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  • Tuberculosis Resurgent as Trump Funding Cut Disrupts Treatment Globally

    Tuberculosis Resurgent as Trump Funding Cut Disrupts Treatment Globally


    Dalvin Modore walked as if there were broken glass beneath his feet, stepping gingerly, his frail shoulders hunched against the anticipation of pain. His trousers had become so loose that he had to hold them up as he inched around his small farm in western Kenya.

    Mr. Modore has tuberculosis. He is 40, a tall man whose weight has dropped to 110 pounds. He has a wracking cough and sometimes vomits blood. He fears the disease will kill him and has been desperate to be on medication to treat it.

    Mr. Modore is one of thousands of Kenyans, and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, with TB who have lost access to treatments and testing in the weeks since the Trump administration slashed foreign aid and withdrew funding for health programs around the globe.

    Many, like Mr. Modore, have grown significantly sicker. As they go about their lives, waiting and hoping, they are spreading the disease, to others in their own families, communities and beyond.

    The whole system of finding, diagnosing and treating tuberculosis — which kills more people worldwide than any other infectious disease — has collapsed in dozens of countries across Africa and Asia since President Trump ordered the aid freeze on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.

    The United States contributed about half of international donor funding to TB last year and here in Kenya paid for an array of essentials. Trump administration officials have said that other countries should contribute a greater share to global health programs. They say the administration is evaluating foreign aid contracts to determine whether they are in the national interest of the United States.

    While some of the TB programs may ultimately survive, none have received any money for months.

    Family members of infected people are not being put on preventive therapy. Infected adults are sharing rooms in crowded Nairobi tenements, and infected children are sleeping four to a bed with their siblings. Parents who took their sick children to get tested the day before Mr. Trump was inaugurated are still waiting to hear if their children have tuberculosis. And people who have the near-totally drug-resistant form of tuberculosis are not being treated.

    Mr. Modore shares a bed with his cousin and his home with four other relatives. All of them have watched him get sicker and thinner, fearing also for their own health.

    Despite being fully treatable, tuberculosis claimed 1.25 million lives in 2023, the last year for which data is available. If TB begins to spread unchecked, people throughout the world could become at risk.

    The main TB research effort, testing new diagnostics and therapies, has been terminated. The global procurement agency for TB medications lost its funds, then was told it might regain them, but still has not. Stop TB, the global consortium of government and patient groups that coordinates tuberculosis tracking and treatment, was terminated, had the termination rescinded, but still has received no funds.

    The United States did not pay for all the TB care in Kenya, but it funded critical pieces. And when those were frozen, it was enough to bring the entire system to a halt.

    The United States paid for motorbike drivers, who earned about $1 for transporting a sample taken from a person with a presumptive infection to a lab to test it for TB. The drivers were fired on the first day of the funding cut — so the transportation of samples stopped.

    The United States paid for some laboratory equipment used to process tests. In many places, processing stopped.

    The United States paid for the internet connectivity that allowed many testing sites to send results back to far-off patients via local community advocates known as TB Champions. So even when patients found a way to send samples to a working lab, notification of results stopped.

    Without testing that confirms whether a person is infected and what type of TB they have, family members cannot start on preventive therapy.

    The United States paid for the half-dozen tests that patients need before beginning treatment for multi-drug-resistant TB, to make sure their bodies will be able to tolerate the harsh drugs. These tests can cost $80 or more, beyond the reach of many patients. Without the tests, clinicians don’t know what drugs to prescribe very sick patients. Prescriptions stopped.

    The United States paid for the ships and trucks that moved drugs to ports and on to warehouses and clinics. Shipments stopped.

    And the United States paid for the data management contract that provided a national dashboard of data on cases, cures and deaths. Tracking stopped.

    Evaline Kibuchi, the national coordinator for the Stop TB Partnership in Kenya, predicted that it would take only three months before infections and deaths from TB increased. “But we won’t even know about the new deaths, because all the data collection was supported by U.S.A.I.D.,” she said.

    The United States also paid the stipends — about $35 a month — of community health workers, and TB Champions, who lost the tiny salaries that belie their vital role. Research has shown that because TB treatment involves taking drugs for many months, often with miserable side effects, patients are much more likely to finish a course of medication and be cured when someone is checking on them regularly, cheering them on and watching for lapses.

    But across Kenya, the community advocates have kept working, unpaid, covering the costs of trying to reach patients and delivering diagnoses out of their own pockets.

    Mr. Modore’s constant cough drew neighborhood attention in January. Doreen Kikuyu, the TB Champion in his area, came and collected a sputum sample from him and used the motorbike system to send it for diagnosis.

    By the time his results came back, the Trump administration had frozen the system. Ms. Kikuyu could not get funds for a motorbike to take her to his home to inform him. “But I could not leave him without knowing the answer,” she said. “So I set out walking.”

    She also explained that the lab analysis did not provide information on whether he had a drug-resistant form, so he would need further testing before he could start the proper medication. But he would have to pay 1,000 Kenyan shillings — about $8 — to send a sample to the regional laboratory that could do this test. To pay for it, they might need to sell a chicken, one of their few assets. They debated what to do as the days ticked by.

    “I’m really hoping to start on medication but I’m just left wondering what will happen,” Mr. Modore said one recent afternoon, sitting hunched in the shade of a stand of trees outside his house.

    Eventually, the intrepid Ms. Kikuyu managed to scrape together the money, by gathering contributions from other now-fired community health workers and neighbors. She sent the sample to the lab. Good news came back: Mr. Modore did not have drug resistance and could take the standard medications.

    But there was no one to prescribe them. The staff members at the clinic were paid by the United States, and they were now fired. Ms. Kikuyu was at her wit’s end, knowing Mr. Modore was desperately ill.

    Working her phone, using airtime she bought herself, she badgered a local government TB official who is a clinician to meet her at the hospital and to prescribe and issue the drugs from the shuttered clinic storeroom. She scraped together more money to bring Mr. Modore to the clinic on a motorbike. As she watched him grin and take his first pills, she felt a flood of relief.

    But immediately, she faced a new worry: His family and close neighbors, about a dozen people, needed to start preventive therapy to protect them from getting sick too. The clinic is closed. If she can find a clinician to prescribe drugs for the adults, at least, she could deliver them. (TB drugs for children are complex and require a doctor’s supervision.) But she’s out of money to get back to the Modore home. She has worn herself out walking to the homes of other patients who are waiting for tests, waiting for results, waiting for drugs.

    “It’s a problem,” she said wearily. “But we have to get to that family.”

    For TB treatment to work, patients must take their drugs every day, without interruption, for months.

    Barack Odima, a 38-year-old mechanic in Nairobi, has the most deadly form of the disease, one that is resistant to most treatments. Last fall he started on a rare drug combination, but when he went to pick up his medication two weeks ago, the clinic staff told him that one of the drugs had not been restocked and that they had nothing for him.

    “If I don’t get this drug that is missing, how will I be cured?” Mr. Odima said.

    After another week, the clinic received a small batch of medications. The clinician and the pharmacist had been laid off, so a TB Champion gave him the medication — but could not tell him how many more pills he might receive.

    While he is on the drugs, Mr. Odima is supposed to have monthly testing of his blood, liver and kidneys to make sure his body is tolerating them. That costs about $80, previously covered by the U.S. grant, and he has not had a test since the funding freeze. Mr. Odima’s wife and five children are supposed to be rechecked for the disease this month; it will take all his savings to pay for X-rays.

    In an interview in a clinic treatment room plastered with stickers and posters advertising U.S.A.I.D. support, Mr. Odima said he was grateful to the United States for assisting with his treatment, but was baffled that the country had cut off help. Of course his own government should provide such care, he said. “But we are a dependent country,” he said, “and Kenya is not able to support the programs so that all the people with these diseases can get cured.”

    In truth, the TB treatment system in Kenya was none too sturdy before the United States yanked its support — the country had nearly 90,000 new infections last year. Labs ran short of supplies to do molecular tests, and people were often misdiagnosed.

    The TB Champions, who drop in to check in on anyone they hear about with a persistent cough, were intended as a low-budget, high-impact strategy to change that. Since the aid freeze, they have taken on outsize importance. In the scruffy western Kenyan town of Busia, a Champion named Agnes Okose is using the money she earns from her snack stall to fund trips to outlying villages. Since late January, she has been delivering diagnoses and collecting sputum samples in plastic sample jars she buys herself, toting them in a small lunch cooler to a laboratory in town.

    “I am a TB survivor myself; I cannot leave people just dying,” she said. “Whatever small-small money we can find, we are using it.”

    The aid cuts have also crippled a network of clinics set up all over Africa two decades ago by President George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Those clinics bypassed the frail, bureaucratic and graft-riddled health systems in countries battling TB and H.I.V. and put patients on lifesaving medication quickly. Twenty years later, they were still partly or totally separate, in most places, and had U.S.-paid staff.

    Now African health officials are scrambling to absorb those patients into the regular medical system — as many as 40 percent more people to care for, in facilities that were already overstretched. Kenya’s national government has said it is working on a plan but offered no details for how it will bridge the yawning funding gap.

    But because all the TB and H.I.V. cases have gone to the separate clinics for years, clinicians in the main facilities don’t know about drug protocols, side effects or signs of treatment failure.

    “You will have health care workers who have never seen a TB case; there will be quality-of-care issues,” said Dr. Timothy Malika, who oversees the TB program of Kisumu County, which has one of the highest rates of TB infection in Kenya.

    Abigael Wanga, who lives in a village in Busia County, has five children; two have taken TB treatment for a year. But the two children, Philemon, 8, who hopes to be a pilot one day, and his headstrong sister Desma, 3, still have chest pain and coughs, and no appetite.

    Ms. Okose fears they are drug-resistant. She collected sputum samples from them and their three siblings the day before the inauguration. The testing is frozen, and all five children continue to sleep under one blanket at night.



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  • How Foreign Aid Cuts Are Setting the Stage for Disease Outbreaks

    How Foreign Aid Cuts Are Setting the Stage for Disease Outbreaks


    Dangerous pathogens left unsecured at labs across Africa. Halted inspections for mpox, Ebola and other infections at airports and other checkpoints. Millions of unscreened animals shipped across borders.

    The Trump administration’s pause on foreign aid has hobbled programs that prevent and snuff out outbreaks around the world, scientists say, leaving people everywhere more vulnerable to threatening viruses and bacteria.

    That includes Americans. Outbreaks that begin overseas can travel quickly: The coronavirus may have first appeared in China, for example, but it soon appeared everywhere, including the United States. When polio or dengue appears in this country, cases are usually linked to international travel.

    “It’s actually in the interest of American people to keep diseases down,” said Dr. Githinji Gitahi, who heads Amref Health Africa, a large nonprofit that relies on the United States for about 25 percent of its funding.

    “Diseases make their way to the U.S. even when we have our best people on it, and now we are not putting our best people on it,” he added.

    In interviews, more than 30 current and former officials of the United States Agency for International Development, members of health organizations and experts in infectious diseases described a world made more perilous than it was just a few weeks ago.

    Many spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the federal government.

    The timing is dire: The Democratic Republic of Congo is experiencing the deadliest mpox outbreak in history, with cases exploding in a dozen other African countries.

    The United States is home to a worsening bird flu crisis. Multiple hemorrhagic fever viruses are smoldering: Ebola in Uganda, Marburg in Tanzania, and Lassa in Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

    In 2023, U.S.A.I.D. invested about $900 million to fund labs and emergency-response preparedness in more than 30 countries. The pause on foreign aid froze those programs. Even payments to grantees for work already completed are being sorted out in the courts.

    Waivers issued by the State Department were intended to allow some work to continue on containing Ebola, Marburg and mpox, as well as preparedness for bird flu.

    But Trump administration appointees choked payment systems and created obstacles to implementing the waivers, according to a U.S.A.I.D. memo by Nicholas Enrich, who was the agency’s acting assistant administrator for global health until Sunday.

    Then last month, the Trump administration canceled about 5,800 contracts, effectively shuttering most U.S.A.I.D.-funded initiatives, including many that had received permission to continue.

    “It was finally clear that we were not going to be implementing” even programs that had waivers, Mr. Enrich recalled in an interview.

    The decision is likely to result in more than 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg, and 200,000 cases of paralytic polio each year, according to one estimate.

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has been working diligently since being sworn in to review every dollar spent,” the State Department said in an emailed statement.

    “We’ll be able to say that every program that we are out there operating serves the national interest, because it makes us safer or stronger or more prosperous,’” the statement quoted Mr. Rubio as saying.

    Most U.S.A.I.D. staff members were terminated or placed on administrative leave without warning. The agency had more than 50 people dedicated to outbreak responses, the result of a Congressional push to beef up pandemic preparedness.

    Now it has six. Those who were fired included the organization’s leading expert in lab diagnostics and the manager of the Ebola response. “I have no idea how six people are going to run four outbreak responses,” said one official who was let go.

    Also sent home were hundreds of thousands of community health workers in Africa who were sentinels for diseases.

    In early January, the Tanzanian government denied there were new cases of Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever. It was a community health worker trained through a U.S.-funded Ebola program who reported the disease a week later.

    The outbreak eventually grew to include 10 cases; it is now under control, the government has said.

    Even in quieter times, foreign aid helps to prevent, detect and treat diseases that can endanger Americans, including drug-resistant H.I.V., tuberculosis and malaria, and bacteria that don’t respond to available antibiotics.

    Much of that work has stopped, and other organizations or countries cannot fill the gap. Compounding the loss is America’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which has instituted cost-cutting measures of its own.

    “This is a lose-lose scenario,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, who has led pandemic prevention efforts at the W.H.O. and the C.D.C.

    The slashing of foreign aid deprives the world of American leadership and expertise, but it also locks the United States out of global discussions, Dr. Fukuda said: “For the life of me, I cannot see the justification or the reason for this very calculated, systematic approach to pull down public health.”

    U.S.A.I.D.’s intense focus on global health security is barely a decade old, but it has mostly received bipartisan support. The first Trump administration expanded the program to 50 countries.

    Much of the aid was intended to help them eventually tackle problems on their own. And to some extent, that was happening.

    But confronted with a new virus or outbreak, “there’s so many things that one has to do and learn, and many countries can’t do that on their own,” said Dr. Lucille Blumberg, an infectious diseases physician and expert on emerging diseases.

    U.S.A.I.D. and its partners helped countries identify the expertise, training and machinery they needed, brought together officials in various ministries and engaged farmers, businesses and families.

    “It actually doesn’t cost the U.S. government that much,” said an official with a large development organization. “But that sort of trust-building, communication, sharing evidence is a real strength that the U.S. brings to health security — and that’s gone.”

    In Africa, some countries have reacted to the disappearance of aid with alarm, others with resignation. “We’re doing our best to adapt to this development,” said Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s health minister.

    “The U.S. government is not responsible, ultimately, for the health and the security of Nigerian people,” he said. “At the end of the day, the responsibility is ours.”

    A successful outbreak response requires coordination of myriad elements: investigators to confirm the initial report; workers trained to do testing; access to test kits; transport of samples; a lab with enough workers, running water, electricity and chemical supplies for diagnoses; and experts to interpret and act on the results.

    In broad strokes, the C.D.C. provided expertise on diseases, U.S.A.I.D. funded logistics and the W.H.O. convened stakeholders, including ministries of health.

    Before the aid freeze, employees from each organization often talked every day, sharing information and debating strategy. Together, they lowered response time to an outbreak from two weeks in 2014 to five days in 2022 to just 48 hours most recently.

    But now, C.D.C. experts who have honed their expertise over decades are not even allowed to speak to colleagues at the W.H.O.

    U.S.A.I.D. funding for sample transport, lab supplies, fuel for generators and phone plans for contact tracers has ended. Much of its investment in simple solutions to seemingly intractable problems has also stopped.

    In West Africa, for example, rodents that spread Lassa fever invade homes in search of food. One program in U.S.A.I.D.’s Stop Spillover project introduced rodent-proof food containers to limit the problem, but has now shut down.

    In Congo, where corruption, conflict and endless outbreaks mean that surveillance “looks like Swiss cheese even at the best of times,” the mpox response slowed because there were no health workers to transport samples, said a U.S.A.I.D. official familiar with the response.

    More than 400 mpox patients were left stranded after fleeing overwhelmed clinics. Before a waiver restarted some work, the United States identified two new cases of mpox, both in people who had traveled to East Africa.

    In Kenya, U.S.A.I.D. supported eight labs and community-based surveillance in 12 high-risk counties. Labs in the Marsabit, Mandera and Garissa counties — which border Ethiopia and Somalia — have run out of test kits and reagents for diseases including Rift Valley fever, yellow fever and polio, and have lost nearly half their staff.

    Kenya also borders Uganda and Tanzania and is close to Congo — all battling dangerous outbreaks — and has lost more than 35,000 workers.

    “These stop-work orders would mean that it increases the risk of an index case passing through unnoticed,” Dr. Gitahi said, referring to the first known case in an outbreak. His organization has terminated nearly 400 of its staff of 2,400.

    Many labs in Africa store samples of pathogens that naturally occur in the environment, including several that can be weaponized. With surveillance programs shut off, the pathogens could be stolen, and a bioterrorism attack might go undetected until it was too late to counter.

    Some experts worried about bad actors who may release a threat like cholera into the water, or weaponize anthrax or brucellosis, common in African animals. Others said they were concerned that even unskilled handling of these disease threats might be enough to set off a disaster.

    Funding from the U.S. government helped hire and train lab workers to maintain and dispose of dangerous viruses and bacteria safely.

    But now, pathogens can be moved in and out of labs with no one the wiser. “We have lost our ability to understand where pathogens are being held,” said Kaitlin Sandhaus, founder and chief executive of Global Implementation Solutions.

    Her company helped 17 African labs become accredited in biosafety procedures and supported five countries in drafting laws to ensure compliance. Now the firm is shutting down.

    In the future, other countries, including China, will know more about where risky pathogens are housed, Ms. Sandhaus said: “It feels very dangerous to me.”

    China has already invested in building labs in Africa, where it is cheaper and easier to “work on whatever you would like without anyone else paying attention,” said one U.S.A.I.D. official.

    Russia, too, is providing mobile labs to Ugandans in Mbale, on the border with Kenya, another official said.

    Some African countries like Somalia have fragile health systems and persistent security threats, yet minimal capacity for tracking infections that sicken animals and people, said Abdinasir Yusuf Osman, a veterinary epidemiologist and chair of a working group in Somalia’s health ministry.

    Each year Somalia exports millions of camels, cattle and other livestock, primarily to the Middle East. The nation has relied heavily on foreign aid to screen the animals for diseases, he said.

    “The consequences of this funding shortfall, in my view, will be catastrophic and increase the likelihood of uncontrolled outbreaks,” Dr. Osman said.

    In countries with larger economies, foreign aid has helped build relationships. Thailand is a pioneer in infectious diseases, and U.S.A.I.D. was funding a modest project on malaria elimination that boosts its surveillance capabilities.

    The abrupt end to that commitment risks losing good will, said Jui Shah, who helped run the program.

    “In Asia, relationships are crucial for any type of work, but especially for roles that work with surveillance and patient data,” she said. “Americans will suffer if other countries hesitate to engage with us about outbreaks.”



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  • Emergency Food, TB Tests and H.I.V. Drugs: Vital Health Aid Remains Frozen Despite Court Ruling

    Emergency Food, TB Tests and H.I.V. Drugs: Vital Health Aid Remains Frozen Despite Court Ruling


    Funds for vital health programs around the world remain frozen and their work has not been able to resume, despite a federal judge’s order that temporarily halted the Trump administration’s dismantling of the government’s main foreign aid agency.

    Interviews with people working on health initiatives in Africa and Asia found that parents in Kenya whose children are believed to have tuberculosis cannot get them tested. There is no clean drinking water in camps in Nigeria or Bangladesh for people who fled civil conflict. A therapeutic food program cannot treat acutely malnourished children in South Sudan.

    “We have people traveling 300 kilometers from the mountains to try to find their medications at other hospitals, because there are none left where they live,” said Maleket Hailu, who runs an organization that assists people living with H.I.V. in the Tigray region of Ethiopia and relied on funding from the United States Agency for International Development. “U.S.A.I.D. was providing the medications and transporting them to rural places. Now these people are thrown away with no proper information.”

    A State Department spokesperson said on Tuesday that the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio had issued more than 180 waivers permitting lifesaving activities to resume, and that more were being approved each day. The department did not reply to a request to provide a list of the 180 projects.

    But even programs with waivers are still frozen, according to people in more than 40 U.S.A.I.D.-funded groups, because the payments system that U.S.A.I.D. used to disburse funds to the organizations has not operated for weeks. Without access to that money, programs cannot function.

    Organizations usually receive their grants in small increments, by submitting requisitions for activities they will imminently carry out. They rely on that quick turnaround to keep operating. Many of the groups affected are nonprofits that have no other source of funds.

    “Some N.G.O.s have received waivers, but waivers without money are just pieces of paper — and you can’t run programs with just paper,” said Tom Hart, the chief executive officer of InterAction, which represents 165 organizations that deliver foreign aid. “These organizations haven’t been paid for work dating back to December, and they have zero assurance they’ll be paid for that work or any work going forward.”

    Speaking at a meeting with aid organizations last week, Peter Marocco, the Trump appointee who is now the director of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the State Department, said the payment system was offline but would be restored by Feb. 18. It has not been.

    Mr. Marocco signed a declaration submitted to the judge in the federal court, reporting on the government’s compliance with the restraining order. In it, he argued that the administration was acting based on other regulations, not the executive order, to continue to freeze funding.

    The Trump administration insists that the waiver system is allowing emergency work to continue unfettered. But the process of issuing the exemptions has been complex, the State Department spokesperson said, because the department has had to verify that organizations seeking them are not misrepresenting their activities.

    “The department found that many activities that have previously been described as lifesaving humanitarian assistance have in reality involved D.E.I. or gender ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-lifesaving assistance and efforts that explicitly go against the America First foreign policy agenda set forth by the president,” the statement said.

    Organizations that have received waivers report that one or two activities in larger projects were approved to restart, while the surrounding and related activities are still frozen.

    The chief executive of a large organization providing health care who asked not to be identified because he was barred from speaking with the news media by the U.S.A.I.D. stop-work order, said his agency had received two of 24 waivers for which they applied. If the organization had all the waivers, they would cover about five percent of its activities. So far it has received no funds. “I can’t buy medications with a waiver,” he said.

    The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation is the only organization The Times has found in an extensive survey of U.S.A.I.D. recipients that has resumed work after receiving a waiver.

    But the foundation has not been able to access any new money. To restart its H.I.V. testing and treatment programs, it has used money it had received as repayment for disbursements before the stop-work order, said Trish Karlin, the organization’s executive vice president. She said the foundation received waivers for 13 of its 17 projects.

    “For awards where we are not funded by advances but rather are paid in arrears after we invoice the U.S. government, we have not been paid and are due almost $5 million,” she said.

    Karoun Demirjiancontributed reporting.



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  • With Aid Cutoff, Trump Severs a Lifeline for Millions

    With Aid Cutoff, Trump Severs a Lifeline for Millions


    Funds from the world’s richest nation once flowed from the largest global aid agency to an intricate network of small, medium and large organizations that delivered aid: H.I.V. medications for more than 20 million people; nutrition supplements for starving children; support for refugees, orphaned children and women battered by violence.

    Now, that network is unraveling. The Trump administration froze foreign aid for 90 days and has planned to gut the U.S. Agency for International Development to just 5 percent of its work force, although a federal judge paused the plan on Friday. Given wars and strapped economies, other governments or philanthropies are unlikely to make up for the shortfall, and recipient nations are too hamstrung by debt to manage on their own.

    Even the largest organizations are unlikely to emerge unscathed. In interviews, more than 25 aid workers, former U.S.A.I.D. employees and officials from aid organizations described a system thrown into mass confusion and chaos.

    A tower of blocks may take hours to build, but “you pull one of those blocks out and it collapses,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the H.I.V. prevention organization AVAC, which relied on U.S.A.I.D. for 38 percent of its funding.

    “You’ve gotten rid of all of the staff, all of the institutional memory, all of the trust and confidence, not only in the United States but in the dozens of countries in which U.S.A.I.D. works,” Mr. Warren said. “Those things have taken decades to build up but two weeks to destroy.”

    Small organizations, some with as few as 10 employees, have folded. Some midsize organizations have furloughed up to 80 percent of their employees. Even large organizations — including Catholic Relief Services and FHI 360, among the biggest recipients of U.S.A.I.D. funding — have announced large layoffs or furloughs.

    In one survey, about 1 in 4 nonprofits said they might last a month; more than half said they had enough reserves to survive for three months at most.

    The damage is compounded by President Trump’s announcement that the United States would withdraw from the World Health Organization, forcing its leaders to announce cost-cutting measures of their own.

    Global health experts said that the future suddenly looked uncertain, even dystopian, and struggled to articulate alternatives.

    “We are quite clear that the future looks different,” said Christine Stegling, a deputy executive director at UNAIDS, the United Nations’ H.I.V. division. But “none of us yet has a real picture of what that means.”

    The damage extends not just to the health of people abroad but to Americans and American businesses. Along with the roughly 100,000 positions cut overseas, an estimated 52,000 Americans in 42 states have lost their jobs.

    The global health care supply chain market was valued at nearly $3 billion in 2023 and was expected to grow. Each year, about $2 billion in American agricultural products were purchased as food aid. The abrupt halt risks more than $450 million worth of corn, lentils, rice and other commodities that are in transit or in warehouses and ports.

    “The economic impact of this is going to be astounding to people’s lives and businesses,” said Lisa Hilmi, executive director of CORE group, a consortium of large global health practitioners.

    Ms. Hilmi, who worked as a nurse in many conflict and disaster zones, said that a lack of health services could drive poor health, malnutrition, epidemics, civil unrest and “a much broader meltdown of society across the world.”

    “If America is the biggest superpower, then we need to act like it,” she said. “And part of that is acting with humanity.”

    A week after the aid was paused, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for lifesaving humanitarian assistance and medications. But stop-work orders for some programs, including food assistance, followed even after the waiver’s announcement.

    Last week, one large organization got the go-ahead for some of its programs. But later that same day the Trump administration placed dozens of U.S.A.I.D. officers on leave, leaving the organization wondering whether the division that issued the waiver was still a viable entity and the officer who wrote the notice was still employed.

    “It’s another example of the dizzying chaos that this administration has inflicted on us,” said a senior official at the organization.

    The leaders of most organizations that depend on U.S.A.I.D. funding would not speak on the record, fearing retaliation from the Trump administration.

    Even when organizations have received approvals to continue, no money has flowed. One large organization received less than 5 percent of its expected budget for the period, but others have received nothing.

    “I obviously welcome that the secretary approved a waiver and put a post on the internet, but we cannot pay our bills with the post,” a senior official at a large organization said of Mr. Rubio.

    Some groups feel morally obligated to continue to provide lifesaving services, hoping that they will eventually be reimbursed. But with dozens of small organizations shuttering by the day, damage to some of the world’s most vulnerable groups is accruing, some experts warned.

    The ecosystem of global health is so closely interwoven that the pause has frozen the work even of organizations that receive no money from the U.S. government.

    The nonprofit IPAS works with hundreds of organizations in dozens of countries to provide access to contraception, abortion and other reproductive health services. Many of the clinics have shuttered, some permanently, said Anu Kumar, the organization’s president.

    The speed of the disruption did not allow clinics time to make contingency plans or taper their dependence on the funding, she said, adding, “This definitely has a ripple effect.”

    After one week of the freeze, more than 900,000 women and girls will have been denied reproductive care, a figure that will grow to 11.7 million over the 90-day pause, according to the Guttmacher Institute. “That’s more than the entire population of North Carolina,” Dr. Kumar said.

    As a result, the institute estimated, 4.2 million girls and women will experience unintended pregnancies, and 8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

    Many H.I.V. programs were focused on “key populations” at highest risk, including transgender people and men who have sex with men, who are marginalized and even criminalized in some countries.

    In Uganda, for instance, where a harsh anti-gay law can carry the death penalty for consensual homosexual activity for people with H.I.V., nonprofit groups funded by the United States have been crucial sources of financial and medical support.

    “It’s something every American should be proud about, but I don’t think they know it,” said Kenneth Mwehonge, executive director of the Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development, which monitors the quality of other H.I.V. programs in Uganda.

    “I don’t think they know how much they’ve contributed and the lives they’ve saved, and they don’t celebrate it enough,” he said. His organization has had to let go of 105 full-time staff members and community workers.

    Childhood immunizations, malaria prevention and treatment and malnutrition programs are also stalled. So are programs on education, economic empowerment, preventive health services and family planning.

    “This is a perfect storm for poor health outcomes, no getting around it,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, executive director of the Global Health Council, a membership organization of health groups.

    Some U.S.A.I.D.-funded organizations provided clean water and sanitation, particularly for refugee populations. Others helped governments protect against diseases like polio and measles in conflict zones and among nomadic groups. Still others provided expertise in containing outbreaks of dangerous pathogens like Ebola and Marburg, which are smoldering in Uganda and Tanzania.

    Any of these threats, if not contained, could easily cross borders and land on America’s shores, said Rebecca Wolfe, who worked at the U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit Mercy Corps for 15 years and is now a development expert at the University of Chicago.

    The world “is so interconnected, and to try to divide it into ‘America first’ and the rest no longer works in today’s age,” she said.

    Some U.S.A.I.D. employees and aid organizations said that the sudden unplugging of funding was antithetical to the goal: helping countries become independent enough to care for their own citizens.

    In the past few years, U.S.A.I.D. has been working on training midwives, nurses, doctors, laboratories and hospitals to begin to transfer the responsibility.

    Self-sufficiency would require small nonprofits at the local level to deliver services, but the smallest organizations are also the least likely to weather the current storm.

    “The irony is that their priority in Project 2025 is localizing and moving away from big partners,” said Jeremiah Centrella, former general counsel at Mercy Corps. “But big international partners are the only ones with access to private donors and strong enough balance sheets to get through this.”

    It’s unclear what will happen to the tens of thousands of workers who suddenly have no jobs and no industry in which to find one.

    In Kenya, Mercy Githinji cared for 100 households in the Kayole neighborhood of Nairobi when the clinic where she worked, run by the U.S.A.I.D. Tumukia Mtoto Project, abruptly closed down. Now Ms. Githinji, a 52-year-old single mother of four daughters, is unsure how she will pay rent or school fees.

    The clinic provided medical care but also helped residents with rent money, food and sanitary pads. “Now there’s no check, there’s nothing,” Ms. Githinji said. “It’s very bad. People are suffering.”

    Even if aid were to resume next week, clinics and offices have already closed, people have moved, and trust has been broken, some former U.S.A.I.D. employees said.

    Others said they were desperately saddened — not for themselves, but for the people they had pledged to serve.

    “The only way I have been able to describe it is, it feels like grief,” one former U.S.A.I.D. employee said.

    “Our mission is to save lives and alleviate suffering,” she said. “Not having the opportunity to contribute to that, and have it be taken away overnight, arbitrarily, without notice or reason, being called a criminal or radical lunatic, has just been deeply heartbreaking.”

    Stephanie Nolen contributed reporting.



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  • Trump and Musk Bring Vast Aid Machinery to a Halt in Africa

    Trump and Musk Bring Vast Aid Machinery to a Halt in Africa


    For decades, sub-Saharan Africa was a singular focus of American foreign aid. The continent received over $8 billion a year, money that was used to feed starving children, supply lifesaving drugs and provide wartime humanitarian assistance.

    In a few short weeks, President Trump and the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk have burned much of that work to the ground, vowing to completely gut the U.S. Agency for International Aid.

    “CLOSE IT DOWN!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Friday, accusing the agency of unspecified corruption and fraud.

    A federal judge on Friday halted, for now, some elements of Mr. Trump’s attempt to shutter the agency. But the speed and shock of the administration’s actions have already led to confusion, fear and even paranoia at U.S.A.I.D. offices across Africa, a top recipient of agency funding. Workers were being fired or furloughed en masse.

    As the true scale of the fallout comes into view, African governments are wondering how to fill gaping holes left in vital services, like health care and education, that until recent weeks were funded by the United States. Aid groups and United Nations bodies that feed the starving or house refugees have seen their budgets slashed in half, or worse.

    By far the greatest price is being paid by ordinary Africans, millions of whom rely on American aid for their survival. But the consequences are also reverberating across an aid sector that, for better or worse, has been a pillar of Western engagement with Africa for over six decades. With the collapse of U.S.A.I.D., that entire model is badly shaken.

    “This is dramatic and consequential, and it’s hard to imagine rowing it back,” said Murithi Mutiga, Africa program director at the International Crisis Group. Mr. Mutiga described the collapse of the agency as “part of the unraveling of the post Cold War order.”

    “Once, the primacy of the West was assumed” in Africa, he said. “No more.”

    Experts says the agency’s abrupt undoing will cost many lives by creating huge gaps in public services, especially in health care, where U.S.A.I.D. has poured much of its resources.

    In Kenya alone, at least 40,000 health care workers will lose their jobs, U.S.A.I.D. officials say. On Friday, several U.N. agencies that depend on American funding began to furlough part of their staff. The United States also provides most of the funding for two large refugee camps in northern Kenya that house 700,000 people from at least 19 countries.

    Ethiopia’s health ministry has fired 5,000 health care professionals who had been recruited under American funding, according to an official notification obtained by The New York Times.

    “We are in disbelief,” said Medhanye Alem of the Center for Victims of Torture, which treats survivors of conflict-related trauma at nine centers in northern Ethiopia, all now closed.

    Of over 10,000 U.S.A.I.D. employees worldwide, barely 300 will remain under changes conveyed to staff on Thursday night. Only 12 will remain in Africa.

    The most pressing challenge for many governments is not to replace the American staff members or money, but to save American-built health systems that are rapidly crumbling to the ground, said Ken O. Opalo, a Kenyan political scientist at Georgetown University in Washington.

    Kenya, for instance, has enough drugs to treat people with H.I.V. for over a year, Mr. Opalo said. “But the nurses and doctors to treat them are being let go, and the clinics are closing.”

    Broader economic shocks are also likely in some of the world’s most fragile countries.

    American aid accounts for 15 percent of economic output in South Sudan, 6 percent in Somalia and 4 percent in the Central African Republic, said Charlie Robertson, an economist who specializes in Africa. “We could see governance effectively cease in a few countries, unless others step up to replace the hole left by the U.S.,” he said.

    Whether U.S.A.I.D. is truly dead may yet be determined by Congress and the U.S. courts, where supporters have filed a raft of legal challenges. But the Trump administration seems determined to move faster than its challengers.

    As Mr. Musk and his team have commandeered the agency’s operations in Washington, shuttering its headquarters and sacking or suspending 94 percent of its staff, its vast aid machinery in Africa has shuddered to a halt.

    In major hubs in Kenya, South Africa and Senegal, American aid officials were shocked to find themselves labeled “criminals” by Mr. Musk, then ordered to return to the United States, according to eight U.S.A.I.D. employees or contractors who all spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

    On Friday, the Trump administration gave all U.S.A.I.D. staff members 30 days to pack their bags and come home, causing turmoil among families now faced with the prospect of pulling children out of school on short notice. If the federal court that is now reviewing that directive does not overturn it, few will have jobs to return to.

    Several U.S.A.I.D. officials noted that Google’s artificial intelligence system, Gemini, had been activated on their internal communications systems recently, and that internal video calls conducted on the Google platform were suddenly set to automatically record.

    Officials said they worried that Mr. Musk’s team could use A.I. to monitor their conversations to ferret out dissenters, or to excerpt snippets of conversations that might be weaponized to discredit the agency.

    Colleagues at the agency have turned to Signal, an encrypted messaging app, this week to share information unofficially. People are being driven by fear, one of them said.

    In private, even senior U.S.A.I.D. officials agree that the agency needs an overhaul. In interviews, several recognized the need to streamline its bureaucracy, and even questioned an aid system that relies so heavily on American contractors and fosters a damaging culture of dependency among African governments.

    Announcements by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and acting head of U.S.A.I.D., that emergency food and lifesaving aid would be exempted from the administration’s cuts were initially welcomed by employees. But, officials said, it turned out to be largely a mirage. Despite the promise of waivers, many have found it impossible to obtain one.

    Worst of all, many said, were the broadsides delivered by Mr. Musk and the White House portraying the agency as a rogue, criminal agency run by spendthrift officials pursuing their personal agendas. Such attacks were false and deeply hurtful to Americans who sought to relieve human suffering around the world, several people said.

    In Nairobi, where U.S.A.I.D. has about 250 Kenyan and 50 American staff members, several Kenyans spoke at a tense town hall this week.

    They worried that talk at the White House of widespread corruption inside the agency might cause other Kenyans to believe that they, too, had benefited from fraud, said an official who attended the meeting.

    Like the Americans present at the town hall, the Kenyans worried they were about to be fired. But there was one major difference between the two groups, the official noted: While the Kenyans were anxious for their livelihoods, the Americans were worried about their country.



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  • In Africa, Danger Slithers Through Homes and Fields

    In Africa, Danger Slithers Through Homes and Fields


    Snakes like these are giants. Black mambas can stretch to 14 feet, and the longest king cobra ever recorded was 19 feet.

    Puff adders are petite by contrast, as short as six inches and no longer than six feet, but very thick. They have long, retractable fangs that can deliver poison into muscle.

    Their venom destroys blood-clotting factors, and victims die slow, gruesome deaths, bleeding in the brain, eyes and mouth.

    Identifying the attacker can help tailor treatment. But many people never see the snake that bites them or, if they do, cannot identify it. To the untrained eye, venomous snakes may look indistinguishable from harmless ones.

    The names don’t make it any easier. Green mambas are green, but black mambas are pale gray to dark brown; they are so-named because the inside of the mouth is black. They are better recognized by their coffin-shaped head and unnerving smile.

    Some scientists are building A.I. models to identify snakes, so that anyone with a smartphone might be able to distinguish them.

    About a third of snakebites are in children. They occur less often among pregnant women, but the outcomes — which include spontaneous abortion, ruptured placentas, abruption, fetal malformations and death to both mother and fetus — can be catastrophic.

    Often the victims are farmers. The loss of a breadwinner devastates families.

    Ruth Munuve’s husband worked as a driver in Nairobi and came home to the family farm every other weekend. He was bitten on a Saturday in April 2020, at age 42, while walking through the brush on his way home from a night out.

    Two hospitals scrambling to treat Covid patients turned him away. By the time he died two days later, his body had swelled to double its size, a hallmark of a puff adder bite, said his sister, Esther Nziu.

    Ms. Munuve now grows maize and cowpeas, mostly for food, and sells green grams. Ms. Nziu has five children of her own, but she is doing her best to help raise her brother’s four children.

    Money is tight, but the women still paid to fortify the house. “I don’t want anybody else to be bitten by snakes,” Ms. Nziu said.



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  • Moderna halts plans to build Kenya vaccine plant as Covid shot demand plunges

    Moderna halts plans to build Kenya vaccine plant as Covid shot demand plunges


    A nurse prepares a dose of Moderna Covid-19 vaccine at Oltepesi Dispensary in Kajiado, Kenya, on September 9, 2021.

    Patrick Meinhardt | AFP | Getty Images

    Moderna on Thursday said it has paused plans to build a vaccine-manufacturing site in Kenya after a steep drop in demand for its Covid vaccines.

    The biotech company said it has not received any vaccine orders for Africa since 2022 and has taken more than $1 billion in losses and write-downs related to the cancellation of previous orders from the continent.

    Moderna’s decision aligns with its broader effort to cut costs by resizing its Covid vaccine-manufacturing footprint. The company’s business took a major hit last year as demand for those jabs waned worldwide, with people relying less on protective vaccines and treatments against the virus.

    Shares of Moderna fell 45% last year, but the stock is up around 6% this year.

    In March 2022, the company said it would invest about $500 million in the Kenyan site and supply as many as 500 million doses of its messenger RNA vaccines to Africa each year. Moderna also had plans to start filling doses of its Covid vaccine in the continent as early as 2023.

    But the company has since determined that demand in Africa “is insufficient to support the viability of the factory planned in Kenya,” Moderna said in a statement on Thursday. Still, the company said it is committed to “ensuring equitable access and meeting emerging demands from African nations” for its Covid shot through its global manufacturing network.”

    The company said it is also working to develop vaccines for diseases that predominantly affect the African continent, such as HIV and malaria. Those shots are part of Moderna’s broader effort to expand access to vaccines that are out of reach in many parts of the world.

    But those jabs are still in the early stages of development, the company noted.

    “Given this, and in alignment with our strategic planning, Moderna believes it is prudent to pause its efforts to build an mRNA manufacturing facility in Kenya,” the company said in a statement. “This approach will allow Moderna to better align its infrastructure investments with the evolving healthcare needs and vaccine demand in Africa.”

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  • Man wanted in Massachusetts for murder rearrested in Kenya after a week-long escape

    Man wanted in Massachusetts for murder rearrested in Kenya after a week-long escape


    Fugitive wanted for Massachusetts murder captured again after escaping police in Kenya


    Fugitive wanted for Massachusetts murder captured again after escaping police in Kenya

    00:38

    NAIROBI, Kenya – A man wanted in Massachusetts to face murder charges has been rearrested, a week after he dramatically escaped from police custody in Kenya, police said Wednesday. 

    Kevin Kangethe, 40, of Lowell, escaped while awaiting extradition on a Massachusetts warrant alleging he killed his girlfriend and left her body in a car at Logan Airport in Boston last fall. Last week, he slipped out of a police station in Nairobi and jumped into a privately owned minivan. 

    Kangethe was arrested in Embulbul, Kajiado County on the outskirts of Kenya’s capital city on Tuesday evening as he sought refuge at one of his relatives’ homes, Nairobi police boss Adamson Bungei said. 

    “We have rearrested him and we thank all that helped in this,” he said. 

    “With this suspect’s recapture we are once again on track to seek justice for Margaret Mbitu and her family. It is our hope that Kevin Kangethe’s return to Boston will proceed in a timely manner and without further incident,” Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden said in a statement Wednesday.

    kenya.jpg
    Kevin Kangethe in court in Nairobi, Kenya, February 14, 2024.

    CNN


    In a country where corruption endemic and the police force has been ranked for decades the most corrupt institution in the country, Kangethe’s escape raised suspicion the police officers on duty that day may have been bribed to allow his escape. 

    The four officers who were on duty at the report office that day have been suspended awaiting disciplinary action and may face prosecution. 

    The officer’s report seen by the Associated Press said that on the day Kangethe escaped, a man named John Maina Ndegwa introduced himself to the officers as Kangethe’s lawyer and said he wanted to speak with his client. 

    “The officers agreed to his request and removed the prisoner from the cells and took him to (an) office … leaving them there. After a short while the prisoner escaped by running away and left the (lawyer) behind,” the report said. 

    Officers pursued Kangethe but did not catch him, the police report said, adding that Ndegwa was arrested. 

    maggie-mbitu.jpg
    Maggie Mbitu

    Courtesy photos


    Kangethe had been detained pending a ruling on whether he should be extradited to face a first-degree murder charge in connection with the death of Maggie Mbitu on Oct. 31, 2023. 

    Massachusetts State Police said in early November that Kangethe had left her body in a car at Logan International Airport and boarded a flight to Kenya. Massachusetts officials said they were working with Kenyan authorities to locate him, and he was arrested in a nightclub on Jan. 30 after being on the run for three months. 

    A police official told the AP that Kangethe said he had renounced his U.S. citizenship. The police official, who insisted on anonymity in order speak freely about an ongoing investigation, said if Kangethe were an American citizen he would have been repatriated without a court process. 

    The court approved a police application for him to be detained for 30 days while the extradition issue was heard. 

    Mbitu, 31, of Whitman, was a health care aide in Halifax. She was last seen leaving work Oct. 30 and reported missing by her family. The preliminary investigation showed Mbitu had left work and traveled with Kangethe to Lowell, where he lived, the prosecution said. 

    Mbitu’s family said they are thankful Kangethe is back in custody.

    “We are cautiously cheering the news that Kevin Kangethe, Maggies Mbitu’s murder suspect, has once again been arrested by the authorities in Kenya,” Mbitu’s family said in a statement to WBZ-TV.

    “We hope that he will be extradited without delay back to the USA to face justice for his crimes. Meanwhile we hope that the Kenyan government will not spare any resources to keep him in custody. We are thankful to God, the media, those in law enforcement who worked around the clock to apprehend him once again and anyone else who played a part in his arrest.” 



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  • Lions are being forced to change the way they hunt. It’s all because of a tiny invasive ant, scientists say.

    Lions are being forced to change the way they hunt. It’s all because of a tiny invasive ant, scientists say.


    A tiny invasive ant muscled into a Kenyan savannah and sparked such a dramatic transformation in the landscape that even the local lions changed the way they hunt, according to research published Thursday.

    The study highlights the potentially profound impacts of invasive species, which are spreading at an increasing rate as human activities give animals, insects and plants opportunities to hitchhike into new territories.

    “Oftentimes, we find it’s the little things that rule the world,” said Todd Palmer, an ecologist from the University of Florida, who was part of the research team that traced the implications of the big-headed ant on the hunting habits of lions in central Kenya.

    “These tiny invasive ants showed up maybe 15 years ago, and none of us noticed because they aren’t aggressive toward big critters, including people. We now see they are transforming landscapes in very subtle ways but with devastating effects,” Palmer said.

    It all starts with the whistling-thorn acacia trees in the plains of Laikipia, Kenya.

    A male lion, Panthera leo, resting and yawning near a stand of acacia trees on the savanna in Mara National Reserve, Kenya.
    A male lion, Panthera leo, resting and yawning near a stand of acacia trees on the savanna in Mara National Reserve, Kenya.

    Sergio Pitamitz/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images


    These thorny trees had developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the local acacia ant: The trees provide shelter and food for the ants and in return they use their stinging bite to discourage hungry elephants from devouring the trees.

    But the big-headed ant changed all that.

    Thought to have originated on an island in the Indian Ocean and brought to the area by the movement of people and goods, these invasive marauders arrived around two decades ago and started killing the acacia ants, leaving the whistling-thorn trees vulnerable to herbivores.

    Diminished tree cover poses a problem for lions because they rely on the element of surprise to ambush their prey, notably zebras.

    Researchers spent three years in Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy tracking the lions’ movements with GPS collars to see how they responded in the areas colonized by the invasive ants.

    Their study, published in the journal Science, found that the big-headed ants had led to a threefold decline in zebra killings.

    “This study was a beautiful snapshot of how complicated ecosystems can be — this idea that you pull on a single thread and the whole system reacts,” said Meredith Palmer, an ecologist who was not involved in the study.

    The researchers were surprised to find that the ants’ impact did not cause the lion population to decline — good news because lion populations in the region have already shrunk to around 2,000 individuals from an estimated 100,000.

    Instead, the big cats switched dining preference and strategy — ganging up in larger groups to go after buffalo, said Douglas Kamaru of the University of Wyoming, lead author of the study.

    While the lions have adapted thus far, the big-headed ants could spell trouble for other species that rely on the whistling-thorn tree, like giraffes or the critically endangered black rhino.

    “The question is what happens going forward,” Kamaru told Agence France-Presse.

    And the lions’ changing diet may provoke its own cascade of impacts.

    “We don’t yet know what could result from this profound switch in the lions’ hunting strategy,” Palmer said.

    Last year, the intergovernmental science advisory panel for the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity catalogued more than 37,000 so-called alien species that have taken root — often literally — far from their places of origin.

    That number is trending sharply upward, along with the bill for the damage, estimated at well over $400 billion a year.

    Research has shown that climate change has exacerbated the situation. One study found that at least a third of new introductions of invasive species in the last 200 years have occurred since 1970.

    In November, a different study looked at how warming temperatures have changed the hunting habits of cheetahs. Researchers found that the speedy cats — usually daytime hunters — shift their activity toward dawn and dusk hours during warmer weather. That sets them up for more potential conflicts with mostly nocturnal competing predators such as lions and leopards, the study said.



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  • Nations negotiate terms of plastics treaty in Nairobi – Times of India

    Nations negotiate terms of plastics treaty in Nairobi – Times of India



    NAIROBI: The latest negotiations towards a global treaty to combat plastic pollution opened in Nairobi on Monday, with tensions expected as nations tussle over what should be included in the pact.
    Some 175 countries agreed last year to conclude by 2024 a UN treaty to address the plastic blighting oceans, floating in the atmosphere, and infiltrating the bodies of animals and humans.
    While there is broad consensus a treaty is needed, there are very different opinions about what should be in it.
    As the talks formally opened, Peru’s Gustavo Meza-Cuadra Velasquez, chair of the forum’s intergovernmental negotiating committee, warned that plastic pollution posed “a direct threat to our environment, human health, and the delicate balance of our planet.”
    “We have the collective power to change this trajectory,” he said.
    Negotiators have met twice already but the November 13-19 talks are the first to consider a draft text of the treaty published in September and the policy options it contains.
    Around 60 so-called “high ambition” nations have called for binding rules to reduce the use and production of plastic, which is made from fossil fuels, a measure supported by many environment groups.
    It is not a position shared by many plastic-producing economies, including the United States, which have long preferred to focus on recycling, innovation and better waste management.
    The draft presenting the various ways forward will form the basis for the high-stakes deliberations at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) headquarters in Nairobi.
    With more than 2,000 delegates registered, and advocates from environmental and plastic groups also in the room, the negotiations are expected to get heated as the details are hammered out.
    Hundreds of climate campaigners, waving placards reading “Plastic crisis = climate crisis”, on Saturday marched in Nairobi calling for the talks to focus on cutting the amount of plastic produced.
    Kenyan president William Ruto described plastic pollution as “an existential threat to life, to humanity and everything in between.”
    “To deal with plastic pollution, humanity must change. We must change the way we consume, the way we produce, and how we dispose (of) our waste.”
    Call for urgency
    The meeting to debate the future of plastic comes just before crucial climate talks in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates later this month, where discussions over fossil fuels and their planet-heating emissions are due to dominate the agenda.
    As in the UN negotiations on climate and biodiversity, financing is a key point of tension in the plastic talks.
    Rich economies have historically polluted more — and for years exported trash for recycling to poorer nations, where it often winds up in the environment.
    Some developing nations are concerned about rules that might place too great a burden on their economies.
    Environment groups say the strength of the treaty depends on whether governments commit to capping and phasing down plastic production.
    Plastic production has doubled in 20 years and in 2019, a total of 460 million tonnes of the stuff was made, according to the OECD.
    Despite growing awareness of the problem surrounding plastic, on current trends, production could triple again by 2060 without action.
    Around two-thirds of plastic waste is discarded after being used only once or a few times, and less than 10 percent is recycled, with millions of tonnes dumped in the environment or improperly burned.
    The Nairobi meeting is the third of five sessions in a fast-tracked process aiming to conclude negotiations next year so the treaty can be adopted by mid-2025.
    Campaigners say delegates in Nairobi must make considerable headway to remain on course and warned against time-consuming debates over procedural matters that caused friction at the last talks in Paris in June.





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