Donor countries at a London summit pledged Tuesday to increase funding for family planning, but proposed cuts to family planning programs by the U.S. government overshadowed the conference.

The largest boost in donations announced at the Family Planning Summit came from the U.S.-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which sought to improve women’s access to contraceptives.

“The $375 million that the foundation announced today, that is absolutely not a reaction to President [Donald] Trump,” Melinda Gates said. “There is not anything anyone can do to fill the bucket of the money that the U.S. has committed to family planning.”

The United States is by far the biggest donor to global family planning programs, giving $600 million this year. But Trump announced in April that he planned to withdraw financial support for the U.N. Population Fund, accusing it of using what he called “coercive” family planning practices, including providing abortions. The United Nations strongly rejected the claims.

Nigeria’s minister of health, Isaac Adewole, told VOA the cuts would have an impact.

“Every country in the developing world will be worried, because it really signifies an increase in the [funding] gap,” he said. “We know family planning is one of the strongest anti-poverty strategies the world has ever known. It is a low-hanging fruit for reducing maternal mortality. It will contribute to shared prosperity.”

Call for action

By 2050, Nigeria is on course to be the third most populous country, with more than 400 million people. Nigeria’s minister of budget and national planning, Zainab S. Ahmed, said action was needed fast.

“Our economy cannot grow fast enough to be able to sustain that size of population,” Ahmed said, “so it is a very significant challenge and we need to address it now.”

Nigeria is budgeting $3 million for family planning programs in 2017 and says more is needed. Ministers say reaching young people is key.

The African MTV drama “Shuga” weaves messages around sexual health, contraception and HIV, and it reaches an estimated 720 million people. It’s currently partly funded by the U.S. government.

Georgia Arnold, executive director of the MTV Staying Alive Foundation, said, “It is much harder for governments and organizations to be able to speak openly about sex. That is where we come in. We can use our brand. We can use our access to young people and all of the media platforms that they use.”

Delegates expressed hope that partnering between the private sector and governments can provide improved access to contraceptives and family planning advice.
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Doctors and parents involved in female genital mutilation will face up to 15 years in prison under new Michigan laws.

Female circumcision or cutting is already a federal crime punishable by five years in prison. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed legislation on Tuesday that creates a state crime with harsher penalties.

The legislation was proposed after six people from an India-based Muslim sect called Dawoodi Bohra were charged in a genital mutilation case involving six girls at a suburban Detroit clinic. Two of the girls are from Minnesota, and four are from Michigan.

Michigan is the 26th state to officially ban the practice, which is common in some parts of the world.

The new laws also require increased public education and lengthen the statutes of limitations to file charges and lawsuits.

The laws take effect in October. 
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Reports over the past decade have drawn global attention to shocking abuses some women have been subjected to during childbirth in developed and developing countries.

The maltreatment has ranged from lack of privacy and neglect to forced sterilization, sexual and physical assault, and refusal to release a mother or child from a birth facility without payment. The problems are especially acute in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 66 percent of all maternal deaths per year worldwide, according to a February report from UNICEF, the U.N. Children’s Fund.

A four-year study by researchers in the United States and Tanzania looked at ways to reduce abuse of mothers-to-be. Keys included gathering community stakeholders and health care workers to define standards of care and identifying barriers to change.

Previous efforts to reduce mortality of women giving birth focused on getting them into health care facilities to deliver their children. Despite dramatic increases in facility-based childbirth, however, decreases in mortality remained modest. Even when facilities are equipped to save a mother’s life, reports of abuse can keep women from seeking medical treatment during birth.

Site is no guarantee

“It doesn’t matter where you give birth — just because it’s a building doesn’t mean you survive,” Lynn Freedman of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health told VOA.

With colleagues from Columbia, the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania and Harvard University, Freedman designed one of the first attempts to show how abuse could be reduced. The researchers followed facilities in the Tanga Region of Tanzania for their study and randomly selected one to receive the intervention. They called their project Staha, which means “respect” in Swahili.

They first gathered stakeholders in the community and asked them to develop a set of standards for what appropriate care during childbirth should be. The residents were able to provide a unique local perspective. In this case, stakeholders felt it was important to foster a mutual respect between patients and health providers.  

Freedman agreed, saying, “Patients can blame the health workers, who are more an expression of systemic problems and not the sole cause of them.”

Quality improvement

Researchers then distributed the standards in the facility and convened a quality-improvement team made up of its employees. The team determined drivers of abuse and implemented changes to correct them. Changes included continuous patient surveys, increased oversight by management and educators, and tea for the staff to show appreciation on difficult days.

A year after they finished working with the facility, the researchers went back to see whether there had been changes in reported abuse and if progress had been sustained.  They found that there was a 66 percent decrease in levels of reported abuse. The sharpest decreases were seen in reports of neglect and physical assault.

But Freedman warned against immediately recommending that others implement these changes. Getting the community involved is most important, she said.

It’s not, ” ‘Here’s the best practice.  Do this,’ ” she said. It’s vital “that people themselves analyze the situation and develop the intervention.”

While attention has been growing, Freedman hopes for more. This is an issue that “everyone who actually lives with and works in the system knows is there, but has been so not the priority of policymakers and donors — almost like a silent emergency.”
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American technology companies are bringing automation and robotics to the age-old task of battling mosquitoes in a bid to halt the spread of Zika and other mosquito-borne maladies worldwide.

Firms including Microsoft and California life sciences company Verily are forming partnerships with public health officials in several U.S. states to test new high-tech tools.

In Texas, Microsoft is testing a smart trap to isolate and capture Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, known Zika carriers, for study by entomologists to give them a jump on predicting outbreaks.

Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences division based in Mountain View, California, is speeding the process for creating sterile male mosquitoes to mate with females in the wild, offering a form of birth control for the species.

While it may take years for these advances to become widely available, public health experts say new players bring fresh thinking to vector control, which still relies heavily on traditional defenses such as larvicides and insecticides.

“It’s exciting when technology companies come on board,” said Anandasankar Ray, an associate professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside. “Their approach to a biological challenge is to engineer a solution.”

Smart traps

The Zika epidemic that emerged in Brazil in 2015 and left thousands of babies suffering from birth defects has added urgency to the effort.

While cases there have slowed markedly, mosquitoes capable of carrying the virus  — Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus — are spreading in the Americas, including large swaths of the southern United States.

The vast majority of the 5,365 Zika cases reported in the United States so far are from travelers who contracted the virus elsewhere. Still, two states — Texas and Florida — have recorded cases transmitted by local mosquitoes, making them prime testing grounds for new technology.

In Texas, 10 mosquito traps made by Microsoft are operating in Harris County, which includes the city of Houston.

Roughly the size of large birdhouses, the devices use robotics, infrared sensors, machine learning and cloud computing to help health officials keep tabs on potential disease carriers.

Texas recorded six cases of local mosquito transmission of Zika in November and December of last year. Experts believe the actual number is likely higher because most infected people do not develop symptoms.

Pregnant women are at high risk because they can pass the virus to their fetuses, resulting in a variety of birth defects.

Those include microcephaly, a condition in which infants are born with undersized skulls and brains. The World Health Organization declared Zika a global health emergency in February 2016.

Most conventional mosquito traps capture all comers — moths, flies, other mosquito varieties — leaving a pile of specimens for entomologists to sort through. The Microsoft machines differentiate insects by measuring a feature unique to each species: the shadows cast by their beating wings. When a trap detects an Aedes aegypti in one of its 64 chambers, the door slams shut.

The machine “makes a decision about whether to trap it,” said Ethan Jackson, a Microsoft engineer who is developing the device.

The Houston tests, begun last summer, showed the traps could detect Aedes aegypti and other medically important mosquitoes with 85 percent accuracy, Jackson said.

The machines also record shadows made by other insects as well as environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity. The data can be used to build models to predict where and when mosquitoes are active.

Mustapha Debboun, director of Harris County’s mosquito and vector control division, said the traps save time and give researchers more insight into mosquito behavior.

“For science and research, this is a dream come true,” he said.

The traps are prototypes now. But Microsoft’s Jackson said the company eventually hopes to sell them for a few hundred dollars each, roughly the price of conventional traps. The goal is to spur wide adoption, particularly in developing countries, to detect potential epidemics before they start.

“What we hope is [the traps] will allow us to bring more precision to public health,” Jackson said.

Sorting mosquitoes with robots

Other companies, meanwhile, are developing technology to shrink mosquito populations by rendering male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes sterile. When these sterile males mate with females in the wild, their eggs don’t hatch.

The strategy offers an alternative to chemical pesticides.

But it requires the release of millions of laboratory-bred mosquitoes into the outdoors. Males don’t bite, which has made this an easier sell to places now hosting tests.

Oxitec, an Oxford, England-based division of Germantown, Maryland-based Intrexon Corp, is creating male mosquitoes genetically modified to be sterile. It has already deployed them in Brazil, and is seeking regulatory approval for tests in Florida and Texas.

MosquitoMate, a startup formed by researchers at the University of Kentucky, is using a naturally occurring bacterium called Wolbachia to render male mosquitoes sterile.

One of the biggest challenges is sorting the sexes.

At MosquitoMate’s labs in Lexington, immature mosquitoes are forced through a sieve-like mechanism that separates the smaller males from the females. These mosquitoes are then hand sorted to weed out any stray females that slip through.

“That’s basically done using eyeballs,” said Stephen Dobson, MosquitoMate’s chief executive.

Enter Verily. The company is automating mosquito sorting with robots to make it faster and more affordable. Company officials declined to be interviewed. But on its website, Verily says it’s combining sensors, algorithms and “novel engineering” to speed the process.

Verily and MosquitoMate have teamed up to test their technology in Fresno, California, where Aedes aegypti arrived in 2013.

Officials worry that residents who contract Zika elsewhere could spread it in Fresno if they’re bitten by local mosquitoes that could pass the virus to others.

“That is very much of a concern because it is the primary vector for diseases such as dengue, chikungunya and obviously Zika,” said Steve Mulligan, manager of the Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District in Fresno County.

The study, which still needs state and federal approval, is slated for later this summer.
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Eleven of the world’s biggest banks pledged on Tuesday to find out how much exposure they have to risks related to climate-change, a move backed by environmentalists who say better information on the costs of global warming will push lenders to transition towards green investments.

With more than $7 trillion under management, some of the biggest names in global finance have signed onto the United Nations-backed disclosure effort for information on new risks presented by climate change.

Information on banks’ climate risks could eventually be reviewed by regulators as part of their financial disclosures, said Simone Dettling, a researcher with the U.N. Environment Program working on the transparency plan.

“The goal is to shift lending away from carbon intensive sectors that are becoming risky towards green technologies that are becoming more attractive,” Dettling told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

Before banks can change their lending patterns they need to understand how their portfolios will be impacted by climate change. Most currently do not have this information, Dettling said.

“They have committed to finding these numbers,” she said of the voluntary plan.

Once banks have information on their exposure to climate risks they can begin disclosing how these risks will impact investors while looking for new sustainable alternatives, she said.

That disclosure could happen within the next year, she said, although banks and U.N. officials are still hammering out the details.

Information on investments in fossil fuel firms, renewable energy businesses and transportation companies is likely to be among the data disclosed as part of banks’ climate-risk assessments, Dettling said.

Banks backing the plan for new research into climate risks include ANZ, Barclays, Bradesco, Citi, Itaú, National Australia Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Santander, Standard Chartered, TD Bank Group and UBS, said the U.N. Environment Program.

“The scale and sophistication of climate risk and opportunity continue to grow,” Citi Bank spokesman Ed Skyler said in a statement on Tuesday. “Working together to refine our approaches to enhanced disclosure will help accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.”
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Average households use a lot of water that cannot be re-used and it goes to waste. A new project in Sweden is testing a water treatment system that would put to use the nutrients and other useful elements from used water while eliminating the toxic parts. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Insecticides, mosquito nets, and disrupting breeding grounds all reduce mosquito populations and slow the spread of malaria. Now, researchers want to take away the insect’s food to fight the disease that kills a child every two minutes.

Mosquitoes mostly feed on plant sugars that can be hard to find during the dry season in Africa, where 90 percent of malaria cases develop. Researchers thought one potential source of food might be from the flowers on a small type of mesquite tree. The tree, imported from Mexico 40 years ago to provide firewood and shore up irrigation dykes, quickly became invasive and grew out of control.  

To test their idea, researchers monitored mosquito populations in six villages in the Bandiagra District of Mali. After a week, they removed the flowers from the mesquite trees in half of the villages.

The report, published in Malaria Journal, found that with less food around, the mosquitoes didn’t live as long and populations dropped 69 percent. This didn’t just mean fewer mosquitoes, it meant fewer old mosquitoes. That’s important because it takes 12 days for the malaria virus to get to the salivary glands of a mosquito where it could infect a human. So if mosquitoes die even a couple of days earlier, that could greatly reduce the number of mosquitoes that pose a threat.

“This suggests that removal of the flowers could be a new way to shift inherently high malaria transmission areas to low transmission areas,” said Gunter Muller, lead author of the study from Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School.

Devil tree

But getting rid of mesquite is easier said than done. It’s not as if people haven’t tried to control the tree before. It encroaches on crop lands, makes areas inaccessible, and can use up what little water there is. It has been known to grow up though the floors of huts. Even getting to the flowers is a challenge, due to the 10-centimeter-long thorns that grow along the branches.  

Many refer to it as the devil tree, but Medusa tree may be just as apt a name, since it can grow back from just its roots after it is cut down.

Biologist Dawn Wesson from the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine said this was one of the first attempts she has seen to control mosquito populations by restricting their food source.

Wesson, who was not involved in the research, highlighted that not only were populations depressed, but that the degree of impact varied greatly depending on the species of mosquito. In this case all of the species can carry malaria, but Wesson hopes that in other contexts this could be used to help a benign species of mosquito displace a dangerous species of mosquito. That impact could extend beyond the end of any food control measures.

Approach could backfire

But Wesson also cautioned that removing mesquite might backfire. Without flowers to feed on, these mosquitoes might turn to blood meals. This could lead to more frequent bitings and increased transmission of malaria. “It’s probably unlikely,” she told VOA. “They did show a nice decrease … in the older female mosquitoes. But remember their study only took place over a period of about eight days.”

The next step, she suggests, should be to measure the impact of removing mesquite, not just on mosquito populations, but also on the incidence of malaria.

 
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