I am doing a large amount of data entry today and do not have much time for writing. But, below are some posts and articles I enjoyed in the last week.
The U.S. Navy: America’s Unrecognized Public Health Shield –
Not too many Navy people know their organization serves on the front line of America’s disease defenses. Even fewer officers know–or even care–that the Navy occasionally beats the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention at disease detection, discovering, for example, the first domestic case of H1N1 Influenza.
State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunizations, 2009 –
“The State of the world’s vaccines and immunization (Third edition) is a call to action to governments and donors to sustain and increase funding for immunization in order to build upon the progress made so far in meeting the global goals. It focuses on the major developments in vaccines and immunization since 2000.
Agricultural Development Teams -
USAID does not have the agricultural specialists needed for the mission in Afghanistan, but the National Guard sure does. They have been especially successful in Ghazni.
Risk to aid workers goes up in 2009 -
The world is less safe for aid workers, access to needy communities in conflict is on the decline, and aid is increasingly tied to military or other strategic objectives. These are among the gloomy conclusions of Development Assistance Research Associates (DARA), an aid watchdog, as it releases its 2009 Humanitarian Responsiveness Index today.
So are unintentional civilian deaths trending up or down in absolute terms and / or as a percentage of all civilian deaths? This analysis suggests that collateral damage rather than war crimes now constitute the majority of civilian deaths in international wars worldwide, and that the total number of collateral damage deaths is 20 times higher than at the turn of the last century.
Christopher R. Albon is a political science Ph.D. specializing in armed conflict, public health, human security, and health diplomacy.
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