Watching the World
40,000% Inflation Rate!
● “Bolivia’s inflation rate is the highest in the world,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “In 1984, prices zoomed 2,700%, compared with a mere 329% the year before. Experts are predicting the inflation rate could soar as high as 40,000% this year.” Prices are going up by the day and by the hour. At last report, a bar of chocolate cost 50,000 pesos—a two-inch (5-cm) stack of bills that far outweighs the chocolate. A pharmacist said she bought a new luxury Toyota auto three years ago for the same price she now asks for three boxes of aspirin. “Planeloads of money arrive twice a week from printers in West Germany and Britain,” says the report. “Purchases of money cost Bolivia more than $20 million last year, making it the third-largest import, after wheat and mining equipment.”
Famine Families
● Famine does more than threaten life. It also disrupts age-old traditions. In famine-stricken parts of Chad, the extended-family system, which obligates even distant relatives to care for those on the margin of survival, is threatened, reports The New York Times. Also, well-fed parents accompanying starving children is no longer an uncommon sight, says Dr. Jan van Erps, a Belgian who has been living in central Chad for several years, and Catherine Joguet, a French nurse who works with him. They believe that some parents let their sick children die in order to give scant food to family members with a better chance of survival. “In the families, the men eat first, women second, then children,” says Van Erps. “Cousins are no longer welcome when they come to share scarce food.”
Lines, Lines
● Soviet citizens spend 65 billion man-hours each year standing in lines, 80 percent of that time in food lines, writes Vasily D. Patrushev in Izvestia of Moscow. Patrushev, who works for the Work and Leisure Time Department of the Institute of Sociological Research and who is an expert on lines, adds that the total waiting time is equivalent to the working hours of 35 million full-time employees. But “to think that lines are caused by shortages of goods is a typical misconception,” he says. “The line that we all dislike does not look bad on the books of the store. The line, in fact, represents a living, unbroken conveyor of buyers, and insures that the store fulfills its sales plan.” Izvestia also printed a letter from an economist who stated that stores have no desire to overfulfill their monthly sales plan “for fear that a higher plan will be handed down in the future,” thus creating more work for the store.
Depopulation Drive
● The Mexican government is trying to persuade people to move out of “Mexico’s increasingly crowded and unlivable capital,” reports The New York Times. Mexico City, with about 18 million inhabitants, is growing at a rate of about a hundred thousand per month. The poverty-stricken peasants who continue moving in add to the strains on the city’s public services and facilities. Recently, President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado announced that more than 50 government agencies and government-operated industries, involving 40,000 federal employees, will be moved out of the city into the countryside. Not only will the move get people out of Mexico City but it is designed to decentralize federal money and power and to make other areas more appealing.
Ocean Plastic
● “The world’s seas and oceans, already polluted with spilled oil, toxic chemicals and radioactive waste, are now being fouled by a new and insidious form of pollution—plastic waste,” reports The New York Times. According to the National Academy of Sciences, each year commercial fishing fleets—a major polluter—dump more than 52 million pounds (24 million kg) of plastic packaging material into the sea and lose more than 298 million pounds (135 million kg) of plastic fishing gear, including nets, lines, and buoys. An estimated one to two million seabirds and more than a hundred thousand sea mammals die each year from eating bits of floating plastic or from becoming entangled in plastic nets.
Transplants Increasing
● “Doctors meeting at Stanford University [recently] forecast that up to 700 heart transplants will be performed annually in the US by the end of the decade,” reports New Scientist. “This is about five times the current number.” The operation was virtually abandoned in the 1970’s because most patients died within a few weeks. But patients are now living longer due to the recent success of the drug cyclosporine A, which stops the body’s efforts to reject foreign tissue. “More than 80 per cent of Stanford’s patients are alive after one year and 67 per cent are alive after three years,” says the report. The operation itself costs $80,000. Add to this another $45,000 for tests before surgery and for postoperative care. The government is now considering who will pay for these operations in the future.
Star-Naming Business
● Since 1979 a hundred thousand people have each paid $25 to $35 to a company in Illinois—one of a number of such companies in the United States—for the privilege of naming a star after themselves or loved ones. They are told that the names “will be listed in a book which will be copyrighted at a later date in the Library of Congress,” says a Library of Congress press release. But a book copyright does not confer official status on star names, explains the release. Official names are designated only by the IAU (International Astronomical Union) based in Paris, France. Says an IAU official: “We take a dim view of this star-naming business.”
Ashes Into Orbit
● In Florida a consortium of undertakers and engineers called the Celestis Group have engaged a private company, Space Services, Inc., to send the ashes of deceased people into orbit in late 1986 or 1987. To accomplish this, Celestis will reburn the remains of each deceased person booked on the flight until the ashes fit into a capsule measuring a mere three eighths of an inch by one-and-a-quarter inches (1 cm by 3.2 cm). As many as 13,000 of these capsules will fit into Space Services’ satellite. With telescopes, relatives of the deceased will be able to view the satellite as it passes overhead. Cost for the space burial is a sky-high $3,900 per customer.
British AIDS Scare
● “The death . . . of a Church of England prison chaplain suffering from AIDS has precipitated a major health scare in Britain,” reports The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Canada. The 38-year-old cleric was the 52nd AIDS victim in Britain. “We are getting phone calls from respectable church ladies who have sipped wine from the same cup” as the chaplain, says Dr. Anthony Kirkland, a district health officer. “They are worried they may have picked up the infection, but I can assure them there is absolutely nothing for them to worry about.” Kirkland says the chaplain was a homosexual. But, he adds, “he kept the two sides of his life entirely separate.”
Brazilians Going Up in Smoke
● Cigarette smoking is the leading avoidable cause of death in Brazil, says WHO (World Health Organization). In 1979 smoking caused an estimated one quarter of the 90,000 deaths due to ischemic heart disease and one third of the 60,000 deaths due to cancer, besides killing 40,000 newborn babies. “But the government, facing the world’s biggest debt crisis, is not likely to encourage its citizens to stop smoking,” reports New Scientist. “Some 75 per cent of the retail price of cigarettes goes to the government, the world’s highest tobacco tax. Despite this financial burden, Brazilians buy more than 370 million cigarettes a day, supplying 11.6 per cent of their country’s tax revenue.”
Drinking and Drugs
● A survey by the New York State Health Department has found that 20 percent of New York’s teenagers smoke, 55 percent drink alcoholic beverages, and 65 percent have tried drugs. The survey, based on telephone interviews of 1,214 teenagers aged 13 to 19, was representative of the 2.1 million teenagers in the state. On this basis, of the 1,183,000 teenagers who drink alcoholic beverages, 36 percent drink at least once a week and 21 percent are heavy drinkers, having five or more drinks per sitting. According to the survey, 30 percent of New York’s teenagers have tried marijuana.
Baby-Gate Warning
● Recently, six companies stopped making accordion-style baby gates under an agreement worked out with them by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, reports the New York Daily News. The gates, commonly used to keep youngsters from wandering, have been linked to the deaths of eight children in recent years. “Safety officials warned that as many as 10 million of the gates remain in American homes, and they urged parents to stop using them,” says the report.
Eye Typing?
● Engineers in Ottawa, Canada, have developed a pair of eyeglasses that makes it possible to type by ‘eye command,’ reports The Medical Post of Toronto. How does it work? The glasses are connected to a computer and a printer. In one of the eyepieces is a display of 60 different characters—the alphabet, necessary punctuation marks, and a set of commands—with a sensor that can determine which character the user’s eye is focused on. After a certain “dwell time,” usually a half second, a red light illuminates the selected character to confirm the choice. After another half second, a computer beep assures the user that his choice has been stored in the computer’s memory. The message can also be printed out on paper whenever the wearer eyes the character representing the printer. “The device is expected to open up a whole new world for some severely handicapped persons,” says the report.
Hazards in Paradise
● Automobile accidents are the major cause of injuries in most of the world’s urban areas. Not so in remote areas. In sections of Papua New Guinea, for example, the main hazard is trees, reports the British Medical Journal. Researchers analyzing admissions to the Provincial Hospital in Milne Bay Province found that 41 percent of wounds and injuries were tree related. Accidents included falling off a tree while climbing and being struck by a falling tree limb or by a falling coconut—which could strike a person on the ground with a force of almost 2,000 pounds (900 kg). While a popular stereotype is that of the islander reclining under his trees, the researchers conclude: “Most villagers work hard planting their gardens and often risk their lives climbing high to reap the produce of their tallest trees.”
Drunk-Driving Sanctions
● The carnage caused by drunk drivers is producing severe reactions from various law-enforcement authorities. Quoting from Health News Digest, The Medical Post of Canada reports that in Turkey “police take drunk drivers 32 km (20 miles) from town, from where (under escort) they are forced to walk back.” In Finland a “second drunk driving offence results in permanent revocation of driving licence.” In Kentucky, U.S.A., drunk drivers must assist the police and transportation crews in clean-up of drunk-driving collisions. In El Salvador “they execute you by firing squad,” says the article.