforce as their minimum wages climb.
In Maine, legislation in 2015 attempted to make personal care worker wages more competitive with specific reimbursements for worker compensation. But a popular initiative will raise the minimum wage to $12 by 2020, minimizing those differences.
In Arizona, minimum wage increases have been accompanied by increased reimbursement rates, and in Washington state, workers negotiated a $15 wage for some home-care workers for when the state minimum increases to $13.50 in 2020.
New York advocates say a higher state minimum wage won’t attract any extra workers in rural regions such as Clinton County, where Bushey lives.
A single agency, North Country Home Services, hires and trains about 300 home health aides and personal care aides for about 1,000 people throughout a mountainous region the size of Connecticut. In any given week, the agency says, it leaves 400 hours of state-authorized care unfilled due to staffing shortages.
Special type of worker
The aides who continue despite the wages are a special breed, said Erica Stranahan, of Plattsburgh, who has worked as a home health aide with North Country for nine years and earns about $12 an hour. Stranahan said several of her co-workers have recently left home care for less-intensive professions that will soon have similar wages.
Stranahan acknowledged she makes it work only by sharing rent and living expenses with her boyfriend. She said she feels a responsibility to those she cares for, and would rather find a second job than quit caring for others.
“I enjoy helping people,” she said. “We’re with them for so many hours. It’s almost like we’re a second family for them,” Stranahan said.
But Rosalie Kline, a personal care aide in Canandaigua for nearly 13 years who also struggles to make ends meet, said that if worse came to worst, she would find another job that paid more.
“I wouldn’t want to. I love my job,” she said. “But I might need to.”
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke up for free trade at a major technology fair on Sunday with jabs clearly pointed at an increasingly protectionist United States.
Both called for a free trade deal to be reached quickly between Japan and the European Union, in comments made after G-20 finance ministers and central bankers dropped a long-standing mention of open trade in their final communique after a two-day meeting in Germany.
Neither leader named the U.S. government as they opened the CeBIT technology fair in Hanover, but both used the opportunity to distance themselves from protectionist tendencies coming from the Trump administration.
“In times when we have to argue with many about free trade, open borders and democratic values, it’s a good sign that Japan and Germany no longer argue about this but rather are seeking to shape the future in a way that benefits people,” Merkel said.
As G-20 president, Germany feels especially committed to these principles, she added.
After meeting President Donald Trump in Washington on Friday for the first time, Merkel said she hoped the United States and the European Union could resume discussions on a trade agreement. Trump said he did not believe in isolationism but that trade policy should be fairer.
Merkel stressed that Germany was strongly in favour of free trade and open markets.
“We certainly don’t want any barriers but at a time of an ‘Internet of things’ we want to link our societies with one another and let them deal fairly with one another, and that is what free trade is all about,” she said.
Speaking at the same event, Abe said: “Japan, having gone through reaping in abundance the benefits of free trade and investment, wants to be the champion upholding open systems alongside Germany.”
He added: “Of course to do so it will be necessary to have rules that are fair and can stand up to democratic appraisal.”
He also said the European Union and Japan should soon reach an economic deal. Merkel welcomed his comments, saying: “It’s very, very good that Japan says we want a free trade agreement, we want it soon because that could be the right statement and Germany would love to be a driving force behind this.”
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told Bild am Sonntag newspaper he was pleased that he would be meeting Abe on Tuesday and said the bloc wanted to conclude a free trade deal with Japan this year.
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Eight million metric tons of plastic wind up each year in the oceans, harming marine life and entering the food chain. Mike O’Sullivan reports a new documentary film called “A Plastic Ocean” looks at the problem, and its solutions.
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A huge meteorite slammed into the southern African country of Namibia during prehistoric times. Now, pieces from that meteorite could be used as a natural catalyst to store energy from renewable sources. Scientists at a technology institute in Switzerland found that the meteorite’s composition is key to its effectiveness as a catalyst. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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In textiles, nothing has the impact of spider silk. These protein strands are stretchy and in some ways as strong as steel but without the weight. Scientists have been making artificial spider silk for years, with varying degree of success. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports some Swedish researchers have found a new way to spin the miracle fiber, and they make it look easy.
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the meeting of finance ministers of the G20 countries was a success Saturday despite the ministers not reaching agreement on trade protectionism.
“I will leave here confident that my colleagues and I are able to work in partnership to …foster and promote global growth and financial stability,” he said.
Citing President Donald Trump’s commitment to American companies and workers, Mnuchin pushed back on and effectively omitted a ban on protectionism from the joint statement released at the end of the summit.
Mnuchin did, however, say that the United States still believed in free trade.
“We believe in free trade, we’re one of the largest markets in the world, we’re one of the largest trading partners in the world,” Mnuchin said. “Having said that, we want to re-examine certain agreements,” he continued, speaking specifically about NAFTA.
Other world powers present played down any disagreement between the countries.
“It’s not true we are not agreed. It’s completely clear we are not for protectionism,” Wolfgang Schaeuble, finance minister of host country Germany, told reporters, though he did, without mentioning a country by name, say that “maybe one or the other important member state needs to get a sense of how international cooperation works.”
The G20 is a informal forum on economic cooperation between 19 countries plus the European Union. Representatives from the 19 countries and the EU will meet for a formal summit in July.
For some medical students, getting a yes or no Friday was more important than finding the right life partner.
Friday was “Match Day,” the annual day when medical students find out which U.S. medical institution has accepted them for a residency program. It is a competition, of sorts: 32,000 training slots are available for 42,000 applicants, according to this year’s data.
A residency, three to five years of practical experience and training in a student’s chosen medical specialty, is the next step after medical school, which in the United States generally means four years of postgraduate university studies.
Of those 42,000 applicants vying for residencies, all but about 6,000 are foreign nationals. And that is where their aspirations could collide with President Donald Trump’s latest executive order regulating immigration to the United States.
‘Extensive upheaval’
The National Residency Match Program (NRMP), a nonprofit group that organizes the matches between students and hospitals, said the new immigration order has had a substantial impact on its program. In its current revised form, the order bans citizens from six Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the U.S., at least temporarily.
“The consequences of the [January 27] executive order are far-reaching for match applicants, and the upheaval it is causing is extensive,” NRMP’s chair, Dr. Maria Savoia, and CEO Mona Signer said in a joint statement.
“The affected applicants have worked hard for many years to achieve their goal of becoming physicians,” the two medical-education experts said, “and they should not be denied that opportunity because of a blanket policy that does not consider the individual.”
U.S. courts have issued a restraining order preventing enforcement of the travel ban, pending further legal arguments, but NRMP says it is concerned that some immigrants or foreign medical students with valid visas will nevertheless be delayed or rejected at U.S. borders.
Holidays at home are not care-free
In addition, foreign medical students who travel to their home countries during holidays or breaks in their university studies fear they may not be able to return in time to take up their new residencies in the U.S. Such medical programs typically begin each year on July 1.
“U.S. training programs should be able to select applicants based on their excellent character and qualifications, without regard to nationality. Both applicants and programs benefit from an orderly process for entry into graduate medical education,” said Signer, who is a public health specialist, and Savoia. “The executive order disrupts that process very considerably.”
Hospitals and other medical institutions that offer residencies worry that foreign students they choose for the multiyear training programs will be unable to begin their studies on schedule, Signer said.
Medical residencies are sometimes known as internships, or first-year post-graduate studies, because they occur during a fledgling doctor’s first year of practical training alongside or under direct supervision of a fully qualified physician in one of 21 recognized medical specialties.
Is US becoming less welcoming?
Those who administer medical residency programs do not directly choose the candidates they would like to attract. Instead they rank applicants in order of preference. Under those conditions, Signer said, “It seems likely that residency program directors will be reluctant to rank J-1 visa applicants because they may not be able to enter the country to begin training.”
The U.S. State Department’s J-1 visa program offers foreign nationals an opportunity to come to the United States “to teach, study, conduct research, demonstrate special skills or receive on-the-job training for periods ranging from a few weeks to several years,” according to Cultural Vistas, a nonprofit American group that has been organizing international exchange programs since 1963.
The perception that the United States is becoming less welcoming to foreign nationals in the medical professions appears to be having an effect.
Fewer non-U.S. citizen “international medical school graduates,” or IMGs, submitted program choices for this year: 7,284 in 2017 vs. 7,460 in 2016. However, NRMP said more of these candidates (52.4 percent) were matched with institutions – the highest match rate since 2005.
Foreign physicians benefit all Americans
About 1,800 IMGs already enrolled in accredited residency and fellowship programs in the U.S. are impacted by the travel ban, according to Dr. Thomas J. Nasca, CEO of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
“These physicians are providing much needed medical care to a conservatively estimated 900,000 patients in urban, suburban and rural communities across the country annually. They are a valued and welcomed group of colleagues,” he wrote in a statement.
“Many communities, including rural and low-income areas, often have problems attracting physicians to meet their health care needs. To address these gaps in care, IMGs often fill these openings. These physicians are licensed by the same stringent requirements applied to U.S. medical school graduates,” the chief executive officer of the American Medical Association, Dr. James Madara, wrote last month.
“The medical education community must support all international medical graduates and their families during these difficult times,” NRMP’s statement said.
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Washington’s National Zoo hired its first animal nutritionist 30 years ago. Since then the zoo has been preparing specific, well-balanced meals for each animal, provided by volunteers and food preparation teams. For Yahya Barzinji, Elizabeth Cherneff reports.
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In a medical emergency, an ambulance with a qualified medical team on board can be a lifesaver. But in Nepal, this service is rare if not nonexistent. To help provide the best possible medical emergency services, a team of doctors from Stanford University in California spent 12 weeks training four dozen medical technicians in Kathmandu. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Each day in the United States hundreds of thousands of yellow-painted buses carry millions of children to schools and back home. Scientists at the University of Maryland are developing algorithms that can help transport students more efficiently. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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In Greece’s grinding economic crisis, a home for abused children is now taking in those whose parents are struggling to feed them.
It is perhaps the darkest sign of economic devastation in Greece, where traditionally strong family ties are starting to crumble after years of depression.
A quarter of Greece’s workforce is unemployed and a quarter of its children live in poverty, according to United Nations figures, forcing parents to depend on grandparents for handouts.
But pensions too have been cut a dozen times.
In Athens, the Model National Nursery, set up a century ago for orphans of war, can hardly keep up with the number of parents turning to it for help. Unable to cover their basic needs, parents leave their children in the home all week.
Iro Zervaki, its head, says at least 40 children are on the waiting list, four times as many as a couple of years ago.
The home sleeps 25 in a bare room with rows of beds draped in blue blankets, and lacks the staff and funds to increase capacity, she said. Most places are for abused children.
Dozens of other children, all aged two to five, come in daily, but the days away from their parents are long.
“We had incidents where children even attempted to leave, to run away, to go to their mother,” Zervaki said.
In the buzzing playground, a little girl tugged the social worker’s blouse and yelled: “Miss! When will I go to my mum?” “They can’t tell the days apart so every day they ask: ‘Is it Friday?'” Anthoula Zarmakoupi, the social worker, said. “They know mum will pick them up at the weekend.”
But sometimes even that was not possible, she said. “We have children whose parents are homeless so it’s very difficult for them to even collect them for the weekend.”
For the home too, brighter days seem as far away as ever.
State funding has been cut and covers just half of the staff’s wages. The home depends on donations for food and clothes, and Zervaki says it is hard to tell if she will be able to make next month’s payments.
“It doesn’t look like tomorrow will be any better,” she said. “It will take some years. I hope not too many.”
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It could be a Hollywood screenplay. Juliana Armelin and her husband Paulo Siqueira decided to radically change their lives in 2010, quitting jobs in Sao Paulo’s financial sector and moving to a farm seven hours away to start growing coffee.
Seven years later, they clinched for a second consecutive year Brazil’s most prestigious coffee award, beating hundreds of established producers in a country that has exported coffee for more than 200 years.
“I would never imagine we could reach this status in such a short period,” Siqueira told Reuters on Friday after the couple received the annual award from Italian roaster Illy.
“I used to say that we don’t have a story on coffee, but only some chapters so far,” said Armelin.
The couple met during college, graduating in engineering from Brazil’s top ranked university, USP. They spent some years together in the United States getting Master of Business Administration degrees at the University of Chicago before starting careers in Sao Paulo.
Armelin is a former Mckinsey & Company consultant, while Siqueira held positions as a fund manager at Credit Suisse and boutique investment firm Vector Investimentos.
They ended up in the coffee business due to Armelin’s father, who decided to start producing the beans.
“I helped him in the research and started to like the idea.
We already had thoughts at running something together,” Armelin said.
After studying the possibility, they bought a 210-hectare (518 acres) farm in the municipality of Ibiá in a coffee-producing region known as the Cerrado Mineiro, in Minas Gerais state.
“It was an old cattle ranch, only pasture,” Siqueira recalled. They planted the first trees in 2011, collected the first beans two years later and had their first full harvest in 2015. Within a year, they received the first award.
The couple’s farm is a state-of-the-art facility. The fields are 100 percent irrigated, with a fully mechanized harvest. The washed arabicas are put to dry in raised beds to avoid contact with the soil, which could affect the flavor.
“We studied a lot, talked to a lot of people who knew how to produce high quality coffee and we did everything they said we should,” said Armelin. “Some people used to say that we were nerds that went to coffee production. And we used to say, ‘yes, we are.'”
The Terra Alta farm was chosen for aspects like the plentiful availability of water and its flat terrain to allow for mechanization.
The couple used as much government-backed credit as they could to buy all the equipment. “We have debt for the rest of our lives,” said Armelin, smiling.
The farm today exports 80 percent of its production, which varies from 10,000 to 13,000 60-kg bags per year. Many deals are done directly with gourmet coffee sellers in the United States.
Siquiera said the coffee community in the Cerrado region has always been very receptive, despite their unusual background.
But the couple stops short of recommending their experience to others.
“Even if you have the money, it really is not easy. Growing coffee requires extreme dedication,” Armelin said, adding that she takes care of the financial details while her husband likes to be out in the fields.
But they have no regrets. “We like this a lot. We will probably be coffee growers for the rest of our lives,” she said.
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Airbnb expects to maintain its rapid growth in Africa this year and double its customer numbers to 1.5 million, its Chief Executive Brian Chesky and regional head told Reuters on Friday.
The number of people using the online room rental service on the continent rose by 143 percent to about 765,000 guests in 2016 from the year before, said Nicola D’Elia, the firm’s Africa and Middle East chief.
“If you just look at 2017, it’s going to double, you will have 1.5 million people at the end of this year,” added D’Elia.
Airbnb CEO Chesky confirmed that the California-based company expected to double African customer numbers this year.
“Certainly that would be the forecast,” he said in an interview in Cape Town, adding: “This is literally just the beginning. It [Africa] is still relatively under-penetrated.”
Chesky said the company had 77,000 homes across Africa – out of its 3 million globally – but that it could easily have “hundreds of thousands” in a continent that’s home to over a billion people.
The 77,000 homes represented an increase of 95 percent from 2015 to 2016, the company said.
South Africa, which was an early adopter of Airbnb, is the top-ranked country in Africa in terms of listings and visitors, who mainly come from the United States, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands.
The top five cities in Africa are Cape Town, Marrakesh, Johannesburg, Nairobi and Casablanca, although listings are found in diverse locations from St Helena island in the south Atlantic Ocean to Freetown in Sierra Leone, and even a smattering in Somalia.
Chesky, who described Africa as “an incredibly exciting emerging market for travel”, was speaking to Reuters in Langa, Cape Town’s oldest township where he put in an appearance to surprise graduates from an Airbnb training program.
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