Monday 31 May 2010

How Small Is Beautiful


I also found in my old notebook, notes from another seminar on practical action which I'd like to share.

This was a seminar run by the organisation Practical Action (http://www.practicalaction.org.uk/practical-action-uk/home-uk) and Greg from Kenya kindly spoke to use about how Kenyan communities are tackling climate change. Obviously a lot has come up in the year or so since I attended this seminar, but little has changed so all that's below will most probably still be relevant.

Cycle:

Increased drought - less livestock - less time for education - more walking - less money from processing & production

-Without investment MDG's (Millennium Development Goals (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/) will become a distant dream.

-A typical household in Kenya will earn £11 per month.

A solution to solve waste and hygiene problems:

-Plastic bags full of waste excretion fill the slums
-Communities build a toilet block
-Waste now goes into a bio gas chamber which heats the water for showers

This is visited by 27,000 people per week.
It means that 11% more girls are in education where better sanitation is available.

The micro-hydro solution:

-A dam is built where a small fraction of the water is channelled to go back to the river
-200 litres of water per second powers the turbine which produces 14kWh
-Allows batteries to be charged for welding equipment, TV, mobile phones etc which means income is brought in to maintain the turbine and the communities can communicate with each other/further afield

  • 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity
  • Nearly 3 billion cook with biomass or mineral coal (solid fuels)
  • Small hydro power plants use pipes in hilly areas, and turbines in rivers & lakes
  • Small wind turbine produces 100W which is enough for 1 house
  • Countries with immediate access to production emit just as much, or sometimes even more CO2 than developed nations e.g. Qatar, Kuwait (More than USA), Venezuela (same as France)
  • Approximately $500 billion needs to be spent on renewable energy in order to solve most of the problem - Hydro is the cheapest option
  • Assessments of communities are made in order to choose which ones get priority - (shouldn't they all be equal?!?)
Other projects Practical Action have run:

Floating gardens in Bangladesh
Planting pumpkins in silty mud leftover from the rain created $2.7 million at market value

HIV/AIDS


I've just gone to use an old notebook and found some notes from a seminar I went to a year or so ago on HIV/AIDS, and thought I would share the information I got from it. I never had a clue before this seminar on the difference between HIV and AIDS and I'm always correcting people now when they say the wrong one, even if it's just a passing comment as people really should know what it is - lets face it, it's not the 80's anymore and we're free to speak out on such an issue.

So firstly, some jargon:

Epidemic - an outbreak of disease which is large spread or exceeds expectation
Endemic - smaller scale outbreak of diseases
HIV - 'human immuno-deficiency virus' - it is transmitted/contracted through bodily fluids (sex, needle sharing, through breast milk, during birth and from blood transfusions). It brings down the whole immune system so that the body is unable to fight other diseases; IT IS A VIRUS
AIDS - this comes after contracting HIV as the virus enters your body and reduces your amount of white blood cells which means it is easier for other viruses to enter and work better. AIDS is the visibility of other infections, the addition of new viruses to your body and the reduction of the immune system's efficiency. Only once the white blood cells drop to a certain amount will you be medically diagnosed as having AIDS.
ARV - 'anti-retroviral drugs' are drugs which don't cure AIDS but make it harder for further viruses to penetrate
1st Line - A patient who has never had ARV
2nd Line - A patient whose body has become immune to ARV's

And some dates:

whenever-1900 - HIV passed from apes to humans
Early 1970 - HIV enters the USA
1982 - AIDS "invented"
1984 - Aids affecting Africans
1987 - First HIV/AIDS drug approved (AZT)
2000 - Less than 1% of AIDS patients get treatment
2001 - Cheapest ARV drug cost $10,000 per patient per year
2003 - The August 30 Agreement states that a country can produce cheaper or their own version of a drug and export it to other countries in similar need
2004 - America launches PEPFAR (President's Emergency Fund)

Patent Pool:

Due to Intellectual Property, there's a difficulty for countries to produce cheaper drugs. However, ideas/patents can be shared to either innovate new products and/or make them cheaper. These are then distributed to generic manufacturers who compete with others so the price is dropped, and fair royalties are then given back to pharmaceutical companies.

I hope that has been illuminating.

For more information, go to:


Sunday 30 May 2010

northernbelle1 on Sense of Fashion

northernbelle1 on Sense of Fashion

Some things that i've handmade or customised or vintage pieces I've picked up. A nice mixture I would say. Have LOTS more to add though.