NEWSBYTE-PING CHEN

Chris Guillebeau writes the blog the Art of Non-Conformity. After spending four years working for a medical charity in West Africa, he hit the road and decided to travel to every country in the world before his 35th birthday. So far, he’s been to more than 125, and along the way, has built what he calls a “small army” of devoted readers around the world — artists, entrepreneurs, aid workers, travelers and more. We caught up with Chris after he landed from his latest trip to Algeria to hear his thoughts on humanitarian aid, fighting cynicism, telling the good stories and more.

How did you first get involved in West Africa as an aid worker?

[After 9/11], I’d read a story about a surgeon originally from California who went for West Africa to volunteer for a year and ended up staying for 17.  I felt really challenged by that story and had also  been reading a lot about Sierra Leone, the 4th-poorest country in the world at the time. There was this organization Mercy Ships that needed long-term volunteers there, so I said, I’m totally on board.

If you don't have a hero rat or a salad spinner on hand, why not try a low-cost microscope?

Previously here on Global Poverty, we've blogged about various low-budget global health diagnostic tools, including trained rats that can sniff out tuberculosis and converted lettuce-washers that diagnose anemia. Now, a new invention by Rice University undergraduate Andy Miller is adding a new device to the mix: a cheap, battery-powered microscope that can identify tuberculosis cases, yet still fits inside a lunch box.

Every year, an estimated 1.3 million people die from tuberculosis, mostly in Africa, Asia and South America, many of whom go undiagnosed. If properly deployed, Miller's invention could make it possible for health workers to more easily identify and target people with the disease — even without access to lab facilities or reliable electricity. Though hospital machines that diagnose tuberculosis retail for as much as $40,000, Miller's microscope — weighing in at a slim 2.5 lbs — costs just $220.

Vicente Fox is a man who arrived at his change of heart several years late. As president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, he was a key U.S. ally in the drug war. Now, less than five years after he exited office, Fox thinks it's time to legalize drugs altogether.

"Radical prohibition strategies have never worked," he writes on his blog.

Fox's outspoken support for legalization might be taboo among U.S. politicians, but in Latin America, his views place him squarely at the heart of a growing consensus. Last year, former presidents Fernando Cardoso of Brazil and Cesar Gaviria of Columbia issued a joint condemnation of the war on drugs, joined by onetime Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo.

In recent years, Mexico's war on drugs has turned especially bloody, following current president Felipe Calderon's decision to enlist the country's troops against drug cartels, . Since 2006, over 28,000 people have died in Mexico's drug war — more than six times the number of U.S. fatalities in Iraq.

The top killer in Malawi isn't malaria, and it isn't AIDS. It's a condition far more mundane than either of those diseases, and something that not many people want to talk about: diarrhea.

Across Malawi, lack of toilets and clean drinking water takes the lives of some 12,000 children a year. The Mgona area, for example, is home to about 36,000 people — a settlement crammed into a small space near an abandoned railway line, where IRIN describes access to toilets as "almost unheard of." There, diarrhea-related diseases, including dysentery and cholera, find easy stalking ground.

Now, though, local residents are beating back these diseases through the use of composting toilets, which operate under the cheerful name of SkyLoos.

The story has all the requisite staples: sultry women, city lights, emotional backstabbing. But MTV's Shuga is more than that. For its target audience in Kenya, it's also a compelling meditation on HIV/AIDS.

We've written before here about various development efforts that are using TV to educate villagers in countries as far-flung as Brazil and Mozambique on issues like climate change, global health and more.

Now, as U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Eric Goosby puts it, MTV is helping bring the "cool factor" to the fight against HIV/AIDS. After all, worldwide, youth between ages 15-24 are among the most vulnerable to the disease, accounting for 40% of all new HIV infections.

The exciting thing about Shuga is that so far, it seems to be working. An overwhelming 60% of youth in Kenya watch the program, which weaves in concrete lessons alongside the emotional drama — one character, for example, cheats on her boyfriend with a man who pressures her into having sex without a condom. The man turns out to be HIV-positive.

In Alabama, the latest controversy over the judicial system isn't a whodunit — more of a "who dropped the ball?"

The law in question was originally intended to curb the influence of big donors on the state's judicial system. But at this point, fully 15 years after it was passed, it's never been enforced. The attorney general says the state court system needs to write up enforcement rules first. The court system, though, argues that the law needs approval from the U.S. Justice Department — which the AG's office hasn't asked for.

Whoever's to blame here, the upshot doesn't change: what could be one of the most strict judicial campaign finance laws on the books has continued to gather dust.

Unlike most other countries in the world, here in the U.S., we actually elect our judges. And recently, according to one New York Times op-ed, spending to influence such races has "soar[ed] into the stratosphere." In a state like Ohio, justices vote in favor of their campaign donors fully 70% of the time. A 2002 survey found that more than half of over 2,400 state court judges queried openly admit that campaign contributions sway their decisions, at least sometimes.  

By at least one metric, the Hopital Adventiste d'Haiti is quite well-equipped. Its storerooms are filled with wheelchairs, hygiene kits, a thousand-gallon box of dishrags, dozens of laryngoscopes and a 20-year supply of rubbing alcohol and peroxide.

There's one problem, though: this Haitian hospital — like so many of its counterparts — lacks cash. And no matter how well-equipped a hospital may be, it's nothing if it can't afford to staff it.

As Sarah Ryley reports, in the aftermath of the 7.0 earthquake that devastated Haiti this January, plenty of people were willing to send donated syringes, medical bandages and other supplies. But at this point, she writes, many containers full of supplies are languishing unused, while hospitals are buckling under the financial strain of trying to support basic operational expenses.

Recently, for example, the 1,800 employees at Port-au-Prince's largest general hospital went on strike because they hadn't been paid since the quake (costing patients' lives). The American Red Cross made an emergency cash donation of $3.8 million to support salaries — but such outlays are the exception.  

When President Richard Nixon launched the drug war in 1971, he wasn't thinking about HIV/AIDS. But 40 years later, scientists and global health leaders are convinced that the policies he helped set in motion are exacerbating one of the world's most terrifying public health scourges.

Last week, thousands of scientists, physicians and activists endorsed the Vienna Declaration — a document that called for an end to the U.S.-led war on drugs. The tagline? Drug policy should be based on science, not ideology. According to its authors, the criminalization of drug users is "fuelling the HIV epidemic," not to mention engineering a "crisis in criminal justice systems [and] record incarceration rates in a number of nations."

The declaration lists a litany of demands, among them, scaling up of harm reduction efforts and decriminalization of drug use.

If it was a bold declaration — one signed by over 10,000 individuals, including multiple nobel laureates — it's also one that's long overdue. Outside sub-Saharan Africa, one in three new HIV infections are caused by illicit drug injections, while in certain regions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, fully 70% of injecting drug users have become infected with the virus.  

Activists around the world are raising a glass today — of clear, cold water — after the UN today declared that access to clean water and sanitation is a human right.

Without water, the average person wouldn't last more than a handful of days (or less, depending on their environment). Yet oddly enough, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed in 1948, while Article 25 invoked food, clothing, housing and medical care, water was left off that list.

Now, though, thanks to Bolivia — who first introduced the non-binding measure to the UN General Assembly — the UN has deemed the right to clean water and sanitation a right that's "essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights." In other words, it's the one human right that undergirds all others.

Not a single country voted against the resolution, though fully 40 nations abstained from the vote — mostly developed countries, including the U.S. (The resolution calls for international institutions and other countries to help ensure the right to water and sanitation via cash and tech transfers, as well as capacity building.)

True, this resolution is non-binding, and ultimately it's just a piece of paper. So for more jaundiced observers, there's plenty of reason to feel skeptical. But as we often write about here, this latest vote helps counter the fact that — as one press release puts it — the global community has treated water and sanitation issues as a "second fiddle" for years.

When it comes to the fight against malaria, don't just think about white-robed scientists or larger-than-life figures like Bill Gates, the presidents of Tanzania and Uganda argue in a new Wall Street Journal op-ed. Consider, instead, the role of the humble tax collector.

Every year, the mosquito-borne disease takes the lives of some 800,000 Africans a year. And while bed nets and bilateral agreements are important, tax and tariff reform is likewise key to combating the disease.

What do taxes and tariffs have to do with malaria? Most anti-malarial products — from bed nets to medicines — are produced outside Africa. To reach the 200 million people in Africa affected by the disease each year, they have to be shipped great distances and distributed from African ports.

In the process, that cargo is usually subject to motley taxes and tariffs — which, as presidents Jakaya Kikwete and Yoweri Museveni explain, not only reduce the overall amount of goods that can be purchased, but also create frustrating delays in their circulation.