jaginsburg.com
  • home
  • journalism | science | tech
    • sci | tech
  • exhibitions
    • introduction
    • mickey pallas
    • News art
  • children's media
  • photography
    • photography
    • book covers
  • blogs
    • Medium
    • better
    • PechaKucha
    • TrackerNews (archive)
    • archived faves
  • DNG Archives
    • Fields

Germs, Soap & Water

11/29/2010

0 Comments

 
masthead
At TrackerNews, we tend to shy away from issues that have “days” as almost a sure mark that the cause, however noble, is all but lost. Awareness is whipped to fever pitch, followed almost inevitably by a “what do we do now?” hang-over, and an ADD sprint onto the next issue du jour. But World Toilet Day (Nov. 19) caught—and kept—our attention. So much so, we used it as the fulcrum of one the largest link suites ever on the aggregator.  —Ed.

It is as basic—and necessary—as breathing. And, just like breathing, one of the first things we need to be able to do on our own: We poop. But what begins as a triumph of living, quickly devolves into daily problem with deadly implications. Human poop is a happy home for at least 50 pathogens, including cholera, the latest of Haiti’s cascading list of immeasurable woes.

At some point each day, each one of the now more than 6 billion people on that planet will need to “take a moment,” “go to the powder room,” or “be right back.”  For one in six, however, there is no “powder room,” or even a bucket into which to “do one’s business.”  A full third don’t have access to a clean bathroom. Instead, they do as nature designed, find a place to squat and simply “go”—or, in the jargon of the sanitation experts, perform “open defecation” (OD).

It is messy, smelly, wildly dangerous in terms of public health, and dicey in terms of personal safety. Women and children are especially vulnerable to attack and rape. No safety, privacy or dignity.

Journalist Rose George, author of “The Big Necessity” and an expert on the issue, notes that only a small fraction of development funds spent on water projects goes toward sanitation. Yet to seriously move the dial on global public health, safe toilets and hand-washing with soap are required as well. According to one, oft-quoted stat, one child dies every 15 seconds from largely preventable diarrheal diseases. Hand-washing with soap alone can reduce the tally by more than half.

Read More
0 Comments

When Tipping Points Collide: On Oil Spills, Dead Zones, Superweeds, Dead Birds, Dead Bees and Not-So-Funny Laughing Gas

6/8/2010

0 Comments

 
masthead

If only there were a rewind button.

From the first, almost cheerfully do-able estimate of 1,000 barrels of oil spewing daily into the Gulf of Mexico to a…

  • jaw-dropping 5,000 barrel revision
  • horrifying 19,000 barrel update
  • are-you-kidding-me? 25,000 barrel recalculation
  • and an it’s way-way-way-more-than-the-Exxon-Valdez admission
…the bad news on the BP catastrophe has gone so far off the dial, it has zoomed past “worst case scenario” to “pretty much the worst case ever.”

Dispersants that present environmental issues of their own have only made the situation more complex. “We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil,” according to Admiral Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander in charge of the clean-up. It will takes months to scrub the surface. Years at least to scrub the wetlands.


Read More
0 Comments

Rebuilding Haiti: On Trees, Charcoal, Compost and Why Low Tech, Low Cost Answers Could Make the Biggest Difference (& How High-Tech Can Help)

2/10/2010

0 Comments

 
masthead
On the link between environmental health & public health; Rebuilding Haiti from the soil microbes up; A humanitarian aid petri dish; Jared Diamond’s checklist for collapse & Haiti as vision what could be in store for the rest of us; Charcoal cartels, Amy Smith’s better answer & Nicholas Kristof’s compost toilet tour

Five years ago, in a move as practical as it was visionary, the Hôpital Albert Schweitzer (HAS) in Haiti began planting trees – lots of trees – in an effort to mend an ailing landscape.

Small farm plots on hilly terrain had been stripped bare of soil-stabilizing cover (2/3 of the the country is on land that slopes 20% or more). No soil means no food means malnutrition means disease, illness, death.

“Practically every medical problem in Haiti is poverty-related,” notes Dr. Vehnita Suresh, the hospital’s CEO. “The never-ending cycle of deforestation lead(s) to more ecological damage, more compromised farming, more poverty and more hunger. It goes on and on and on.”

Public health and environmental health are so tied together, you simply can’t have the former without the latter. “We can go on giving health-care forever,” says Dr. Suresh, “It would never really touch even the brim of the problem here.”

Read More
0 Comments

“TrackerNews: Haiti” – A Special Resources Page

1/26/2010

0 Comments

 
masthead
A special TrackerNews page with news, info and resources relevant to Haitian relief and reconstruction, prototype “sketch” for a personal aggregation tool; Hi-tech meets What-tech?, Haiti’s legacy  

At TrackerNews, we tell stories by collecting and connecting links. Unlike most aggregators  that are driven by by dateline or popularity, we are interested in context, mixing news stories and research papers, conference videos and book sites, archived articles and blog posts from the field. Typically, between 4 and 6 story groups about health (human / animal / eco), humanitarian work and technology are on the site at any given time, setting the stage for the alchemy of cross-disciplinary insight. Eventually, everything ends up in a searchable database. Day by day, link by link, a broadly defined beat becomes a richer archive, a deeper resource.

Very occasionally, major breaking news stories—a hurricane, disease outbreak, political unrest, climate conference—have taken over the entire site. But the Haitian earthquake stands apart with its mix of staggering devastation, technological hope, massive global response, cascading threats (disease, looting, hurricanes), ecological horror (the fertile skin of  the land has literally been stripped bare from deforestation) and the glimmering potential to right more than three centuries of unspeakable wrongs rooted in the slave trade.

For two weeks, dozens upon dozens of Haiti-related links have coursed through the TrackerNews columns. More have been tweeted via @TrackerNews. Now we have created a special permanent TrackerNews: Haiti resources page. (Ed. Note: the site was taken down after the TrackerNews Project wrapped) 





The Haiti Special Resources page was created with a prototype custom
aggregation tool. 

Read More
0 Comments

Follow the Pigs! Swine Flu, Factory Farms, Mapping and Public Health

4/27/2009

0 Comments

 
masthead
“Disease is an outcome.”  Wildlife biologist Milt Friend said that to me years ago when I was working on a story about the emergence of a frightening new virus just beginning to sweep across the country: West Nile. Friend had helped found the National Wildlife Health Center (a sort of CDC for critters), which was handling crow necropsies. After rattling off a disturbingly long list of wildlife die-offs from the last 30 years, he stopped, looked me in the eye and with a determined passion born of heartbreak said those four words. He had seen more than his share of ducks dropping dead — by the millions — from duck plague,  and frogs with way too many legs, and “Mad Deer,” wobbling around with a version of the same ailment that causes Mad Cow. These were not random natural phenomena, but disasters aided and abetted by human action. Disease is an outcome.

Those words were ringing in my ears when the first reports of the Mexican swine flu outbreak began trickling in few days ago. Dozens of young, otherwise healthy men were dying. Was this an encore of the infamous 1918 pandemic? Another SARS? Patients killed by their own overzealous immune systems (“cytokine storms”)? Or poor patients who came to the hospital too late to be saved?  Then came lab reports of an unusually cosmopolitan swine/avian/human virus, with genetic links to two continents. This sort of thing doesn’t just happen. An awful lot of things have to happen first to make it possible.

Read More
0 Comments

    background

    The TrackerNews Project was a demo aggregator I developed for InSTEDD, an independent spin-off of Google.org's humanitarian practice. It covered health issues, humanitarian work and technology.

    archives

    November 2013
    November 2011
    October 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    April 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009
    September 2009
    August 2009
    July 2009
    May 2009
    April 2009
    February 2009
    December 2008
    November 2008
    October 2008

    Categories

    All
    Agriculture
    Architecture
    Big Data
    China
    Climate Change
    Communications
    Conferences
    Cyber Security
    Deforestation
    Demographics
    Disease Surveillance
    Earthquake
    Energy
    Environment
    Food
    Food Aid
    Free Press
    Haiti
    Health
    Hunger
    Innovation
    Instedd
    Land Mines
    Lighting
    Microfinance
    Mining
    Nuclear
    Oceans
    Philanthropy
    Pollution
    Probiotics
    Recycling
    Sanitation
    Social Enterprise
    Solar
    Tech
    Terrorism
    Transportation
    Travel
    Trees
    Vaccines
    Water
    Water Borne Disease
    Water-borne Disease
    Weather

    •
introduction
Picture
sci / tech
blogs
children's media
Picture
exhibitions
photography
Website designed by 
J.A. Ginsburg