Published9 hours agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Stephanie HegartyPopulation correspondent, BBC World ServiceThe UN says the world’s population has hit eight billion, just 11 years after passing the seven-billion milestone.After a big surge in the middle of the 20th Century, population growth is already slowing down.It could take 15 years to reach nine billion and the UN doesn’t expect to reach 10 billion until 2080.It’s hard to calculate the number of people in the world accurately, and the UN admits its sums could be out by a year or two.But 15 November is its best estimate for the eight billion line to be crossed. In previous years, the UN has selected babies to represent the five, six and seven-billionth children – so what can their stories tell us about world population growth?A few minutes after he was born in July 1987, Matej Gaspar had a flashing camera in his tiny face and a gaggle of besuited politicians surrounding his exhausted mother.Stuck at the back of a motorcade outside, British UN official Alex Marshall felt partially responsible for the momentary chaos he had brought upon this tiny maternity unit in the suburbs of Zagreb.”We basically looked at the projections and dreamed up this idea that the world population would pass five billion in 1987,” he says. “And the statistical date was 11 July.” They decided to christen the world’s five-billionth baby.When he went to the UN’s demographers to clear the idea they were outraged. “They explained to us ignorant people that we didn’t know what we were doing. And we really shouldn’t be picking out one individual among so many.”But they did it anyway. “It was about putting a face to the numbers,” he says. “We found out where the secretary general was going to be that day and it went from there.” This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.Thirty-five years later the world’s five-billionth baby is trying to forget his ceremonious entry into the world. His Facebook page suggests he’s living in Zagreb, happily married and working as a chemical engineer. But he avoids interviews and declined to speak to the BBC.”Well, I don’t blame him,” Alex says, remembering the media circus of Matej’s first day.Since then, three billion more people have been added to our global community. But the next 35 years could see a rise of only two billion – and then the global population is likely to plateau.Just outside Dhaka in Bangladesh, Sadia Sultana Oishee is helping her mum, peeling potatoes for dinner. She’s 11 and would rather be outside playing football but her parents run a pretty tight ship. The family had to move here when their business, selling fabric and saris, was hit by the pandemic. Life is less expensive in the village, so they can still afford to pay school fees for their three daughters. Oishee is the youngest and the family’s lucky charm. Born in 2011, she was named one of the world’s seven-billionth babies. Her mum had no idea what was about to happen. She hadn’t even expected to give birth that day. After a doctor’s visit she was sent to the labour ward for an emergency Caesarean section. Oishee arrived at one minute past midnight, surrounded by TV crews and local officials craning over each other to see her. The family were stunned but delighted. While her father had hoped for a boy, he’s now happy with his three hard-working, intelligent daughters. His eldest is already in university and Oishee is determined to become a doctor. “We are not that well-off and Covid has made things harder,” he says. “But I’ll do everything to make her dream come true.”Since Oishee was born, another 17 million people have been added to Bangladesh’s growing population. This growth is a great medical success story, but the rate at which Bangladesh is expanding has slowed enormously. In 1980 the average woman would have more than six children, now it is less than two. And that’s thanks to the focus that the country has put on education. As women become more educated they choose to have smaller families. This is crucial for understanding where the world’s population is likely to go. The three main bodies that make projections on global population – the UN, the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington and the IIASA-Wittgenstein Centre in Vienna – vary on the gains they expect in education.The UN says the global population will peak in the 2080s at 10.4 billion but the IHME and Wittgenstein believe it will happen sooner – between 2060 and 2070, at less than 10 billion. But these are just projections. Since Oishee was born in 2011 a lot has changed in the world, and demographers are constantly surprised. “We were not expecting that the Aids mortality would fall so low, that treatment would be saving so many people,” says Samir KC, a demographer at the IIASA. He’s had to alter his model because an improvement in child mortality has a long-term impact, as surviving children go on to have children themselves.And then there are the staggering drops in fertility. Demographers were shocked when the number of children born per woman in South Korea dropped to an average of 0.81, Samir KC says. “So, how low will it go? This is the big question for us.”It is something more and more countries will have to grapple with.While half of the next billion people will come from only eight countries – most of them in Africa – in most countries the fertility rate will be lower than 2.1 children per woman, the number necessary to sustain a population.In Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of the most rapidly declining populations in the world, 23-year-old Adnan Mevic thinks about this a lot. “There is going to be nobody left to pay for pensions for retired people,” he says. “All the young people will be gone.”He has a masters in economics and is looking for a job. If he can’t find one he’ll move to the EU. Like many parts of Eastern Europe, his country has been hit with the double-whammy of low fertility and high emigration.Adnan lives outside Sarajevo with his mum, Fatima, who has surreal memories of his birth.”I realised something was unusual because doctors and nurses were gathering around but I couldn’t tell what was happening,” Fatima says. When Adnan arrived, the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was there to christen him the world’s six-billionth baby. “I was so tired, I don’t know how I felt,” Fatima recalls, laughing.Adnan and his mum flick through photo albums. In one a tiny boy sits in front of a giant cake, flanked by men in suits and military khakis. “While other kids were having birthday parties, I was just visited by politicians,” Adnan says.But there were perks. Being the six-billionth baby led to an invitation to meet his hero, Cristiano Ronaldo, at Real Madrid, when he was 11. He finds it stunning that in 23 years the world population has grown by two billion people. “That’s really a lot,” he says. “I don’t know how our beautiful planet will cope.”More on this storyHow the world got to 8 billion – and where next. Video, 00:01:44How the world got to 8 billion – and where next11 hours ago1:44Where is India’s billionth baby now?27 October

Published10 hours agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Stephanie HegartyPopulation correspondent A global poll commissioned by the BBC highlights the profound and diverse effect that the pandemic had on mental health, says the World Health Organization. A surprising number of people questioned, in 30 countries, report feeling better now than they did before Covid-19. The poll also suggests the effect of the pandemic on wellbeing is more pronounced in women and young people.Nguyen Thanh Giang is on the phone to her dad as he marches through his garden, keen to show her his fruiting mango trees. He’s delighted to hear from his daughter who lives 400km away in Ho Chi Minh city. Before lockdown, Giang was busy running her printing business and raising her teenage son. She rarely called and could go two or three years without seeing her parents. “We didn’t really have a great relationship in the past but, after Covid, I realised I needed to get in touch with them more,” she says.”It really makes me feel like I’m not alone.”In a poll commissioned from GlobeScan by the BBC World Service, 36% of people around the world said they felt better now than before the pandemic, while 27% said they felt worse. Many said that spending more time with family and having a better connection to their community and to nature had all had a positive effect, and they felt clearer about their overall priorities in life.People in Vietnam, India, Egypt, and Nigeria were most likely to say they felt better, while in Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong they were most likely to say the opposite.People in the UK who said they felt worse than before the pandemic narrowly outnumbered those who said they felt better, while in the US it was the other way round. In seven other European countries people were also more likely to respond negatively.The poll was conducted online in June and July this year and reached more than 29,000 people.”The GlobeScan findings show that the pandemic had a profound effect on the mental health of many people,” a WHO spokesperson said. “This effect was not uniform, but diverse and differed between population groups.”Like many young mothers, Tran Nguyen Kim Ngan struggled during Ho Chi Minh City’s fourth and harshest lockdown, which started in June last year. She had a new job and a one-year-old to contend with. “I was so exhausted that to find time for myself I just went to the toilet and stayed there for a few minutes. I took a breath in and out and then continued with my day,” she says.In almost all of the countries surveyed, women were more likely than men to report that the pandemic had a negative impact on their mental health. But the same factors that caused Ngan stress then are now helping her to feel better.Parents living with children under 18 were more likely than others to say their mental health was better than before the pandemic.”I think for me it was easy to recover because I was so busy in my daily life, with work and my child,” Ngan says.The last two years also saw some major changes in her life. She was headhunted for a new job, bought an apartment with her husband and adopted a cat. She’s even started learning Japanese.”I think I’m braver after Covid,” she says. “If I want to do something I just do it now. I don’t delay.”But there were areas where men and women had much more in common, such as their increased sense of community and connectedness after the pandemic. Andrew Oswald, professor of economics and behavioural science at the University of Warwick, cautions against reading too much into people’s accounts of how they felt in the past.”What we know is that there is a persistent kind of optimism-today bias. People look back and incorrectly tend to think that things were worse then and that they are happier now,” he says. “This has been demonstrated in long-running longitudinal research by comparing recall levels of happiness with the actual levels of happiness when measured at the time.”But he says the findings on gender are consistent with his own work.The World Happiness Report, which uses survey data from Gallup gathered each year for the past 10 years in 150 countries, suggests a long-term upward trend in stress, worry and sadness in most countries and a slight decline in the enjoyment of life.However, it suggests that how people rate their lives has remained remarkably resilient during Covid-19. There has also been a global upsurge in the proportion of people reporting that they give money to charity, help strangers and do voluntary work.Vietnam moved up two places in the World Happiness rankings this year.At the University of Social Sciences in Ho Chi Minh city, therapist Trinh Thanh Vi has seen a vast improvement in the mental health of her clients in the past year. She’s part of a programme called Vaccine for the Mind that started during the pandemic.It began with a mental health hotline providing support to people during last year’s lockdown, as the city saw a surge in reports of anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Many were also suffering from grief and loss. Three-quarters of Vietnam’s reported Covid deaths happened here. Globally, a third of people surveyed say they lost a close loved one during the pandemic, with 56% of them saying that the death was influenced “a great deal” by Covid-19.But Vi sees a silver lining in all of this – she believes that the past year has raised awareness of mental health in Vietnam. “Now people know where to seek help when they have mental health issues. When they have anxiety or a panic attack, they know where to go,” she says.She also found that during the city’s harsh lockdown, people came together to provide food and support to one another.”This belief in kindness helped people overcome the pandemic,” she says. “In the Vaccine for the Mind programme, there were so many people who decided to come and volunteer for us. After the pandemic I realised my contact list had exploded.”The GlobeScan poll suggests that the pandemic’s impact varied for different generations.When Vietnam went into lockdown, Dang Quang Dung, author of the popular comic Meo Moc, started getting disturbing messages from his readers. Dang’s comic is written as a diary of his own life, his experience of studying abroad, of personal loss, of lockdown – in it he appears as a black cat. He shares these things with his readers, and this encourages them to share their experiences with him.”There were a lot of messages with red flags about trauma, PTSD, things like that,” his partner Wendy Truong explains. “And these were very young people as well.”Together they decided to start a new comic, one that focuses on mental health and offers advice from professionals. In his research in the UK, Prof Andrew Oswald found that young people took the biggest wellbeing “hit” while the old were much less affected psychologically.In GlobeScan’s poll, young people aged 18-24 were much more likely to say the pandemic had a major effect on their mental health – either positive or negative. Older people were more likely to say it had no effect at all. This may suggest varying attitudes to, or awareness of, mental health. “My dad’s a doctor but he doesn’t recognise mental health as a real issue,” Wendy says. “In Vietnam, it’s really divided right now.”The younger people she knows are taking care of themselves now more than ever, organising group calls, checking up on each other more regularly or taking part in yoga or meditation. Others who seem to have benefited more are those on higher incomes and people who live in cities. This makes sense to Wendy, in a country where younger people are more likely to be urban white-collar workers.”We didn’t get hit, at least financially,” she says. “We could afford to stay indoors and still do work and be employed. But I don’t think that’s the case for everybody. Think of the older uncles and aunties who had to work in factories.”I think for millennials, it’s a lot easier.”A WHO spokesperson said the findings of the poll emphasised that further research was needed on the pandemic’s impact on mental health among specific at-risk populations. The spokesperson noted that outpatient mental health services had been particularly disrupted during the pandemic and that this had “further widened the mental health treatment gap”.”Future studies should therefore focus on scaling up mental health services and psychosocial support as a fundamental component in preparedness and response plans for future public health emergencies.”Additional reporting by Sarah HabershonThe full poll results can be downloaded on the GlobeScan website

Published59 minutes agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Stephanie HegartyPopulation correspondent Life expectancy has been slow to rise again after the shock of the pandemic, according to new research.Data on registered deaths from 31 countries shows few recovering in 2021, and many seeing further declines.Countries that rolled out vaccines quickly, to all age groups, have generally bounced back faster.Life expectancy in England and Wales rose slightly in 2021, while in Scotland and Northern Ireland it fell further, the researchers say.The paper – from the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research – is an update to research from last year, which found the pandemic caused the biggest global drop in life expectancy since World War Two.Researchers compiled data on registered deaths from 31 countries – 29 in Europe, plus Chile and the US. They found that in only four – Belgium, France, Sweden and Switzerland – has life expectancy returned to the level it was in 2019. The situation was worse in the US and in Eastern and Central Europe, which saw further declines in 2021.”The scale of the worsening losses, particularly in Eastern Europe, are really quite sad,” says Ridhi Kashyap, professor of demography at the University of Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, and one of the authors of the report.The drop in life expectancy in many of these European countries has mirrored the health and mortality crisis that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union, the researchers say. Image source, Getty ImagesThese life expectancy figures – known as “period life expectancy” – aren’t a prediction of how long a child born today will live for. They show the average age a new-born would live to if today’s death rates persisted for that child’s entire life.Before the pandemic, life expectancy was on a consistent upward trajectory almost everywhere. Lives were getting longer, on average, year on year. But that changed dramatically in 2020. In England and Wales, period life expectancy dropped from 81.7 years in 2019 to 80.7 in 2020. A year later it was up only a little – to 80.9. Period life expectancy figures for Northern Ireland and Scotland in 2021 were 80.3 and 78.5 respectively.The UK’s Office for National Statistics will publish its data on life expectancy for 2021 at the end of this year. Covid-19 in the UK: Cases, hospital admissions and deathsCovid protection may be boosted by genesOne in 20 suffer long-term Covid effects, study finds”Pre-pandemic life expectancy in the UK didn’t compare very well with much of Western Europe,” says Dr Veena Raleigh, senior fellow at UK health charity, The Kings Fund. “We were already lagging behind – we were seeing the slowest improvements in life expectancy,”We went into this virus with a health and social care system that was overstretched – long waiting lists, and fewer beds, nurses and doctors than most Western European or high-income countries.”She cautions against reading too much into comparisons between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as the latter nations have much smaller population sizes.In the US the drop was even higher – falling two years in 2020 and a further two months in 2021. Image source, Getty ImagesWhat struck the researchers was the age of people dying last year. As vaccines rolled out to older age groups, excess deaths dropped among the over-80s in most countries. But under-80s started contributing more to life expectancy losses.Where vaccines were rolled out earlier and to all age groups at the same time, life expectancy was more likely to bounce back. Bulgaria is a striking example. It lost a year and a half on its life expectancy in 2020 and a further two years in 2021. By the end of 2021 only one in four Bulgarians were vaccinated, and only 37% of over-60s, the lowest rate in the EU. Dr Raleigh says the regional differences between Eastern and Western Europe are particularly noteworthy. Before Covid, gaps in life expectancies between East and West were narrowing, but this study shows that the pandemic has reversed that trend. Similarly, before the pandemic, the gap between the life expectancies of men and women was narrowing: “The pandemic has opened up that gap again.” The study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, was limited to 31 countries by the quality of data available. “There have probably been countries that had much worse pandemics in terms of life expectancy losses but because of data inequalities in the world, we’re not in a position to measure that at the moment,” says Prof Kashyap. While many hope that life expectancy will recover in 2022, Prof Kashyap says the effects of Covid are still being felt in health systems all over the world: “There are worrying signs in England and Wales of excess mortality, particularly over the summer. It hasn’t been a smooth recovery.”

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage source, Getty ImagesPresident Biden is asking world leaders to pledge to vaccinate 70% of the global population by September next year. But research shows rich countries are still holding surpluses of vaccines, many of which could soon be thrown out.Boarding a plane to Iran this summer, Bahar was excited to see her father for the first time in four years. She had no idea coronavirus was about to rip through the country – and her family – in a deadly second wave. First it was a friend of the family, who was preparing for her son’s wedding when she got sick. She died soon after. Then it was her father’s uncle, then an elderly aunt. Bahar worried desperately about her grandmother who had only had one vaccine dose and was still waiting for her second.Bahar is 20 and lives in the US where she got vaccinated in April. Though she knew she was somewhat protected, she spent the final days of her trip cloistered in her father’s house worried about who the virus would attack next. Few members of her family have been vaccinated in a country where supplies are low. Soon after she returned to the US, she found out her father was sick. She was far away and paralysed with fear. “It’s like survivor’s guilt,” she says. “I left Iran totally fine, completely healthy just because I had two shots of the Pfizer vaccine.” Her father recovered but many older relatives did not. “I felt pretty guilty knowing that.” image source, SubmittedThis imbalance of the vaccine supply makes for stark statistics. Just over half of the world has yet to receive even one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. According to Human Rights Watch, 75% of Covid vaccines have gone to 10 countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit have calculated that half of all of the vaccines made so far have gone to 15% of the world’s population, the world’s richest countries administering 100 times as many shots as the poorest. In June, members of the G7 – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – pledged to donate one billion doses to poor countries over the next year. “I smiled when I saw that,” says Agathe Demarais, lead author of a recent report on global vaccines supply at the Economist Intelligence Unit and a former diplomat. “I used to see this a lot. You know it’s never going to happen.” Covid vaccine tracker: How’s my country doing?The UK promised 100m of that pledge, so far it has donated just under nine million. President Biden pledged 580m of which the US has delivered 140m so far. And the EU bloc promised 250m doses by the end of the year – it has sent about 8% of those. Like many middle-income countries, Iran bought vaccines from Covax, the global scheme supported by the WHO to get doses where they’re needed most. Covax purchases and then sells vaccines at low-cost to middle income countries and donates to poor countries. image source, Getty ImagesBut Covax has faced a major supply problem. It planned to distribute two billion doses in 2021 with most of them coming from a facility in India but when a second wave of infections crippled India in May, the government issued an export ban.Since then Covax has relied on doses donated by rich countries. And supply has been slow, some of the receiving countries have yet to vaccinate 2% of their population. “Currently doses tend to get shared in low volumes, at short notice, and with shorter than ideal expiry dates – making it a huge logistical lift to allocate and deliver these to countries able to absorb them,” says Aurélia Nguyen, managing director of the Covax facility.How many vaccines are rich countries sharing?It’s not a global supply problem. Rich countries have been building up surpluses of vaccines, according to Airfinity, a science analytics company researching global supply. Vaccine manufacturers are now making 1.5bn doses every month, 11bn will have produced by the end of the year. “They’re producing a huge number of doses. It has scaled up immensely over the last three or four months,” says Dr Matt Linley, lead researcher at Airfinity.The world’s richest countries could have 1.2bn doses that they don’t need – even if they start administering boosters.A fifth of those doses – 241 million vaccines – could be at risk of going to waste if they are not donated very soon, says Dr Linley. It’s likely that poorer countries won’t be able to accept vaccines unless they have at least two months left before they expire. “I don’t think it was necessarily rich countries being greedy, it’s more that they didn’t know which vaccines would work,” says Dr Linley. “So they had to purchase several of them.”With its latest research Airfinity hopes to show governments that there is a healthy supply of vaccines and that they don’t need to keep surpluses. Instead they can donate what they don’t need now and be confident that more doses will be produced in the coming months. “They don’t want to be caught off guard,” says Agathe Demarais. “It’s also about domestic political pressure because part of the electorate would probably be very unhappy to see vaccines being donated, if there is a feeling that they’re still needed at home.” The UK government says it does not have a stockpile of vaccines and has made an agreement with Australia to share four million doses which will be returned from Australia’s own allocation at the end of the year.”Vaccine supply and deliveries have been carefully managed in the UK to offer all those who are eligible the opportunity to be vaccinated as soon as possible,” says a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care. Covid map: Where are cases the highest? Aurélia Nguyen at Covax says it’s not just governments that need to act. “We also need manufacturers to meet their public commitments to Covax and prioritise us over bilateral deals to nations that already have enough doses.” If global vaccine manufacturers are now producing 1.5 billion doses every month, she says, the question is why are so few reaching poor countries. “Where Covax’s need is greatest, governments should swap their place in the queue so we can get the doses we have ordered sooner.”For Bahar and her family, these doses aren’t just numbers they are real lives, friends and family. Every few days, she hears another story of someone who has died. When friends at university said they don’t want to get vaccinated she used to try to argue with them but she can’t do it anymore, it’s too upsetting. “I just try to let it go but it’s definitely hard seeing people not use the privilege that they have.”

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage copyrightAFPIn November Pascuala Vázquez Aguilar had a strange dream about her village Coquilteel, nestled among the trees in the mountains of southern Mexico. A plague had come to the village and everyone ran to the forest. They hid in a hut under a tall canopy of oak trees.”The plague couldn’t reach us there,” Pascuala says. “That’s what I saw in my dream.”A few months later the pandemic had engulfed Mexico and thousands of people were dying every week. But Coquilteel and many small, indigenous towns in the state of Chiapas were left relatively unscathed. This has been a blessing but it also presents a problem.Almost 30% of Mexicans have received one vaccine against Covid-19 so far but in the state of Chiapas the take-up rate is less than half of that. In Coquilteel, and many remote villages in the state, it’s likely to be closer to 2%. Last week Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador remarked on the low vaccination rate in Chiapas and said the government needed to do more.Covid map: Where are cases the highest? Covid vaccines: How fast is worldwide progress?Pascuala is a community health leader for 364 communities in the area and she has been vaccinated. She travels in and out of the village and worries about bringing Covid back to her family and friends who, like most of their neighbours are not vaccinated.They’re influenced by lies and rumours swirling around on WhatsApp. Pascuala has seen messages saying the vaccine will kill people after two years, that it’s a government plot to reduce the population or that it’s a sign of the devil that curses anyone who receives it.image copyrightAFPThis kind of disinformation is everywhere but in villages like Coquilteel, it can be particularly potent. “People don’t trust the government. They don’t see the government doing anything good, they just see a lot of corruption,” Pascuala says.The community in Chilón are predominantly indigenous descendants of the Mayan civilisation. In Chiapas there are over 12 official traditional languages spoken. The first language in Coquilteel is Tzeltal and few people speak much Spanish.The indigenous community in this part of Mexico has a history of resistance to the central authorities, culminating in the Zapatista uprising in 1994. “The government doesn’t consult people on how they want to be helped or how to govern,” says Pascuala. “The majority don’t believe that Covid exists.”This isn’t just a problem in Mexico or in Latin America, it’s happening all over the world. In northern Nigeria in the early 2000s and later in parts of Pakistan, distrust of the authorities led to boycotts of the polio vaccine. Some of these communities believed a lie that the vaccine was sent by the US as part of the “War on Terror”, to cause infertility and reduce their Muslim population.”There is fertile ground for rumours and misinformation where there’s already a lack of trust in authorities and maybe even in science,” says Lisa Menning, a social scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO) who researches barriers to vaccine uptake. “There are information gaps and perhaps poorly designed communications campaigns that have targeted these communities historically.”image copyrightGerardo GonzálezNicolasa Guzmán García spends much of her day in Coquilteel tending to her chickens and growing fresh vegetable for her family. She does believe Covid is real but doesn’t feel the need to be vaccinated. “I don’t leave my home very much. I don’t travel to the city, I’m focused on looking after my animals,” she says.She also believes that their traditional lifestyle protects the community – they eat healthy, fresh food and get a lot of fresh air and exercise. And like a lot of indigenous communities across Latin America, the Tzeltal practise a mix of Catholicism and their ancient spiritual religion.”I can’t say if this vaccine is bad or good because I don’t know how it was made, who made it and what’s in it,” says Nicolasa. “But I prepare my traditional medicine myself so I have more confidence in it.”She uses a mixture of cured tobacco, home-made alcohol and garlic to help with breathing problems, and tinctures made from Mexican marigold flowers or water of the rue plant for fever.Colombia bets on privately funded vaccinationsSecond doses run dry in Brazil’s scramble to vaccinateMedical doctor Gerardo González Figueroa has been treating indigenous communities in Chiapas for 15 years and says trust in herbal medicine is not just out of tradition but necessity – because medical facilities are often far away.He believes there are some protective benefits from traditional diet, lifestyle and healing practices but he is extremely worried about low vaccination rates.”I don’t think the efforts of the Mexican government have been strong enough in getting all of society involved,” he says. “These institutions have been acting in a paternalistic manner. It’s ‘go and get your vaccines’.”image copyrightAFPThe federal government has said its vaccination programme is a success, with mortality declining by 80% amidst the third wave of Covid sweeping across Mexico’s more densely populated urban areas.Pascuala believes the authorities gave up too easily when they saw that people were rejecting getting vaccinated in the village.”It’s a false binary to think of supply and demand as separate things,” says Lisa Menning of the WHO. She points to the US, where polling in March showed communities of colour had also been hesitant to get vaccinated until authorities put a major effort into making vaccination accessible. Vaccination rates in these communities are now much higher.”Having easy, convenient and really affordable access to good services, where there’s a health worker who’s really well-trained and able to respond to any concerns and responds in a very caring and kind respectful way – that is what makes the difference.”It can’t be a top-down approach, she says. “What works best is listening to communities, partnering with them, working with them.”Coquilteel is one of millions of small, rural communities around the world where this is sorely lacking. For now, all Pascuala can do is keep trying to convince people to get vaccinated and she’s focusing her efforts on those who leave the village, like truck drivers. But until everyone is vaccinated, she can only put her trust in other powers.”Thanks to God we live in a community where there are still trees, and where the air is still clean,” she says. “I think in some way, Mother Earth is protecting us.”You may also be interested in