Healthcare in Africa on brink of crisis as US exits WHO and USAid freezes funds (UPDATE) Hundreds of thousands dead

[Mister Terrific]

Elon Musk says that no one has died because he slashed humanitarian aid. I went to South Sudan to check if that's true. It's not. Within an hour of starting interviews, I had the names of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who had died because of decisions by wealthy men in Washington.
The visit that moved me the most was to a remote area that used to have no health care, where women routinely died in childbirth. Then a US-funded maternity clinic opened through
@UNFPA
in December, and not one woman has died since. I showed up, and people mistakenly thought I was responsible for the clinic. One new mom wanted to name her baby for me, and the village elders thanked me and hailed America's generosity. What they didn't know was that Trump/Musk had cut all funding for UNFPA and that as a result the maternity clinic will close this month, and women will once again be bleeding to death in the dust.
Here's a giftlink to my report from ground level about what the shutdown of USAID means: Opinion | Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True.

 

[Gloxina]

 

[JT-Money]

 

[Strapped]

Africa needs to educate it's citizens & stop begging for outside investment to privatize everything & drive up prices

 

[Mister Terrific]

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands​

The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.


We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.

The toll is appalling and will continue to grow. But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly. When H.I.V. or tuberculosis goes untested, unprevented, or inadequately treated, months or years can pass before a person dies. The same is true for deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses. Another difficulty is that the deaths are scattered. Suppose the sudden withdrawal of aid raises a country’s under-five death rate from three per cent to four per cent. That would be a one-third increase in deaths, but hard to appreciate simply by looking around.

The Administration, for its part, has denied causing widespread harm, even as it has made the scale of the damage harder to measure—halting data monitoring and dismissing the inspectors general who might have documented it. This is common in cases of public man-made death. During Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1961, the Chinese government released no accurate mortality data. Observers abroad understood that a hunger crisis was under way when China began importing grain, but the scale of the catastrophe was not known until the mid-nineteen-eighties, when the first reliable census allowed historians to calculate that between twenty-three and thirty million people had died.


A fuller accounting of the fallout from U.S.A.I.D.’s shutdown will probably have to await analysis of the United Nations’ 2025 mortality statistics, which likely won’t appear until 2027. But there are other ways to glimpse the scale of the harm. With a documentary team that includes both American and local journalists, I have been following what has happened in Kenyan communities where U.S.A.I.D. had been active—in an advanced-H.I.V. ward in Nairobi, in primary health-care centers that had sharply reduced malaria, in a refugee camp, and elsewhere.

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands

The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

www.newyorker.com