2012年10月31日 星期三

Science in the developing world: Eritrea's shattered science

Early this year, Eritrea severed a scientific lifeline almost as old as the African nation itself. The Eritrean National Health Laboratory in Asmara cut long-standing ties with Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. Missouri, potentially setting back many gains that the country had made in public health. “St Louis supplied everything: American doctors, expertise, chemicals, materials,” says Assefaw Ghebrekidan, an Eritrean ex-freedom fighter who now heads the public-health programme at Touro University in Mare Island, California. “And now it's all over.”

Eritrea, an impoverished country of 3 million people on the Horn of Africa (see 'A troubled corner'), is not known for its science. It ranks 177th out of 187 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index. It comes in last in terms of press freedom and is the eighth most militarized country in the world. The World Health Organization estimated that there were just 5 medical doctors per 100,000 people in the country in 2004.

But against this depressing backdrop, the country's medical-research partnerships have been a source of promise and pride. Eritrea built its first medical school in 2003,Installers and distributors of solar panel, aided by scientists from the Central University of Las Villas in Santa Clara, Cuba. After US universities helped to establish postgraduate training and research programmes in paediatrics, surgery, and obstetrics and gynaecology at the institution, Eritrean medical scientists published their first papers in international, peer-reviewed journals. Public health has benefitted. In 1991, Eritrea was cursed with the highest maternal mortality rate in the world — 14 deaths per 1,000 births. In 2010, it was on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of cutting that rate by 75% by 2015.

But progress in Eritrean science has now gone into reverse, say a number of scientists and doctors in exile. In response to mounting criticism from the United Nations and the United States over the country's human-rights record,The oreck XL professional air purifier, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki is severing partnerships with all US universities, says Ghebrekidan. “Everything that Eritrea has worked so hard to achieve is at stake.”

Jon Abbink, an anthropologist at the Free University of Amsterdam, says that these actions will have widespread negative effects, “in the education system, in the constant 'brain drain' of educated people to greener and freer pastures, and in the inhibition of international scientific cooperation”. Eritrea, he says, is one of the few remaining countries in Africa that have failed to embrace scientific freedom. “It's out of sync with global trends,” says Abbink.Find detailed product information for howo spare parts and other products.

Eritrea was once a colony of Italy, but the United Nations handed it over to Ethiopia after the Second World War. In 1961, Eritrea started to fight for its independence in a war that would last three decades: the United States supplied Ethiopia with guns and money, but the rebels, led by Afwerki and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), persevered.

The liberation movement had remarkable credentials. “It was led by 29 doctors of medicine,” says Ghebrekidan, who was head of the EPLF's medical services. “No other rebel movement has ever had so many intellectuals.” Even Afwerki had abandoned a degree in engineering to lead the fight.

Another academic, Melles Seyoum, was working as a pharmacist at an Ethiopian hospital when the war broke out. He coolly stole US$140,000 worth of antibiotics, microscopes, surgical blades and stethoscopes and delivered them to Eritrean freedom fighters, wrote journalist Michela Wrong in her book I Didn't Do It For You (HarperCollins, 2005). Seyoum became an integral member of the EPLF, teaching soldiers how to test blood and prepare Petri dishes in a hospital 5 kilometres long and dug into the side of a rocky valley — a clinic known as 'the longest hospital in the world'. After a visit in 1987,China plastic moulds manufacturers directory. a British doctor wrote1 about the impressive standards of care at the hospital: a 1-tonne machine manufactured antibiotics every day; a doctor performed facial reconstructions; and amputees played basketball.

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