At last, intelligent aid for Africa

It is a little after dawn in the Maasai district of Engarenaibor in northwestern Tanzania. Amid a pre-historic landscape of rolling grassland and acacia trees, Paolo Lemorongo, a farmer, is rounding up cows, so that his visitors can see for themselves the tiny yellow tags that have been attached to each animal’s ear. The tag signifies an animal inoculated against the deadly Ndigana kali, better known as East Coast fever.

“Before the vaccination became available, most of my animals died,” says Mr Lemorongo. “If the cows delivered 80 calves, only five would survive. Of course, when vets first brought the treatment here some people were suspicious, but when they saw that so many animals survived, suddenly everyone wanted it.”

Mr Lemorongo, whose home is a four-hour drive by Land Rover from Arusha, the nearest city, is understandably delighted to be the beneficiary of a ground-breaking aid project, developed by Galvmed (Global Alliance for Livestock Veterinary Medicines). This Edinburgh-based charity was founded five years ago with the aim of halting East Coast fever and 12 other deadly livestock diseases that lay waste to millions of animals every year across the African continent and throughout the developing world.

It seems an unfeasibly large ambition...

... and it is hugely ambitious. The whole article is here Galvmed's intelligent aid. Strangely, this article is filed under "Scotland" at Times online; also the paper printed the word Maasai as Masai, I know not why. All of which is rather a shame, because this is a fantastic aid project, which deserves to be widely reported.

The photo is by me, for once. James Glossop took some fantastic pix, four of which you can see on the Times site, and more on his Times blog, when he gets round to putting them up.

Gates funds intelligent aid to farmers

A donation of £17 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will enable an Edinburgh-based charity to set out this year to halt the spread of some of the most virulent livestock diseases in the developing world, armed with a war chest of vaccines and medicines.

In Galvmed's sights are 13 feared killers, including avian influenza, swine fever and Rift Valley fever, which in 2007 claimed 325 human lives in Kenya, Tanzania and Somalia, along with the deaths of tens of thousand of animals.

The charity's first campaign, which is already underway, is aimed at East Coast Fever a disease endemic in 11 African countries, and responsible for the deaths of 1.1 million cattle every year. The combined value of this devastation is estimated at $168 million, a loss carried by many inhabitants of some of the poorest nations on Earth.

Conditions could be undeniably difficult, said Hameed Nuru, a Botswanan vet who is the charity's director of policy and external affairs. Even in war-zones it was important that livestock was protected to ensure that many farmers were not thrown even deeper into poverty.

“We have to include livestock issues in the aid package, and look at how to give people a start, to rebuild. This is a difference between what we are doing and the aid which is given because people have to eat, because it is emergency. We see it in holistic terms: give a man a fish, he eats for one meal, teach him how to fish and he eats for his lifetime.” said Dr Nuru.

The full story is here: Galvmed

I haven't posted here for a couple of weeks but over that time, one or two vaguely amusing stories have made into the paper. The argument over parking charges in Tobermory, for example.

If you're only on this site because you're a spaced-out PR executive from Seattle, you possibly won't know that Tobermory is the principal 'town' (population 700) on a Scottish island called Mull, beautiful, calm, peaceful, the kind of place where traffic policemen and parking attendants are unknown and unnecessary. Until some bureaucrat in a faraway office decides: "What they need is a parking attendant..."

More here: Tobermory.

In the next story I get to sit in a very fast car while it is driven very fast around a test track. It's a very fuel efficent vehicle and could yet save the planet, but I can exclusively reveal that it doesn't provide a cure for motion sickness. Here it is: Hybrid.