London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) – British Prime Minister David Cameron was scheduled to announce on Monday the creation of thousands of new jobs to jump start the British economy, which is in danger of falling into a double dip recession.

The new jobs will come from more than 100 projects to be financed by $1.5 billion (₤1 billion) in public money. The spending is expected to be matched by the private sector, particularly those in the telecommunications, services, hospitality, electronics and automotive industries.

Among the infrastructure projects the joint government-private sector initiative is expected to launch is the super-fast broadband project for rural areas. The $450-million (₤300-million) project aims to make available fiber broadband to rural Britain by the end of 2014. The project would boost the number of British homes and offices with access to fiber broadband by the end of 2014 to 17 million from the current 6 million.

Other projects under the pipeline include the construction of two new power stations in Yorkshire which would create 1,000 new jobs and enough energy to light more than two million residences.

Over the weekend, 100 British economists asked the coalition government to have a Plan B to save jobs in the country.

The economists criticized Chancellor George Osborne for sticking to his austerity program, which they blame for the threat of a double dip inflation over Britain just three years after the 2008 global financial crisis from which the country has yet to recover.

The economists pushed for an end to spending cuts and sought another round of quantitative easing to finance a Green New Deal to create thousands of new jobs.

View full post on Labor Stories

Lille, France (IRIN) – With global health funding on the decline, officials are concerned that strains of tuberculosis (TB), including multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), may go untreated. Stop TB Director Mario Raviglione spoke to IRIN/PlusNews at the International Lung Health Conference in Lille, France, about the threat of drug resistant TB treatment and the precarious TB funding gap.

Question: The HIV and TB communities have been bemoaning the lack of service integration for years – why can’t they get together?

Answer: “It’s a turf issue. If I am dealing with an issue, then I tend to focus on my issue. If someone comes and disturbs me with some additional work then I would be reluctant. I think it’s a human reaction.

“We need to educate people in public health that if you have a person that has TB in the African context, it is likely that this person will be affected by HIV. It makes no sense to have this person come in the morning to a clinic to collect their TB drugs and then tell them to go in the afternoon to another clinic to collect their HIV drugs.”

Q: Directly Observed Treatment Short course (DOTS) has been slammed by some as ineffective and paternalistic – is the World Health Organization (WHO) planning to move away from DOTS?

A: “I’m aware that some people say that it is not right, it’s a paternalistic approach… someone actually called it a ‘veterinarian approach’ to public health, meaning not that patients are animals but that the TB community wants to treat them as if they were and supervise every single thing they do. It makes some sense when you look at it from that perspective.

“Nevertheless, DOTS is an approach that where it worked, has prevented the onset of drug resistance and cured patients. Where it hasn’t worked, like in some parts of South Africa, it has allowed incredible epidemics of MDR-TB and even MDR-TB among people living with HIV. [MDR-TB is resistant to one or both of the strongest anti-TB drugs.]

“Our position is not going to change, we will recommend constantly that patients be counseled, supervised in a positive way, reminded on a daily basis and supported throughout the course of this treatment.

“I would be the first one to say, ‘I’m educated enough that I don’t have to be reminded every day – it’s humiliating for me.’ But there are others who are not in a lucky position like that and they tend to lose their treatment because simply they are not counseled enough, not supported enough.

“One has to weigh the ideology and the principles against the practicality of things.”

Q: What’s the biggest issue in TB at present?

A: “Second-line drugs are rare today in the sense that the production of quality drugs is limited to very few WHO prequalified companies… and some are difficult to produce.

“The market is not enough for the industry… to produce the amount of drugs that would be needed if we were able to detect and diagnose all the MDR-TB cases.

“At the moment, there is a vicious circle because in order to have a better market for second-line drugs, we need a higher volume of patients, which is simply not there because most countries do not do systematic drug susceptibility testing. About 90 percent of the MDR-TB cases we think exist are not detected by the system so the market is limited to about 30,000 cases per year that are officially notified.

“By the time we have laboratories capable of diagnosing everyone with MDR-TB, then we will encounter a real problem because there will not be enough drugs to treat these patients, which will become a big, huge ethical issue. I really hope these two things go together, the development of systems to diagnose cases so that the volume of cases detected increases and it becomes more attractive for the industry to produce the drugs.”

Q: A study from Botswana recently showed problematic adherence to isoniazid preventative TB therapy (IPT), which uses one of the two main drugs used to treat TB to prevent active disease. Some have linked this to the drug resistant TB burden in the country – how should we be interpreting this study?

A: “The number-one message I take away from the Botswana study is that it’s a challenge to implement large-scale preventative therapy for TB.

“Mathematical models show clearly that if you implement preventative therapy, we will probably be about 7 percent effective in preventing TB. The problem is the feasibility.

“I’m not that concerned, to be honest, with the issue of developing resistance [within IPT provision] because people who are infected with TB and don’t have the active disease – there’s such a small amount of bacteria in their body that it is quite unlikely that one of them is a mutated [strain] that is resistant from the start to isoniazid, so that I’m not wasting my drug or stimulating resistance.

“However [IPT] will change depending on setting. It’s clear that if you have basic resistance to isoniazid in the population and that resistance is already 10-15 percent, then your prophylaxis in 10-15 percent of the cases won’t work.

“If I were in the former Soviet Union, where isoniazid resistance is 30 percent, then there is no way on earth that we’d use a prophylaxis with isoniazid because in one-third of patients it won’t work. This is why, in some settings, it might be good to use a combination of drugs.”

Q: What is the future of TB funding?

A: “Funding for TB has gone up quite substantially in the last decade but there is still a gap. In the middle-income countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – 95 percent of TB funding is domestic. On the other hand, if you look at the poorest countries, particularly in Africa, you will find that most rely on international financing for more than 50 percent [of their TB programs].

“With the decrease in international aid as a consequence of the financial crises… we are in a very fragile situation. The achievements we have witnessed over the past decade are at big risk in the next five years if international financing [and] domestic financing are not consolidated and maintained. If not, we will go back 15 years because TB is like that – it is not a disease that will go away in one or two years, it requires constant investment.

“It’s an illusion that we’re now controlling TB.”

llg/kn/mw

– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

View full post on All Stories

Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – The number of Americans heading abroad for medical care rose sharply last year amid high health care costs and a poor economy in the United States, according to medical tourism industry figures.

Some of their preferred locations for life-saving surgeries and other procedures are India and Mexico, the health information company Health Digital Systems reported.

Surgeries like hip replacements, dental implants and heart bypasses can cost half as much in Southeast Asia and Latin America compared with the United States.

Among the six million Americans who traveled abroad for medical care last year, 45 percent traveled to Asia, 26 percent to Latin America and 2 percent to the Middle East, according to industry statistics.

Health care officials in the countries treating foreigners are upbeat about their patients. Medical tourism, primarily from the United States and Europe, represents a nearly $100 billion a year industry.

Mexico’s Health Ministry recently produced a report saying “the globalization of health services can offer excellent medical care at lower costs than developed countries.”

The health ministry has developed a strategic plan to encourage medical tourism by continuing “the effort to improve the perception of public safety and promote [Mexico's] image as a global capital of culture and entertainment.”

Any success by Mexico’s health providers in reaching American patients is most obvious in border cities like Monterrey, Tijuana and Chihuahua, according to the Health Digital Systems. Pharmacies, hospitals and medical specialty practices have sprung up to take care of them.

However, patients also assume risks by trusting their health care to foreign medical standards.

Only 2 percent of Mexico’s hospitals have earned “Joint International Commission” certification.

The certification means a hospital and its staff have met international standards that would allow them to be reimbursed by foreign medical insurance companies.

India’s medical tourism industry is losing patients to competing hospitals in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia amid concerns about poor sanitation.

Indian hospitals have been struggling with a “superbug” that is resistant to disinfectant.

As a result, some patients are reporting they become sick when they enter Indian hospitals for other treatments.

Nevertheless, the discount price of foreign medical treatment is creating a backlog of patients for hospitals with good reputations.

Mediescape, an Indian medical tourism company, reports that India’s hospitals offering medical services to patients from the United States and Europe say their booked up to December.

Between 15 percent and 20 percent of India’s hospital income now comes from medical tourism, according to industry data.

There were 800,000 foreign patients in India last year. They are expected to generate a $3 billion a year industry for India by 2015, up by more than a third from 2010.

Behind the figures on rising medical tourism is the desperation of patients who cannot afford health care in the United States, where about 40 percent of the population lacks adequate medical insurance, according to U.S. government statistics.

Some Americans are even treating themselves for serious ailments, not always with successful outcomes, according to a recent survey by TMD Limited, a medical tourism company.

“Today we are seeing many breast cancer patients that self-treated for years,” said Antonio Jimenez, a doctor raised in New Jersey who now runs the Hope4Cancer Institute in Mexico’s Baja California. “Unfortunately, cancer treatment is not a do-it-yourself project.”

Many of the women search for treatments on the Internet.

“We see more and more women who have spent thousands of dollars on supplements and wonder cures they used at home,” Jimenez said. “When those treatments fail, they look for a clinic that can help.”

The American Cancer Society reports that 230,480 American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. Of those, 39,520 will die.

View full post on All Stories

Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – New claims for jobless benefits have edged down slightly. However, they remain above the 400,000 mark, signaling that a recovery in the jobs sector of the economy is still not underway.

There were 402,000 initial claims for unemployment compensation benefits during the week of Oct. 22, down by 2,000 from the 404,000 newly jobless workers who filed claims the previous week, according to the United States Department of Labor.

The less volatile four-week moving average of initial claims went up. It increased by 1,750 to 405,500, from the revised average for the previous week of 403,750 claims.

However, the total number of people claiming benefits in all programs showed a decrease during the latest week for which such data is available. During the week ending Oct. 8, some 6,681,507 people claimed jobless benefits, down by 14,634 from the previous week.

View full post on Labor Stories

Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The cost of attending public colleges rose significantly this fall with tuition at four-year universities rising 8.3 percent to $8,244, the College Board reported Wednesday.

In 2011, the price of studying and living on campus at the average public university rose 5.4 percent for in-state students, or about $1,100, to $21,447.

Many campuses had increases that were dramatically higher. For instance, California State University-San Marcos posted the highest percentage increase in the United States . The school raised its tuition and fees by 31 percent for the 2011-12 academic year to $6,596, Collededata.com reports.

The University of New Hampshire hiked its tuition 11.5 percent to $15,250, making it the most expensive public college system in the U.S.

The cost of attending a typical private college also increased by 4.3 percent to $42,224.

Tuition at community colleges, still considered a bargain, jumped 8.7 percent, to about $3,000 a year for full-time students.

The increases are in part due to recent cuts in federal grants and tax benefits

Fewer than 12 percent of private college students pay those school’s high tuition prices. A full 88 percent of freshman at private universities received scholarships to reduce their costs, according to a recent survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

On average, private college students receive $15,530 in scholarships and federal tax benefits, cutting their average net cost to $26,700, according to the College Board.

Less than half of all public university students shell out the full tuition price to attend, according to federal studies. At least 52 percent of all students at public four-year universities receive scholarships or grants.

Beginning Oct. 29, all colleges are required to post a “net price calculator” on their websites that will help students and their families figure out how much freshman year will most likely cost.

View full post on Education Stories

Paris, France (AHN) – Australia has been found to be a major contributor to the global environment’s rapid deterioration.

In a 134-page report entitled “CO2 Emissions From Fuel Combustion,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) said Australia’s coal-related emissions rose to 220.9 million metric tons in 2009 from 73.2 million metric tons in 1970. From 1990 to 2009, the country’s burning coal emissions jumped 61 per cent.

Australia supplies coal to more than 20 countries. In 2009-10, according to data from the Australian Coal Association, Australia’s biggest markets were Japan, China, South Korea, India, Taiwan and Europe.

The IEA said two-thirds of global emissions in 2009 originated from just 10 countries, with China and the United States both producing 41 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. Electricity/heat generation and transport were the major factors that produced two-thirds of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2009, up from 58 per cent in 1990.

The IEA had been urging nations to stop fossil subsidies in order to reduce CO2 emissions. The energy body has also been actively lobbying for the use of renewable energies such as solar energy and wind power to gain a bigger market share as well as reduce further deterioration to the global environment.

View full post on All Stories

New York, NY, United States (AHN Sports) – It appears that the NBA is going to have an even shorter season if there ends up being a season at all.

According to a report, The NBA will announce Tuesday that at least two more weeks of the season will be canceled after labor talks broke down last week.

The New York Daily News reported the story citing a source. NBA commissioner David Stern already canceled the first two weeks of the season, which was scheduled to begin Nov. 1.

The first cancellation wiped out 100 games and the new announcement is expected to extend through Nov. 28, accounting for 102 more games.

According to the report, there is a “feeling” that the league can still reach a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement in time to save the Christmas Day games. Stern had said that they would likely be canceled if no deal was reached by last Tuesday.

After a three-day federal mediation session, the NBA owners and players announced Thursday that labor talks had broken down and no further meetings were scheduled.

NBA players reportedly want to resume the talks but will not agree to a 50-50 split of the league’s $4 billion in revenue, somewthing the owners are insisting on to resume talks.

The NBA has stated it will not move off a 50-50 split of basketball-related income (BRI), while the players, who were guaranteed 57 percent in the previous labor deal, have refused to drop below 53 percent in the new deal.

NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver said the union had lowered its offer to 52.5 percent of BRI Thursday, while owners were continuing to stick to the 50-50 split.

View full post on Labor Stories

Jerusalem, Israel (The Media Line) – Is it an expression of Palestinian nationalism or is it delegitimizing the State of Israel?

That’s the question at the heart of a controversy over Israel’s decision to expurgate Palestinian symbols and a nationalist take on history from the textbooks used by students in largely Arab east Jerusalem.

Jalal Abukhater, a high school senior who studies in Palestinian-ruled Ramallah, brought the controversy to the public eye over the weekend in the +972 website, a forum for left-of center Israelis, in an essay “Israel imposes censored Palestinian textbooks in East Jerusalem.”

“It’s really weird. The children are the core of every society and they are trying to deface their identity to alter their history and background. That is really dangerous,” Abukhater told The Media Line. “What I learned I will never forget. It is basic education and if you do this and alter their identity through textbooks they will grow up having a blind side and might be ignorant on many issues.”

But the Knesset Education Committee, which ordered the textbooks used by public schools in east Jerusalem to be modified, says the books engage in incitement and intolerance.

At a meeting last year, committee chairman Zevulun Orlev, who belongs to the right-of center Habayit Yehudi Party, said an examination of the textbooks detected “delegitimization of the State of Israel” as well as “inculcating values of hatred, violent confrontation, jihad and martyrdom, absence of conciliation, absence of peace, ignoring the map of Israel and the existence of Israel.”

The textbook controversy is the latest tussle in the battle over the character east Jerusalem, which Israel seized in the 1967 Six-Day War and annexed shortly afterwards. Unlike their peers in the West Bank, east Jerusalem’s largely Palestinian population have Israeli residency and enjoy government benefits and unhindered movement. But in recent years, they have felt besieged by Israeli Jews moving into their neighborhoods

Acting on directives from the Knesset committee, the Jerusalem Education Administration (JEA), the municipal educational authority, began ensuring last year that public schools in east Jerusalem used approved-only textbooks. But the controversy heated up this year when the directives were imposed on private schools, which make up about half of the schools east Jerusalem Palestinians attend.

Abukhater compared many of the censored changes in textbooks used from first to 10th grades now being used in east Jerusalem schools and found changes such as the removal of the Palestinian flag from first grade coloring books and the deletion of all songs or poems about Palestinian uprisings or longing for homelands.

At a meeting of the Knesset committee least year, Dani Bar-Giora, the chairman of the JEA, said Israel has for some time been vetting Palestinian textbooks before they are printed and distributed to east Jerusalem schools. The textbooks are written and edited under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority but must be approved by Israel before they reach students.

“Textbooks go through a process of censorship. The books come to us. There is a whole process of inspection and supervision over them. Whatever needs to be changed is changed. It is reprinted and then sent back into the system,” Bar Giora told the committee, according to published minutes.

These modifications include the removal of maps, slogans and historical references, including all mention of Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as references to the “Nakba,” or catastrophe, the term Palestinians use to describe the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

Abukhater said he was speaking to a friend of his who was studying at a Christian school in east Jerusalem who told her their teachers were being pushed to drop textbooks published under the aegis of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which rules in the West Bank but has no official standing in east Jerusalem.

“She told me that her teacher has been warning them that even though the censored textbooks are forced on us we still don’t have to believe everything we read in the text. You have to go home and read other books to enlighten yourself. She was telling me that they might be forced to use the textbooks because they might be forced to shut down if they don’t and the students would not be able to go to Israeli universities if they refused the textbooks,” Abukhater said.

Yochanan Manor, the chairman of Impact-SE, an organization that examines textbooks for tolerance, said his group has detected a growing “Islamization” in Palestinian Authority textbooks.

Israel allowed Jordanian school books to be used in east Jerusalem in the years after the 1967 war. But that following the 1993 Oslo peace accords that established the Palestinian PA in the West Bank, Israel allowed PA textbooks to replace the Jordanian ones. They included Palestinian interpretations of history, culture and geography.

“It was ridiculous. The municipality was paying a lot of money to reprint these books and instead of modifying them with text that could foster coexistence between Arabs and Jews ecetera, it was simply just removing the PA logo,” Manor told The Media Line.

He said that rather than requiring new material be put in its place, censors left gaping holes in the textbooks, which caused more damage by emphasizing to the readers that the content was censored.

“They were doing many things without thinking them through because when you erase text you leave a blank page that only raises more questions,” Manor said.

Abukhater said Israeli authorities were confiscating textbooks from schools and replacing them with textbooks without Palestinian logos and references to Israeli communities in the territories.

“My textbooks enlightened me about the history of Palestine. I have learned a lot through textbooks and I think that if my fellow Palestinians in east Jerusalem have this information censored from them, they are missing a lot and it is just dangerous,” he said.

View full post on Education Stories

Sanaa, Yemen (IRIN) – Altaf Abdullah al-Mahdi, 40, has found it increasingly difficult to feed her family in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, since she and her 19-year-old daughter, Baghdad, lost their jobs as cleaners in a plastic factory, which closed in May amid growing political unrest in the country.

The family live in a two-room house in a Sana’a slum, which they inherited from their father, a casual construction worker who died in a scaffold collapse last year. Al-Mahdi and four of her six children are dependent on the two oldest boys, Jamal, 13, and Yasser, 11, who together make some YR1,400 (US$5.53) a day working in a car maintenance shop.

Both look stunted with thin arms and sunken cheeks, and appeared underweight. “They work more but eat less,” their mother said. “Both started to have anemia. I am worried about the future of their health. Who else will support us if something bad happens to them?”

The family spends more than 85 percent of its income on food. Al-Mahdi adds water to the beans or yoghurt so that they go further. She and her oldest daughter skip dinner or eat less to leave more food for the children, she told IRIN.

Yemen’s fragile economy has nosedived since February, when protests – which have degenerated into pitched battles on the streets of major cities between an armed opposition and a divided military – began calling for the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, one third of the population was chronically undernourished before the political crisis. Close to 40 percent of Yemenis were unemployed, and with only a small fraction of its cereal needs locally grown, the country is extremely vulnerable to rising global food prices.

One kilogram of bread in Sana’a now costs YR250 ($1.10), compared to YR170 in January.

The last time the Al-Mahdi household ate meat was more than two weeks ago when a neighbor brought them half a chicken. It has been almost one month since they have tasted fruit.

Here is what the family of seven eats on a typical day.

Breakfast: 410 grams of beans (42 US cents); 1 kilogram of bread ($1.10) = 3,110 calories

Lunch: 500 grams of rice (94 cents); 150 grams of yoghurt (63 cents); 1 kilogram of bread = 2,399 calories

Dinner: 1 kilogram of bread; tea = 2660 calories

The total calorie intake per person per day works out at roughly 1,167 calories. However, the recommended calorie intake per person per day is 1,940 calories for women and 2,550 calories for men. For the average child, the recommended daily calorie intake ranges between 1,715 and 1,970 for boys, and 1,545 and 1,740 for girls.

ay/hb/eo/oa/cb

– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

View full post on All Stories

Grasberg, Papua, Indonesia (AHN) – At least nine people have been killed in two separate incidents of violence in the Papua region of Indonesia.

Six men were reportedly killed when an attempt to disperse people attending a pro-independence congress in Papua turned deadly.

The incident occurred shortly after Forkorus Yoboisembut was announced as president of the Democratic Republic of Papua.

Police moved in to scatter the people attending the congress when Yoboismbut began reading a declaration of independence. The police claim they were only firing in the air. However, six men were killed.

The other three men were killed by an unidentified gunman at the Grasberg copper and gold mine operated by Freeport-McMoran.

Thousands of miners have been striking over wages since Sept. 15 at the mine located in eastern Papua. It is one of the largest gold and copper mines in the world.

Only one of the men killed was a contractor, while the other two men were not employees.

Authorities are still investigating both incidents.

View full post on Labor Stories