Drawn-out deaths. Communities torn apart. Survivor’s guilt. Patrick Fallah says his memories of the days when the Ebola virus swept through Liberia are so awful that he sometimes has trouble focusing on the present.

“Sometimes when I have a flashback of the death of my son and others who died in the Ebola treatment unit, I don’t want to speak to people. I grieve so much that my mind is not really on what I am doing,” said Fallah, 30, who lost his 8-month-old son and stepmother and is president of the National Ebola Survivors Network of Liberia.

The trauma of the world’s deadliest Ebola outbreak, which killed more than 11,300, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, has left many survivors fighting a battle some worry will never end.

But Liberia, one of the world’s poorest countries and with just one psychiatrist, has announced the ambitious goal of expanding access to mental health care to 70 percent of its population in the next few years.

The World Health Organization declared an end to the Ebola outbreak in June, estimating that more than 10,000 people who had been infected have survived in the three West African countries, including more than 4,000 in Liberia.

As the world’s attention has turned to other crises, many Ebola survivors still face the psychological consequences of the epidemic, feeling guilt over their pasts and worry for their futures without resources to deal with the pain.

Mental health is often an expense far beyond the reach of impoverished countries. Liberia is still struggling to rebuild its basic health services after more than a decade of back-to-back civil wars that left a quarter-million people dead, with many killings carried out by drugged, under-age fighters notorious for hacking off survivors’ limbs.

Then Ebola arrived, frightening Liberians with its lack of a cure and its transmission through contact with body fluids. Many people became too scared to touch others or offer comfort as the death toll grew.

Now Liberia’s government has announced its ambition to expand mental health care access to its more than 4.2 million people, with help from the U.S.-based The Carter Center.

“After the civil war, people didn’t go through enough counseling. You have people already going through post-traumatic depression. Then Ebola came, and that built on what was already going on,” said Dr. Francis Kateh, Liberia’s deputy health minister and chief medical officer.

The Carter Center is helping to train Liberia’s health care workers to identify mental health issues.

Last month, 21 clinicians specializing in child and adolescent mental health graduated from the training. They join 187 mental health professionals who have been trained by the center since 2010 to work in prisons, with refugees or in other settings and are based in primary care clinics and hospitals around the country.

The Carter Center hopes to replicate its program in other countries, including Sierra Leone.

But educating the public will take time, the new mental health workers say.

“There are many people living with mental health problems in Liberia without knowing they are,” said one of the new specialists, Theophilus A. Joe.

Stigma remains around mental health issues, said Musulyn Massaqoui, a registered nurse and another recent graduate. Most people come to clinics only for physical issues, she said.

Ebola survivors often have hearing and vision problems, joint pain or chronic fatigue, according to the medical aid charity Doctors Without Borders. Many also are shunned by their communities and family members, making them vulnerable to mental health issues.

Children left orphaned by Ebola or who watched family members die are especially challenged, said Fallah with Liberia’s survivors’ network, which has about 1,800 members.

“They continue to have depression. They are still thinking about their parents,” he said. “Sometimes when they sit in the class, they don’t concentrate.” During the holidays, some feel so neglected that they “want to take up knife to kill themselves.”

Some of Liberia’s newly trained mental health workers have been placed in schools and orphanages to lessen the chances of stigma, said The Carter Center’s mental health program director, Eve Byrd.

That approach is critical, she said. “If you address childhood trauma early, you’re most likely to decrease symptoms of illness as the person ages.”

Stigma in Liberia has proven to be deadly. In March, an Ebola survivor who made the cover of Time magazine for her work as a nurse during the outbreak died when she experienced complications after childbirth and the nurses on duty were too afraid to touch her.

 
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European scientists are taking part in the March for Science demonstration taking place in hundreds of cities around the world to commemorate Earth Day. Science and research skeptics are becoming more mainstream in an era of populist and Eurosceptic movements. And on both sides of the Atlantic, there is less funding to support independent research.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a professor at the University of Leuven, says shifting priorities in Europe has had an impact on the work of scientists.

“Now funds for fundamental research are much more difficult to get. Even if the budget remains the same or sometimes has increased, there was a shift in priorities towards research that is supposed to deliver more immediate results in terms of job creation or that kind of thing. Or research that helps the European industry to bring a product to the market. And climate scientists are not building any products that the European industries can sell.”

The European Union set a target for its member states that they should spend three percent of their budget on science, but many countries are only at around two percent.

Scientists hope that by joining forces globally, they will raise awareness about a global trend that seems to take science less serious. With U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House and populist and Eurosceptic movements gaining popularity in Europe, scientists say their budgets are being reduced and their work is being taken less serious.

Bas Eickhout, a scientist and member of the European Parliament for the Greens Party, says climate change policy should not be seen as a “left wing hobby.” He calls on scientist to be more involved in the decision making process.

“Not in policy making itself but providing information to politicians is crucial. And quite often once we start with decision making, that information is just lost. Scientist are really a bit too scared for the word lobby, and I don’t think its lobbying that your doing, but its also trying to feed decision making also during the negotiations, and not only at the beginning.”

The March for Science is a volunteer based movement and organizers say there is an “alarming trend toward discrediting scientific consensus and restricting scientific discovery.” The organizers aim to celebrate science and hold political and science leaders accountable, but do not affiliate with any political party.

Sofie Vanthournout, director of Sense about Science EU, a charity advocating the importance of science, says the march aims to change the perspective of citizens and politicians who doubt the importance of science:

“The message that we want to bring it is important for every aspect of our lives, for every aspect of society. Whether it’s in technology that we use in our daily lives or whether it is for important decisions that politicians make about our lives. We don’t want scientists to tell politicians what to do but we need the politicians to have access to all of the facts and all of the knowledge that is available.”

One week after the March of Science, the Peoples Climate March will follow. In 2015, the world came together to sign the Paris Accord, an agreement signed by almost all nations in the world to curb global warming.

U.S. President Trump promised during his election campaign to pull the United States out of the international accord, but later softened his stance, saying he thinks there is “some connectivity” between human activity and global warming.

 
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Scientists are taking the unprecedented step of staging marches in more than 600 cities worldwide in the face of what they see as a growing political assault on evidence-based knowledge.

Thousands of scientists and their supporters are attending March for Science events Saturday across the globe, including those in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cape Town, London Madrid, Nigeria and Seoul.

In Berlin, organizers said about 10,000 people marched toward the Brandenberg Gate holding up placards that read “Facts not feelings” and We love experts — those with evidence.”

Marchers in Geneva carried signs that said “Science — A candle in the Dark” and “Science is the Answer.”

In London, demonstrators marched from the Science Museum to Parliament Square in Westminister holding placards supporting science.

The March for Science thrusts scientists, who generally avoid advocacy and whose work is based on impartial experimentation, into a more visible spotlight.   

For nuclear physics graduate student Chelsea Bartram, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” were the last straw.

President Donald Trump had disputed photographic evidence of the size of his inauguration crowd. Reporters challenged him, prompting Conway to respond that the administration gave “alternative facts.”

“Many scientists I know, myself included, spend so many hours in the lab sacrificing enormous amounts of their life for this abstract idea” that understanding reality can benefit human civilization, said Bartram, who is pursuing a doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“And then to have someone say, ‘Well, that’s not important anymore,’ it’s so devastating,” Bartram added.

So Bartram planned to support science’s role in government decisions on health, safety, the economy and more by joining demonstrators at the flagship March for Science event in Washington.

The Washington event featured speakers and several large teach-in tents on the National Mall where scientists, educators and leaders from a variety of disciplines discussed their work, effective science communication strategies and training in public advocacy. Organizers say the event is non-partisan and is not aimed against the Trump administration or any politician or party.

Organizers of the international event, which coincides with Earth Day, say it is the first step in a global movement to acknowledge and defend the vital role science plays in everyday life.

“Science extends our lives, protects our planet, puts food on our table (and) contributes to the economy,” says Caroline Weinberg, national co-chair for the March for Science.

“Policymakers threaten our present and future by ignoring scientific evidence when crafting policy, threatening scientific advancement through budget cuts and limiting the public’s knowledge by silencing scientists,” Weinberg said.

Trump’s most recent budget proposal calls for cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that would eliminate some 56 programs and drastically reduce funding for the agency’s Office of Research and Development and Science Advisory Board. Trump’s budget proposal also recommends some $6 billion in cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of biomedical research funding in the world.

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a first-generation Iraqi immigrant, is the pediatrician who alerted officials in Flint, Michigan that the city’s water was contaminated with lead. She is a March for Science honorary national co-chair. “We march for science so that scientists have the freedom like I did, to speak out, free from politicization and to continue to make the world a better place.”

Tipping point

Organizers have not released expected crowd size estimates. But the dispute over crowd sizes was just one small example of what scientists see as a larger pattern. During the U.S. presidential campaign, Trump dismissed the scientific consensus about the dangers of human-induced climate change. His appointee to lead the EPA, Scott Pruitt, also does not accept climate science. He has repeatedly clashed with the agency he now heads.  

But scientists say their frustration has been building for decades.

“We might have reached a tipping point now, but acting as though this is a new thing is giving too much credit to the current administration,” said Weinberg.

And it goes far beyond climate change, Weinberg added. “It’s about not paying attention to the best research on things like food stamps. It’s about cutting things like Head Start and after-school programs,” to name a few. “And that all affects health, because that’s a time to set kids on the right path.”

Critics say a public protest risks further politicizing science, turning scientists into just another interest group.

Bartram sums up a widespread response: on hot button issues like climate change, opponents have already done it. “I don’t think anything we do is going to further politicize it,” she said.

Disconnect

But if the goal is to get policymakers to listen, “A march isn’t going to change anything,” said Rob Young, head of coastal research at Western Carolina University.

Young says much of the problem stems from the growing disconnect between scientists and voters, especially the rural and working class people who voted for Trump. He says most probably have never met a scientist.

Scientists need to get out of the lab more, he said, and explain how their work affects people’s health and livelihoods.

That’s what march organizers hope, too.

The American Geophysical Union’s Davidson said a major post-march goal is more public engagement.

“I think the day is gone when scientists can stay in their ivory towers and assume that everyone is going to recognize their value,” he added.
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The founder of Microsoft, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, has given a passionate defense of foreign aid while voicing fears the political climate in the U.S. and in Britain could result in cuts to aid budgets. In a speech this week in London, he warned that withdrawing aid would “create a leadership vacuum that others will fill.”

Gates, who gives $5 billion a year to development aid through the foundation he set up with his wife, Melinda, is one of the world’s most generous philanthropists. In a speech at London’s Royal United Services Institute this week, he voiced fears that the political tide is turning against foreign aid.

“It concerns me that some world leaders are misinterpreting recent events as reasons to turn inward instead of seeing them for what they are: problems that although they are difficult and will take time, can be solved — if we invest in the long-term solutions that are necessary,” Gates said.

Watch: Billionaire Philanthropist Bill Gates Warns Against Cuts to Aid Budgets

The United States remains by far the world’s biggest donor, funding long-term programs and emergency relief across the globe. But President Donald Trump is proposing significant cuts to the $43-billion foreign aid budget as part of efforts to reduce government debt.

Gates argues that many critics of foreign aid don’t realize the major progress that has been achieved.

“If you could only pick one number to highlight the effectiveness of the development agenda since 1990, I would pick the number 122 million. That’s the number of children’s lives that have been saved,” he said.

He disputed the notion that funding foreign aid is a bottomless pit.

“As you bring down that childhood death rate, families choose to have less children,” he said. “The population goes down very substantially. Which brings within reach all of the things society is trying to do: better health, better education, economic opportunity.”

Gates’ speech in London comes as Britain gears up for a snap election in June. The UK is one of the few developed countries to meet the U.N. aid budget target of 0.7 percent of GDP. Current Prime Minister Theresa May has committed to keeping that pledge but many in her party want aid money diverted to the military.

Gates said he wanted to make the case for the facts.

“When aid is mismanaged it is a double crime, stealing both from the taxpayer and from the poor.” he said. “But let’s be clear. The bulk of this aid is getting to its recipients and having an incredible effect. There will always be a need to adjust, we’re working in very tough countries, so you’ll never get 100 percent perfect effectiveness. But you can learn. And every year, the aid is better spent.”

Aid agencies say the debate could not come at a worse time, with about 65 million refugees around the world, worsening conflicts in the Middle East and famine striking East Africa.
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Ear infections are one of those things almost everyone has to deal with. They’re painful, but generally easily treatable. But for many people, chronic ear infections can significantly affect their hearing and their quality of life. Polish doctors may have discovered a tiny solution for what can be a big problem. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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In 16 U.S. cities, citizen scientists, including schoolchildren, spent a few days this month documenting plant and animal species and helping scientists understand their regions’ diversity and the challenges many species face.

The City Nature Challenge, held April 14-18, is a competition that was started last year by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences. This year, it involved institutions across the United States. The challenge is to see which city can document the most species; results are to be announced Saturday, which is Earth Day.

“Last year, it was San Francisco against Los Angeles,” said Lila Higgins, manager of citizen science at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “This year, it’s L.A. versus San Francisco and New York and Chicago and Seattle and many, many other cities.”

The young citizen scientists took photos and recorded observations on their cellphones, uploading the data through a phone app called iNaturalist.

Frank Az, 9, of Esperanza Elementary School in Los Angeles said he loves observing nature, “finding different species of birds and insects.” He was outside the museum with binoculars and a cellphone camera, along with other students.

His friend, Andrea Garcia, was excited as she described finding “two mourning doves in their nest” as well as “ants, bees and a house finch.”

The children worked with some adult scientists who monitor species in this region, including Greg Pauly, a specialist on amphibians and reptiles at the Natural History Museum. Pauly said that Los Angeles is one of the world’s 35 top biodiversity hot spots, but that the sprawling urban complex also faces “a large threat to that biodiversity.”

The children documented their sightings of insects, flowers and birds alongside their teachers. It is something they do regularly at school. Principal Brad Rumble of Esperanza Elementary said the migration of one bird species had captured the children’s interest.

“Every year, we do a contest to predict when will the yellow-rumped warbler first arrive on campus,” he said. The students vote, and those who correctly guess the date when the tiny visitor appears get a trip to the Natural History Museum.

“That little bird,” said Rumble, “brings up so many wonderings about geography and range and weather, and why does it like this tree? These questions form in students’ minds, and they’re off and running.”

The children are learning many lessons, said museum President Lori Bettison-Varga.

“We are part of this environment, and they are part of this environment — the plants, the animals, the critters that live here,” she said, “so it’s really helping us to understand how to increase the health of our environment.”

And this annual competition, she said, gets people of all ages involved in science.
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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft faces one last perilous adventure around Saturn.

Cassini swings past Saturn’s mega moon Titan early Saturday for a gravity-assisted, orbit-tweaking nudge.

“That last kiss goodbye,” as project manager Earl Maize calls it, will push Cassini onto a path no spacecraft has gone before — into the gap between Saturn and its rings. It’s treacherous territory. A particle from the rings — even as small as a speck of sand — could cripple Cassini, given its velocity.

Cassini will make its first pass through the relatively narrow gap Wednesday. Twenty-two crossings are planned, about one a week, until September, when Cassini goes in and never comes out, vaporizing in Saturn’s atmosphere.

Launched in 1997, Cassini reached Saturn in 2004 and has been exploring it from orbit ever since. Its European traveling companion, Huygens, landed on Titan in 2005. Cassini’s fuel tank is practically empty, so with little left to lose, NASA has opted for a risky, but science-rich grand finale.

“What a spectacular end to a spectacular mission,” said Jim Green, NASA’s planetary science division director. “I feel a little sad in many ways that Cassini’s discoveries will end. But I’m also quite optimistic that we’re going to discover some new and really exciting science as we probe the region we’ve never probed before.”

There’s no turning back once Cassini flies past Titan, Maize said. The spacecraft on Wednesday will hurtle through the 1,200-mile-wide gap (1,900 kilometers) between Saturn’s atmosphere and its rings, at a breakneck 70,000-plus mph (113,000 kph).

From a navigation standpoint, “this is an easy shot,” Maize said. The operation will be run from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The concern is whether computer models of Saturn’s rings are accurate. On a few of the crossings, Cassini is “kind of flirting with the edge of where we think it’s safe,” he noted.

For at least the first trip through the gap, Cassini’s big dish antenna will face forward to shield the science instruments from any ring particles that might be lurking there. A couple instruments will provide a quick rundown on the dust situation.

Scientists anticipate lots of lightweight impacts, since the spacecraft will be going through extremely small material, more like smoke than distinct particles. Material from the innermost D ring — which is slowly extending into Saturn — should be diffuse enough “that we should be fine,” Maize said.

If the models are wrong and Cassini is clobbered by BB-size material, it still will end up exactly where NASA is aiming for on Sept. 15 — at Saturn. The space agency wants to keep the 22-foot-high, 13-foot-wide spacecraft away from Titan and its lakes of liquid methane and from the ice-encrusted moon Enceladus and its underground ocean and spouting geysers. It doesn’t want to shower contaminating wreckage onto these worlds that might harbor life.

This last leg of Cassini’s 20-year, $3.27 billion voyage should allow scientists to measure the mass of the multiple rings — shedding light on how old they are and how they formed — and also to determine the composition of the countless ring particles. First spotted by Galileo in 1610, the rings are believed to be 99 percent ice; the remaining 1 percent is a mystery, said project scientist Linda Spilker. A cosmic dust analyzer on Cassini will scoop up ring particles and analyze them.

“Imagine the pictures we’re going to get back of Saturn’s rings,” Spilker said.

Cassini will have the best views ever of Saturn’s poles, as it skims its surface. Near mission’s end, Spilker said, “we’re actually going to dip our toe” into Saturn’s atmosphere, sending back measurements until the last possible moment.

All this is on top of a science mission that already has rewritten the textbooks on the Saturnian system.

“But the best is still yet to come — perhaps,” Maize said at a news conference in early April. “But we are certainly going to provide more excitement.”
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In some of the world’s remotest corners, health workers armed with smartphones, digital maps and medication are making steady progress in eliminating trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, a leading expert said.

Better living conditions have wiped out trachoma in many countries but some 200 million people are still at risk of contracting the disease, according to the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI).

Trachoma is categorized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a neglected tropical disease (NTD), one of a group of 18 debilitating and sometimes fatal illnesses that affect 1.5 billion people, mainly in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Efforts to treat trachoma include improving access to clean water and decreasing the number of infected people by treating them with antibiotics.

ITI Director Paul Emerson said antibiotics donation programs, increased government spending, a global mapping project identifying hotspots and the use of smartphones to collect data had been gamechangers in fighting trachoma.

“We know where the disease is, we know what to do about it and where do it,” Emerson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“That may sound simple but we can only reach our goal of eliminating trachoma through a combination of joined-up efforts.”

Trachoma can be prevented in childhood by having facilities for children to wash their faces and if caught soon enough the disease is easily treatable with repeated doses of antibiotics.

Those suffering with an advance stage of the disease, in which the eyelashes turn inward and scrape the cornea, can be treated with simple surgery.

This week, governments and private donors pledged more than $800 million at a meeting in Geneva to accelerate the fight against NTDs.

The Geneva gathering came five years after a meeting in London brought a commitment by the public and private sectors to achieve WHO goals for the control and elimination of NTDs.

Fight Gathers Steam

In 2015, nearly one billion people received treatments donated by pharmaceutical companies for at least one NTD, a 36 percent increase since 2011, the WHO said this week.

The fight against trachoma has also gathered momentum as the number of people at risk dropped by 50 percent in the last six years, while those requiring treatment now stands at 182 million, down from 325 million, according to the ITI.

Emerson said thanks to the Global Trachoma Mapping Project (GTMP), an effort to document where the disease is endemic, health workers can now say for sure where treatment is needed.

Ethiopia is one of the countries that has made significant strides in fighting trachoma, said Emerson.

The government has included fighting trachoma as a target in its national health plan, provided significant domestic funding, participated in the mapping project and is training doctors to conduct surgeries to correct the effects of trachoma.

Health workers in Ethiopia use smart phones to collect data in the field that are then streamed to an analyst who can call the field team to correct errors in real time, he said.

But despite progress in fighting trachoma and other NTDs, experts agree that drug companies need to step up donations of medicines.

“The challenge now is in reaching the most neglected populations, communities in conflict and in closing the funding gaps,” said Emerson.
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