IMF loans ‘drive TB deaths’

IMF loans ‘drive TB deaths’

News in perspective Upfront– GARY CALTON/PANOS BAILOUT LOANS TAKE THEIR TOLL The global organisation charged with securing financial stability and r...

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News in perspective

Upfront– GARY CALTON/PANOS

BAILOUT LOANS TAKE THEIR TOLL The global organisation charged with securing financial stability and reducing poverty could be bad for your health. The International Monetary Fund lends money to countries with financial problems and in return requires them to cut spending to control inflation. Critics have long charged that this in fact reduces spending on healthcare and so promotes the spread of disease. Now David Stuckler and colleagues at the University of Cambridge have analysed the spread of tuberculosis in 21 countries in central and eastern Europe that received IMF loans after 1989. The countries started with a TB mortality rate of 6 per 100,000 people, on average. The researchers found that the loans were linked with a 13 per cent increase in cases of TB, and 16 per cent more deaths (PLoS

Medicine, DOI: 10.1371/journal. pmed.0050143). The team also discovered that the countries spent less on TB control and had fewer doctors per person after receiving IMF loans. What’s more, the bigger the loan, the bigger the increase in TB that followed. The effect was not because countries with worsening TB simply attracted more IMF attention, says Stuckler, as the TB rates were falling or at least steady before the IMF loans. The team also found that for each year of a country’s involvement with the IMF, the TB death rate increased by 4 per cent, on average. William Murray, a spokesman for the IMF, says that the organisation advises countries to spend on healthcare, and that the increases in TB and mortality are due to something else.

Farmers beware

across the country from the south-east, where bluetongue arrived last year. The vaccination “front” has now reached Yorkshire in northern England, alarmingly close to the country’s main sheep areas. The disease kills sheep but only makes cattle ill. Sheep just outside the vaccinated zone are at high risk, being close to potential infection, but are unlikely to be vaccinated till autumn. Much depends on whether enough farmers south of the line have vaccinated their livestock to slow the spread of the virus. The number of cases to date in France, though, suggests that it may be hard to stop.

–Cutbacks hit healthcare–

“BUBBLE fusion”, once hailed as a potential green-energy source, is mired in controversy again. Rusi Taleyarkhan, who claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion by popping bubbles in a solvent, has been found guilty of research misconduct. In 2002, Taleyarkhan, then at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and now at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, claimed in Science that his team could create bubbles that trigger nuclear fusion by bombarding a cool solvent with neutrons and sound waves. When others failed to replicate the work, a Purdue committee investigated allegations of misconduct involving Taleyarkhan in 2006, and cleared him of wrongdoing. Yet a second investigation began

“The sole motivation for adding the author was a desire to overcome reviewer criticism” in May 2007 when further, secret allegations were made. Last week, the Purdue panel found two instances of misconduct. First, he added an author who did not significantly contribute to a 6 | NewScientist | 26 July 2008

subsequent paper aiming to replicate the result. “The sole apparent motivation for the addition was a desire to overcome a reviewer’s criticism” that the experiments should not have been carried out by one person, the report says. Second, in a 2006 paper in Physical Review Letters, he stated that the results reported in his original paper “have now been independently confirmed”. This assertion was false and constituted misconduct, the panel concluded. Taleyarkhan, who could not be reached for comment, was cleared of seven further allegations, including plagiarism and allowing a misleading press release. JEFF ROTMAN/NATUREPL.COM

The bubble bursts

BLUETONGUE is back. It has survived another winter in northern Europe, and now farmers are vaccinating livestock in a race against the biting midges that carry the virus. The first cases of the disease, which affects ruminants, began to surface this month, with France so far reporting 260. Most are located along the front line of last year’s outbreaks, suggesting that the epidemic is spreading into new territory despite France’s compulsory vaccination policy. In England, voluntary vaccination has been rolled out

Coral reefs’ lifeline IF YOU want to save coral reefs from rapacious starfish, you should ban fishing. The crown-of-thorns starfish, Acanthaster planci, preys on corals in some of the most biodiverse and threatened reefs in the world, dwarfing coral losses from storms and bleaching. The predator is less devastating in “no-take zones” of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, however, where fishing has been banned since 1989 –Not so rapacious now– (Current Biology, vol 18, p R598). www.newscientist.com