<
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts-impact.html>
"As the world’s richest men slash American aid for the world’s poorest
children, they insist that all is well. “No one has died as a result of a brief
pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.”
That is not true. In South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, the
efforts by Musk and President Trump are already leading children to die.
Peter Donde was a 10-year-old infected with H.I.V. from his mother during
childbirth. But American aid kept Peter strong even as his parents died from
AIDS. A program started by President George W. Bush called PEPFAR saved 26
million lives from AIDS, and one was Peter’s.
Under PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS
orphans got their medicines. Then in January, Trump and Musk effectively
shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, perhaps illegally, and
that PEPFAR outreach program ended. Orphans were on their own.
Without the help of the community health worker, Peter was unable to get his
medicines, so he became sick and died in late February, according to Moses
Okeny Labani, a health outreach worker who helped manage care for Peter and 144
other vulnerable children.
The immediate cause of death was an opportunistic pneumonia infection as
Peter’s viral load increased and his immunity diminished, said Labani.
“If U.S.A.I.D. would be here, Peter Donde would not have died,” Labani said.
We worked with experts at the Center for Global Development who tried to
calculate how many lives are at risk if American humanitarian assistance is
frozen or slashed. While these estimates are inexact and depend on how much aid
continues, they suggest that a cataclysm may be beginning around the developing
world"
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
