USAID: May It Rest in Peace

 The Diplomatic Courier published on 23 April 2025 a commentary titled "In Memoriam: USAID (1948-2025)" by Steven E. Hendrix, former senior USAID official.

USAID died quietly in February 2025 undone by political bureaucratic suffocation and homicidal strategic confusion.  What follows the death of USAID will be repackaged into State Department public diplomacy toolkits or crisis response units. Private contractors will fill the void.  Multilateral organizations will pick up the slack.  But in death USAID leaves behind a legacy of people trained, systems built, and crises averted.  

Ethiopia: Cost-Effectiveness of Medical Interventions

The Lancet published in its May 2015 edition an article titled "Health Gains and Financial Risk Protection Afforded by Public Financing of Selected Interventions in Ethiopia: An Extended Cost-effectiveness Analysis."

The researchers looked at health gains (deaths averted) and financial risk protection afforded (cases of poverty averted) by nine interventions that the government of Ethiopia intends to make universally available. 

On a cost-effective basis, the interventions that avert the most deaths, in order, are measles vaccination, pneumococcal conjugate vaccination, and caesarean section surgery.  The interventions that avert the most cases of poverty are caesarean section surgery, tuberculosis treatment, and hypertension treatment.

The authors also included in the study rotavirus vaccination, diarrhoea treatment, malaria treatment, and pneumonia treatment.