Word: asia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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AGRA, for its part, says it has learned the lessons of Asia's experience. Africa's farmlands are divided into small, impoverished plots and scattered across a diverse ecological landscape. What works just south of the Sahara is likely to be very different from what would be successful in the Ethiopian highlands or the Congolese tropics. Rather than try to impose a transition to large-scale, industrialized agriculture, AGRA is providing small-scale farmers with a variety of products for use in traditional planting. The idea, says Joe DeVries, director of AGRA's seed program, isn't to supplant existing...
...Nasheed says he is determined to secure liberal democracy in the Maldives. He sees the dissident struggle he helped wage in the Maldives, an orthodox Sunni nation, as a lightning rod for change in the Muslim world. But there are more pressing challenges at home. The Maldives boasts South Asia's highest GDP per capita, but the figure is inflated by the country's significant tourism revenues, which do not trickle down to everyone. Some 40% of the Maldives' population still earns less than $2 a day. And Maldivian youth are in the middle of a drug epidemic that, proportionate...
H1N1 has already jumped out of animals and established itself in people, so it's too late to contain it, but there are new viruses brewing all the time in the animal world. That includes H5N1 bird flu, which is simmering in Asia and Africa and could still mutate and trigger a pandemic. Globalization has made us especially vulnerable to new diseases--the right pathogen in the right place could spread around the world in 24 hours--but it also gives us the tools to form an effective defense. "The fact that the world is one continuous village now means...
Wolfe's brainchild is a model of what that immune system might look like. With funding from the likes of Google, GVFI has teams on the ground in Africa and Asia surveilling wild animals and the people who live in proximity to them for new pathogens. These "sentinel populations" will provide early warning when a new virus emerges; if a dangerous disease is discovered as soon as it crosses from animals to people, quick action can contain it--but only if we're looking. "Tens of millions for surveillance could save us the hundreds of billions it would cost...
...Authorities in East Asia - which has suffered heavily in recent years from outbreaks of various infectious diseases - have clamped down early and quickly on suspected cases of swine flu. Just over a week ago, Hong Kong released some 300 people stuck at a business hotel after cooping them up in a weeklong quarantine when one guest was found to be carrying the virus. The city, one of Asia's busiest business and travel hubs, was ravaged by the 2003 SARS epidemic as well as subsequent scares over avian flu. As a consequence, its counterpandemic procedures are among the most draconian...