Ethiopia

Oldest Human Fossil Discovered In Ethiopia

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This 2.8 million-year-old jawbone may be the oldest human fossil in existence, according to two papers published simultaneously in Science. Researchers now suspect that Homo (the genus that includes modern humans) dates back at least 400,000 years earlier than previously thought.

But this particular fossil, found in the Afar region of Ethiopia and temporarily named LD 350-1, appears to be a new type of Homo that falls right between Lucy and Homo habilis. The fossil’s slim molars and proportionate jaw are hallmarks of habilis, for instance, but its primitive chin looks a lot more like Lucy’s. For now, the researchers are calling their discovery “Homo species indeterminate,” as they still aren’t exactly sure what it is.

Most 2.8 million-year-old fossils are too ancient to date by conventional means, so the researchers sampled volcanic ash above and below the jawbone and then used argon40 dating to determine the age of the eruption that formed each sample. The results give us the youngest and oldest dates that the hominin who owned LD 350-1 could have lived—2.5 and 2.8 million years ago, respectively.

Scientists also discovered prehistoric antelope, elephant, hippopotamus and crocodile remains nearby, and several members of the international team behind LD 350-1 analyzed these fossils to learn more about the ecosystem in which our newest addition to Homo existed. Based on the nearby wildlife, researchers think early Homo lived in an open grassland environment—a stark contrast to Lucy’s forested habitat. But whether mass climate change 3 million years agoencouraged this shift from the forest to the prairie (and, by extension, from ape to modern human), still remains to be seen.

Check Out These Amazing Towers In Ethiopia That Harvest Clean Water From Thin Air

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Water: It’s one of the most precious resources on Earth, but its importance seems forgotten in the western world where its ease of access is often instantaneous. But for 768 million people worldwide, it’s a daily struggle to find safe water, and in result, 1,400 children under the age of five die from water-based diseases every day.

Inspired to offer solution to this issue in a creative way, designer Arturo Vittori invented stunning water towers that can harvest atmospheric water vapor from the air. The nearly 30-foot tall WarkaWater towers can collect over 25 gallons of portable water per day, and are comprised of two sections. The first is a semi-rigid exoskeleton built by tying stalks of juncus or bamboo together; the second, an internal plastic mesh similar to the bags oranges are packed in. The nylon and polypropylene fibers act as a scaffold for condensation, and once droplets of dew form, are funneled by the mesh into a basin at the base of the structure.

The crisis of water shortage caught Vittori’s attention while traveling through Ethiopia. “There, people live in a beautiful natural environment but often without running water, electricity, a toilet, or a shower,” he says. It’s common for women and children to walk miles to worm-filled ponds which are contaminated with human waste. There, they collect water in trashed plastic containers or dried gourds, then carry the heavy load on treacherous roads back to their homes. This is a process which takes hours and endangers the children by exposing them to dangerous illnesses. It also takes them away from school – ensuring that a cycle of poverty repeats.

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Hence, the creation of “WarkaWater”. Vittori shared, “[this] is designed to provide clean water as well as ensure long-term environmental, financial, and social sustainability. Once locals have the necessary know how, they will be able to teach other villages and communities to build the WarkaWater towers.” Each tower costs approximately $550 and can be built in under a week with a four-person team and locally available materials.

Digging a well might seem a more obvious solution, but that requires drilling 1,500 feet into Ethiopia’s rocky plateaus, and can be very expensive. After a well is dug, pumps and a reliable electrical connection must also be maintained – making it an unlikely proposition.

How did such an invention come to exist? Vittori was inspired by the giant, gravity-defying, and dome-shaped Warka tree which is native to Ethiopia, sprouts figs, and is used as a community gathering space. “To make people independent, especially in such a rural context it’s synonymous of a sustainable project and guaranties the longevity,” says Vittori. “Using natural fibers helps the tower to be integrated with the landscape both visually with the natural context as well as with local traditional techniques.”

Without a doubt the design is beautiful, inspiring, and an intelligent way to wick moisture from the atmosphere to lessen the burden women and children are often subject to while striving to attain water.

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Though the final product is handcrafted, Vittori has used the same parametric modeling skills honed working on aircraft interiors and solar powered cars to create a solution that is safe and stunning.

The finished design is a 88-pound sculpture, 26-feet wide at its broadest point, and just a few feet at its narrowest. It seems the two-year period of perfecting the design was worth the wait. But it continues to be improved, as Vittori and the team have tested this design in multiple locations, and continue to work on improvements that increase the frame’s stability while simultaneously making it easy for villagers to clean the internal mesh.

With such a design ready for action, their hope is to have two WarkaWater towers errected in Ethipioa by 2015. The team and world-wide supports believe this is possible.

Vittori is also looking for financial rainmakers who’d like to seed these tree-inspired structures across across the country.

GIANT SOLAR “TULIPS” WILL HELP ETHIOPIA BECOME CARBON NEUTRAL BY 2025

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Around the globe, more countries are looking to reduce their carbon emissions by bolstering renewable energy infrastructure, but they can’t do it alone. Nations with eco-friendly initiatives rely on energy and technology companies to help them meet their goals. In Ethiopia, a partnership with AORA Solar, developer of solar-biogas hybrid power technology, may help that country reach its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2025. AORA will join forces with three universities in Ethiopia to promote academic cooperation for the development and advancement of renewable energy technologies in the middle-income country.
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The partnership is in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which AORA Solar announced they signed this week with Arizona State University LightWorks, Addis Ababa Science and Technology University (AASTU) and Adama Science and Technology University (ASTU). Under the MoU, educational and research programs will be launched to support the national energy goals, and the efforts will be overseen by the Ethiopian Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Energy and the Ethiopian Ministry of Science and Technology.

In addition to renewable energy research, AORA Solar’s involvement with the universities will lead to the installation of AORA’s solar-biogas hybrid power technology at both Ethiopian institutions. “Our ongoing engagement with AORA Solar illustrates our commitment to conducting use-inspired research, engaging globally, valuing entrepreneurship and providing students with the necessary skills and knowledge to affect a transition to a sustainable world,” said Gary Dirks director of LightWorks and director of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU. They went on to say the partnership could enhance the lives of Ethiopian citizens. Surely, if the 2025 carbon neutral goal is met in part due to this relationship, that will be true.

Polio is re-emerging in areas previously considered polio free.

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Concern is mounting that the global drive to eradicate polio is being undermined by security problems and access constraints that have led to a resurgence of poliovirus in a number of countries previously declared to be free of polio.

On 30 September South Sudan’s new health minister, Riek Gai Kok, declared a “national health emergency” after confirming three cases of wild poliovirus type 1 infection. The country had been officially polio free since June 2009, but the health ministry had been on high alert for its reintroduction since an outbreak was confirmed in Somalia last May, which rapidly spread to Ethiopia and Kenya.

There have now been 174 confirmed cases in Somalia, 14 in Kenya, and three in Ethiopia. Major emergency vaccination campaigns have been started in these and neighbouring countries, but vaccinations have been unable to take place in certain no-go areas in Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

The Sudanese Doctors’ Union warned that the disease could rapidly spread across the border because of a “large immunity gap” caused by the denial of aid access in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile areas bordering South Sudan, where the lack of vaccination had left “almost all children susceptible to polio and other vaccine preventable diseases.”1 2

On 1 October the union wrote to the UK prime minister, David Cameron, calling on him to denounce the Sudanese government’s denial of access to healthcare, after doctors were prevented from treating hundreds of people injured in recent demonstrations.

The union’s UK spokesman, Abdelmalik Hashim, told the BMJ that Sudan had just experienced the worst outbreak of yellow fever in recent years after the expulsion of aid groups from Darfur, and now “the refusal of the government of Sudan to cooperate with the international community is jeopardising all the gains achieved by the global polio eradication programme since 1988.”

Source:BMJ

Noma: a neglected enigma.

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Noma is a disease surrounded by riddles. It manifests itself only in the poorest populations in developing countries, enclosed by ignorance and extreme poverty. The worldwide prevalence of noma is unknown—estimates range from 30 000 to 140 000 cases.1 Most cases of noma worldwide occur in the so-called noma belt, which is situated directly south of the Sahara and runs across Africa from Senegal to Ethiopia. Another puzzle is that child mortality and malnutrition are prevalent on the Indian subcontinent, but noma is not reported there.2, 3 The prevention and treatment of noma is not a priority in the countries where the disease is prevalent. Moreover, deaths from noma are not included in the mortality statistics of these countries. The cause of noma—the biological mechanism that ignites the gangrene—remains a mystery. Although the disease is clearly an opportunistic infection, we still do not know whether some of the commensal microorganisms in the oral microbiota play a particular part in the expanding gangrene. Also puzzling is how an unknown percentage (a common estimate suggests 10%) of noma patients survive the often extensive gangrene without any medical treatment. Antibiotic treatment of noma has not been subject to medical research, except for in some old observational studies.4 Furthermore, after one and a half centuries of surgical experiments, a good surgical treatment for a frequent sequela of noma, complete trismus of the mouth, has still not been found.5

The study by Baratti-Mayer and colleagues, undertaken in Niger, focuses on risk factors for noma. It is admirable that this large group of Swiss scientists, almost all members of the only scientific group on noma in the world, GESNOMA, has embarked on such a large and well-organised prospective, matched, case-control study to assess the risk factors for noma, and even more admirable that they have collected their data successfully under very difficult circumstances.

Their results confirm that malnutrition has a paramount role in the development of noma, and that poverty is associated with the disease. They also confirm a link between noma and recent illnesses of respiratory and intestinal origin. A new aspect to their study is the inventory of the oral microbiota in patients with noma and in controls. Their results do not confirm the role of Fusobacterium necrophorum (present in herbivores) as a trigger organism for noma, as suggested by Enwonwu and colleagues6 who hypothesised that the presence of herbivore livestock was a potential risk factor for noma. Baratti-Mayer and colleagues also describe differences in the intraoral microbiota of noma patients and controls, with a lower amount of Fusobacterium genus and spirochetes in patients with noma than in healthy controls. This result is intriguing because previous findings by Stewart,7 Eckstein,8 and Emslie9 showed the presence of spirilliform and fusiform microorganisms (called Borrelia vincenti and Fusiformis fusiformis at that time), often in large numbers, in biopsy samples taken from the transitional zone between the gangrene and healthy tissue, which suggested an important infiltrating role for these two microorganisms. In this context, the results of this study do not solve the puzzle of the trigger of this devastating gangrene but rather magnify it. Invasive diagnostics with, for example, needle biopsies from this transitional zone could help to elucidate the nature of this gangrene.

An interesting finding, which is not commented on in the Discussion section, is that all 82 patients with noma received amoxicillin and metronidazole, resulting in a mortality rate of 8·5%. This article is, as far as I know, the first publication reporting treatment results of a series of noma patients since 1966, when Michael Tempest reported a similar mortality rate of 8% in 250 patients treated with penicillin.4 This finding implies that a combination of amoxicillin and metronidazole is a good treatment to give to patients with noma, and perhaps also a penicillin, in view of the results of half a century ago.

However, a major problem is that most patients with noma worldwide do not have access to medical facilities because they are not available or are too expensive. Patients might consult a traditional healer, whose treatment (often a branding iron or caustic herbs) will lead to a deterioration in the patient’s condition. Western non-governmental organisations have also provided treatment in the past. Unfortunately, such programmes are now in jeopardy because of political instability and concomitant insecurity for aid workers from developed countries.

Noma is a disease that can be prevented completely by a particular level of economic welfare for the poorest people in society. This degree of welfare has been reached by most of the world’s population, which has expanded across the planet for thousands of years. An old companion on this journey of expansion, which is found on the edges of human being’s habitat (and is the case for every animal), is hunger and death. Death by starvation is expressed in many ways, of which noma is iconic as the “face of poverty”.10 We want to eradicate phenomena such as extreme poverty, famine, and starvation, as seen in the definition of the Millennium Development Goals and the recent G8 focus on nutrition. The future will show us whether or not these goals are the starting points of a feasible global health target.

References

1 Fieger A, Marck KW, Busch R, Schmidt A. An estimation of the incidence of noma in north-west Nigeria. Trop Med Int Health 2003; 8: 402-407. CrossRef | PubMed

2 Black RE, Cousens S, Johnson HL, et al. Global, regional, and national causes of child mortality in 2008: a systematic analysis. Lancet 2010; 375: 1969-1987. Summary | Full Text | PDF(1713KB) | CrossRef | PubMed

3 Gragnolati M, Shekar M, Das Gupta M, Bredenkamp C, Lee Y. India’s undernourished children: a call for reform and action.World Bank, 2005. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/SOUTHASIAEXT/Resources/223546-1147272668285/IndiaUndernourishedChildrenFinal.pdf. (accessed June 2, 2013).

4 Tempest MN. Cancrum oris. Br J Surg 1966; 53: 949-969. CrossRef | PubMed

5 Montandon D. Surgery of noma: a 20-year experience. Stomatologie 2007; 104: 1-9. PubMed

6 Falkler WA, Enwonwu CO, Idigbe EO. Isolation of Fusobacterium necrophorum from cancrum oris (noma). Am J Trop Med Hyg 1999; 60: 150-156. PubMed

7 Stewart MJ. Observations on the histopathology of cancrum oris. J Pathol 1912; 16: 221-225. PubMed

8 Eckstein A. Noma. Am J Dis Children 1940; 59: 219-237. PubMed

9 Emslie RD. Cancrum oris. Dent Pract Dent Rec 1963; 13: 481-495. PubMed

10 Marck KW. Noma, the face of poverty. Hannover: MIT-Verlag GmbH, 2003.

Source: Lancet