Watching the World
To End World Hunger
● “It is terrible, absolutely mindless,” said George Ignatieff, former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations and NATO. “Hundreds of children die every minute. But instead of giving them the basics of life we spend more than a million dollars a minute on arms. And all we buy is more and more insecurity, more and more instability.” According to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the 1985 estimate for military spending around the world is $1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000). Of that trillion, 10 to 15 percent could end world hunger, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
Ten-Cent Miracle
● The discovery was hailed as “potentially the greatest medical advance of this century” by The Lancet of Britain. What was it? The cure for diarrhea, which takes the lives of five million children a year in Third World countries. The treatment, called ORT (oral rehydration therapy), consists of feeding a stricken child a mixture of salt, sugar, baking soda and potassium dissolved in water. Recovery is rapid. But very few Third World parents use ORT, even though a premeasured ORT packet costs only a dime. “We’ve discovered that without education, none of it works at all,” says Gail Smith, deputy executive director at UNICEF Canada in Toronto. “The governments involved have to commit themselves to do a massive promotional campaign, to sell the idea of ORT just the way we would sell a new soft drink. You need billboards, movie stars and catchy jingles on the radio. That’s what seems to work best.”
Spreading Deserts
● In 1977 a special United Nations conference mandated a program to halt the spread of deserts by the year 2000. But after six years, little progress has been made. “Only a few countries have managed to develop national plans,” and many schemes have failed “because they lacked community participation and support,” says a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Adding to the problem is the fact that “emphasis has been placed on measures to increase production, rather than on arresting desertification processes.” Meanwhile, spreading deserts threaten 35 percent of the earth’s land surface and a fifth of its people. The amount of farmland that is degraded annually—now about 21 million hectares (52 million a.)—rises each year. The worst areas affect 135 million people in Africa, the Indian subcontinent and South America.
New Drug Alarm
● “Smoking coca paste (the first product of the extraction from the coca bush leaf) is now endemic in Peru and Bolivia and spreading across the continent,” says a report in The Journal of Toronto, Canada. Experts fear large-scale importers will soon include North America. “People in the United States and Canada must understand that cocaine sulphate (coca paste) is far more dangerous and far more addictive than cocaine hydrochloride [the purified white powder],” says Bolivian cocaine expert Dr. Nils Noya. Citing cases of people he knew who seemed to be able to limit their intake of cocaine hydrochloride, Noya warned: “With coca paste, such control does not exist. As soon as you become addicted, there is no possibility of your giving it up—ever—unless you have a really special personality.” Addiction takes two weeks, sometimes only four or five days. Addicts young and old—with little desire to eat—look like cadavers. Furthermore, says the report, “coca paste is laughably cheap; enough for one smoke costs 20c.”
Men Beat Machines
● After ten years of field experience, road-building experts concluded that labor gangs in the Third World can construct rural roads made of gravel just as well as fleets of bulldozers, graders and compactors can, reports New Scientist. Furthermore, labor-based methods are economically sound “wherever wages are below $4 a day, which probably covers over 80 per cent of the developing world,” explained Dr. Geoff Edmonds of the ILO (International Labour Office) at a seminar held in London. Though many engineers regard the use of manual labor as technologically backward, he says the pick-and-shovel approach would create employment, reduce import bills and give greater self-reliance for developing countries.
Computers Fizzle
● Sales of home computers priced under $1,000 have dipped 20 to 30 percent below last year’s level, say many manufacturers and retailers. “The bloom is off the rose in the computer field,” concludes analyst Harry Edelson. Why the drop in an industry that was formerly doubling and tripling in sales each year? According to The New York Times, manufacturers now figure that marketing didn’t sufficiently emphasize the practical value of these computers and that “gadget fans” made up many of the early buyers. “People have discovered that you can balance a checkbook by hand much faster than you can enter all that information in a computer,” adds an official of a large chain store. But while sales of inexpensive computers has dipped, more expensive and powerful computers are selling well. Says the chairman of a large computer company, “The buyer is becoming more sophisticated and wants a more meaningful machine.”
Sick Sea
● Nearly a quarter of Mediterranean beaches are unsafe for bathing, according to a United Nations survey of 700 beaches in 14 countries. Also, shellfish were unsafe to eat in 48 out of 50 areas that were sampled in four countries. Another UN study warned that pregnant women should not eat too much tuna fish from the Mediterranean. Why all these problems? There is too much pollution entering the Mediterranean Sea, either as sewage or as industrial waste.
Poor Mates
● The type of people who decide to live together prior to marriage do not attend church services as frequently as do others, do not have as strong a belief in traditional marital roles and are less committed to marital permanence. That is what sociologists Alfred DeMaris of Auburn University and Gerald Leslie of the University of Florida found after interviewing 544 recently married couples. Psychology Today summarizes the conclusions of these two researchers by saying that “those who cohabit [prior to marriage] are probably the least likely to conform to traditional marriage conventions and, therefore, the most likely to be dissatisfied with their marriages.”
Kiddie-Vitamin Alert
● Vitamins for children come in many shapes, sizes and colors. But these products are coming under increasing scrutiny in the United States. Over 130,000 children under age five were reportedly treated in emergency rooms last year because of ingesting vitamins that look like candy, and 14 percent of them had to be hospitalized. Newspaper writer Joe Graedon emphasizes the need for parents to keep these vitamins out of the reach of children, adding: “It won’t hurt to start teaching youngsters that vitamins are not candy.”
Jump-Starting Your Car
● Charging a dead battery with a jumper cable running from a healthy battery is a common experience for some car owners. But watch out! “About 20,000 people in the United States were treated in hospitals last year for injuries related to car battery accidents,” reports The Globe and Mail of Toronto. Obviously, people should stand clear of the batteries. But what is the best way to connect the jumper cables? “For most cars, which have negative grounds,” says the report, “first connect the positive terminals of the two batteries, then the negative terminal of the healthy battery. Make the final connection on the engine block of the disabled car—NOT the negative battery pole.”
Space Junk
● Some 3,800 pieces of man-made junk are now circling the earth, according to NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command). Two thirds of this space-age garbage—nonfunctioning space probes and satellites, discarded rocket boosters, oxygen cylinders, broken solar panels, and so forth—will circle indefinitely 22,300 miles (36,000 km) above the earth. The other third, 120 to 300 miles (200 to 500 km) from the earth, will circle until they are pulled down by the earth’s gravity and burn up in the atmosphere. The number that survive and hit the earth is unknown. Says Time magazine: “The probability of space rubble hitting a person is so small that Lloyds of London considers the odds impossible to calculate.” Yet five crewmen on a Japanese freighter are said to have been struck and seriously injured by wreckage from a Soviet spacecraft in 1969. Scientists are now considering methods to collect the debris and tow it to special junkyards in space, lest it damage functioning satellites and spacecraft.
Giant Bee Found
● Long thought to be extinct, the giant bee of Indonesia, Chalicodoma pluto, has been found alive and thriving. Several colonies of the inch-and-a-half (4-cm) long bees—15 times larger than the common honeybee—were recently discovered living in termite nests on three Indonesian islands. Further distinguishing the bees are their huge beetlelike jaws—used to punch holes in the strong termite nests and gather materials to build protective nests inside. The giant bee had not been seen since 1859 when specimens were found.
Too Much to Read
● How much scientific information is published annually? The SCI (Science Citation Index) of the Institute of Scientific Information lists 540,000 scientific articles, reviews, and so forth, for the year 1982. If each was five pages long on the average, the yearly information would require 2.7 million pages. However, the SCI registers only the most important scientific material. If it included only a fifth of the information produced worldwide, 13.5 million pages would have been produced—corresponding to almost a thousand meters (over half a mile) of shelves full of literature. States the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat: “If you start today to read through all the scientific information published last year, and you read 20 pages an hour, day and night, your task will be finished in the year 2050.”
Wrong Numbers
● People are often a bit dismayed when they receive their phone bills, but none have probably been more shocked than customers whose monthly bills this year exceeded $100,000. The bill for a woman in New York State totaled $109,505 and was so bulky that it had to be delivered by truck in five bundles. A Washington, D.C., man was billed $194,657 for over 15,000 long-distance calls—1,500 of which were made on one day! And a Michigan group, whose monthly bill is usually only a few hundred dollars, received a 3,000-page bill of almost $321,000! Fortunately, no one had to pay those amounts—the result of cheaters fraudulently making long-distance credit-card calls. Just how the thieves got and distributed the victims’ credit cards and telephone numbers was unknown. Aside from lost or stolen cards, numbers can be overheard or found scribbled on walls of phone booths. As reported in U.S.News & World Report, credit-card holders are now being asked to stipulate how many calls they will make a month and will be notified when that number is exceeded.