Emerging Setbacks in the Fight Against Malaria

The world community has made significant progress over the past few decades in battling one of humanity's oldest and most deadly enemies--malaria. Now, however, there is evidence emerging of how difficult this fight can be. BBC News has the story:

Scientists have found new evidence that resistance to the front-line treatments for malaria is increasing.
They have confirmed that resistant strains of the malaria parasite on the border between Thailand and Burma, 500 miles (800km) away from previous sites.
Researchers say that the rise of resistance means the effort to eliminate malaria is "seriously compromised".
The details have been published in The Lancet medical journal.For many years now the most effective drugs against malaria have been derived from the Chinese plant, Artemisia annua. It is also known as sweet wormwood.
In 2009 researchers found that the most deadly species of malaria parasites, spread by mosquitoes, were becoming more resistant to these drugs in parts of western Cambodia.

While this research has focused on Asia, the same issue almost certainly is emerging in Sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria takes its biggest toll.

Prof Francois Nosten, who is part of the research team that has carried out the latest work, says the development is very serious.
"It would certainly compromise the idea of eliminating malaria that's for sure and will probably translate into a resurgence of malaria in many places," he said.
Another scientist involved with the study is Dr Standwell Nkhoma from the Texas Biomedical Research Institute."Spread of drug-resistant malaria parasites within South East Asia and overspill into sub-Saharan Africa, where most malaria deaths occur, would be a public health disaster resulting in millions of deaths."

The problem here is that the focus of most research and community-based programs remains on prevention (especially treated bednets), rather than treatment.

Prof Nosten says the current spread of resistance could be similar to what happened in the 1970s with chloroquine, a drug that was once a front-line treatment against the disease.
"When chloroquine resistance reached Africa in the middle of the 1970s it translated into a large increase in the number of cases and the number of children who died increased dramatically."
"If we were to lose artemisinin then we don't have any new drugs in the pipeline to replace them. We could be going back 15 years to where cases were very difficult to treat because of the lack of an efficacious drug."

Club of Rome Study Revisited--It Isn't Pretty

As we approach the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, the question continues to arise as to whether or not development can be sustained. Forty years ago researchers at MIT concluded that it could not be sustained if we simply went about business as usual. Now James Forrester and his research group at MIT have revisited those old models, and found that their dreary conclusions seem still to hold. The Associated Press reports on an article that is in this month's Smithsonian magazine.

Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several possible future scenarios. The business-as-usual scenario estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and precipitous population decline could occur by 2030.Turner compared real-world data from 1970 to 2000 with the business-as-usual scenario. He found the predictions nearly matched the facts. “There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,” he says. “We are not on a sustainable trajectory.

This is not to say, however, that disaster is inevitable--it will occur only if we fail to act, which so far we have pretty much failed to do. The original study argued that "unlimited economic growth was possible, if governments forged policies and invested in technologies to regulate the expansion of humanity’s ecological footprint." That is still true, but we have wasted 40 years, watching the population grow and the environment get worse. The computer simulation models suggest that we are headed for the edge of the cliff but are not worried yet about putting on the brakes.

Demography is Destiny in Politics

Demography may not determine everything, but it certainly sets the parameters for what can happen in the world, and there is perhaps no better place to see this in action than in politics in a democracy. Chuck Todd at MSNBC is so convinced that demography is destiny that he repeatedly uses that term. This morning he was discussing this on his TV show, The Daily Rundown, in the context of the race between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum for the Republican Party presidential nomination. He framed the issue in terms of three demographic characteristics--education, income, and religion. I encourage you to watch the segment,  but I won't leave you in suspense. The demographics lean towards Romney.

CyberSeminar on Population and the Environment

The Population-Environment Research Network (PERN) has just announced a new cyberseminar to be held 7-14 May 2012, ahead of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June of this year. The cyberseminar will draw upon two documents that are available at the PERN website. 

(1) a global forum of experts met under UNFPA sponsorship in late November at IIASA in Austria to bring data and research to bear on these higher-level  population relationships. Under the broader umbrella of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, their summary document, the Laxenburg Declaration on Population and Sustainable Development, was announced in a 24 February 2012 letter in Science magazine; and (2) The Royal Society's expert international working group, chaired by Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston FRS, oversaw a study which resulted in a major report, People and the Planet, which will be released on 26 April 2012. They conducted a wide-ranging
evidence gathering exercise involving meetings with government, industry, academia, and intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations in the UK and overseas, as well as an open public call for evidence.

Even if you don't participate in the cyberseminar, these will be useful documents to consider, given the overall premise that the organizers have in mind:

In this cyberseminar we will draw on both documents. It takes as a premise that population matters are important in considerations of sustainable development (SD). Yet, the framing of the discussion has tended to be Malthusian, with a focus on population size and growth rates and a policy emphasis on efforts to curb population growth rates. The size of populations, though, is only one dimension of their characteristics that matter for SD prospects. Research indicates that size is usually not even the most important dimension. Other dimensions—among them age distribution, household composition, place of residence, migratory and consumption patterns, gender considerations, and educational structure—have arguably more important and more predictable implications for people’s ability and willingness to engage in mitigation of environmental challenges, their effectiveness in adapting to such challenges, and their success in developing and adopting new approaches and technologies across the spectrum of daily life.

These represent what I think of as the BIG issues when it comes to population, and we all need to participate as much as we can. If for whatever reason you miss the chance to actively participate in the cyberseminar as it is taking place, the PERN website has an archive to which it will posted. 

Still Haggling Over Census 2010

April 1st is the traditional "census day" in the United States every ten years (even if data collection is actually spread out over several months). So, the beginning of this April marks two years since the 2010 census in the US, and haggling over the results continues, although probably nearing an end. The New York Times has a story today that the City of New York has lost its bid to have its census count upped by 50,000 people that it claims the Census Bureau did not count.

The challenge centered on four neighborhoods — Astoria and Jackson Heights in Queens, and Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn.The city said that the census, which placed the city’s total population at less than 8.2 million, had incorrectly concluded that homes and apartments in these areas were vacant.
In a response to Mr. Bloomberg in late March, Arnold A. Jackson, the acting chief of the bureau’s Decennial Management Division, acknowledged a minor error that had been addressed, but added that “this correction does not affect the total census population or housing unit counts for the City of New York.”

If you read the letter from the Census Bureau you will see that does not really address the issues raised by the city's demographers, so I suspect that this is not the end of the story. The Census Bureau has a vested interest in not acknowledging errors. It doesn't want a cascade of complaints from every municipality--especially in an era when the Bureau almost certainly lacks the budget to really investigate these issues. At the same time, every municipality is searching for every spare human in its count, in order to help it chase after ever more scarce state and federal funding. 

The NYC Planning Department did note that even if these people were added to the count, they would not change the congressional redistricting process--which is, of course, still being haggled over in various parts of the country.