Category: Africa
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I have just finished reading The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, by Peter Hessler. I found this book because I stumbled on some tweets of his that suggested he actually had a nuanced view of China, which is highly unusual for a western journalist. He is a journalist working at the New Yorker,…
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I have just completed a three day trip to Chengdu, China, where I was visiting an NGO that provides HIV testing and counselling to men who have sex with men. There’s not much to report about the trip itself – the NGO is doing well and we came up with some interesting research opportunities, and…
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Avengers: Infinity War is essentially a terrible movie. It’s about an hour too long, it has too many characters and too many plot threads running at once, and most of the characters are either not introduced or barely introduced, get very little dialogue and don’t get any development. If you haven’t watched a long train…
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Recently I wrote a post criticizing an article at the National Bureau of Economic Research that found a legal ivory sale in 2008 led to an increase in elephant poaching. This paper used a measure of illegal poaching called commonly the PIKE, which is measured through counting carcasses discovered in searches of designated areas. This…
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Today the Guardian reported on a new study that claims a large sale of legal ivory in 2008 actually led to an increase in illegal elephant poaching. Basically in 2008 China and Japan were allowed to pay for a large stockpile of legally-obtained ivory, in the hopes that this would crash the market and drive…
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This week 700 asylum seekers drowned when their boat capsized somewhere in the Mediterranean sea; reports suggest that a large number of these poor souls were locked in the hold of the ship and had no chance of escape. A year ago the people on this ship might have been found rescued earlier by the…
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Today’s media are breathlessly reporting that the WHO is predicting 5,000 – 10,000 new cases of Ebola virus disease per week by the beginning of December. There is no written documentation on this, but I did find this study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) from the WHO’s rapid response unit which suggested…
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Media reports today that the Spanish government has killed a dog. Not just any dog – this was Excalibur, the hapless pet of the nurse who is quarantined for Ebola in Spain. The nurse, Teresa Romero Ramos, is being treated for Ebola after contracting it while treating a returned missionary; her husband is in isolation…
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This week the journal Science reports a new study finding HIV first emerged in Kinshasa (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in the 1920s – not the 1970s or 1980s as previously suspected. The disease was likely introduced to Kinshasa through bush-meat, but spread rapidly across the Congo through mobile workers moving on Belgian-built…
Compromise and Conceit 