Interesting Links for 23-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. EU pushes for Palestinian statehood, rejecting Israeli leader's insistence it's off the table

(tags:Israel Palestine Europe )

2. No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health

(tags:death statistics Palestine Israel )

3. What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

(tags:space security research )

4. No cervical cancer cases detected in women who had HPV vaccine, Public Health Scotland study finds

(tags:cancer women GoodNews vaccine )

5. New Brexit red tape creating 'existential' crisis, say food and flower firms

(tags:uk europe food flowers doom )

6. The World's First Malaria Vaccine Program for Children Starts Now

(tags:malaria vaccine )

7. Does Palworld break Pokémon's copyright? A lawyer speaks

(tags:law copyright pokemon nintendo games design )

8. Finally some hope on Alzheimer's

(tags:alzheimers )

Comments

4

[danieldwilliam]

This is obviously good news but I've no idea (and a quick look at Wikipedia didn't tell me) what age we should start expecting women to develop cervical cancer. The teenagers who were vaccinated in 2008 will be in their mid to late twenties now.

We'll have vaccinated perhaps 200,000 people since 2008 - so pretty encouraging to have zero cases.

Re: 4

[channelpenguin]

AFAIK, it can show up in mid 20s for sure.

Re: 4

[danieldwilliam]

I noticed that the screening programmes start in the mid-twenties. Screening programmes tend to be pretty ruthless (clinical even) about only screening people when it is useful to do so en masse - so I'm not at all surprised that folks in that young are at risk.

Re: 4

[splodgenoodles]

I had cervical dysplasia from HPV when I was about 24.

And now, in my 50's I'm dealing with it again.

I'm delighted by the vaccine!

Re: 4

[andrewducker]

The Lancet has their own study on this (in England). Indicates a dramatic reduction in cases, and goes into more detail: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02178-4/fulltext

Re: 4

[draigwen]

Women can start developing cervical cancer from when they become sexually active (or at least the type prevented by the vaccine, which is the most common type).

6

[danieldwilliam]

It will be a notable thing when African countries are able and willing to self-fund malaria vaccines.

Worth every penny to the West to pay for it but much better all round when the locals are funding it.

Re: 6

[andrewducker]

It will be.

I wonder what the steps needed are.

Re: 6

[danieldwilliam]

I think it could be as easy as
Step 1 - get richer
Step 2 - pay someone to provide vaccines to you

But having a more developed bio-tech industry, some more infrastructure for moving vaccines around, a deeper and more developed education system. I think the first big step is probably getting local manufacturing facilities set up so providing the vaccine isn't just sending money abroad. That way the continent gets both the benefits of the vaccinated population and some of the jobs associated with the production.

If the stat mentioned in the article is right and universal for Sub-Saharan Africa that nearly half of all hospital admissions are related to Malaria that's a lot of health care money that can be spent on something else.

Re: 6

[andrewducker]

I was more thinking that step 1 there seems to cause issues.

Relieving a lot of healthcare costs will probably help move things in the right direction, of course.

Re: 6

[danieldwilliam]

This survey of how African economies are doing over the last 20 years might address parts of Step 1

https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/reimagining-economic-growth-in-africa-turning-diversity-into-opportunity

Re: 6

[andrewducker]

Interesting piece, although sentences like "Almost half of Africa’s people live in countries where GDP growth between 2010 and 2019 exceeded the continent’s average growth rate of 4.2 percent since 2000." set my teeth somewhat on edge. You mean to say that half of the people are above average and half are below average? Astounding!

But yes, some good stuff in there, and I'm glad that some parts are improving.

Re: 6

[danieldwilliam]

I think if you had 1 country that had 50% of the continents population and was growing at 10% and 9 countries with the other half of the population growing at 2%, you'd have average growth by country of 2.8% and half of the people would be in a country with an above average growth rate.

That would be different if there were 5 equally sized countries, 2 growing at 1%, 1 at 2% and two at 5%.

Re: 6

[bens_dad]

Well, this compares two different time periods, so all bets are off.

Even with one set of data, yes there are lots of ways that you can have more than half the people above average.

But I believe Andrew's point was that we expect about half the people to be above average. It is normal. It proves nothing.

Re: 6

[danieldwilliam]

Agreed - we'd normally expect half of people to be above and half below average - so, on the face of it, "half of people above average" isn't a useful comment. Smacks of dog bites man.

But I think in this case there's something interesting in the observation. We're not comparing the GDP of people, we're comparing the GDP of groups of people by countries. Those countries are different in interesting and important ways. They have different regulatory and policy regimes, different endowments of factors of production, different sized populations, with differently sized urban centres and lots of other factors that would affect long-term GDP growth.

On reflection my prior would have been that I'd have expected GDP growth to be concentrated in one very large country (with several large cities), a handful of small countries (with unusual natural endowments of factors of production) and two or three medium sized countries (with stable and successful regulatory and policy regimes) with the rest of the continent seeing significantly lower growth. So I think my guess would have been 25% of people in Africa live in countries with above average GDP growth with the rest living in a majority of much slower growing countries. That's party based on the relatively low levels of intra-continental trade.

If about half of the people are living in countries with above or below average GDP growth I think that's actually useful information. It suggests that GDP growth in Africa is more even and more widely distributed than I was expecting. Instead of some people getting richer very quickly instead most people are getting richer more steadily. I think that's probably better in the long run than a few countries bolting ahead.

[jack]

That was a fascinating look at the sort of things that need to be decided.

I do rather think that, although having some sort of unofficial two tier "trusted" and "untrusted" system is a bad way of doing it, once you've sent many dozens of people through something, it's inevitable to start having some more safety standards because if you have a "kill everyone" button just sitting there, SOMETHING is going to go wrong eventually.

[calimac]

3) When I read "an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back," I imagined an astronaut on the ISS. He could just stay there and refuse to get on the spacecraft home. I wasn't expecting a threat of murder-suicide on the space shuttle. Yikes!

5) News flash: If you're not part of the EU, there will be a border between you and it. Amazing how many people couldn't figure that out.

[hairyears]

Yes, and the other shoe dropped, somewhere out of sight:
Amazing how many people couldn't figure that out.
It's worrying, that we know so little about who did figure it out, and profited from funding a campaign of deceit.