People Fixing The World Folgen

It's estimated that a person dies from a snakebite every five minutes. Many more people face life-changing injuries, losing limbs and consequently their livelihoods. Antivenoms are expensive to make and are in short supply, particularly in remote communities where they are needed the most. And what’s more, snakebites in different parts of the world need different types of antivenoms. Many of the current treatments available in sub-Saharan Africa have been developed from snakes in Asia, but antivenom made to treat Indian snakebites won’t work as well on people bitten by snakes in Africa.Now a new research facility in Kenya is trying to develop better antivenoms from African snakes. And they've launched a motorbike snakebite ambulance service too, to get people who have been bitten to hospital fast.(Photo Credit: BBC)

For the past 20 years, police chiefs and policy makers around the world have been fascinated by an idea: that violence spreads through cities like a disease, with patterns of clustering and transmission, and opportunities to inoculate communities against it.Violence-reduction programmes, influenced by epidemiology, have been implemented in Chicago, Glasgow and - most recently - London. But before these initiatives, a link between violence and disease was made by a Colombian doctor called Rodrigo Guerrero. When Guerrero became mayor of Cali in Colombia in 1992, the city was in crisis. It was the height of a war between the Cali and Medellin drug cartels with the homicide rate reaching a shocking 120 per 100,000 people. Guerrero’s approach was not to wage a war against the cartels, or to cave into corruption. Instead, he used his knowledge as a Harvard-trained epidemiologist to gather data about the exact causes of homicide, make hypotheses, and try interventions. “I was no longer an epidemiologist, but a violentologist,” he recalls.In this programme Dr Guerrero gives reporter William Kremer a tour of his city and explains his approach.Reporter: William Kremer(Photo Caption: Dr Rodrigo Guerrero / Photo Credit: BBC)

In the 1970s hundreds of thousands of wells were dug across Bangladesh to give people access to cholera-free water. But this led to what the World Health Organization has called the largest mass poisoning of a population in history, worse than Chernobyl. That’s because the water in the wells wasn’t tested for arsenic. Decades on, it’s a major problem. The WHO says more than 35 million Bangladeshis have been chronically exposed to arsenic in their drinking water, and about 40,000 die of arsenicosis every year. The field test for it is inaccurate and prone to human error. Most Bangladeshis drink from wells in their back yards which haven’t been tested for years, if at all. But now a gadget is being developed which will allow anyone to test a well cheaply, instantly and accurately. The scientific key to it is a tiny enzyme, found inside a bacterium affectionately known as Mr Tickle, which was discovered in an Australian gold mine.Reporters: Chhavi Sachdev and Jo Mathys(Photo Credit: BBC)