Forecasting for Hunger

12/12/23 • 16 min

It’s heartbreaking when a drought or flood causes crops in a region to fail, and children to go hungry. Kids can starve to death or endure social, economic, and health problems well into adulthood due to malnutrition.

But what if there was a way to predict when these weather disasters are likely to happen, so governments, aid organizations, and residents could prepare?

A team at the University of Chicago says people could already do this, using one of the best-known weather patterns: the El Niño Southern Oscillation or ENSO.

“ENSO has destabilizing effects on agriculture, economic production, and social stability throughout areas of the global tropics that are teleconnected to it. It has been linked to human health outcomes directly through its effects on vector- and water-borne infectious diseases, as well as indirectly by decreasing agricultural yields and increasing food insecurity and the likelihood of conflict,” they write in a Nature Communications article.

It's possible to predict this Pacific Ocean-based pattern, says Dr. Amir Jina, an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago. In this episode of One World, One Health, listen as Dr. Jina explains how people could use predictions about El Niño years to get ahead of some of the forces that make children go hungry.

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But what if there was a way to predict when these weather disasters are likely to happen, so governments, aid organizations, and residents could prepare?

A team at the University of Chicago says people could already do this, using one of the best-known weather patterns: the El Niño Southern Oscillation or ENSO.

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Community Health Workers – Indispensable, yet invisible

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Who reminds an HIV-positive pregnant woman to take her vitamins and the drugs that will protect her baby from infection?

Who explains to fearful parents that COVID-19 vaccines will protect them and their children from the disease?

Who shows people how to wash their hands properly so they don’t spread germs to themselves and others?

In many countries across the globe it’s community health workers like Margaret Odera of Nairobi, Kenya.

Margaret, herself an HIV-positive mother who has managed to ensure her husband and children remain uninfected, works day and night to keep her community safe, too. Yet she feels undervalued and underpaid.

She’s become an advocate for community health workers like herself – most of whom are women, and many untrained and either underpaid or unpaid.

Listen as Margaret tells One World, One Health host Maggie Fox what she does in her work for the community, and how training and better pay are needed for her and others in her trade to promote health both locally and globally.

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Beyond Bullets and Bombs – Conflicts and Disease Spread

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In Gaza, thousands have been killed, tens of thousands injured, and hundreds of thousands more are without shelter, clean water, or medical care.

“You have these horrible, horrible scenes playing out in many places,” says Avril Benoit, executive director of Medecins Sans Frontieres-USA, also known as MSF or Doctors Without Borders in English.

Humanitarian groups such as Doctors Without Borders have called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas so they can help innocent and helpless civilians caught in the conflict in Gaza.

People in Gaza are suffering horrific injuries, and without antibiotics and even the most basic of medical supplies, they are likely to develop deadly infections. The filthy and crowded conditions are helping the spread of diarrhea and respiratory disease. People are also developing skin infections such as scabies, and they’ve had to abandon treatment for day-to-day conditions from diabetes and high blood pressure to cancer chemotherapy.

MSF is struggling to help the people of Gaza, Benoit tells One World, One Health host Maggie Fox in this episode. While Gaza is, understandably, grabbing the headlines, more than six million Sudanese people are displaced and fighting malaria and malnutrition, while avoiding violence and slaughter. Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are living in unbearable conditions in the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh. Refugees are fleeing conflict in Ukraine and Syria as well. “We are really stretched very thin,” Benoit says. “Syria has fallen off our radar.”

Listen as Benoit talks about the horrors that conflict rain on populations, and the enduring effects that persist long after the bombs and shooting stop.