The newborns fighting for survival in Afghanistan

 

A year into Taliban rule, the number of newborn deaths and miscarriages in one province, Badakhshan, have nearly doubled, local doctors say.

Foreign funding which financed Afghanistan’s public healthcare was frozen in August last year. Our correspondent Yogita Limaye has spent time in maternity wards there, witnessing the unbearable suffering of women with no access to pain relief, forced to share beds, and an acute shortage of doctors.

Amongst all of this, some babies are beating the odds, and surviving, but tragically many are not.

Lockdowns force women to get unsafe abortions

 

The coronavirus is pushing more women to seek illegal abortions, as lockdowns limit healthcare. There are 25 million unsafe abortions every year, almost half all terminations worldwide. And now the pandemic is eroding hopes of progress.

Hospital waiting lists hit record high for routine treatment in England

 Hospital waiting lists for routine operations and treatments in England are now at a record high.

More than two million people are having to wait more than 18 weeks to be seen - and more than 80,000 have waited for more than a year.

What The Trump: From morning to night, Trump's Tuesday was filled with unbelievable comments

Mark Sumner 

It’s not as if Donald Trump doesn’t occasionally deliver a head-scratcher. In fact, Trump’s staff of media surrogates spend most of their time not advancing the case for some policy proposal, but acting as translators for his latest gibberish-burst. Trump’s regular production of nonsense, counter-sense, anti-sense, and plain old hate speech is so high that most of the media has long become inured to the idea that each day would see a verbal Trump land in the punch bowl. 

But by any standard, even if that standard is noises made by a possum with one foot caught in a trap, Trump’s Tuesday was special. Extra special. Over the course of a single day, Trump declared that:

His father was born in Germany. "My father is German.  Right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, and so I have a great feeling for Germany." Fred Trump was born in the Bronx in 1905.

The noise from windmills causes cancer. After claiming that living “anywhere near a windmill” drops property values 75 percent (it doesn’t), Trump wasn’t sure that he had made power from something that doesn’t burn a fossil fuel sound scary enough, so then he added on. “They say the noise causes cancer.” In this case “they” are clearly idiots.

The 2018 midterms were rigged. Speaking at a Republican fundraiser, Trump told the assembled politicians they need to ramp up the paranoia about elections and implied that the midterms were rigged. “There’s something going on. Hey, you gotta be a little bit more paranoid than you are. We have to be a little bit careful, because I don't like the way the votes are being tallied.”

The oranges of the Mueller report. In a meeting with the secretary general of NATO, Trump told reporters that they really needed to look into the “oranges” of the Mueller report. Then he did it again. Then he did it again. “I hope that they now go and take a look at the oranges, the oranges of the investigation.” While it was hilarious at the time, misfiling the word “origins” turns out to be the least-odd statement of Trump’s day.

Someone is going to leak his speech to the media. Trump’s speech at a Republican fundraiser was carried live on C-SPAN, various media sites, and attended by the White House press corps. All of which needs to be said just to make it clear how TrumpTrump’s statement that "Someone's going to leak this whole damn speech to the media" really was.

Windmill noise does not cause cancer. No kind of noise causes cancer—not even listening to Trump. Though coal dust, coal smoke, and coal ash … those things absolutely can cause cancer. But the windmill thing wasn’t the most over-the-top statement from the paranoid man with German oranges.

And it wasn’t even Trump’s statements about how he could make a profit by shutting down a billion dollars a day in business on the southern border. Or reversing himself on the same topic.

During the same GOP fundraising speech, Trump suggested that he might change his catchphrase for the 2020 election. Rather than MAGA, Trump declared, "We'll be the party of health care. We shouldn't run away from health care." Then he went on to explain how he wrangled with Mitch McConnell and convinced him to run away from health care. Though, to be fair, Trump actually said “hett care,” and no one knows what that is, so maybe he’s doing it well. 

Trump went on to say that his new Make America Hetty Again campaign would be different because they would make overturning Obamacare mission one. "Immediately after the election, it's going to be our first vote.”

But didn’t he say exactly that in 2016? Someone needs to go back to the oranges to be sure.

Bullets and bills: The cost of getting shot in America

Video by Hannah Long-Higgins

Megan Hobson still cannot walk properly since being caught in a crossfire of bullets in Florida six years ago. But for her and many other shooting victims, the price of survival is not just months of rehabilitation and operations.

It is tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills with no end in sight.

The robot-proof job men aren't taking

It’s easy to imagine that the jobs of the future, if they even exist, will all revolve around technology. But it turns out, the jobs that are least likely to succumb to automation are those that involve building human relationships. The healthcare field is a prime example— nurses, physician assistants, and physical therapists have higher-than-average salaries and major expected job growth. These fields share something else in common— they’re dominated by women. Despite the erosion of traditionally “masculine” fields like manufacturing, men just aren’t taking these high-paying, in-demand healthcare jobs in the numbers you’d expect. For decades, nursing in particular has been considered “women’s work,” in part because it’s assumed that women, more so than men, have a kind of innate capacity for caring and empathy. But men in nursing say this mindset is holding us back. For them, caring and empathy are stills that can be developed, not traits someone is worth with or without based on their gender.

Cambodia: Unlicensed to Heal

101 East investigates Cambodia's healthcare system and asks if unlicensed village medics are the best hope for the sick.

He never finished medical school, but for the villagers of Rael in Cambodia's remote countryside, Chek Cheoum is a lifesaver. 

He only charges what his patients can afford, and is always nearby.

With 0.2 doctors for every 1,000 people, Cambodia has one of the world's lowest ratios, forcing many to rely on unlicensed physicians like Cheoum.

But when a village suffered a widespread HIV outbreak after contaminated needles were used on patients, the government banned all unlicensed medics.