Efforts to prevent infectious-disease epidemics and other health threats were funded mostly through a five-year supplemental package
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to scale back or discontinue its work to prevent infectious-disease epidemics and other health threats in 39 foreign countries because it expects funding for the work to end, the agency told employees.
.. The CDC currently works in 49 countries as part of an initiative called the global health security agenda, to prevent, detect and respond to dangerous infectious disease threats. It helps expand surveillance for new viruses and drug-resistant bacteria, modernize laboratories to detect dangerous pathogensand train workers who respond to epidemics... The package included $582 million in funds to work with countries around the world after the Ebola crisis in 2014 and 2015. But that funding runs out at the end of fiscal 2019... Public health leaders had said they hoped dollars for the work would eventually be added into the CDC’s core budget, after the epidemic delivered a wake-up call about the world’s lack of preparedness for deadly epidemics... if its funding situation remains the same, it will have to narrow activities to 10 “priority countries” starting in October 2019.. The 10 countries where global health security activities will remain are India, Thailand, Vietnam, Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, Jordan and Guatemala.. Other countries where the agency currently conducts global health security agenda activities include Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world’s main hot spots for emerging infectious diseases and the site of the first Ebola outbreak in history; Pakistan; Indonesia; Haiti; and China.. Those countries next on the priority list, after the top 10, are China, the DRC, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Sierra Leone
Proud to Live in a Nation of Holers
Let’s not mince words: Moldova is a hole. Modify with any four letters you wish.
I mention Moldova because it’s where my paternal grandfather was born in 1901. An anti-Semitic rampage in his hometown, Kishinev, soon forced his family to leave for New York, where my great-grandfather labored as a carpenter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for eight dollars a week. Low skills, low wages, minimal English, lots of children and probably not the best hygiene — that’s half of my pedigree. The other half consisted of refugees.
I’m not alone. America is a nation of holers. It is an improbable yet wildly successful experiment in the transformation — by means of hope, opportunity and ambition — of holers into doers, makers, thinkers and givers. Are you of Irish descent? Italian? Polish? Scottish? Chinese? Chances are, your ancestors did not get on a boat because life in the old country was placid and prosperous and grandpa owned a bank. With few exceptions, Americans are the dregs of the wine, the chaff of the wheat. If you don’t know this by now, it makes you the wax in the ear.
.. Liberals can be squeamish about calling poor countries bad names, while conservatives such as Mark Steyn chortle that “nobody voluntarily moves to Haiti.” Which, let’s be real, is basically right.
Yet that’s beside the point. We are not talking about Haiti, El Salvador, Nigeria or any other country on the president’s insult list. What counts are the people from these countries
.. But immigrants are more likely to be fleeing those dysfunctions and prejudices than they are to be bringing them
- .. Dorsa Derakhshani, the international chess master from Iran who came to the United States last year because, as she wrote in an op-ed for The Times, the mullahs “cared more about the scarf covering my hair than the brain under it.”
- Vietnamese boat people did not bring fratricidal hatreds with them to America.
- Soviet refuseniks did not bring a Soviet work ethic.
.. They don’t bring crime to cities. They drive out crime by starting businesses and families in shrinking cities or underserved neighborhoods.
.. sub-Saharan Africans have “among the highest college-completion rates of any immigrant group.”
.. As for Haitians, MPI found they had a higher labor participation rate than the overall work force, and had median household incomes of $47,200 — lower than the overall U.S. median, but robust by any developed nation standard.
.. How can this be? It shouldn’t be a mystery. Immigrants self-select.
.. To really see it clearly, you must first rise up from a hole.
Donald Trump has not, to say the least, risen from a hole. But he is sinking into one.
.. It may be that it won’t damage him politically — Republican Party leaders, increasingly unshameable, will mumble mild disapproval until the news cycle turns — but it does damage the country. We have a president even more ignorant of America than he is of the rest of the world.
e Italy offers swimming lessons for refugees traumatized while crossing the Mediterranean
His swimming and rescue training aims to calm the trauma of a passage that has claimed the lives of at least 2,300 migrants and refugees this year.
.. And the Nautical Technical Institute in this gritty coastal city is trying to help emotionally scarred teenagers overcome their fear of the water in a region where most jobs are tied to the sea.
.. The program, which started in May, aims to teach basic first aid, and rescue and diving skills to the about two dozen teenage boys who live together in a dormitory at Basilica di Sant’Antonio in Messina. All of the boys are from sub-Saharan Africa. Some fled wars. Others are escaping poverty. All made the desolate journey through Libya, where many migrants are forced into labor, imprisoned and brutalized.
.. His mother is blind, he said, and he has no other family members. His plan is to become a professional soccer player in Italy and send money home.
.. “People are racist here. If there’s a bench, and white people are sitting there, and you sit down, they’ll get up,” said Richard Amegah, 17, who made a 19-month journey from his native Ghana to Italy that started in 2014... Unlike the largely Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees who streamed into Greece in 2015, many of the migrants on the Italian route are traveling northward for economic reasons... This year, the principal sources of migrants have been Nigeria, Bangladesh, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Senegal and Mali, according to Italian Interior Ministry figures... In the chaos, boys started falling off the slippery back of the boat. Among them was one of Hubert’s closest friends, Moussa, who drowned, he said.Now the lanky 17-year-old says he wants to become a lifesaver after fleeing his native Ivory Coast when he was 11 after rebels killed his parents.
Nigeria’s Comics Pull Punch Lines From Deeper Social Ills
Forget crooked politicians, daily blackouts, long lines at gas stations or even the scourge of Boko Haram here in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Despite the litany of social ills and troubles — or maybe because of them — Nigeria has never laughed harder.
Comedy here is booming. Top comics have become, in a few short years, among Nigeria’s most successful entertainers and now perform throughout Africa.
.. So quickly has the art form caught on that stand-up comics have become fixtures at social events, like the lawyers association that hired Ali Baba for its dinner here recently. Securing a talented comic for a wedding, company event or political gathering has now become de rigueur in Nigeria’s higher social circles.
“Ten years ago, you had masters of ceremonies who would just run a program and put in some lighthearted talk that would make people smile,” said Barclays Ayakoroma, a cultural critic who has written about the rise of stand-up comedy in Nigeria. “But today, depending on how deep your pocket is, you must get a good stand-up comedian for your event. Today, there is hardly any function that you will not see a stand-up comedian coming in and performing during interludes. It’s a common practice nationwide.”
.. Sometimes he texts jokes to politicians with whom he has built a relationship to gauge their response before using the material.
.. As comedians have become powerful, some politicians have come to understand the benefits of serving as comic material. Being the subject of a joke can be proof of the politician’s power or of ties to an influential comic.
“Some of them will come up to me and say, ‘Talk about me,’ ” Mr. Agwu said. “It’s like hype for them.”