Sri Lanka’s financial crisis, its worst since independence, is swiftly becoming an alarming health crisis.

Sri Lanka imports more than 80% of its medical supplies. Now almost 200 medical items are in shortage, including 76 essential, life-saving drugs, from blood-thinners for heart attack and stroke patients to antibiotics, rabies vaccines and cancer chemotherapy drugs. Essential surgical equipment and anaesthesia is running out so fast that the decision was made this week for only emergency surgeries, mostly heart and cancer patients, to go ahead. Cancer drugs, which are notoriously expensive to import, have been particularly badly hit by shortages in recent weeks, and the responsibility to source them has fallen on the heads of oncologists themselves. They have been putting out global appeals for donations, and writing letters to private supporters, organisations and governments, to ensure cancer treatments are not delayed. All routine surgeries – anything from hernias to swollen appendixes – have been put on hold. Some government hospitals have been instructed to only admit emergency patients. 

“Ultimately, people are definitely going to die,” said a doctor in Colombo. She described how the hospital was so low on certain drugs they had to instruct families of patients to go out to pharmacies and try to buy it themselves. The doctor said the shortages were getting worse. “I’m worried about pregnant mothers because soon I don’t know whether we will have enough drugs to perform cesarian sections,” she said.

Dr Buddhika Somawardana, an oncologist at Colombo’s largest cancer hospital, described the “great stress” he and other doctors were under as essential cancer drugs began to run out over a month ago or stopped being available at all.

“One of the drugs we give patients undergoing chemotherapy, which boosts their blood count so they aren’t liable to serious infections, is not available any more,” he said. Somawardana said the crisis was placing a huge “financial and psychological burden” on cancer patients, who were having to source and pay vast sums for their own medicines to continue their treatment, previously free and easily accessibly in hospitals under Sri Lanka’s lauded universal healthcare system.

Ruvaiz Haniffa, a doctor in Colombo, expressed his frustration that doctors had “seen this coming as early as January” but little had been done by authorities to set up backup plans to ensure no medicines ran short, even as the country’s foreign reserves began to deplete to worryingly low levels.

“We are facing great ethical dilemmas as doctors,” said Haniffa. “We used to have a very efficient health system. But at the moment, it has become ineffective. More people will die, which is not acceptable.”

He said his patients were being forced to find their own drugs and pay prices over 40% higher, if they could find them at all.

Haniffa said he feared for the long-term impacts on the life expectancy of Sri Lankans. “With the kidney disease and the diabetes and the hypertension we are not treating now, it causes long term damage,” he said. “So in five years, we will see strokes go up, heart attacks go up, neurological problems go up, cancers go up.”

‘People are going to die’: crisis-hit Sri Lanka runs out of medicine | Sri Lanka | The Guardian

 “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

— Arundhati Roy, April 2020

 An Israeli airstrike on an agrochemical warehouse during last year’s war in Gaza amounted to the “indirect deploying of chemical weapons”, according to a report analysing the attack and its impact.

Incendiary artillery shells fired by the Israel hit the large Khudair Pharmaceutical and Agricultural Tools warehouse in the north of the Gaza Strip on 15 May last year, setting fire to hundreds of tonnes of pesticides, fertilisers, plastics and nylons. The strike created a toxic plume, which engulfed an area of 5.7 sq km and has left local residents struggling with health issues, including reports of miscarriages.

Legal experts concluded that while conventional weapons were used in the bombing, “the shelling of the warehouse, with knowledge of the presence of toxic chemicals stored therein, is tantamount to chemical weapons through indirect means. Such acts are clearly prohibited … and prosecutable under the Rome Statute of the international criminal court”.

The strike on the Khudair warehouse was the first in a series of attacks deliberately targeting Gaza’s economic and industrial infrastructure, with half a dozen other factories and warehouses systematically bombed.

Impact of Israeli strike in Gaza akin to chemical weapons, NGO report finds | Israel | The Guardian

 “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

— Arundhati Roy, April 2020

 “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

— Arundhati Roy, April 2020

Oil giants BP and Shell are on course to make a combined profit of about £40bn this year from the rocketing price of petrol and gas.

North Sea oil and gas companies that already benefit from huge tax breaks could use fresh rules to slash how much they pay under a new windfall tax announced by Rishi Sunak as part of his £15bn cost of living package, according to a thinktank. The chancellor risks raising a fraction of the £5bn he expects from the complex scheme – which allows the cost of new investments to be offset against profits – should oil and gas companies take the opportunity to dramatically reduce their contribution to the exchequer, said the thinktank Common Wealth.

Research carried out with the New Economics Foundation, which found that the government had handed firms operating in British waters tax breaks worth about £3.1bn in 2019-20 and £2.5bn in 2020. Most of the funds were directed to shareholders in share buy-back schemes. The Treasury has not calculated how much of the £5bn in extra tax could be lost if North Sea operators claim extra investment allowances over the next three years.

Christine Jardine, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson, said Sunak’s “11th hour” 25% windfall tax on oil and gas company profits allowed them to carry on “with business as usual” and direct most of their profits to shareholders.

“It’s bad enough that the chancellor waited until the 11th hour to tax big oil and gas, when Liberal Democrats first called for a windfall tax last October. Now it looks like it may not even raise what he said it will. That’s more levy lite than windfall tax.” She accused the chancellor of “going soft on huge companies making a killing out of a crisis”.

Loophole could let North Sea oil and gas giants slash UK windfall tax bill | Oil and gas companies | The Guardian

The UK’s top scientists working on carbon capture technologies do not believe they will be developed and scaled up in time to reach net zero and limit global heating to 1.5C.

Experts speaking at a Greenhouse Gas Removal Hub event in London warned that these techniques, including direct air capture, biofuels, biochar, afforestation and advanced weathering, are not a silver bullet and should make up just a fraction of the efforts to decarbonise. Of 114 scientists in the audience, 57% said they were “not confident” the UK would meet the 2030 goals in the net zero strategy of 5m tonnes of engineered greenhouse gas removal, and 30,000 hectares a year of tree planting; 25% said they were quite confident, and 11% said there was no chance.

Gideon Henderson, the chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said: “GGR [greenhouse gas removal] is hard and expensive. And we cannot afford to see it as a surrogate to compensate for continued emissions in sectors that can be decarbonised. It is not an excuse not to decarbonise, so we must drive down emissions anyway.” Henderson said afforestation is the “poster child” of GGR, because “everyone seems to love it, and it’s nice to have more trees”. However, he said trees “are not a panacea” because of the amount of land they need, which is taken out of food production, which then causes tensions with food security. There is also a tension between woodland, which has more biodiversity benefits but is slower growing, and forests, which grow quickly and lock in more carbon sooner.

Prof Mark Taylor, the deputy director of energy innovation at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), said: “People see it as having the biggest market, there’s been funding from American companies – it feels like a silver bullet, there are lots of people who like it. Ministers like it because they think: ‘Oh, that sounds easy, you can take it out the air and that’s it.’ And that’s the thing that gets investment…”

Storing carbon in soil is a popular method, according to Henderson there are concerns over how long the carbon can be stored in the soil and how it is measured. If the soil begins to release carbon again shortly after it is stored, this could cause problems, especially if it is not being measured effectively and counted in net zero targets. He explained: “I think that if we see significant financial resources coming into this area to incentivise storing soil carbon without being able to measure it, and being sure of its permanence, there’s a risk of continued emission from storage which isn’t permanent or sufficiently well measured.”

The idea of a machine that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stick it permanently in rocks is a very attractive one, and it is perhaps unsurprising that this is the most popular technology for scientists trying to solve this problem.

But it is currently a very energy intensive process. Taylor explained: “We need to use energy to extract the CO2, the pure stream CO2 from the solid, so what we’re looking for an integration that can drive down the costs of DAC, and particularly drive down the cost of extracting the CO2 and the energy costs of extracting the CO2. Because at the moment, there’s no point in capturing CO2 from the air and then using natural gas to run a heat process to extract a pure CO2 stream.”

Greenhouse gas removal ‘not a silver bullet to achieve net zero’ | Carbon capture and storage (CCS) | The Guardian

 The tally of unionized Starbucks locations is continuing to grow.  The Starbucks Workers United union campaign continues to produce astounding election wins week after week.  260 stores have petitioned for National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections: The union has won 77 NLRB elections, (87%) most by overwhelming margins, including in places where union victories are rare, including in Mesa, Arizona; Boone, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Knoxville, Tennessee; Augusta, Georgia; and Overland Park, Kansas.and has lost only nine elections. 

By the union’s count, there are now 100 stores across the nation that have unionized, that milestone being achieved after successful votes at two stores in Seattle, the birthplace of Starbucks.

Starbuck workers in Greenville, South Carolina, once known as being “among the most relentlessly anti-union cities in the nation,” by The New York Times, voted eight to one to become the first unionized store in the state. For the past two years, South Carolina has been the least unionized state in the country, and  union density in 2021 was just 1.7 percent. Greenville is even more anti-union than the rest of South Carolina. The metropolitan area has only seven employers with any union workers. Local employers brag about it. “In 2021, the private sector unionization rate for the Greenville area was only 0.3%. The Greenville Metropolitan Statistical Area is the least unionized Metropolitan Statistical Area in the United States…There have been no reported work stoppages reported in the past ten years.”

SOURCES

Starbucks Workers United Wins in US’s Most Anti-Union City (truthout.org)

Organizers Herald 100th Win as Starbucks Unionization Wave Continues (commondreams.org)

 A Short Story from the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

 From the May 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard