SPACE RACE 2.0
China unfurls flag on Moon during Chang'e 5 mission
Posted Yesterday 

The flag has been made from a fabric that will withstand the cold lunar temperatures.

(Supplied: Mission Of The People's Republic Of China To The EU Twitter Account)
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China unfurled a flag on the Moon shortly before a probe sent to collect lunar rocks launched its return mission to Earth, according to China's space agency.

Key points:

The Chinese flag is two metres wide and 90cm tall and weighs about a kilogram
It is made from a fabric that will withstand cold temperatures

It is attached to the Chang'e-5 lunar probe's lander vehicle

Pictures released by China's National Space Administration appear to show the flag attached to the Chang'e-5 probe.

The Chinese flag is two metres wide and 90cm tall and weighs about a kilogram and has been made from a fabric that will withstand the cold lunar temperatures.

The BBC reported the flag was unfurled by the Chang'e-5 lander vehicle just before its ascender vehicle took off using the lander as a launchpad.

Tweets from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chuying and the Mission of the People's Republic of China to the EU confirmed the event.

"Proud to have our national flag Flag of China unfolded on the moon," the EU mission account tweet read.

"The #Change5 probe collected samples and took off from moon.

"It will contribute to global scientific studies in fields such as the formation and evolution of the moon."

The US planted the first flag on the Moon during the manned Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

Five further US flags were planted on the lunar surface during subsequent missions up until 1972.

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Mission of China

@ChinaEUMission

China government account

Proud to have our national flag

unfolded on the moon

. The #Change5 probe collected samples and took off from moon. It will contribute to global scientific studies in fields such as the formation and evolution of the moon.

4:21 AM · Dec 4, 2020·Twitter Web App

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SPACE RACE 2.0

Jeff Bezos shares Blue Origin engine that will take the first woman to Moon’s surface

While women have gone to space for exploration, they have not stepped on the moon yet.

 FE Online | December 6, 2020 

During the test, the engine tallied 1,245 seconds of test-fire time and is expected to fuel the company’s National Team Human Landing System lunar lander.

Blue Origin, space company of Jeff Bezos, will be taking a woman to the moon’s surface for the first time. While women have gone to space for exploration, they have not stepped on the moon yet. Jeff Bezos announced the company’s decision to take a woman astronaut to the moon at a time when NASA is deciding on picking its first privately built lunar landers. These lunar landers have the capability to send astronauts to the moon by 2024. The 56-year old billionaire took to Instagram to announce this on Friday and his post read, “This (BE-7) is the engine that will take the first woman to the surface of the Moon.” Bezos also shared a video of the lander’s engine test that took place at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

“The BE-7 is a high-performance, additively manufactured liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen lunar landing engine with 10,000 lbf of thrust — deep throttling down to 2,000 lbf for a precise landing on the Moon,” read his Instagram post. Blue Origin has been developing the BE-7 engine for many years now. During the test, the engine tallied 1,245 seconds of test-fire time and is expected to fuel the company’s National Team Human Landing System lunar lander.

A report by The Indian Express noted that Bezos led space company is leading a “national team” as the prime contractor. This team was assembled last year in order to build its Blue Moon lander and it includes Northrop Grumman Corp, Lockheed Martin Corp, and Draper. It is to note that the company has been competing with Elon Musk’s famous SpaceX and Leidos Holdings Inc’s Dynetics for NASA’s next human lunar landing system that will ferry humans to the moon in the next few years. So far, Blue Origin has been contending for lucrative government contracts.

Earlier this year, NASA also awarded Blue Origin’s team, a lunar lander development contract accounting for $579 million along with the other two competing companies. While SpaceX received $135 million for its Starship system, Leidos-owned Dynetics was given $253 million. Come March 2021, NASA is expected to pick two companies out of the three and these two companies can continue to build lander prototypes for moon missions.

Why mRNA vaccines like those being made to treat coronavirus are a quantum leap for biotech

No mRNA vaccine has ever been mass-produced to fight a disease — coronavirus would be the first

By MATTHEW ROZSA
SALON  DECEMBER 6, 2020

COVID-19 vaccine | DNA double helix close-up

 (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images Images)

If the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines successfully put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic, as they seem poised to do, we will owe our salvation to the development of mRNA vaccines — an unprecedented, novel vaccine technology that may revolutionize how vaccines are made.

Indeed, an mRNA vaccine has never been mass-produced and licensed to treat an infectious disease. The mRNA vaccines to treat the novel coronavirus would be the first.

Yet understanding the quantum leap that mRNA vaccines represent requires understanding where we are right now. The biotechnology giants Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech announced last month that they had seen promising results as they near the end of clinical trials for their vaccine candidates. Both vaccines are likely to be produced on a wide scale and distributed en masse to the public.

Yet what is particularly striking is that both are mRNA vaccines, mRNA being short for "synthetic messenger RNA." Understanding why these are so novel requires some background on the history of vaccination.

Vaccines before mRNA

As Dr. Norbert Pardi, a research assistant professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on messenger RNA therapeutics, explained to Salon, there are three major type of vaccines. It is likely that you have heard of the first two, and probably have been injected with them at some point in your life, as almost all Americans are.

First, so-called conventional vaccines essentially train the body to recognize and combat antigens, the molecule or molecular structure found on a disease-causing organism (or pathogen) which usually triggers an immune response in the body.

"When you use conventional vaccines you deliver the actual protein antigens that will induce immune responses," Pardi explained.

For instance, one conventional vaccine platform are live-attenuated vaccines, which use a weakened form of the germ that causes a disease. Once in the body, the immune system learns to recognize the antigen and develop immunity, but the patient doesn't become sick because the form of the pathogen has been weakened.

"Live-attenuated vaccines are often very effective but they sometimes induce adverse events," Pardi explained.

Another related subtype of conventional vaccines are called protein subunit vaccines; these are considered very safe, Pardi said, as they introduce "non-living, non-infectious materials" that include one or more antigens from a given pathogen. Once introduced to the body, the immune system learns how to recognize the pathogen in the future.

Viral vector-based vaccines, and genetic vaccines like those which use DNA and RNA, are the second and third main vaccine technologies.

"When you use viral-vectored-based or genetic vaccines, you deliver a blueprint that will allow the host cells to produce protein antigens that will then induce an immune response," Pardi said.

This is a bit more sophisticated than the standard conventional vaccine, in that you're giving the cells a blueprint rather than a piece of the pathogen itself. In other words: conventional vaccines, which are either a weakened form of the pathogen or genetic "pieces" of it, teach the immune system to recognize the real pathogen after seeing these similar versions. It would be akin to recognizing a specific brand of car after seeing an ad for it, or even just a partial picture of its hood. But a viral vector-based vaccine or genetic vaccine would be more akin to recognizing what a Ford Focus looks like having only seen its blueprint.

The third and completely new technology, and the crux of this story, is the mRNA vaccine. For these, scientists create synthetic versions of mRNA, a single-stranded RNA molecule that complements one of the DNA strands in a gene. They then inject a bespoke version of the mRNA into the body, so that cells can produce proteins like those found in a given virus and train the immune system to fight a particular disease before it enters your bloodstream. Think of it as being a bit like training a soldier to fight against actors playing an enemy so they can be better prepared to fight the actual enemy.

In the case of the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines, these train the body's cells to recognize a protein associated with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, known as Spike. Spike is the protein that creates the little points that stick out around the sphere of the virus like the spines of a sea urchin. By helping the body's cells to produce Spike, the vaccines in the process train the immune system to recognize it and protect the human body from novel coronavirus infections.

The holy grail of vaccine technology?

Dr. Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist who specializes in RNA-mediated mechanisms and work as a senior vice president at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals, explained to Salon about what makes these new vaccines so different.

"Vaccines containing killed viruses or viral proteins will only induce antibodies," Karikó explained, referring to how conventional vaccines work. "Meanwhile, mRNA vaccines, in addition to antibodies, also induce cellular immune response," she added, "because the encoded viral proteins are synthesized inside the cell of the vaccinated person." This is an immunological double-whammy: the mRNA injected makes one's body literally synthesize the same proteins that the virus will synthesize, as though it's a dress rehearsal for real infection.

Karikó added that cellular immune response is important because although antibodies will eliminate and recognize viruses in the blood, there is a second type of white blood cell called T cells that recognize infected cells, and destroys them. In other words, antibodies patrol the bloodstream; T cells look for houses that have already been infiltrated. "That's what the BioNTech mRNA vaccine demonstrated," Karikó said. "It induced coronavirus-specific antibodies and T cells."

As for mRNA vaccines like the ones developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech — which are technically known as "nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccines" — Pardi explained that they are "have two more critical advantages: the flexibility of antigen design stemming from their fully synthetic nature and the ease of production." He emphasized that "once you have the coding sequence(s) of your antigen(s) you want to target you can quickly make these vaccines." He noted that Moderna made their vaccine in just 42 days after they had figured out SARS-CoV-2's genetic sequence.

These mRNA vaccines are also quicker and easier to modify if necessary, Pardi noted. "You can use the same manufacturing procedure to produce different mRNAs . . . this makes production much faster, simpler, and potentially cheaper."

The long road to mRNA vaccines

mRNA vaccines are a very new technology, and had a long road to being developed. Indeed, it has been thirty years since the first paper came out that proposed using mRNA for vaccines.

"There was very slow progress in the development of mRNA-based therapeutic approaches because there were two major hurdles that needed to be overcome," Pardi told Salon. The first hurdle was "the instability of mRNA and the lack of a safe and efficient carrier molecule that can protect mRNA from rapid degradation." Because mRNA is fragile, you can't just put it in water and inject it; it needs to sit inside something.

The second problem was more macroscopic: inflammation. Or, as Pardi described it: "the lack of methods that could decrease inflammation induced by the administration of mRNA."

The inflammation problem was solved in 2005 by Karikó and a colleague from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Drew Weissman. The two of them discovered that, by "replacing some of the building blocks of mRNA," they could almost eliminate inflammation.

"This key discovery allowed them to produce safe, therapeutic quality mRNA, so-called nucleoside-modified mRNA," Pardi said.

As for the carrier molecule problem, Pardi added that subsequent technological advancements helped develop better delivery materials for mRNA, particularly a material called lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs. "Both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccines use the nucleoside-modified mRNA-LNP platform," Pardi said. This method has been found to be safe and effective in the Phase III clinical trials from both companies.

Karikó made considerable career sacrifices in the name of developing mRNA vaccines. Her belief that they could work got her demoted at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, according to STAT News, which pointed to the fact that there was no money coming in to sponsor her work on mRNA. Yet Karikó has since been amply vindicated; the 2005 papers by her and Weissman were noticed by scientists who later helped found Moderna and BioNTech, Pfizer's future partner.

Dr. Derrick Rossi, who helped found Moderna, bluntly told STAT News that Karikó and Weissman deserve the Nobel Prize in chemistry. "If anyone asks me whom to vote for some day down the line, I would put them front and center," Rossi said. "That fundamental discovery is going to go into medicines that help the world."

Indeed, one wonders how the world would be different if Karikó and Weissman had not succeeded in realizing their vision regarding mRNA technology.

"It is hard to say," Pardi said. "One thing is pretty sure, we would not have been able to develop nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccines," or the type of vaccines used by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.

Karikó herself told Salon that other biotechnology had progressed tremendously in the past ten years, including the ability to sequence viral RNA quickly, and that this helped speed the vaccine. "Those who were making vaccines against this coronavirus this year were relying on sequence information published by Chinese scientists in early January 2020," she noted humbly.

It also seems safe to speculate that, if Karikó and Weissman had not prevailed through hard work and ingenuity, we may not have the technology available right now to develop COVID-19 vaccines. Likely, the vaccines would have still come, albeit later — and it's all because they were ahead of the curve about the potential of mRNA vaccines.

MATTHEW ROZSA

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

Nurses in the Philippines can’t go abroad, but there are few opportunities at home
DECEMBER 05, 2020   RAISSA ROBLES SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

Newly graduated nurses take their oaths at a ceremony in a mall in Manila in 2010.
Reuters

Lorna Sianen Pagaduan was en route to a new nursing job in Libya when she “got stuck in Hong Kong ” more than two decades ago.

But that misfortune turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as 22 years later she is now president of the city’s Filipino Nurses Association, and has used her earnings to put six siblings through school.More from AsiaOneRead the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite.

This is why she rejects the Philippine government’s decision late last month to cap the number of newly hired nurses and other health professionals it sends abroad annually at 5,000, starting from this year.

“It’s very discriminatory. We understand the Philippines needs nurses but our families also need something to put in their stomachs,” said Pagaduan, who is in her late 40s. “What if, like me, you have six siblings, your father is jobless and your mother is sick? You would choose your family even if you love your country.”

When announcing the cap imposed by the Inter-Agency Task Force on Covid-19, labour secretary Silvestre Bello said it was imposed to ensure the country had enough medical professionals to continue to fight the pandemic, adding that the cap might “increase eventually”.

The Philippines has recorded more than 435,000 cases of Covid-19 and close to 8,500 related deaths, the second highest in both categories in Southeast Asia.

However, Dr Anthony Leachon, a former special adviser to the Covid-19 task force, told This Week in Asia the cap was “unnecessary” even from the perspective of handling the pandemic. He said the country had a large untapped pool of nurses who worked in “odd jobs like call centres” because of the low pay nurses earned in the Philippines.

“They are just not being mobilised properly by the government,” he said. “If they are properly paid, I think they will step up and go to local hospitals.”

Thousands of medical practitioners leave the Philippines to work overseas every year, with an estimated 16,000 nurses going last year alone, according to Eleanor Nolasco, vice-president of Filipino Nurses United advocacy group, which is based in Manila.

Newly graduated nurses gesture while having their picture taken by a friend before an oath taking ceremony in Manila in 2010. PHOTO: Reuters

But the numbers could even be higher because the Philippine government only tallies fulfilled “job orders” for nurses, Pagaduan said, leaving out those who depart as “caregivers” – a role she herself initially occupied in Hong Kong.

It is unclear how many nurses there are in the Philippines, as the government’s statistical authority does not correlate such data. Filipino Nurses United said there were 200,000 trained nurses who were either unemployed or working in jobs outside the health sector, while in 2017 the Tokyo-based Medical Research Information Center Global put the number of board-certified Filipino nurses at 500,000.

That same year, a study by the Philippine Nurses Association, the country’s professional body, found that fewer than 68,000 nurses were employed in the country’s hospitals and state-run community health centres.

“There are just not enough job opportunities even in government hospitals,” Filipino doctor Hans Jesper del Mundo wrote in an essay for the Japanese centre, published in 2018. “This is the main reason why most health professionals practise abroad or even consider changing careers.”

No shortage

Dr Jean Franco, a professor of political science at the University of the Philippines, said she was “totally against the cap” on nurse deployment as “it violates the right of our nurses to work abroad”.

“We really don’t have a shortage of nurses,” she said. “There are 200,000 jobless nurses because they don’t want to be employed in hospitals where the pay is low.”

After shelling out as much as 500,000 pesos (U$10,400) for a four-year nursing course, many of these “standby nurses” look to recoup their investment by working better paid jobs such as “business process outsourcing … or in high-end beauty salons and clinics”, Franco said.

She blamed the government for “commodifying” the profession as part of its decades-long policy of exporting manpower, which has encouraged an oversupply of nurses. This, in turn, depressed wages and led many hospitals in the country to only hire nurses on temporary contracts for low pay, on the understanding that they would leave for jobs abroad once they had enough experience.

Some hospitals in the Philippines pay their nurses as little as 500 pesos (U$10.40) a day — less than what a shop assistant in a large grocery store chain could earn. In other words, Franco said, “nurses are disposable”.

This leads to a high turnover, with one medical director of a large private hospital in Metro Manila telling This Week In Asia that nurses in his hospital who join “in January leave by the end of the year” and those left behind are “not that good”.

“You can’t blame the nurses for leaving because their salaries are really low. They should be given the opportunity but of course, this affects our health care system,” he said, on condition of anonymity.

In October last year, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled that nurses working for public hospitals and health offices were entitled to higher basic pay. The ruling effectively increased their monthly starting salary to 30,531 pesos (US$636) from 20,754 pesos previously — but it did not cover private hospitals, where entry-level salaries can be as low as 15,000 pesos.

Leachon, the former Covid-19 task force special adviser, said to resolve the problem of the lower pay scale in private hospitals compared with state hospitals, all nurses — not just frontliners — should be paid the same wage, with the government partly subsidising pay in private hospitals during the pandemic. He added that the country’s Universal Health Care Law, which provides budgetary support for health care workers, should be tapped for this.
Overworked, underpaid

As well as being underpaid, Filipino nurses are also often overworked, with many hospitals in the country ignoring Department of Health guidelines that a nurse should only care for a maximum of 12 patients over an eight-hour period, according to Nolasco of Filipino Nurses United, who said it was more common for nurses to care for as many as 40 patients as part of 12 to 16 hour shifts.

The government’s response has been to encourage nurses at private hospitals to “go on strike”, as labour secretary Bello put it last week, so their employers can “learn the value of your profession”. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, for his part, told the country’s nurses in August: “Enter the police force. The salary is higher.”

On Friday, the All University of the Philippines Workers Union-Manila, which includes medical frontliners, staged a lunchtime protest to demand promised hazard pay and risk allowances that had gone unpaid since March. President Karen Mae Faurillo said the union had recently been told there was “no budget” to fulfill these promises, which had been made by the Duterte government.

There is one part of the Philippines where nurses can expect to earn a competitive salary, however – the conflict-ridden Bangsamoro Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao in the country’s far south.

An additional 1,415 nurses were recently contracted to work for a year in the region’s community health centres under a Department of Health deployment programme offering salaries of 41,000 pesos per month, according to Yasmin Bacarat, governor of the Philippine Nurses Association’s local branch.

A lack of infrastructure, poor transport links and frequent power outages make working in the region a challenge, however.

Bacarat, who had a stint in Saudi Arabia before embarking on her 20-year career as a community nurse in Bangsamoro, said Filipino nurses should be given the opportunity “to experience life outside the Philippines” if they wanted.

“From my personal experience, it is really difficult to walk to all the barangays (villages),” she said.

“At first I looked at the rice fields and wondered why am I here, I want to work in Manila, but I realised I was helping save lives. It’s very self-fulfilling, so I fell in love with what I’m doing.”

As for Pagaduan in Hong Kong, now that all her siblings have finished school, “I’m already getting ready to go back home,” she said.

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.

The heath care workforce needs higher wages and better opportunities

Janie McDermott and Annelies Goger

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

BROOKINGS INSTITUTE

Despite the onrush of corporate PR campaigns lauding the nation’s health care workers as the “heroes” of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of these workers report feeling underpaid and undervalued in their high-risk jobs. Entry-level roles in health care—such as home health aides or nursing assistants—provide critical patient care and are in very high demand nationwide. But workers in these positions must contend with very low wages, unstable hours, low access to benefits like health insurance, and limited career advancement options. Not coincidentally, these occupations are disproportionately filled by female, Black, and Latino or Hispanic workers.

DEMAND FOR HEALTH CARE WORKERS IS HIGH, BUT JOB QUALITY IS OFTEN LOW

Following the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, an influx of newly insured Americans increased overall demand for health care workers. The country’s aging population and high turnover in the field have also contributed to a need for more health care workers, particularly in long-term care settings.



Entry-level heath care workers can encounter a wide range of job-quality challenges. Low wages and part-time status keep roughly half of nursing assistants and home health aides living in or near poverty. Many low-wage health care workers are independent contractors rather than employees, making them ineligible for benefits such as paid sick leave and exempt from protections against harassment and discrimination. Approximately one in six direct-care workers in nursing homes and home health settings are uninsured. Low-wage health care workers often have unpredictable scheduling, and sometimes face penalties for not accepting last-minute changes.

These job-quality issues likely contribute to high turnover within these occupations, which is costly for employers. A 2020 survey found nursing assistants had a turnover rate of 27% per year (with a median income of $29,640), significantly higher than the turnover of 16% for registered nurses (with a median income of $73,300).

Low-wage health care jobs are highly segregated by race and gender, contributing to racial and gender equity problems in the broader labor market. As of 2019, 79% of workers in health services were women, and research suggests that health care work is undervalued precisely because it is associated with “women’s work.” Black workers make up nearly one-third of the direct-care workforce, which includes only lower-wage occupations. Because health care workers make up 12% of the entire U.S. labor force, occupational segregation in health care has a powerful effect on labor market dynamics. 

PUBLIC INVESTMENTS IN HEALTH CARE TRAINING ARE CONCENTRATED IN LOW-WAGE OCCUPATIONS

WIOA adult and dislocated worker training programs largely direct participants into low-wage work (Figure 2). Annualized median earnings among health care training program participants exceeded $40,000 in only one occupation: registered nurses. Participants who completed nursing assistant training—the most common training among women—had annualized median earnings of just $20,002. Local workforce boards also place a very high share of female participants in health care training programs (Table 1), which perpetuates occupational segregation and, by extension, gender-based earnings disparities.



Black, Native American, and Latino or Hispanic women are particularly overrepresented in lower-wage health care training programs. Over one-third of Black women who participated in the WIOA Adult program were employed in health care occupations, and nine of the 10 most common training programs that Black women participated in were for health care jobs. Black women account for 36% of nursing assistant training participants, despite making up just 12% of those who exited the WIOA Adult program overall.

Local workforce development board investments in entry-level health care training are commonly justified because health care jobs are “in demand.” But they do little to address structural inequality and occupational segregation; arguably, they reinforce these issues by making it cheaper for employers filling low-wage jobs with high turnover to find a continual supply of labor, while also constraining the ability of workforce boards to invest in workers’ career mobility over the longer term.

LOW-WAGE HEALTH CARE WORKERS FACE BARRIERS TO ADVANCEMENT

Low-wage health care employment doesn’t need to be a dead end. But to progress to higher-wage occupations, low-wage health care workers often face challenges such as entrance exams, high tuition and fees, and attending school while working full time. They also tend to have difficulty receiving credit for their prior learning and often need to start from scratch in order to progress within a career pathway.



Earn-and-learn models like apprenticeships have the potential to address some of these challenges, but accreditation and licensing bodies are often rigid in adapting the standards needed to pay apprentices. Health care apprenticeships also remain concentrated in many of these same lower-wage occupations. Nearly half (44%) of health care apprenticeships are the minimum length of one year, and the average hourly wage upon completion is $17.86.

Building a stronger health care workforce

Improving job quality for low-wage health care workers will likely require federal and state actions to improve standards and pay. These include:

Raising the minimum wage, raising reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid, and creating wage boards.

Addressing volatility in scheduling by requiring more transparency, notice, and predictable pay.

Ensuring that frontline health care workers have consistent access to personal protective equipment, hazard pay, and paid sick leave for the duration of the pandemic.

Addressing structural inequality in the labor market will also require targeted efforts to support greater career mobility for the low-wage health care workforce, including the following strategies:

Change the dynamics of employer engagement: Publicly funded programs that offer worker training subsidies to health care employers can prioritize engagement with employers that show a demonstrated commitment to family-sustaining wages, desegregating the health care workforce, and career advancement.

Better coordination: Employers, workforce boards, training providers, and other partners should coordinate service strategies to offer a seamless career progression that is affordable and accessible to low-wage adults through funding, addressing service gaps, conducting outreach campaigns, and assigning clear roles.

Make it easier to obtain credit for prior learning: Establish articulation agreements and affordable prior learning assessment processes so workers can receive credit for their prior learning and work experience.

Employer investments: 

Employers should provide tuition assistance to frontline workers—particularly, pay-in-advance models that do not require low-wage workers to pay costs upfront.

Increase remediation and support: Increased investments in adult basic education, tutoring, and supportive services such as child care will help more health care workers advance.

Redirect resources to prioritize longer-term success and equity: Local workforce boards can focus on desegregating their training and placement activities in occupations that are already highly segregated by gender and race. They can also shift a higher share of their WIOA allocations to incumbent worker training (as opposed to entry-level training) or provide wraparound support to workers who are receiving tuition aid from other sources.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that the health care industry and its workforce are essential to the U.S. economy, and will continue to be a valuable source of job growth in the economic recovery and beyond. However, the health care industry has a poor track record for advancing equity, and maintains extremely high levels of occupational segregation by race and gender. The country can either continue on the same path of using public funds to reproduce these structural inequalities and unsustainable business models, or take steps to ensure that all health care jobs offer decent working conditions, family-sustaining wages, and more opportunities for advancement

Annelies Goger
David M. Rubenstein Fellow - Metropolitan Policy Program
annelies_goger

Janie McDermott
Research Intern - Metropolitan Policy Program

More Chinese getting HIV when cases in rest of world are falling. It’s because of ignorance about sex, say experts

DECEMBER 05, 2020 By QIN CHEN SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

The rising incidence of HIV in China over the past decade runs counter to the global trend of a decline in new cases of the virus.
Huang Haojie

The spread of dating apps and increased mobile phone usage have made it much easier for Chinese people to find potential sexual partners. However, given the lack of proper sex education in schools, this has left young people more vulnerable to contracting HIV — the virus that can cause Aids.

“Those hook-up apps accelerate the spread of the disease,” said Xiao Dong, director of Man Wellness Centre, an HIV testing centre based in Beijing.More from AsiaOneRead the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite.

It is not just young people in China at risk of getting HIV through sexual transmission, though. Among older people, endemic loneliness and a lack of sexual literacy have also led to a rapid rise in new infections .

According to China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of new HIV infections among people over 50 years old rose more than 11-fold between 2007 and 2017, from 2,565 cases a year to 29,860.

Shao Yiming, the CDC’s chief HIV expert, told online news portal Ifeng News this week that one of the oldest patients to contract HIV was 93 years old.

“The person was fine at 91 years old but contracted the disease at 93,” he said.

The rising incidence of HIV in China over the past decade runs counter to the global trend of a decline in new cases of the virus.

The Chinese National Health Commission reported that 131,000 people contracted the disease in 2019. In 2007, the number of new cases was just under 33,000.

In 2020, 95 per cent of the newly infected HIV patients contracted the disease through sex — 70 per cent were heterosexual partners.

By comparison, the United States reported just under 38,000 new cases in 2018.

In 2019, the number of people around the world newly infected with HIV was 1.7 million.

The prevalence of sexually transmitted HIV in China is because of several factors, among them the public’s general lack of sexual knowledge and the proliferation of dating apps 

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A social worker doing a rapid HIV test for a person in Beijing. Most of the new cases in China are spread through sex. PHOTO: Xiao Dong

Hooking up without sex education

Xiao said he has been urging the Chinese government to get technology companies to do more to protect teenagers and spread knowledge about practising safe sex.

The apps “need to take up these social responsibilities. They have to do it,” said Xiao.

Before new technology changed China’s sex scene, the government consistently shirked its responsibility to provide comprehensive sex education to schoolchildren. Only recently has the government made sex education mandatory for schoolchildren .

For decades, schools in China would either ask students to self-study the reproductive chapter in biology class or give a few sessions about menstrual cycles. Proper sexual behaviour, how to build relationships with the opposite sex, and gender and identity issues were often skipped or there was no teaching about them at all.

Social workers and volunteers promote a 2020 World Aids Day event in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. PHOTO: Huang Haojie

Zhang Renjie, director of Red Ribbon Social Service Centre, a non-governmental group focused on public health and based in the eastern city of Suzhou, said Chinese teenagers “usually don’t know how to refuse sex, or ask for the kind of sex acts they want”.

Huang Haojie, executive director of the Wuhan LGBT Centre in Wuhan, said: “We have heard of patients who contracted HIV as young as 13 and 15. Most teenagers got the disease through sex.”

The number of new HIV patients between the age of 10 and 15 rose from 881 to 3,388 per year between 2007 and 2017, according to the Chinese CDC.

Huang said that when he taught first-year university students about the risks of getting HIV in 2017 and 2018, a school official asked him to avoid talking about specific sex acts or displaying condoms because it was deemed too “sensitive” for the students, who were aged between 18 and 20

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Huang Haojie from the Wuhan LGBT Centre teaches students about HIV prevention in 2019. PHOTO: Huang Haojie

However, the spread of HIV has forced rapid cultural change. In 2019, that same university begged Huang to discuss sex and condom usage in detail because officials learned the school had a couple of confirmed HIV cases.

In November, China made sex education mandatory for schools as the country grapples with growing problems of sexual harassment, gender inequality and the spread of sexually transmitted infections.

Huang said much of Chinese society believes it is mostly gay people who catch HIV, a debunked misconception. Xiao agreed, and said: “Some schools would tell their students don’t be gay or don’t try out being gay just for fun because of the risk of contracting HIV.”
Lonely, old and looking for love

The other demographic hit hard by China’s growing HIV crisis is the elderly population.

China has urbanised rapidly over the past three decades, and millions of young people have left rural areas and small towns for better job opportunities in the cities. As a result, many old people were left alone at home, and they often experience profound loneliness , which they fill by finding new sexual partners.

Many older people skipped safety precautions because they thought they were not at risk, having assumed HIV is a young person’s disease. Zhang said: “Most older people don’t like to talk about their sex life with others, so they end up using dated knowledge in a time where HIV is spreading much more widely and the risk of contracting is much higher.”

Rapid HIV testing kits can return results within 15 minutes.

 PHOTO: Xiao Dong

A silver lining

For some experts, though, the fact that most new HIV cases in China are now sexually transmitted is a reason for celebration.

In the past, China had a problem with poor health standards, which resulted in people contracting HIV when they gave blood or received a blood transfusion .

Huang said the fact most new infections were now sexually transmitted “means now

#METOOVIETNAM

Vietnam’s $12 fine for groping a woman sparks calls for tougher laws

#MOLEST#SEXUAL HARASSMENT#VIETNAM  ASIAN MALE MACHISMO

By SEN NGUYEN SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST 

DECEMBER 05, 2020

The New Paper illustration

In Vietnam, a man caught groping a woman’s bottom would be slapped with a fine of 200,000 (around US$8.60 or S$12) or the cost of a pizza. This is what happened to an Estonian citizen living in Ho Chi Minh city, after a woman reported him to the police for slapping her posterior in lift earlier this year.

Last year, another man was given exactly the same fine after forcibly kissing a woman, also in a lift.More from AsiaOneRead the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite.

Social media users decried the US$8 fine as being a mere slap on the wrist, pointing to how more sexual harassment cases against women are coming to light because of CCTV use in cities, but perpetrators are not getting their just deserts.

Do Chi, a 25-year-old who works in a logistics company, said she escaped two men on a motorcycle who directed inappropriate remarks at her and attempted to touch her on a poorly lit street. But she felt that reporting it to the authorities would be pointless, so she shared her experience in a private, women-only Facebook group – like many of the other 15,000 members, comprising local and foreign residents of Ho Chi Minh City, who have revealed their experiences of sexual harassment.

“To be honest, [the experience] made me feel more unsafe than I already felt,” said Chi, who at the age of 14 was physically and sexually abused by a male tutor.

“[He] beat me up at first, manipulated me, called me stupid and made me believe it… then he used his finger to touch my private parts, but not too deep to actually take my virginity”.

She said the assaults, which lasted for two years, put her through episodes of depression and suicide attempts in subsequent years, during which she counted on her loved ones for support.

One in 10 women have experienced one or more kinds of sexual harassment in Vietnam, according to the National Study on Violence against Women in Vietnam in 2019 by the United Nations Population Fund, the UN sexual and reproductive health agency.

The study, released in July, found women were most likely to experience unwanted personal electronic messages with sexual content (7.6 per cent) followed by being groped or touched sexually in a public place such as on a bus (4.9 per cent). About 260 respondents said they had been sexually abused before the age of 15.

Foreigners in Vietnam have also been the victims of sexual harassment. Sal*, a middle-aged American citizen and a long-time Hanoi resident, said he had been grabbed by his genitalia without his consent three times in public by Vietnamese men. Like Chi, Sal did not report the incidents to the police, while revealing that other expats had told him about similar experiences.

“I had a little voice in the back of my head reminding me not to hit him,” he said, referring to the third man who grabbed his crotch.

“The one thing I’d always had stressed was that even if you lose your cool and get angry in Hanoi, you never, ever strike a Vietnamese person unless it is in self-defence.

“My experience was very uncomfortable, confusing, and off-putting, but fundamentally, it had little ongoing effect on my life. I can’t imagine the degree of violation that must come with all this also being accompanied by the threat of grave bodily harm or death,” he said, referring to the sexual abuse experienced by women.

While the law stipulates that employers must apply sanctions to offences in the workplace including sexual harassment, sexual assault is not generally considered a criminal offence in Vietnam. Acts such as forcing a kiss on a person or grabbing their body without their consent are considered an administrative violation falling under the category of “indecent speech and behaviour”, with fines ranging between US$4 and US$13.

Ta Ngoc Van, chief lawyer at the Hanoi-based non-profit Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, explained that the acts were considered an offence against the government’s regulations and not against a person.

By comparison, in neighbouring Cambodia, those convicted of sexual harassment face between six days and three months in jail and a fine of between US$25 and US$123. In Singapore, words or gestures intended to insult a person’s modesty are considered a sexual offence and perpetrators can imprisoned for up to a year and/or fined.

In South Korea, a man was fined 3 million won (US$2,700) in 2016 for groping a woman’s bottom on an escalator, while a year later another man was sentenced to six months jail for committing the same offence on the street, according to local media reports.

While many women have come forward to tell their story, Vietnam remains slow to embrace the #MeToo movement to the extent of other socially conservative cultures such as South Korea. However, there was a huge backlash last year against paedophiles after numerous cases of minors who had been sexually harassed, abused and raped came to light – which resulted in stricter regulations to protect children, including a more comprehensive legal definition of child molestation.

Between 2015 and June last year, there were more than 8,700 children who were victims of abuse in Vietnam — 73.85 per cent of whom were sexually abused, according to a government report.

Dr Khuat Thu Hong, a prominent feminist who runs the Institute for Social Development Studies, an independent research organisation in Hanoi, said Vietnam’s laws were “impotent” when it came to protecting women.

“In Vietnam and many countries, children are everything. When something [bad] happens to a kid, people think of their own kids and feel furious which prompts them to speak out. But when adults are assaulted, the level of fury is unlike what we see in regards to children[’s issues]. People don’t take it as seriously,” she said, adding that it would take time for Vietnamese people to understand the importance of the issue and that the #MeToo movement was slowly taking shape in the country.

Lawyer Van — who has worked to secure the freedom of hundreds of victims of human trafficking, most of whom are women — said sexual harassment should be criminalised. “Everybody including the abused have to speak up so that the law can be amended.

“If behaviours which insult the dignity of people, including women, are not punished, the next generation might also disrespect women’s dignity.”

To this end, some young people in Vietnam are fighting stigma to shine a light on sexual harassment and advocate for gender equality.

Linh Hoang, co-founder of the Vietnam Organisation for Gender Equality and sex education start-up WeGrowEdu, said her students were taught about bodily autonomy and their right to equality and respect so as to avoid self-blaming if they became victims of harassment.

“We also explain to students that most harassers or people who take harassment lightly are also victims of ignorance,’’ the 23-year-old entrepreneur and activist said, referring to the lack of education and systemic inequality in Vietnam.

‘’From there, students become fully informed about sexual harassment and see it as a social issue, so they can become stronger and ready to take action if possible to create social change.”

*Name changed to protect the interviewee’s identity

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.