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+--- Thread: Sri Lanka is in crisis — and so are its scientists (doomed communities) (/thread-12575.html)
Sri Lanka is in crisis — and so are its scientists (doomed communities) - C C - Jul 18, 2022
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01946-y
EXCERPTS: Sri Lanka is in a state of crisis. With the country in vast amounts of debt and inflation sky-high, the government doesn’t have enough money to import fuel, exacerbating food shortages. Last weekend, protesters marched into the official residence of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, demanding his immediate resignation. He has since fled the country.
More than six million Sri Lankans — three in every ten households — don’t know where to get their next meal, according to the World Food Programme. And after wave after wave of COVID-19, Sri Lanka is now experiencing a massive outbreak of dengue fever.
Neelika Malavige is an immunologist at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in Colombo who has studied dengue for more than a decade. She spoke to Nature about the situation in Sri Lanka and how it is affecting her work.
What is life like in Sri Lanka at the moment?
Sri Lanka does not have sufficient foreign reserves to import fuel, which has affected every sector. Schools are closed indefinitely. The government has declared Fridays a holiday for all public institutions except essential services. Patients can’t get to hospitals and neither can doctors, nurses and other medical staff. On top of that, we are running out of essential medicines and have daily power outages of more than three hours.
There is also not enough food, partly driven by the government’s decision in May 2021 to impose a nationwide ban on chemical fertilizers, which drastically cut agricultural production and drove up the price of staple foods such as rice and vegetables. Fishing boats don’t have diesel or kerosene to catch fish, an important source of protein. Inflation exceeds 50%, pushing many people into a situation where they can’t afford to eat three meals a day.
We also have close to 41,000 confirmed cases of dengue this year, which exceeds the number we had in the whole of last year.
[...] The power cuts and lack of fuel for back-up electricity generators mean that we cannot use equipment such as our Illumina genomic-sequencing machine, which needs to run continuously for at least 24 hours. ... It has driven up the price of many essential lab items. ... Our staff are also severely affected by the rising food prices... (MORE - missing details)