Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.
Chad joins other countries in eliminating sleeping sickness
Summary: Chad has become the 51st country to officially eliminate sleeping sickness from within their borders, marking the halfway point to a goal set by the World Health Organization in 2021 to eliminate it in 100 countries by 2030.
Context: Sleeping sickness is a parasitic infection caused by the tsetse fly, and it’s only found in Subsaharan Africa, mostly in poorer regions; this infection initially manifests with flu-like symptoms, but eventually also leads to behavior changes, difficulty sleeping, and confusion, and can ultimately result in a coma or death; early detection and treatment of sleeping sickness has helped substantially improve health outcomes in those afflicted, and most of the countries that have eliminated it, thus far, have invested in reducing infection reservoirs, which in this case often means applying insecticide to, and treating afflicted cattle to keep tsetse flies from acquiring the disease from animals, in the first place.
—Africanews
Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win
Summary: The Internet Archive, which lost a court case brought against it by book publishers in March of last year, recently pulled around half-a-million books from its online open library.
Context: This is the result of a years-long struggle between publishers and the Internet Archive, but in essence, the IA is a nonprofit that aims to preserve and make available all sorts of digitized materials, including things like websites, games, and apps, but also print materials that have been scanned, and which are difficult or impossible to find anywhere else; during the height of the pandemic, the IA made all of its books available to anyone who wants them, removing its typical one-person-at-a-time approach that mimicked more conventional libraries, as a sort of emergency, everyone is being forced to stay at home gesture, and that sparked additional legal efforts on the part of book publishers, who were already opposed to the IA’s actions, saying they amounted to piracy; this takedown of hundreds of thousands of books published by the lawsuit-bringing publishers is being appealed, and on one side of this debate are book-readers and open information activists who say this could portend bad things for the future of libraries of all kinds, and on the other are publishers and some authors who say, basically, if these folks make our work available for free, online, how will we be able to keep publishing books?
—Ars Technica
Gilead says its HIV prevention shot was 100% effective in a clinical trial
Summary: Drug-maker Gilead has announced that its twice-yearly injectable HIV drug, lenacapavir has demonstrated 100% efficacy in a late-stage clinical trial.
Context: This double-blind, phase 3 trial involved 5,300 women in South Africa and Uganda, and none of the women in the group that got the drug were infected with HIV during the trial period, while 39 women in the group that didn’t receive it did develop HIV; these results were considered to be so good by an independent data monitoring group that the trial was ended early so all of the women could be offered the drug; results for a second trial that involved men who have sex with men, instead of women, are set to be announced in late-2024 or early-2025, and Gilead’s stock price rose more than 9% following this announcement.
—Quartz
A recent survey from YouGov found that younger Americans like wearing suits more than older Americans, but that a sizable chunk of the population—despite owning a suit—never wear it; a big change from the previous professional paradigm, and a number that’s possibly being influenced by the pandemic-era shift to remote work.
—YouGov
20%
Increase in the number of passengers riding Amtrak trains the first seven months of the company’s most recent budget year (which began in October of 2023), according to Amtrak’s CEO.
He also said the company is on track to exceed its all-time record high number of passengers served in a single year (32.3 million), which was set in 2019.
Amtrak has seen a recent surge in new government funding to help it refurbish popular routes and stations, and introduce new ones to serve currently unserved areas, and this increase was tallied despite the company currently suffering from several diminished routes and issues with some of its tracks.
—Reuters
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