Hope among Millenials- Anja Nikolova of Macedonia

One down side of social networking and "blogging", is how quickly the writing creates a skeptical view of the world. Therefore, I'm delighted with opportunities to read and report on hopeful news, like Anne Ford reported in March 2017, The Rotarian Magazine.

Master of Environmental Management (MEM)- Yale

Rotary scholar combines business and environment

Anja Nikolova of Macedonia- With fluency in five languages, including Macedonian, English, and French, she expects to play a key intermediary and interpretable role in supporting her country to reach an agreement on their emission targets (with Yale, climate talks in Paris), as well as secure the appropriate financial support for the national agenda. The daughter of a Macedonian foreign service officer, Anja Nikolova grew up in London, New York, and Venice. 

Her globe-trotting childhood gave her not only a gift for languages (she’s fluent in five), but also a passion for international environmental issues. With the aid of global grants funded by Rotary districts from Texas, Oklahoma, and Connecticut, Nikolova is working toward her master’s degree in environmental management at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. She has interned at the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition – an initiative to accelerate action on climate change – and attended the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris as a member of the Macedonian delegation.

Q: How did you become interested in environmental issues?
A: It was when my family lived in Venice, because we got floods all the time. Everything just shut down. You walked out of your house and walked into a lake. I remember thinking, “If this happens in such a wealthy city, then I can’t even begin to imagine what happens in other places in the world that are not as fortunate.”

Q: What led you to study at Yale, and what are you hoping to accomplish there?

A: I did an internship with Earthmind, an organization supported by and with its headquarters at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an environmental NGO in Switzerland. That’s when I started becoming more interested in the international environmental scene. Because the environment is so interwoven with other fields, I felt I needed a broader degree, and that’s why I applied to Yale.

I’m interested in tying together the environment and economics on a larger scale to understand the feasibility of certain environmental projects. In the end, if whatever you pursue doesn’t make business sense, it’s probably not going to work. That has to be acknowledged and seen as an opportunity rather than as a threat.

Q: Tell us about your work in Ghana.
A: When I worked at IUCN, one of the projects there was a community agricultural and forestry project in Mole National Park in Ghana. The vision was to empower villagers living on the fringes of the park by teaching them to farm the products that are in the park and then sell them. They don’t have the technical support to sell them at a scale that’s profitable. I’ve connected this project with some Rotarians, and together we’ve managed to raise more than $100,000 for it. Rotarians in Ghana are also very involved.

Q: Now that you’re in the United States, do you have much opportunity to speak languages other than English?

A: I speak maybe three or four languages on a daily basis. With my parents, I speak in Macedonian. With my sister, I speak in Italian. With my friends, it depends. It’s not that I’m some sort of genius; I was just fortunate to grow up in different countries and learn different languages by default.

That has actually motivated me to co-found something at Yale: a program called Tandem Language Café. We match native speakers of two languages who want to learn each other’s language. The pairs meet once a week for eight weeks, and it’s free. This year we had more than 400 applicants. If I had the time this semester, I would even participate, but I’m just so overwhelmed with everything. Otherwise, I would love to learn Mandarin.

– Anne Ford 

(Bonne chance Anja!)

World Health and Polio eradication: End Polio Now

Infectious diseases can be eradicated when a world wide effort is sustained to prevent the spread of diseases. Smallpox was eradicated.  Polio is a preventable illness, but only if everyone in the world is immunized against the infectious virus. Thanks to the Rotary International (RI) Foundation and other humanitarian organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world is very close to ending the scourge of Polio....but we're not there yet. What does this have to do with Americans?  Lots. We must eradicate polio so the world becomes immune to the risk of another epidemic, like the episodes of the 1940s and 50s, when millions experienced morbidity and many mortalities resulted from polio....it could happen; but such an extraordinary occurrence can be prevented, with access to vaccines.

As a member of Rotary, I'm particularly concerned about eradicating polio. I personally know Rotarians who risked their safety by traveling to very poor places on earth where polio still infects children.They go to these places to give the oral vaccine to children. Unfortunately, some of the hardest to reach locations, where polio continues to infects children, are in Pakistan and Nigeria, two of the most economically desperate nations on earth.  

Here is an update on polio from "Health Day" e-magazine:
MONDAY, Oct. 24, 2016 (HealthDay News) --
Polio is almost a thing of the past, but it still exists in small pockets on the planet, U.S. health officials reported Monday.

In 1988, a global effort to eradicate polio, a disease that has crippled millions of children worldwide, began. 

Since then, the number of cases dropped from 350,000 to just 27 this year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We are on the brink of the eradication of polio -- we are closer than ever," CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said during a media briefing.

"In this period [1988-2016], 2.5 billion children have been vaccinated against polio," he said. "If it were not for this effort, an estimated 15 million more children would be disabled. Every year polio eradication is delayed, the incremental cost is about $800 million."

The battle to eradicate the disease, however, continues in areas where it is still endemic, officials added.

"The new cases in Nigeria highlight the need to improve tracking of the disease," Frieden said. "We have to redouble our efforts to get over the finish line in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Despite big obstacles, both countries are making substantial progress."

Vaccinating children in some parts of the world, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, can be a dangerous task. According to published reports, workers in these areas trying to vaccinate children have been killed by extremists who believe vaccinations sterilize children or that workers are Western spies.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is made up of five groups: the CDC, Rotary International, the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Frieden said.

"We will get to a day when polio is history," Frieden said.

Finally eradicating polio is going to cost $1.5 billion, John Germ, president of Rotary International, said during the media briefing.

"If we don't get the funding, polio is going to spread again, and it's going to cost us billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives a year for the children that we must protect against this virus," he said. "It can cost us a dream of a polio-free world."

No cure for polio exists -- it can only be prevented. The polio vaccine can protect a child for life, health officials said.

Despite the progress seen since 1988, "as long as a single child remains infected with poliovirus, children in all countries are at risk of contracting the disease," according to WHO. The virus can easily be imported into a polio-free country and can spread rapidly among unvaccinated populations.

"Failure to eradicate polio could result in as many as 200,000 new cases every year, within 10 years, all over the world," WHO says.

"Polio is almost defeated," Reza Hossaini, director of polio eradication at UNICEF, said during the briefing. But, "the recent cases in Nigeria remind us that almost is not good enough."

More information

Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more on polio.

SOURCES: Oct. 24, 2016, media briefing with Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H., director, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; John Germ, 2016-2017 president, Rotary International; Reza Hossaini, director, polio eradication, United Nations Children's Fund

Last Updated: Oct 24, 2016

Copyright © 2016 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Here's a link to Rotary International "End Polio" campaign. https://www.endpolio.org/