On the Sidelines
NEED TO KNOW
On the Sidelines
AFRICA
Last month, Samuel Nduwimana was in agony in a hospital in Bujumbura, the financial capital of the small central African nation of Burundi.
“I felt very sick and scared. I couldn’t even walk anymore,” he told Agence France-Presse. “I started to lose my appetite, I had a fever and I felt a small pimple on my genitals that hurt a lot. I didn’t even know what I was suffering from.”
Unfortunately, Nduwimana was stricken with monkeypox, or mpox, the latest horrific contagious disease to emerge from Africa.
A virus that causes painful rashes, mpox has no cure, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It has two types – Clade I and II. Clade I, the more severe version, which is driving the current outbreak in Burundi and beyond, kills as many as one in 10 of its victims.
At the time of his interview, Nduwimana was one of around 170 cases in Burundi. Last week, United Nations officials reported 564 confirmed mpox cases and almost 1,600 suspected cases, one-third of which were infecting children.
The spread is occurring in part because Burundi is not prepared to stop mpox. Landlocked Burundi is the world’s poorest country, Bloomberg reported. More than half the country’s children, who are disproportionately contracting mpox, live in poverty.
Burundi’s proximity to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the epicenter of the disease, where most of the 37,500 infections and 1,451 deaths so far tallied have occurred, is also not helping. To make matters worse, testing in the DRC is inadequate, so local and international health officials can’t obtain an accurate reading of the depth of the problem, wrote Voice of America.
Congolese authorities intend to begin vaccinating folks on Oct. 2, meaning more people will likely contract mpox and die before the population’s resistance gains enough traction to counter the spread, CBS News added.
The tragedy is that, even with the jabs, the Congolese will be fighting an uphill battle – even though, due to their experience with health threats, they have the expertise necessary to fight mpox, said Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of the Health Emergencies Program at the World Health Organization.
They also need other medical equipment, support, and infrastructure – diagnostics, therapeutics, and other health products – to stamp out mpox, she said.
Africans aren’t the only ones in danger. Sweden was the first country outside Africa to report a case of mpox, wrote Reuters and NBC News. Cases have been documented in Thailand and India, too.
The sliver of good news is that the WHO approved a new vaccine for mpox this month by Denmark’s Bavarian Nordic, Politico reported.
However, it’s late in the game for the DRC and Burundi, wrote CBS News. Despite pledges of hundreds of thousands of doses, Africa needs to vaccinate 10 million people to contain the spread. No one thinks that will happen any time soon.
Part of the problem is financial – African nations cannot pay for what they need. Another part is logistics. But mostly, it’s a question of will, similar to what happened during the coronavirus pandemic, say health officials, noting that Western countries are sitting on hundreds of millions of doses of mpox vaccines.
“It’s not a technical question, it’s a political one,” Maria Van Kerkhove told Reuters. “Vaccines are useless on shelves … Why wouldn’t we get them to the people who need them right now?”
THE WORLD, BRIEFLY
Walking into War
ISRAEL/ LEBANON
The cross-border conflict between Israel and Hezbollah intensified over the weekend and into Monday, in a sharp escalation that has sounded alarms about an all-out war breaking out in the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Israel carried out a series of airstrikes on southern Lebanon late Saturday night and early Sunday, describing the operation as a preemptive strike targeting rocket-launching sites it believed were to be used in a larger attack planned for Sunday morning. Israeli forces were carrying out “extensive strikes” on targets in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, CNN reported Monday.
Among those killed in the Israeli strikes was senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil who was wanted by the US government for his involvement in a terror attack on the US Embassy in Beirut in April 1983 that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, and the following attacks on the US Marine Corps barracks that October, which killed 241 US personnel.
In response to the strikes, the Iran-backed Hezbollah fired more than 150 rockets and deployed drones targeting Israeli military bases and defense manufacturers, including Ramat David Airbase and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems – the latter a developer of its Iron Dome air defense system.
The violence comes after pager and handheld radio explosions – targeting Hezbollah’s communications systems across Lebanon – killed 39 people and injured thousands. Hezbollah blamed Israel for the blasts.
The current round of hostilities began in October 2023, when Hezbollah initiated attacks in solidarity with Hamas, following the latter’s Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel that left 1,200 Israelis dead and 250 people taken hostage.
Since then, Hezbollah has said more than 500 of its own fighters have been killed by Israel.
The ongoing clashes have ignited international concern and warnings that the situation could spiral into a regional conflict if neither side backs down.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to restore security, pledging to do “whatever is takes”, the Washington Post reported, warning that Israel would intensify its military operations if Hezbollah did not cease its attacks. Even so, the group’s leaders declared that Hezbollah was ready for a prolonged fight against Israel as its deputy leader Naim Qassem said the conflict had entered a “new phase.”
Nicholas Blanford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, suggested that Israel’s strikes are designed to force Hezbollah to either retreat or risk an all-out war. However, Blanford added Hezbollah will not back down, aiming to show Israel that it remains resilient and committed to supporting Hamas.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of civilians on either side of the Israel-Lebanon border have been displaced because of the fighting, the BBC noted.
International calls for de-escalation continue, with Western governments urging restraint and United Nations officials warning that the situation is “on the brink of an imminent catastrophe.”
Goodbye, Old Guard
SRI LANKA
Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake won Sri Lanka’s presidential election Sunday, in a closely watched vote that was marked by popular anger at the country’s political elite whom they hold responsible for the country’s worst economic crisis on record, the Associated Press reported.
Dissanayake won with more than 5.7 million votes, defeating another opposition candidate Sajith Premadasa’s 4.5 million votes, according to the election commission.
Meanwhile, President Ranil Wickremesinghe came in third.
The election comes as the island nation is recovering from its worst-ever economic crisis exacerbated by excessive borrowing, the COVID-19 pandemic, and government policies that drained foreign reserves.
In 2022, the country defaulted on $83 billion of debt, but has since restructured over $17 billion.
The crisis resulted in severe shortages of essential goods, such as medicine, food and fuel. Riots erupted across the country two years ago, with protesters storming government buildings, including the presidential palace, forcing then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country.
Wickremesinghe was later elected by a parliamentary vote in July 2022 to carry out the remainder of his predecessor’s five-year term.
Analysts said Saturday’s vote was seen as a referendum on Wickremesinghe’s stewardship of the recovery: He became deeply unpopular over the harsh austerity measures implemented under an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout program.
They added that Dissanayake’s rise in popularity also reflected widespread dissatisfaction with the political elite, who have been blamed for leading the country into an economic crisis. His anti-corruption, pro-working-class platform has resonated especially well with younger voters and the protest movements that previously ousted Rajapaksa.
The anti-establishment politician pledged to renegotiate the IMF deal to reduce the burden on citizens. However, financial analysts have expressed concerns about the uncertainty this might cause, and that it could delay the disbursement of IMF funds, including an upcoming tranche of $350 million, according to Bloomberg.
Others questioned how Dissanayake will balance his pledge for austerity relief with the fiscal discipline required by the IMF. The new leader will also have to balance Sri Lanka’s foreign policy, especially the country’s relationships with China and India – both of whom are major investors in the country.
While some believe he might lean more towards Beijing because of his Marxist roots, his previous criticism of Chinese investment deals indicates a desire to avoid future debt traps.
No Special Treatment
HONDURAS
The Honduran supreme court ruled over the weekend that legislation allowing the creation of special economic zones exempt from local laws and taxes is unconstitutional, prompting concern among foreign investors and workers operating in those areas, Reuters reported.
The Central American nation is home to a small number of Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs) that were established about a decade ago by former conservative President Porfirio Lobo Sosa.
The special zones were granted a 50-year concession, including so-called start-up cities that enjoy a degree of autonomy. ZEDEs have drawn foreign investors with their offer of low taxes and light regulation, with officials hailing the semi-autonomous entities’ ability to increase investment and job creation.
The most well-known of the ZEDEs is Prospera, located on the island of Roatán, which has mainly attracted investors from the United States.
But leftist President Xiomara Castro has called for these zones to be abolished, warning that they were compromising the country’s sovereignty.
The top court found that the provisions laying out the terms for the creation of ZEDEs violated articles of the country’s charter “written in stone.”
The ruling prohibits the creation of new ZEDEs. However, the legal status of existing ZEDEs remains unclear, with court representatives saying that they will publish an “explanatory addendum” laying out their ultimate fate.
Before the verdict, Prospera representatives warned that declaring the zones unconstitutional would “create a climate of insecurity and uncertainty for investors and employees” and undermine ties between Honduras and the US.
They added that the decision could cause “visas to be canceled, the suspension of support and even a disruption in the flow of remittances.”
DISCOVERIES
Of Mice and Men
Stanford University researchers have recently developed a new technique that makes skin temporarily transparent using a popular dye found in snacks, such as Doritos.
As part of a new study, scientists applied a solution containing the FDA-approved dye FD&C Yellow 5 – also known as tartrazine – on the skin of a sedated mouse.
Within five minutes, they could see everything under its skin, such as intricate blood vessels, a beating heart and the fine structures of muscle fibers in limbs.
“You could see through the mouse,” Adam Wax, a program officer at the National Science Foundation that funded the study research, told the Washington Post. “I’ve been working in optics for 30 years, and I thought that result was jaw-dropping.”
The team explained in their paper that the dye’s almost-magical properties are based on the simple science of optics: The process works by altering how light interacts with the skin.
Normally, skin scatters light due to differences in the refractive index of its components, such as water and lipids. And usually, light scatters in many directions when it passes through the body because it bounces off different things, such as fluids and proteins, making it hard to see through.
The team predicted that certain molecules could change how tissues scatter light, so they opted to test the food dye’s properties.
When they soaked raw chicken in a tartrazine solution, it became see-through as more dye was used. Rubbing this solution on mice’s skin made their internal organs visible, as the tartrazine reduced light-scattering and made the tissue appear clear.
And the substance wasn’t toxic for the animals: It caused no damage to the tissue and it could be rinsed off with water, senior author Guosong Hong said in a statement.
Hong said the discovery could revolutionize healthcare and future medical tests.
“This could have an impact on healthcare and prevent people from undergoing invasive kinds of testing,” said Hong. “If we could just look at what’s going on under the skin instead of cutting into it, or using radiation to get a less than clear look, we could change the way we see the human body.”