CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Going Direct2Farm

Carmen Thönnissen, Programme Manager from the Swiss Agency for Development and Coopertation, recently visited CABI’s Direct2Farm project with her colleagues in Meerut, India. Read Carmen's report on her visit and the impact of mobile technology on Agriculture.

On 23 April 2013, we - from the Swiss Agency for Development and Coopertation (SDC) - had the pleasure to visit one site of the Direct2Farm projects in Meerut, India. Direct2Farm is a mobile-enabled agriculture infomediary service aimed at making high quality information readily accessible to farmers. Accompanied by Mr. Sharbendu Banerjee and Ms Priyanka Anand of the D2F CABI team in Delhi, we visited the Farmer Call Center that serves more than 30,000 farmers; an Airtel phone company selling stand in a nearby market; met with famers in their fields; and visited one farming family’s home near Meerut.

What’s the big deal about Open Access?

Specifically, what’s in it for the people who get involved? How can publishers, government bodies, academic institutions, researchers, and even the general public reap the benefits?

Copyright: ©Gideon Burton CC BY-SA 2.0

The aim of open access is to improve the communication of knowledge and encourage advancements in research by allowing information to be freely accessible to anyone. At a recent conference held in Oxford, the idea of open access data was discussed with people from all walks of life: publishers, researchers, business entrepreneurs. The general consensus was that openness should be common practice in the academic and publishing world – and that subscriptions, journal payments and other barriers to information should become a thing of the past.

Attack of the 340 million propagule timebomb! Stories of Phytophthora

 

Welcome to a new monthly series called CABI Author Focus. Each month one of the many talented authors or editors of books published by CABI will be writing about an element of their research. This month Kurt Lamour, editor of Phytophthora: A Global Perspective, writes for us on his experiences of this plant-damagng pathogen. As well as Phytophthora, Kurt co-edited Oomycete Genetics and Genomics: Diversity, Interactions and Research Tool with Sophien Kamoun.

Potato famine! Starvation and emigration! For many folks the only Phytophthora they’ll ever hear of, albeit tangentially, is through tales of the infamous potato blight that occurred in mid-1800 Ireland.  I’ve often used the famine as a reference point to help answer questions concerning what it is I do for a living; although I’ve learned this conversational strategy can be tricky.

Managing floods and droughts for a changing climate

Extreme weather is becoming increasingly more common in the UK in recent years; for example, recent figures from the UK Environmental Agency (EA) showed that 1 in every 5 days saw flooding in 2012, but 1 in 4 days were in drought. The EA reported that rivers like the Tyne, Ouse and Tone went from their lowest to their highest flows since records began, in the space of only four months. These stats indicate the UK must work on dealing with such extremes. The Flood and Water Mangement Act (2010) and the Environment Agency Catchment Flood Management Plans promote working with natural processes where possible.

April 25th World Malaria Day: affordable medicines & artemisinin-based control

April 25th is World Malaria Day and we’ve had some mixed news this month concerning the GlaxoSmithKline RTS,S vaccine, reported in New England Journal of Medicine. 65% of children were protected in the 1^st year, but protection then declined to zero over the next 3 years: which means booster shots will be essential.  Vaccine efficacy also declined faster in children who were more exposed to malaria than in those who had below-average exposure. Not the grail we hope for, but we inch our way there.

Effectiveness is at the heart of the problem of malaria control. Last year Oxfam’s report “Salt, Sugar And Malaria Pills”  highlighted their concerns on the effectiveness of the “Affordable medicines facility for malaria” (AFMm) hosted and managed by the Global Fund, with financial support from UNITAID, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), and others.

A fuller discussion of these issues can be found in the April issue of Global Health Knowledge Base,  along with the latest research on drug-related aspects of malaria control

Related articles

Wellcome Image of the Month: Malaria

News in Brief: Malaria drug made by baker's yeast

Amyris (AMRS) Scientists to Publish Data on Breakthrough in Key Malaria Vaccine Ingredient

Prevalence rate of malaria declining in Ghana

Malaria: the Institute of Tropical Medicine focuses on elimination using knowledge

Open up! Open ways of dealing with invasive species

I recently attended a conference on the theme of ‘rigour and openness in 21^st century science’. The conference focussed on perhaps the biggest buzzword in current science: open access. Specifically, how can open access be embraced without risking the standards and rigour that are so important to scientific enquiry?

Reducing hunger and undernutrition - how are we doing?

Hunger and undernutrition are amongst the most persistent global development challenges. Part of Millennium Development Goal 1 is to ‘Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger’ (UN, 2012). With global numbers of undernourished people static at 870 million for the past 5 years and undernutrition contributing to the deaths of 2.6 million children under five each year (FAO, 2012), at the global level, clearly insufficient progress has been made towards achieving this target. But, at a national level, how are governments doing?

Earth Day 2013 – The Face of Climate Change

Image courtesy of The Earth Day Network.

Today is Earth Day, which this year is on the theme 'The Face of climate change'. The Earth Day Network is the organization that coordinates Earth Day around the world each year and their website www.earthday.org is encouraging people from around the world to share their stories on the impact of climate change.

Designers help people to see and medicine to hitch a ride with cola

This year’s “Designs of the Year” (an annual competition staged by Design Museum, London) include two entries focussed on improving the health of people in developing countries.

The first is a pair of spectacles, whose lenses are filled with liquid silicon via mini-syringes in the arms. All the wearer has to do is adjust a dial to fill the lens (so changing its shape) until the world comes into focus, their refractive error corrected. Thus you don’t need an optometrist to work out your prescription for you.                

Optometrists are in short supply in Africa & India, so even if you can get hold of a pair of donated spectacle frames & maybe the money to pay for the lenses ( =3 months wages in Africa), you mostly can’t get someone to assess your prescription! Uncorrected refractive error and cataract are the major causes of blindness in developing countries. There’s only so much Unite for Sight and Vision20:20 can do in training & field visits. 

These spectacles, whilst not high-fashion, will eliminate the need for lens prescriptions and expert fitting, and would seem to be the solution to getting 1 billion people to see properly for the first time.

Arab world holds first public health conference

CABI is attending the First Arab World Congress on Public Health this week. Opening in Dubai tomorrow, the conference will be a forum for leaders in public health to exchange knowledge and develop best practice in the region. Speakers from Europe, the USA and Australia, will also bring an international perspective to the public health issues facing Arab countries.

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