#end malaria

[mukathospital]

🦟 World Malaria Day — a reminder that a small bite can carry a big threat. Let’s raise awareness, take action, and support the fight to end malaria. Every life counts, and prevention is powerful. 🌍💪 Together, we can build a world free from this deadly disease.

[pathologylab]

On this #WorldMalariaDay, we stand in solidarity with communities affected by malaria and support #global efforts to eradicate it once and for all. This year’s theme, “Accelerating the fight against #malaria for a more equitable #world,” reminds us that progress depends on innovation, investment, and inclusive public #health strategies. 

#WorldMalariaDay2025 #EndMalaria #GlobalHealth #SDG #g2m #genes2me #rtpcr #malariaday #healthcare #manufacturer #testingsolutions #diagnostics #solutions

[canisalbus]

I've got to say, I've been doing a lot of research on Italy recently and I literally can't stop thinking about your boys. I'm over here trying to read about whatever Crusade and my brain is just a constant loop of "isn't Machete a cardinal? And Vasco was from like Verona, right?" Not super conducive to learning anything, but I am enjoying myself and thought you should know.

Thank you for your lovely art and for sharing your darlings <33

That's adorable ;^; But also sorry the lads keep distracting you, hah.

I'd argue that getting invested in your characters and their stories and having to do background research for them is actually a great way to accumulate knowledge about various subjects. Often it's stuff you probably would never get around to reading about otherwise. I'm not saying it's always information you'll have many practical uses for, but learning about new things is fun and it's beneficial to you and your brain in the long run.

Vasco is from Florence actually! It's usually considered to be the birthplace and the main hub of the entire Renaissance movement. Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli and Michelangelo lived and influenced there and Dante Alighieri (author of The Divine Comedy/Dante's Inferno) was florentine as well, albeit he lived several centuries prior to them.

[iwrotemrtambourineman]

hearing tell of gay francesca on the wind - so epic that they genderbent the asshole brother with malaria 😁👍

[not-so-superheroine]

Elder Graham Needs to Come Get His Mormon Cricket Legion 🦗

saw a comment youtube that read “a swarm of mormon crickets is enough to make you wish for a nuclear winter.” and another that read “i’m a latter day saint and we don’t claim them (the mormon crickets)”  then i thought, “no, you need to claim them. come get your legion of crickets, Joshua Graham.” 

[ghost-mantis]

the moral of the story was that we clearly haven’t sent enough people to the moon and this time will be different

same with the guys who went to the hollow core of the Earth or to find life on Mars

just send more guys

on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport the first person on the moon went there by accident and promptly died. The next dozen or so people also went by accident, and also died. Number 14 figured out that people who go to the moon die and very cleverly brought a sword and six weeks of travel rations. This did not help.

No one on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport ever figured out why people die in space because they don’t need airplanes and never found it particularly interesting to climb tall mountains. Astronomers use telescopes to take pictures of the ever-growing pile of corpses on the moon.

[cursedauxiliary]

I remember having to do senior projects for seminar and with the group trging decide on what to do, and this one girl said the football brain injury stuff but like the project constraints made it not feasibly like 1. you'd need a lot of brain tissue from recently deceased (or you'd really just be looking at old data and recontextualizes it through stats or some shit) 2. expensive /difficult to get 3. Does not relate to any of us at all except the one girl's brother which also made me think why tf is ur brother playing said sport

[transmutationisms]

ive been saying this for Literally Years Now but the most direct medical comparison to covid probably is never going to be HIV on any metric, overall it's probably the SARS outbreak of the early aughts (related viruses, similar transmission, what appear thus far to be similar rates/experiences of post-viral conditions and disability) and politically i do understand why people reach for HIV but like you really need to understand that our current situation is similar to how EVERY SINGLE pandemic / epidemic / outbreak has 'ended' in recent / capitalist history. these are political designations, that tend to get made once the ruling class considers itself safe, and it is typical that workers, global southerners, racialised people, &c continue to bear the brunt of diseases that would be treatable or preventable, were imperial countries and their ruling classes to care. we should be furious every time this happens and in every case where it is still happening: flu, TB, malaria, ebola, zika, plague, on and on, even the smallpox eradication campaign championed as a definitive triumph for public health occurred unevenly and the US and europe allowed the disease to continue to exact its most brutal toll on people in the Horn of Africa and southeast Asia until it was finally eradicated. covid is not unique in its medical OR political properties or ramifications, if you think it is you sorely need to do some more reading and this is why it is both unhelpful and yes, often homophobic to see how often 'covid communicators' jump straight to making alarmist and poorly contextualised comparisons to HIV, Specifically.

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

A Big TB Announcement

Greetings from Washington D.C., where I spent the morning meeting with senators before joining a panel that included TB survivor Shaka Brown, Dr. Phil LoBue of the CDC, and Dr. Atul Gawande of USAID. Dr. Gawande announced a major new project to bring truly comprehensive tuberculosis care to regions in Ethiopia and the Philippines. Over the next four years, this project can bring over $80,000,000 in new money to fight TB in these two high-burden countries.

Our family is committing an additional $1,000,000 a year to help fund the project in the Philippines, which has the fourth highest burden of tuberculosis globally.

Here’s how it breaks down: The Department of Health in the Philippines has made TB reduction a major priority and has provided $11,000,0000 per year in matching funds to go alongside $10,000,000 contributed by USAID and an additional $1,000,000 donated by us. This $22,000,000 per year will fund everything from X-Ray machines, medications, and GeneXpert tests to training and employing a huge surge of community health workers, nurses, and doctors who are calling themselves TB Warriors. In an area that includes nearly 3,000,000 people, these TB Warriors will screen for TB, identify cases, provide curative treatment, and offer preventative therapy to close contacts of the ill. We know this Search-Treat-Prevent model is the key to ending tuberculosis, but we hope this project will be both a beacon and a blueprint to show that It’s possible to radically reduce the burden of TB in communities quickly and permanently. It will also, we believe, save many, many lives.

—

I believe we can’t end TB without these kinds of public/private partnerships. After all, that’s how we ended smallpox and radically reduced the global burden of polio. It’s also how we’ve driven down death from malaria and HIV. For too long, TB hasn’t had the kind of government or private support needed to accelerate the fight against the disease, but I really hope that’s starting to change. I’m grateful to USAID for spearheading this project, and also to the Philippine Ministry of Health for showing such commitment and prioritizing TB.

—

One reason this project is even possible: Both the cost of diagnosis (through GeneXpert tests) and the cost of treatment with bedaquiline are far lower than they were a year ago, and that is due to public pressure campaigns, many of which were organized by nerdfighteria. I’m not asking you for money (yet); Hank and I will be funding this in partnership with a few people in nerdfighteria who are making major gifts. But I am asking you to continue pressuring the corporations that profit from the world’s poorest people to lower their prices. I’ve seen some of the budgets, and it’s absolutely jaw-dropping how many more tests and pills are available because of what you’ve done as a community.

—

I don’t yet have the details on which region of the Philippines we’ll be working in, but it will be an area that includes millions of people–perhaps as many as 3 million. And it will include urban, suburban, and rural areas to see the different responses needed to provide comprehensive care in different communities. This will not (to start!) be a nationwide campaign, because even though $80,000,000 is a lot of money, it’s not enough to fund comprehensive care in a nation as large as the Philippines. But we hope that it will serve as a model–to the nation, to the region, and to the world–of what’s possible. 

—

I’m really excited (and grateful) that our community gets to have a front-row seat to see the challenges and hopefully the successes of implementing comprehensive care. Just in the planning, this project has involved so many contributors–NGOs in the Philippines, global organizations like the Partners in Health community, USAID, the national Ministry of Health in the Philippines, and regional health authorities as well. There are a lot of partners here, but they’ve been working together extremely well over the last few months to plan for this project, which will start more or less immediately thanks to their incredibly hard work.

[mariacallous]

It is hard to calculate all the good that Atul Gawande has done in the world. After training as a surgeon at Harvard, he taught medicine inside the hospital and in the classroom. A contributor to The New Yorker since 1998, he has published widely on issues of public health. His 2007 article in the magazine and the book that emerged from it, “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” have been sources of clarity and truth in the debate over health-care costs. In 2014, he published “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” a vivid, poetic, compassionate narrative that presents unforgettable descriptions of the ways the body ages and our end-of-life choices.

Gawande’s work on public health was influential in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, and, starting in November, 2020, he served on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board. In July, 2021, Biden nominated him as the assistant administrator for the Bureau of Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he worked to limit disease outbreaks overseas. Gawande, who is fifty-nine, resigned the position on the day of Donald Trump’s return to the Presidency.

When we spoke recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gawande, usually a wry, high-spirited presence, was in a grave mood. There were flashes of anger and despair in his voice. He was, after all, watching Trump and Elon Musk dismantle, gleefully, a global health agency that had only lately been for him a source of devotion and inspiration. As a surgeon, Gawande had long been in a position to save one life at a time. More recently, and all too briefly, he was part of a vast collective responsible for untold good around the world. And now, as he made plain, that collective has been deliberately cast into chaos, even ruins. The cost in human lives is sure to be immense. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

President Biden appointed you as the assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., a job that you’ve described as the greatest job in medicine. You stepped down on Trump’s Inauguration Day, and he immediately began targeting U.S.A.I.D. with an executive order that halted all foreign aid. Did you know, or did you intuit, that Trump would act the way he has?

I had no idea. In the previous Trump Administration, they had embraced what they themselves called the “normals.” They had a head of U.S.A.I.D. who was devoted to the idea of development and soft power in the world. They had their own wrinkle on it, which I didn’t disagree with. They called it “the journey to self-reliance,” and they wanted to invest in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, to enable stronger economies, more capacity—and we weren’t doing enough of that. I actually continued much of the work that had occurred during that time.

Tell me a little bit about what you were in charge of and what good was being done in the world.

I had twenty-five hundred people, between D.C. and sixty-five countries around the world, working on advancing health and protecting Americans from diseases and outbreaks abroad. The aim was to work with countries to build their systems so that we protected global health security and improved global outcomes—from reducing H.I.V./AIDS and other infectious diseases like malaria and T.B., to strengthening primary health-care systems, so that those countries would move on from depending on aid from donors. In three years, we documented saving more than 1.2 million lives after COVID alone.

Let’s pause on that. Your part of U.S.A.I.D. was responsible, demonstrably, for saving 1.2 million lives—from what?

So, COVID was the first global reduction in life expectancy in seventy years, and it disrupted the ability across the world to deliver basic health services, which includes H.I.V./AIDS [medications], but also included childhood immunizations, and managing diarrhea and pneumonia. Part of my target was to reduce the percentage of deaths in any given country that occur before the age of fifty. The teams would focus on the top three to five killers. In some places, that would be H.I.V.; in some places that would be T.B. Safe childbirth was a huge part of the work. And immunizations: forty per cent of the gains in survival for children under five in the past fifty years in the world came from vaccines alone. So vaccines were a big part of the work as well.

What was the case against this kind of work? It just seems like an absolute good.

One case is that it could have been more efficient, right? Americans imagine that huge sums of money go to this work. Polls show that they think that a quarter of our spending goes to foreign aid. In fact, on a budget for our global health work that is less than half the budget of the hospital where I did surgery here in Boston, we reached hundreds of millions of people, with programs that saved lives by the millions. That’s why I describe it as the best job in medicine that people have never heard of. It is at a level of scale I could never imagine experiencing. So the case against it—I woke up one day to find Elon Musk tweeting that this was a criminal enterprise, that this was money laundering, that this was corruption.

Where would he get this idea? Where does this mythology come from?

Well, what’s hard to parse is: What is just willful ignorance? Not just ignorance—it’s lying, right? For example, there’s a statistic that they push that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s dollars actually got to recipients in the world. Now, this is a willful distortion of a statistic that says that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s funding went to local organizations as opposed to multinational organizations and others. There’s a legitimate criticism to be made that that percentage should be higher, that more local organizations should get the funds. I did a lot of work that raised those numbers considerably, got it to thirty per cent, but that was not the debate they were having. They’re claiming that the money’s not actually reaching people and that corruption is taking it away, when, in fact, the reach—the ability to get to enormous numbers of people—has been a best buy in health and in humanitarian assistance for a long time.

Now the over-all agency, as I understand it, had about ten thousand people working for it. How many are working at U.S.A.I.D. now?

Actually, the number was about thirteen thousand. And the over-all number now—it’s hard to estimate because people are being turned on and off like a light switch—

Turned on and off, meaning their computers are shut down?

Yeah, and they’re being terminated and then getting unterminated—like, “Oops, sorry, we let the Ebola team go.” You heard Elon Musk say something to that effect in the Oval Office. “But we’ve brought them back, don’t worry.” It’s a moving target, but this is what I’d say: more than eighty per cent of the contracts have been terminated, representing the work that is done by U.S.A.I.D. and the for-profit and not-for-profit organizations they work with, like Catholic Relief Services and the like. And more than eighty per cent of the staff has been put on administrative leave, terminated, or dismissed in one way or the other.

So it’s been obliterated.

It has been dismantled. It is dying. I mean, at this point, it’s six weeks in. Twenty million people with H.I.V., for example—including five hundred thousand children—who had received medicines that keep them alive have now been cut off for six weeks.

A lot of people are going to die as a result of this. Am I wrong?

The internal estimates are that more than a hundred and sixty thousand people will die from malaria per year, from the abandonment of these programs, if they’re not restored. We’re talking about twenty million people dependent on H.I.V. medicines—and you have to calculate how many you think will get back on, and how many will die in a year. But you’re talking hundreds of thousands in Year One at a minimum. But then on immunization side, you’re talking about more than a million estimated deaths.

I’m sorry, Atul. I have to stop my cool journalistic questioning and say: This is nothing short of outrageous. How is it possible that this is happening? Obviously, these facts are filtering up to Elon Musk, to Donald Trump, and to the Administration at large. And they don’t care?

The logic is to deny the reality, either because they simply don’t want to believe it—that they’re so steeped in the idea that government officials are corrupt and lazy and unable to deliver anything, and that a group of young twentysomething engineers will fix it all—or they are indifferent. And when Musk waves around the chainsaw—we are seeing what surgery on the U.S. government with a chainsaw looks like at U.S.A.I.D. And it’s just the beginning of the playbook. This was the soft target. This is affecting people abroad—it’s tens of thousands of jobs at home, so there’s harm here; there’s disease that will get here, etc. But this was the easy target. Now it’s being brought to the N.I.H., to the C.D.C., to critical parts of not only the health enterprise but other important functions of government.

So the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other such bureaucracies that do equal medical good will also get slammed?

Are being slammed. So here’s the playbook: you take the Treasury’s payment system—DOGE and Musk took over the information system for the Treasury and the payments in the government; you take over the H.R. software, so you can turn people’s badges and computer access on and off at will; you take over the buildings—they cancelled the leases, so you don’t have buildings. U.S.A.I.D.—the headquarters was given to the Customs and Border Protection folks. And then you’ve got it all, right? And then he’s got X, which feeds right into Fox News, and you’ve got control of the media as well. It’s a brilliant playbook.

But from the outside, at least, Atul, and maybe from your vantage point as well: this looks like absolute chaos. I’ve been reading this week that staff posted overseas are stranded, fired without a plane ticket home. From the inside, what does it look like?

One example: U.S.A.I.D. staff in the Congo had to flee for their lives and watch on television as their own home was destroyed and their kids’ belongings attacked. And then when they called for help and backup, they could not get it. I spoke to staff involved in one woman’s case, a pregnant woman in her third trimester, in a conflict zone. They have maternity leave just like everybody else there. But because the contracts had been turned off, they couldn’t get a flight out, and were not guaranteed safe passage, and couldn’t get care for her complications, and ended up having to get cared for locally without the setup to address her needs. One person said to me, as she’s enduring these things, “My government is attacking me. We ought to be ashamed. Our entire system of checks and balances has failed us.”

What’s been the reaction in these countries, in the governments, and among the people? The sense of abandonment must be intense on all sides.

There are broadly three areas. The biggest part of U.S.A.I.D. is the FEMA for disasters abroad. It’s called the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, and they bring earthquake response; wildfire response; response in conflicts, in famines. These are the people who suit up, and get assistance, and stabilize places where things are going wrong.

The Global Health Bureau, which I led, is the second-largest part of the agency, and that does work around diseases and health threats, as well as advancing health systems in low- and middle-income countries around the world. There’s coöperation on solving global problems, like stopping pandemics, and addressing measles outbreaks, and so on.

The third is advancing countries’ economies, freedom, and democracy. John F. Kennedy, when he formed U.S.A.I.D. in 1961, said that it was to counter the adversaries of freedom and to provide compassionate support for the development of the world. U.S.A.I.D. has kept Ukraine’s health system going and gave vital support to keep their energy infrastructure going, as Russia attacked it. In Haiti, this is the response team that has sought to stabilize what’s become a gang-controlled part of the country. Our health teams kept almost half of the primary health-care system for the population going. So around the world: stopping fentanyl flow, bringing in independent media. All of that has been wiped out completely. And in many cases, the people behind that work—most of the people we’re working with, local partners to keep these things going—are now being attacked. Those partners are now being attacked, in country after country.

What you’re describing is both human compassion and, a phrase you used earlier in our conversation, “soft power.” Describe what that is. Why is it so important to the United States and to the world? What will squandering it—what will destroying it—mean?

The tools of foreign policy, as I’ve learned, are defense, diplomacy, and development. And the development part is the soft power. We’re not sending troops into Asia and Africa and Latin America. We’re sending hundreds of thousands of civilians without uniforms, who are there to represent the United States, and to pursue common goals together—whether it’s stemming the tide of fentanyl coming across the border, addressing climate disasters, protecting the world from disease. And that soft power is a reflection of our values, what we stand for—our strong belief in freedom, self-determination, and advancement of people’s economies; bringing more stability and peace to the world. That is the fundamental nature of soft power: that we are not—what Trump is currently trying to create—a world of simply “Might makes right, and you do what we tell you,” because that does not create stability. It creates chaos and destruction.

An immoral universe in which everybody’s on their own.

That’s right. An amoral universe.

Who is standing up, if anyone, in the Administration? What about Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom you mentioned. What’s his role in all of this? Back in January, he issued a waiver to allow for lifesaving services to continue. That doesn’t seem to have been at all effective.

It hasn’t happened. He has issued a waiver that said that the subset of work that is directly lifesaving—through humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and so on, and the health work that I used to lead—will continue; we don’t want these lives to be lost. And yet it hasn’t been implemented. It’s clear that he’s not in control of the mechanisms that make these things happen. DOGE does not approve the payments going out, and has not approved the payments going out, to sustain that work.

The federal courts have ruled that the freeze was likely illegal and unconstitutional, and imposed a temporary restraining order saying that it should not be implemented, that it had to be lifted—the payment freeze. Instead, they doubled down. And Marco Rubio signed on to this, tweeted about it earlier this week—that over eighty per cent of all contracts have now been terminated. And the remaining ones—they have not even made a significant dent in making back payments that are owed for work done even before Trump was inaugurated.

There’s always been skepticism, particularly on the right, about foreign aid. I remember Jesse Helms, of North Carolina, would always rail about the cost of foreign aid and how it was useless, in his view, in many senses. I am sure that in your time in office, you must have dealt with officials who were skeptical of the mission. What kind of complaints were you getting from senators and congressmen and the like, even before the Trump Administration took over in January?

It was a minority. I’ll just start by saying: the support for foreign-aid work has been recognized and supported by Republicans and Democrats for decades. But there’s been a consistent—it was a minority—that had felt that the U.S. shouldn’t be involved abroad. That’s part of an isolationist view, that extending this work is just charity; it’s not in U.S. interests and it’s not necessary for the protection of Americans. The argument is that we should be spending it at home.

They’re partly playing into the populist view that huge portions of the budget are going abroad, when that’s not been the case. But it’s also understandable that when people are suffering at home, when there are significant needs here, it can be hard to make connections to why we need to fight to stop problems abroad before they get here.

And yet we only recently endured the COVID epidemic, which by all accounts did not begin at home, and spread all over the world. Why was COVID not convincing as a manifestation of how a greater international role could help?

Certainly that didn’t convince anybody that that was able to be controlled abroad—

Because it wasn’t.

Because it wasn’t, right. And COVID did drive a significant distrust in the public-health apparatus itself because of the suffering that people endured through that entire emergency. But I would say the larger picture is—every part of government spending has its critics. One of the fascinating things about the foreign-aid budget, which has been the least popular part of the budget, is that U.S.A.I.D. was mostly never heard of. Now it has high name recognition, and has majority support for continuing its programs, whether it’s keeping energy infrastructure alive in Ukraine, stabilizing conflicts—whether it’s Haiti or other parts of the world—to keep refugees from swarming more borders, or the work of purely compassionate humanitarian assistance and health aid that reduces the over-all death rates from diseases that may yet harm us. So it’s been a significant jump in support for this work, out of awareness now of what it is, and how much less it turns out to cost.

So it took this disaster to raise awareness.

That’s human nature, right? Loss aversion. When you lose it is when you realize its value.

Atul, there’s been a measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico, and R.F.K., Jr.—who’s now leading the Department of Health and Human Services—has advised some people, at least, to use cod-liver oil. We have this multilayered catastrophe that you’ve been describing. Where could the United States be, in a couple of years, from a health perspective? What worries you the most?

Measles is a good example. There’s actually now been a second death. We hadn’t had a child death from measles in the United States in years. We are now back up, globally, to more than a hundred thousand child deaths. I was on the phone with officials at the World Health Organization—the U.S. had chosen measles as a major area that it wanted to support. It provided eighty per cent of the support in that area, and let other countries take other components of W.H.O.’s work. So now, that money has been pulled from measles programs around the world. And having a Secretary of Health who has done more to undermine confidence in measles vaccines than anybody in the world means that that’s a singular disease that can be breaking out, and we’ll see many more child deaths that result from that.

The over-all picture, the deeper concern I have, is that as a country we’re abandoning the idea that we can come together collectively with other nations to do good in the world. People describe Trump as transactional, but this is a predatory view of the world. It is one in which you not only don’t want to participate in coöperation; you want to destroy the coöperation. There is a deep desire to make the W.H.O. ineffective in working with other nations; to make other U.N. organizations ineffective in doing their work. They already struggled with efficiency and being effective in certain domains, and yet they continue to have been very important in global health emergencies, responding and tracking outbreaks. . . .

We have a flu vaccine because there are parts of the world where flu breaks out, like China, that don’t share data with us. But they share it with the W.H.O., and the result is that we have a flu vaccine that’s tuned to the diseases coming our way by the fall. I don’t know how we’ll get a flu vaccine this fall. Either we’ll get it because people are, under the table, communicating with the W.H.O. to get the information, and the W.H.O is going to share it, even though the U.S. is no longer paying, or we’re going to work with other countries and be dependent on them for our flu vaccine. This is not a good answer.

I must ask you this, more generally: You’re watching a President of the United States begin to side with Russia over Ukraine. You’re watching the dismantlement of our foreign-aid budget, and both its compassion and its effectiveness. Just the other day, we saw a Columbia University graduate—you may agree with him, disagree with him on his politics, but who has a green card—and ICE officers went to his apartment and arrested him, and presumably will deport him. It’s an assault on the First Amendment. You’re seeing universities being defunded—starting with Columbia, but it’ll hardly be the last, etc. What in your view motivates Donald Trump to behave in this way? What’s the vision that pulls this all together?

What I see happening on the health side is reflective of everything you just said. There is a fundamental desire to remove and destroy independent sources of knowledge, of power, of decision-making. So not only is U.S.A.I.D. dismantled but there’s thousands of people fired—from the National Institutes of Health, the C.D.C., the Food and Drug Administration—and a fundamental restructuring of decision-making so that political judgment drives decision-making over N.I.H. grants, which have been centralized and pulled away from the individual institutes. So the discoveries that lead to innovations in the world—that work has a political layer now. F.D.A. approvals—now wanting a political review. C.D.C. guidance—now wanting a political review. These organizations were all created by Congress to be shielded from that, so that we could have a professional, science-driven set of decisions, and not the political flavor of the moment.

Donald Trump’s preference, which he’s expressed in those actions and many others, is that his whims, just like King Henry VIII’s, should count. King Henry VIII remade an entire religion around who he wanted to marry. And this is the kind of world that Trump is wanting to create—one of loyalty trumping any other considerations. So the inspectors general who do audits over the corruption that they seem to be so upset about—they’ve been removed. Any independent judgment in society that would trump the political whims of the leader. . . . The challenge is—and I think is the source of hope for me—that a desire for chaos, for acceding to destruction, for accepting subjugation, is not a stable equilibrium. It’s not successful in delivering the goods for people, under any line of thinking.

In the end, professionally organized bureaucracies—that need to have political oversight, need to have some controls in place, but a balance that allows decision-making to happen—those have been a key engine of the prosperity of the country. Their destruction will have repercussions that I think will make the Administration very unpopular, and likely cause a backlash that balances things out. I hope we get beyond getting to the status quo ante of a stalemate between these two lines of thinking—one that advances the world through incremental collective action that’s driven around checks and balances as we advance the world ever forward, and one in which a strongman can have his way and simply look for who he can dominate.

Right now, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the head of H.H.S. His targets include not only vaccine manufacturers but the pharma industry writ large. But he’s talked a lot, too, about unhealthy food in the American diet—to some extent, he’s not wrong. Do you see any upside in his role in pushing this so-called Make America Healthy Again idea?

Of course there is good. I mean, we as a country have chronic illness that is importantly tied to our nutritional habits, our exercise, and so on. But for all our unhealthiness, we’ve also had an engine of health that has enabled the top one per cent in America to have a ninety-year life expectancy today. Our job is to enable that capacity for public health and health-care delivery to get to everybody alive, I would argue, and certainly to get it to all Americans.

What’s ignored is that half the country can’t afford having a primary-care doctor and don’t have adequate public health in their communities. If R.F.K., Jr., were taking that on, more power to him. Every indication from his history is that this is an effort to highlight some important things. But how much of it’s going to actually be evidence-driven? He’s had some crazy theories about what’s going to advance chronic illness and address health.

I’d say the second thing is the utter incompetence in running things and making things work. They’ve utterly destabilized the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the F.D.A.

Explain that destabilization—what it looks like from inside and what effects it’ll have.

One small example: DOGE has declared that all kinds of buildings are not necessary anymore. That includes the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. They’re saying, “Oh, everybody has to show up for work now, but you won’t have a building to work in anymore.”

No. 2 on the list is F.D.A. specialized centers around the country. There’s a laboratory in St. Louis where they have specialized equipment for testing food and drugs for safety. And so that whole capability—to insure that your foods and your medications are able to be tested for whether they have contaminants, whether they are counterfeit—that’s a basic part of good nutrition, good medicine, that could be pulled away.

Whether it’s maintaining the building infrastructure, maintaining the staff who are being purged sort of randomly left and right, or treating them not like they’re slaves but actually bringing good work out of everybody, by good management—that is what’s not happening.

I have the feeling that you, even in a short time, loved being in the federal government. What I hear in our conversation is a sense of tragedy that is not only public but that is felt very intimately by you.

I did not expect that going into government would be as meaningful to me as it was. I went into government because it was the COVID crisis and I was offered an opportunity to lead the international component of the response. We got seven hundred million vaccines out to the world. But what I found was a group of people who could achieve scale like I’d never seen. It is mission-driven. None of these people went into it for the money; it’s not like they’ve had any power—

I assume all of them could have made more money elsewhere.

Absolutely. And many of them spent their lives as Foreign Service officers living in difficult places in the world. I remember that Kyiv was under attack about eight weeks after I was sworn in. I thought I was going to be working on COVID, but this thing was erupting. First of all, our health team, along with the rest of the mission and Embassy in Kyiv, had to flee for safety. But within a week they were already saying, “We have T.B. breaking out, we have potential polio cases. How are we going to respond?” And my critical role was to say, “What’s going to kill people the most? Right now, Russia has shut down the medical supply chain, and so nearly a hundred per cent of the pharmacies just closed. Two hundred and fifty thousand H.I.V. patients can’t get their meds. A million heart patients can’t get their meds. Let’s get the pharmacies open.” And, by the way, they’ve attacked the oxygen factories and put the hospitals under cyberattack and their electronic systems aren’t functioning.

And this team, in four weeks, moved the entire hospital record system to the cloud, allowing protection against cyberattacks; got oxygen systems back online; and was able to get fifty per cent of the pharmacies open in about a month, and ultimately got eighty per cent of the pharmacies open. That is just incredible.

Yes, are there some people that I had to deal with who were overly bureaucratic? Did I have to address some people who were not performing? Absolutely. Did I have to drive efficiency?

As in any work . . .

In every place you have to do that. But this was America at its best, and I was so proud to be part of that. And what frustrated me, in that job, was that I had to speak for the U.S. government. I couldn’t write for you during that time.

Believe me, I know!

I couldn’t tell the story. I’ve got a book I’m working on now in which I hope to be able to unpack all of this. It is, I think, a sad part of my leadership, that I didn’t also get to communicate what we do—partly because U.S.A.I.D. is restricted, in certain ways, from telling its story within the U.S. borders.

If you had the opportunity to tell Elon Musk and Donald Trump what you’ve been telling me for the past hour, or if they read a long report from you about lives saved, good works done, the benefits of soft power to the United States and to the world and so on—do you think it would have any effect at all?

Zero. There’s a different world view at play here. It is that power is what matters, not impact; not the over-all maximum good that you can do. And having power—wielding it in ways that can dominate the weak and partner with your friends—is the mode of existence. (When I say “partner with friends,” I mean partner with people like Putin who think the same way that you do.) It’s two entirely different world views.

But this is not just an event. This is not just something that happened. This is a process, and its absence will make things worse and worse and have repercussions, including the loss of many, many, maybe countless, lives. Is it irreparable? Is this damage done and done forever?

This damage has created effects that will be forever. Let’s say they turned everything back on again, and said, “Whoops, I’m sorry.” I had a discussion with a minister of health just today, and he said, “I’ve never been treated so much like a second-class human being.” He was so grateful for what America did. “And for decades, America was there. I never imagined America could be indifferent, could simply abandon people in the midst of treatments, in the midst of clinical trials, in the midst of partnership—and not even talk to me, not even have a discussion so that we could plan together: O.K., you are going to have big cuts to make. We will work together and figure out how to solve it.”

That’s not what happened. He will never trust the U.S. again. We are entering a different state of relations. We are seeing lots of other countries stand up around the world—our friends, Canada, Mexico. But African countries, too, Europe. Everybody’s taking on the lesson that America cannot be trusted. That has enormous costs.

It’s tragic and outrageous, no?

That is beautifully put. What I say is—I’m a little stronger. It’s shameful and evil. ♦

[maxknightley]

in retrospect it's pretty funny that a philosophical movement which started with "when giving to charity, consider donating to anti-malaria groups! nets are relatively cheap but can significantly increase quality of life in the third world" somehow ended up with "the utility monster could BECOME REAL someday. please join The Organization To Prevent The Utility Monster From Becoming Real, which is not a scam"

[langernameohnebedeutung]

#was the ep about syphilis?

...still thinking too ethically

show of all times

[dandelionsresilience]

Good News - May 22-28

Like these weekly compilations? Support me on Ko-fi or $Kaybarr1735! Also, if you tip me on Ko-fi or CashApp (and give me some way to contact you if it doesn’t automatically), at the end of the month I'll send you a link to all of the articles I found but didn't use each week - almost double the content!

1. Scientists Invent Healthier More Sustainable Chocolate

“The new chocolate recipe from researchers at ETH Zurich uses more materials from the cocoa pod that are usually discarded, including more of the pulp as well as the inner lining of the husk, known as the endocarp. […] The resulting chocolate also [was “deliciously sweet” and] had 20% more fibre and 30 percent less saturated fat than average European dark chocolate[, and] it could enable cocoa farmers [to] earn more from their crops.”

2. Vermont Is Coming for Big Oil, Making It Pay for Decades of Climate Pollution

“Legislators in Montpelier are on the brink of enacting the "Climate Superfund Act," modeled after the federal Superfund law, that seeks to make oil, gas and coal companies pay for damages linked to historical greenhouse gas emissions. […] Companies would be held liable for the costs associated with […] floods and heat waves, along with losses to biodiversity, safety, economic development and anything else the treasurer deems reasonable[, that were caused by their emissions].”

3. Important bird habitat now protected in the Rocky Mountain Trench

“Grassland-reliant species in the Rocky Mountain Trench now have more protected habitat thanks to a new [270-hectare] conservation area near Cranbrook. […] About one-third of the Skookumchuck Prairie Conservation Area is forested[…,] Most of the site is a dry grassland[…, and] Three hectares of wetlands add to the landscape diversity and offer crucial benefits to wildlife and water systems in the area. This conservation gem also provides habitat for endangered American badger and excellent winter range for elk, mule deer and white-tailed deer.”

4. Lemur Week marked by 70th breeding success

“A wildlife park has celebrated its 70th lemur breeding success ahead of a week raising money to help save the endangered primates. […] The park's open-air Madagascar exhibit is home to 31 free-roaming lemurs and was officially opened in 2008. […] Females are only sexually receptive for just one or two days a year, leaving a small window of opportunity for males to father offspring. […] The two playful siblings, one female and one male, were born to father Bernard and mother Hira.”

5. Innovative material for sustainable building

“Researchers introduce a polymer-based material with unique properties. This material allows sunlight to enter, maintains a more comfortable indoor climate without additional energy, and cleans itself like a lotus leaf. The new development could replace glass components in walls and roofs in the future.”

6. Isle of Wight eagles don't pose threat to lambs as feared

“While there had previously been fears that the eagles would feed on livestock, such as lambs, the project has found no evidence of this. [… “W]hite-tailed eagles effectively steal meals from other predatory birds[, which is] a really important ecological role that had been lost within the landscape and is being restored.” [… The birds’] population was boosted by a chick last year – the first time the species has bred in England in 240 years.”

7. Breakthrough discovery uses engineered surfaces to shed heat

“Cheng's team has found a way to lower the starting point of the [Leidenfrost] effect by producing a surface covered with micropillars. […] The discovery has great potential in heat transfer applications such as the cooling of industrial machines and surface fouling cleaning for heat exchangers. It also could help prevent damage and even disaster to nuclear machinery.”

8. New malaria vaccine delivered for the first time

“A total of 43,000 doses arrived by air today from UNICEF, and another 120,000 are scheduled to show up in the coming days. […] They're the first vaccines designed to work against a human parasite. […] Across four African countries, these trials showed a 75% reduction in malaria cases in the year following vaccination of young children. […] The Serum Institute of India, who will be manufacturing the new vaccine, says a hundred million doses will likely be available to countries by the middle of next year.”

9. Urban gardening may improve human health: Microbial exposure boosts immune system

“"One month of urban indoor gardening boosted the diversity of bacteria on the skin of the subjects and was associated with higher levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines in the blood. The group studied used a growing medium with high microbial diversity emulating the forest soil," [… whereas] the control group used a microbially poor peat-based medium. [… N]o changes in the blood or the skin microbiota were seen. […] “This is the first time we can demonstrate that meaningful and natural human activity can increase the diversity of the microbiota of healthy adults and, at the same time, contribute to the regulation of the immune system."”

10. Cities Are Switching to Electric Vehicles Faster Than Individuals

“[M]ost large cities have adopted some kind of climate goal, and some of them are buying EVs for their municipal fleets at a faster rate than the general public. And that progress could speed up as more EVs enter the market and as cities get educated about grant funding and tax incentives that were passed over the last four years.”

May 15-21 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[halorvic]

December 30, 2024

Arijit Chakravarty: “Learn to live with it,” for other diseases doesn’t mean the same thing as we have applied to COVID. When we say we must learn to live with leprosy, we don’t mean let’s make sure everybody has leprosy. When we say we must learn to live with malaria, we don’t mean let’s make sure everyone gets malaria as often as possible, let’s keep mosquitoes lurking in our tanks outside our house. No one says you must learn to live with tuberculosis. Let’s let it spread as much as possible and see how that goes. No, we suppress those diseases every step along the way. We suppress dengue. We suppress tuberculosis. This whole idea that learning to live with the disease means permitting and encouraging its rampant spread and rapid evolution is just so many levels of stupidity that I don’t have a word for it.

Benjamin Mateus: I’d like to know your thoughts on Trump and RFK Jr., his choice for secretary of health? RFK Jr. has been at the head of vaccine disinformation and anti-public health policies. They are calling for ending any cooperation with the World Health Organization. These will have immense consequences for public health globally. These are political questions, but often I hear scientists do not want to engage in political questions and feel uncomfortable about it. Can we avoid the political implications?

AC: Look, it’s not that I don’t want to get political. It’s that if I was going to get political, I don’t know who to hold up as an example. There’s not a government in the world that has handled this correctly. There’s not a party in this world that’s handled it correctly. It’s all different flavors of stupid. Pick your poison. The Democrats went out of their way to normalize mass infection. They went out of their way to lie about the vaccines and say, “If you’re vaccinated, the pandemic was over.” That was completely unnecessary. It was completely at odds with science. Then you have Trump in the first Trump administration saying, “Why don’t you drink some bleach?” It would be a comedy if the consequences weren’t so grave. Frankly, wherever you go it’s like this. You look at Canada’s Bonnie Henry (Canadian epidemiologist and physician) in British Columbia. On day one she insisted that the kids wouldn’t get infected. Then she went and published a paper, put her own name on it, bragging about how herd immunity has been achieved because 90 percent of Canadian kids have been infected. In the UK you had the hearings on the public health response by the UK government. They noted that the government failed to act quickly. There was no clear policy approach, and they even abandoned contact tracing in mid-March of 2020. They even said that masks don’t help stop the spread and the virus wasn’t airborne. It’s a disgrace. Politicians worldwide have decided that they can brazen out their way through this. And the reason for this is they’ve been advised by a certain set of scientists, a relatively small number of scientists, who have essentially sold out. There are tens of thousands of papers, if not hundreds of thousands of papers, on the risks of COVID. You could literally find thousands of scientists who would be willing to go up in front of the House of Representatives and testify that getting COVID repeatedly is bad for you. Where are those scientists? Nobody’s listening to them. They’re listening to the scientists who whisper in their ears and say that everything will be okay. Ryan Gregory and I wrote a Substack blog post a while back called Calm Mongering where we talk about this—that people have weaponized the logic of science in the service of propaganda by saying, “that’s just a hypothesis.” As soon as you bring up a risk, these “experts” shut down the conversation about the risk by saying we’re not sure that’ll happen. But in fact, that’s an inversion of the precautionary principle. And it’s a lot of the tactics that were used by the merchants of doubt during the tobacco era. The merchants of doubt were a subset of a very small number of corrupt, well-connected and well-funded scientists who went out of their way to make public statements that were at odds with the body of literature that was coming out on lung cancer and tobacco. And we are seeing the exact same thing again. Big tobacco sponsored a bunch of corrupt scientists to create a counter-narrative to reality. This time around, who’s playing the role of big tobacco? It’s the politicians and governments. But the exact same thing is playing out. That nexus between this group of corrupt scientists and politicians who are actively funding their work is a global phenomenon. Unfortunately, I hate to say this, but it’s going to take reality breaking through to solve this. They’ve been very effective at convincing people that this is not a problem you need to worry about.

[ask-whitepearl-and-steven]

Is shattering permanent in the comic (especially with the force fusions and cluster) or can it be fixed down the line like future did? Asking for your opinion on this too bc I found out about it in Future and it makes me feel weird (bc now it feels like any SU stuff and shattering has no consequence or tension, so haven’t been able to read or write stories). Maybe I’m seeing this wrong? Would love your thoughts

Hmm...

So to answer your first question: The comic for WDAU works on the same rules as canon does. I have no intention to over-write anything canon clearly stated to be true.

The ability to put back together shattered gems is definitely a part of that.

So yes, theoretically, even in WDAU, gems being shattered is not 'the end' because they can be eventually re-instated through the work of the diamonds, IF they someday decide to Change Their Minds like they did in the original series.

That being said...

I want to talk a little bit about something you said, because it tickles my brain in an interesting way:

"now it feels like any SU stuff and shattering has no consequence or tension"

And the best way to talk about stuff, I've found, is to ask questions about our underlying assumptions. So my questions for you (all) today are:

For us humans, death certainly IS a constant that remains ever-permanent, and thus it's easy to compare it to shattering and draw that parallel... but is that a fair comparison?

In fiction, death is often circumvented and there still remains reasonable tension in things like magic-heavy worlds, vampire novels, sci-fi where almost any sickness is eradicated, etc. Is this not quite similar to what shattering is for gems?

Is the perceived permanency of shattering the only reason it feels like a heavy consequence?

Are there OTHER consequences of being shattered that make it just as interesting, if not more than, to be explored as a plot device?

Must there be an ever-looming threat of something horrible and permanent happening to make a story good?

There isn't a right or wrong answer to these questions, necessarily. I'm not posing these in order to lead you to a singular, 'absolutely correct' conclusion or way of writing.

For some stories, death DOES need to be permanent in order not to make light of what the characters go through! In some forms of writing, there IS no other way around that consequence.

But I daresay SU is not one of those stories.

Let me put it this way - 100 years ago, medicine had only BEGUN to develop into the thing we know it as today. Sure, there were therapies and treatments for diseases, broken limbs, poisonings, etc. Some of them were quite good, even! But overall, the death tolls back then from basic illness were MUCH higher than they were today.

Pnumonia, Malaria, Syphillis, Smallpox, Bubonic Plague, AIDS.

These were things that people died from, with near CERTAINTY, for the LONGEST time. They were considered the road to a permanent black screen.

And today? Even though they are still, without proper intervention, JUST as deadly, we now have new tools and vaccines to combat them. Hell, if you get vaccinated fast enough you can get bit by a rabid dog and live to tell the tale, unscathed! Rabies used to be a one-stop-shop to the afterlife.

Despite this, we still view these diseases with appropriate fear. They are still dangerous - in the right conditions.

In the right conditions, the consequences for a LOT of things can be permanent. If permanency is what you're looking for.

So alright, the Diamonds can heal shattered gems now. Booooring. How easy it is to fix any shattered gem! What a simple solution to anything tragic.

But................... will they ALWAYS do so?

In fact...will the Diamonds ALWAYS be around?

Will the gems who got shattered always be picked up, piece by piece, and be brought back to them, perfectly preserved? Or will they lose pieces of themselves along the way - literally?

And what NEW consequences can we think of, when we stop thinking of the permanency of death, and start thinking of the Impermanence of those tools that keep us here longer and longer?

Just food for thought. 👀

[3-striiikes]

trans refugee needing urgent help, please do not scroll without reblogging.

[plaintext: trans refugee needing urgent help, please do not scroll without reblogging. end plaintext]

hey so my friend @kakebezi-10 really needs some help rn and to give the basics of her situation;

she is a trans woman currently living in a refugee camp in africa with her cats.

she has been a victim of transphobic violence several time before. as of the last i have spoken to her about it, she also cannot work due to transphobia.

unclean drinking water has made her severely ill. she cannot reach treatment at the moment and needs money in order to reach treatment. she has been diagnosed with h. pylori, ulcers, malaria, and typhoid.

she is already struggling enough. i am truly heartbroken to hear that she is sick and i am even more heartbroken to think of what may happen if she does not receive treatment.

if you can’t donate, please at least reblog and maybe send her a kind word. i’m sure she could use it.

her fundraiser below;

@optimistic-autistic and myself are also willing to do art for those who donate to her. please reach out to one of us with proof of donation and we will negotiate your commission.

i know we’re all very scared right now, but now is a time for unity. please help out where you can.