MUSIC: "Our World" theme
QUINN: "So if matter and antimatter had stayed equal, today there'd be none of either left, and the universe would be a very empty place, and we would not be here."
Those stories, hope for ocean plankton to help counter global warming, and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
U.S. President George Bush this week asked Congress to renew an international program for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, and to double the funding to $30 billion over the next five years.
Speaking outside the White House, he said the money will be spent in joint arrangements called partnership compacts.
BUSH: "America will work with governments, the private sector, and faith- and community-based organizations around the world to meet measurable goals, support treatment for nearly 2.5 million people, to prevent more than 12 million new infections, and to support care for 12 million people, including more than 5 million orphans and vulnerable children."
President Bush on Wednesday.
Africa is, of course, the continent that has suffered most from the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is also a region where armed conflict has frequently raged in some of the areas hardest-hit with AIDS. Now, a study published this week suggests that HIV prevention and treatment programs can be effective, even in conflict zones.
Many health care providers have traditionally felt it wasn't worth it to try to sustain AIDS treatments in war zones. If the course of treatment is interrupted, patients can develop resistance to medication.
But the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders found that they could continue HIV treatment even in the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of the Congo. Daniel O'Brien, the HIV/AIDS advisor to the group's office in Amsterdam and co-author of the new report, says giving AIDS care in such an environment requires proper planning, resources and flexibility.
O'BRIEN: "There are significant benefits for the patients involved. But the program does need to be set up and have in mind, I guess, the potential that the program could be disrupted by conflict, and to try and increase the chances that it'll be sustainable should that happen, but also reduce the risks to the patients on therapy should they have to interrupt [their treatment]."
The study focuses on Bukavu, a mid-sized Congolese city where Doctors Without Borders has had an AIDS program since 2000. Although Bukavu was generally spared the worst of the decade-long fighting in the region, it flared up in the summer of 2004, when rebels invaded the city.
The situation called for flexibility. During the crisis, nurses dispensed medication from home instead of the clinic, for example, and patients were informed of the new arrangements by both word-of-mouth and radio broadcasts.
Doing medical work in conflict zones has obvious risks and challenges, but Daniel O'Brien and his colleagues from Doctors Without Borders say that's no reason not to do it.
O'BRIEN: "If you have to guarantee that a program will always continue and will always be stable, then in most parts of these conflict-affected areas you'd never do anything and then you'd have large numbers of people needing care who would never access it."
In their paper, O'Brien and his colleagues conclude that there are a number of things that can be done to ensure a continuity of care: Educate patients on the importance of not interrupting treatment. Cross-train staff to fill gaps that can occur in emergencies. And provide medical records to patients in case they have to continue their treatment elsewhere, among others.
Dr. O'Brien's study was published in the journal PLoS Medicine.
Physicians more than a century ago described a disorder they called the "wild-child syndrome," a reference to the documented case of a boy who could not, or would not, speak and who some believed had been raised in the wilderness by animals. Today, the disorder now known as autism will develop in approximately one in 150 newborns in the United States before they reach the age of three, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Modern medicine is still searching for the underlying neurological causes and the best methods of treatment. VOA's Andrew Baroch looks at one parent's mission to find the answers, to help improve the life of his autistic son.
BAROCH: The word autism was coined by a medical researcher about a century ago to describe an unusual childhood disorder, meaning:
CONLON: 'Self-directed. Internally-driven. Set off [from people] by one's self.'