Thanks Aurum. I can't find much of anything from Russia on the net, and my Cyrillic skills are pretty much limited to sounding out street names.
Found 2 more items on Zambia yesterday. One relating to power grid, one to public health.
In re power, in addition to the hydro plants in Kafue Gorge and along the Great Zambezi there is a plant in Lunsemfwa and Mulungushi, east of Kabwe which is roughly 100 km N of Lusaka. They have 36 MW capacity and are owned by ZCCM. ZCCM closed the Kabwe division in 1994, and currently the plants have been operating at 11% capacity.
Now mine operations need diesel for underground equipment, and they need electricity for ventilation, lighting and god knows what else. If the ZCCM owns Lunsemfwa and Mulungushi, and if these 2 plants are about 150 km from the major copper and cobalt mines, while the Zambezi plants are
250-300 km away, why are they running at 11%? What does this say about production at ZCCM? Are the plants simply not tied into the national power grid? The Times of Zambia says they supply Luangwa which is on the Zimbabwe border, so it seems they're attached to the grid. Is production so far down at ZCCM that they don't need power? Roan is using power and has an outstanding $10 mil power bill.
Public health. PANA wire service 3/27/99. Zambian Ministry of Health states that 70% [that's not a typo] of the population is infected with TB, and that 30% of the TB cases [or 21% of the overall population} were co-infected with HIV. They also noted that the govt had no resources to buy drugs for individuals infected with drug resistant T
[which essentially is all cases in Africa].
Amongst my other hats, I'm the TB consultant to our local county health department. The first thing we tell the medical students is that TB is not that virulent so that if you see someone with TB, suspect AIDS immediately. In non-AIDS situations, 95% of the people infected with TB will never become infectious or symptomatic, and 5% will develop clinically active TB. In the US, about 2% of the population is infected with TB. If 70% of the Zambian pop is TB +, and if in the copper district at least, HIV infection is north of 46%, then the miner mortality from silico-tuberculosis and AIDS must be horrific, e.g. 20% of your workforce or more dying per year.
We'll see, but outside of an AIDS hospice in San Francisco where a TB epidemic occurred, I've never seen that kind of TB prevalence data. |
