Health initiatives and medical research projects have closed the world around the world in response to the 90 -day break from the Trump administration on foreign aid and arrest work prescriptions.
In Uganda, the national malaria fighting program has suspended insecticide spraying in village houses and has ceased the shipping nets for distribution to pregnant women and young children, said Dr. Jimmy Opigo, Program director.
Medical supplies, including drugs to stop hemorrhages in pregnant women and rehydration salts that treat potentially fatal diarrhea in toddlers cannot reach villages in Zambia because the truck companies that transported them have been paid through a suspended supply project of the American agency for international development, USAID
Dozens of clinical trials in South Asia, Africa and Latin America have been suspended. Thousands of people registered in studies have medicines, vaccines and medical devices in their bodies, but no longer have access to continuous treatment or to researchers who supervised their care.
In interviews, more than 20 researchers and program managers have described the upheaval of health systems in developing countries. Most have agreed to be interviewed on the condition that their names are not published, fearing that talking to a journalist endangering any possibility that their projects be able to reopen.
Many people interviewed melted in tears by describing the rapid destruction of work decades.
The programs that have frozen or withdraw in the last six days have supported front line care for infectious diseases, providing treatment and preventive measures that help avoid millions of deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and malaria and malaria and malaria and malaria and malaria and malaria other diseases. They also presented a compassionate generous and generous image of the United States in countries where China has been increasingly contributed to influence.
The State Department and the USAID did not respond to requests for comments.
There will now be no one to take care of millions of dollars in supplies for vital oxygen systems, purchased for programs funded by USAID which support health clinics in some of the poorest countries in the world. Expeditions, now in transit, should reach the ports in the coming days, but the employees of these programs have been ordered to stop working.
Tuesday evening, Secretary of State Marco Rubio published an exemption from the freeze for “vital humanitarian aid”, including what a state service note called “basic rescue medicine” . However, HIV treatment programs and closed tuberculosis have been informed by their contacts to USAID that they cannot go back to work until they receive written instructions that the renunciation is specifically applied .
Also Tuesday, a federal judge blocked frost Until February 3. But in practice, most offices and programs from USAID countries take place as if the frost stayed in place.
They have not been able to obtain clarifications on the question of whether their work can continue because their contacts assigned to the USAID have been dismissed or on leave, or are under strict instructions not to speak to person.
Despite the court order, thousands of people have already lost their jobs following the frost. About 500 USAID US employees were dismissed. In India countries in Zimbabwe, staff members of health projects were immediately dismissed. An organization called the International Center for Research on Diarrheal Diseases, Bangladesh, which is researching a superior killer of children, dismissed more than 1,000 employees this week.
If the renunciation announced by Mr. Rubio does not apply to his work – as is likely because he should only exempt a close range of activities – many non -profit groups will not have enough funds for Pay their employees or maintain supplies. Already, the organizations which depend on the funds of the USAID could not access money, even for the reimbursement of the expenses already incurred.
Two-thirds of the staff of the President’s malaria initiative, an organization founded by former president George W. Bush who is the largest donor of anti-malaria programs in the world, were dismissed. These employees were contractual staff members because the agency had long -term hiring for boys for permanent positions and included some of the oldest and respected scientists working on the control of malaria in the world.
While the interruption of HIV treatment has incited an outcryThe suspension of malaria work also immediately puts lives, said a scientist who was a member of the higher staff at the president’s malaria initiative for a decade and was dismissed on Tuesday.
The interventions of malaria in Africa are carefully planned around the rainy seasons, whose time varies according to the region. The houses are sprayed with insecticide and children are treated with an antimalarial drug during the maximum malaria transmission times.
“You could once again open the financing valves tomorrow and you will still have children who die in months because of this break,” said the scientist.
More than 50 million children received preventive medication before the rainy season last year.
The delivery of quick tests and malaria drugs to Myanmar, where malaria cases has increased almost ten times At 850,000 in 2023 (the most recent figures available) from 78,000 in 2019, were frozen. Some organizations no longer have workers to distribute supplies even if they were to arrive.
In certain parts of the country, Over 40% Cases are of a type of malaria that is often fatal in children under the age of 5. Malaria medications seem to qualify under the stipulation of “vital humanitarian aid, including essential drugs” included in the waiver, but in the absence of certainty, no one was daring enough to try to release the Medicines now stuck on the Thai border.
Some 2.4 million antiphanage beds are found in production facilities in Asia, made to execute orders funded by the United States and to sub-Saharan African countries. These contracts are now frozen, because the USAID subcontractor who bought them is not allowed to speak to the manufacturer under the frost. The contracts of eight million additional nets are now in the limbo, said a manager of the manufacturer.
The largest USAID project is called the global health supply chain, an effort to rationalize the purchase of supplies for HIV, malaria, maternal health and other key areas, in order to make the system more efficient and save money. It operates in more than 55 countries where, in many cases, it provides most of the key drugs. Now, its global network of personnel has been ordered to stop the work, with the exception of essential tasks, such as the guarding of raw materials in warehouses.
In Zambia, USAID supports the bulk distribution of public health products, using the private trucking industry to move medicines from a central supply to seven regional poles, from which they are taken by truck , motorcycle and boat at rural health centers. This is part of the vast American support for the health system in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, and over time, it has worked to strengthen the capacity of the government’s supply chain.
Since the stop prescription was issued last Saturday, all vehicles carrying health products have been arrested. “They actually paralyzed the Zambian public health sector by withdrawing so suddenly,” said a consultant who worked with the program. Similar systems funded by the United States, now frozen, have also moved a large part of basic medical supplies to Mozambique, Nigeria, Malawi and Haiti.
In East Africa, medical researchers working on projects to find ways to stop the transmission of HIV and develop more efficient contraception have found themselves wading for the explanations to give participants in their clinical trials.
“We have women who test vaginal rings, they already have the rings in them, people who have obtained an injectable for HIV prevention-when you say” stop “, what happens to them?” said a HIV researcher who is a researcher on a number of clinical trials. “We have an ethical obligation towards people who volunteer for trials.”
APOORVA Mandavilli Contributed reports.