The fight against poverty needs to focus aggressively on the health and education of the young and vulnerable, said non-government organization and development officials who spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles recently. 

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said that social unrest will spread without a focus on meeting basic human needs and taking a businesslike approach to philanthropy. The critique comes as a powerful new player, China, forges a major role in international development and as the World Bank prepares a ranking of nations to reflect investments in people.

One in 10 people around the world lives in extreme poverty, which the World Bank defines as earning less than $1.90 a day. Nearly 6 million children under the age of 5 die every year, many from preventable diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea or malaria.

Malnutrition, stunted growth, and cognitive impairment affect more than 150 million young children around the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, leaving citizens unprepared for the automated economy of the future, said Kim. In Afghanistan, half of all young children are stunted in their development, along with one in three in Indonesia. Kim said the numbers are improving, but not fast enough. 

“Many, many, many people will find themselves undereducated and without the skills to be able to compete in the economy of the future,” he said, “and so many countries are going to go down the path of fragility, conflict, violence, and then of course, extremism and migration.”

Kim said the mindset has to change. Too often, he said, national leaders and finance ministers pursue investments in “roads and railways and industrial parks,” ignoring the data that Kim said shows links among health, education and productivity. The World Bank plans to release a nation-by-nation ranking measuring health and education in its first Human Capital Index in October, which Kim said will shame some countries and prod leaders to view social investments more seriously.

There are success stories in the battle against disease and illiteracy, said a former U.S. aid official who now leads the Rockefeller Foundation.

“When you look at countries like Rwanda,” said Rajiv Shah, the foundation’s president, “they’ve achieved a 70 percent reduction in child mortality in just one decade. So, we know that nations can be successful. What it takes, though, is more political will, more focus on science and technology.”

Shah said improvements in health and education produce measurable economic results. “A dollar invested in community health generates $7 to $10 dollars in economic value,” he said, and improving the health of children and reducing child mortality results in families having fewer children and investing more in their education.

China loans

Joining the United States as a major development lender and donor, China has expanded its footprint in the world with loans and aid to 140 countries, by one count exceeding $350 billion over a 14-year period.

In March, China announced a new aid agency, the International Development Cooperation Agency, to coordinate its overseas development efforts. Critics say China’s development outreach comes with fewer restrictions than those imposed by Western agencies regarding corruption, governance and human rights.

Part of the agency’s mandate is to promote China’s Belt and Road initiative, improving the infrastructure to promote Chinese trade, and extend China’s influence across Eurasia.

The Chinese say “their form of interaction, which is basically doing business…is preferable to the way Western institutions have engaged in the past,” said Matt Ferchen, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy. He said much of Chinese lending is in the form of commercial loans from state development banks, and the role of the new agency may be to coordinate Chinese overseas investments. China’s growing involvement in developing economies worries some, but Ferchen said the jury is still out on its impact. 

He said the new Chinese aid arm, the International Development Cooperation Agency, is the result of a bureaucratic restructuring aimed at coordinating development projects across the various branches of Chinese government.

World Bank lending totaled nearly $59 billion last year, projects that ranged from infrastructure projects in transportation and energy to refugee resettlement and basic needs like health and education. 

The World Bank’s Kim said all are important, and a focus on people is good for business.

One health sector official welcomes the approach. 

“The biggest asset class that we have is our talent,” said Tanisha Carino, executive director of FasterCures, a nonprofit organization funded by the Milken Institute. She said nations view people as assets.

“We’re never going to unlock that potential for creativity, for the next generation innovation, for the next cure that we have in the marketplace,” she said.

These analysts said that a stable, prosperous world requires a focus on human needs and that the dividends will follow. 

 
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A koala hospital and new wildlife reserves are the focus of one of Australia’s boldest plans to protect the vulnerable marsupial. Almost 25,000 hectares of state forest will be set aside for koalas in New South Wales state, which will also set up a new clinic north of Sydney to provide specialist care for sick and injured animals.

Koalas are officially listed as vulnerable to extinction in New South Wales. The state government is to spend $34 million on a range of measures to protect the iconic marsupial.Special reserves will be set up where the animals will be able to breed freely.

The koala population in New South Wales has fallen by a quarter over the past two decades. It is estimated there are 36,000 koalas left in the state.Their numbers have also fallen in other parts of Australia.

The animals face various threats, including a loss of habitat due to land-clearing, attacks by dogs, bushfires, heatwaves and road accidents. A sexually-transmitted disease — chlamydia — is also harming the health of many koalas.

Special measures will also be put in place to help drivers avoid koalas that stray onto highways, including better signs. Tunnels and specially-made bridges have also allowed wildlife to traverse roads while avoiding cars and trucks.

New South Wales environment minister Gabrielle Upton hopes to set up a network of koala and wildlife hospitals to help injured animals.

“This is so there are places that we can have resident expertise in one placein places where we know that koala populations are present and need to be sustained and therefore increased over time. We are going to trial chlamydia vaccinations. Chlamydia is a disease that impacts them most severely on the north coast in New South Wales. There are some really practical parts of this package that address some of the roadkill hot-spots,” said Upton.

“We have had some success with underpasses and overpasses in areas where they know they have core habitat. We need to ensure we have the right road signs, the right fencing.”

The new koala clinic will be set up in Port Stephens, north of Sydney. It will join an existing hospital in the regional town of Port Macquarie that began treating injured marsupials in 1973.

Conservationists have welcomed the new facility but argue that the New South Wales state government’s multi-million dollar plan does not address the number one threat to koalas – land clearing and logging.

The koala lives in trees and has large furry ears, sharp claws adapted for climbing and no tail. It features in many Aboriginal stories of creation and is considered a totemic species.
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Scientists at Rockefeller University in New York discovered that the brains of songbirds use a similar process as humans do when learning to make sounds. And, as a result, VOA’s Deborah Block reports, the research could lead to treatments for people with speech impediments.
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Aardvarks are not the most attractive animals. They have rabbitlike ears, a kangaroo tail and a nose like a pig. But they are mammals, and that means they feed their babies milk. At the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio, an aardvark mother is contributing to the largest collection of exotic animal milk in the world. As Faiza Elmasry tells us, the milk is used to learn about mammal nutrition and help create milk alternatives for animal babies that need to be hand-raised. VOA’s Faith Lapidus narrates.
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America will not be “cheated” by foreign countries that “extort” unreasonably low drug prices from U.S. companies, declared President Donald Trump on Friday.

Rolling out an ambitious blueprint to significantly cut the cost of prescription medication here and abroad, Trump announced he is directing U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to make it a priority to prevent foreign countries from forcing American drugmakers to provide medicines at drastically lower prices than in the United States.

“It’s time to end the global freeloading once and for all,” Trump said during a White House Rose Garden event.

Trump did not specifically name any countries, but according to a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers profit margins on brand-name drugs in the United States are four times as high as in more regulated markets, such as major European countries and Japan.

Earning more profit in such countries presumably would give drugmakers greater maneuverability with their bottom line to charge less in America.   

In its annual report last month on the protection of intellectual property around the world, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, in addition to EU nations and Japan, also specifically criticized the drug pricing and reimbursement policies of Canada, India, South Korea and New Zealand. 

In his Rose Garden comments, Trump also singled out what he called greedy companies and middlemen, who he declared had grown rich through “dishonest double-dealing,” vowing his administration is now “putting American patients first.”

Trump’s plan has four main themes: increasing marketplace competition; empowering private health care plans to negotiate discounts for Medicare beneficiaries; providing new incentives for manufacturers to reduce the list prices of medications; and reducing out-of-pocket costs for patients. 

The president’s plan, however, breaks with one of his campaign promises, which was to authorize the purchasing clout of the federal government to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers for lower prices. 

“Instead of putting forth a bold initiative, the president pulled his punch,” said Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the opposition Democrats in the House of Representatives. “The president is breaking his promise to the American people to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, which would save seniors billions of dollars at the pharmacy.” 

Medicare is a federal health insurance program, covering 15 percent of the U.S. population, primarily those age 65 and older and certain younger people with disabilities. 

Pelosi is calling on Trump to work “with Democrats to offer real solutions for struggling families, not waste their time bragging about meager, window dressing (a superficial appearance) policies.”

Shortly after the Rose Garden event, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters in the briefing room that much of Trump’s plan can be achieved without legislative action. 

“Most of this can be done by executive action,” Azar said, adding that “some of this will require regulatory action” that would take months, while restructuring the entire U.S. drug system would take years.  

Azar, a former chief executive of the giant Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, where he raised drug prices, explained incentives need to be put into place to encourage the lowering of prices. 

“The entire system is actually built for increased prices and high prices,” he explained.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which is the industry’s main lobbying organization, said some of Trump’s proposals could help make medicines more affordable for patients, but “others would disrupt coverage and limit patients’ access to innovative treatments.”

PhRMA President and Chief Executive Officer Stephen Ubl said in a statement the association “will be reviewing the request for information and look forward to participating in the comment process in the coming months.”
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An updated version of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, tailored for eventual crewed missions into orbit, made its debut launch Friday from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, carrying a communications satellite for Bangladesh.

The newly minted Block-5 edition of the Falcon 9 — equipped with about 100 upgrades for greater power, safety and reusability than its Block-4 predecessor — lifted off at 4:14 p.m. EDT (2014 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center.

Minutes later, the Block-5’s main-stage booster flew itself back to Earth to achieve a safe return landing on an unmanned platform vessel floating in the Pacific Ocean.

The recoverable booster for the Block-5 is designed to be reused at least 10 times with minimal refurbishment between flights, allowing more frequent launches at lower cost — a key to the SpaceX business model.

Enhanced rocket reusability also is a core tenet of SpaceX owner and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s broader objectives: making space travel commonplace and ultimately sending humans to Mars.

The flight came a day after the original launch countdown was halted one minute before blastoff time due to a technical problem detected by the rocket’s onboard computers. Friday’s second attempt by SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies, appeared to have gone off without a hitch.
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