International

Using nature’s beauty as a tourist draw can boost conservation in China’s valued panda preserves, but it isn’t an automatic ticket out of poverty for the human habitants, a unique long-term study shows.

The policy hitch: Often those who benefit most from nature-based tourism endeavors are people who already have resources. The truly impoverished have a harder time breaking into the tourism business.

A Michigan State University anthropologist who spent more than a year infiltrating the black market for human kidneys has published the first in-depth study describing the often horrific experiences of poor people who were victims of organ trafficking.

Monir Moniruzzaman interviewed 33 kidney sellers in his native Bangladesh and found they typically didn’t get the money they were promised and were plagued with serious health problems that prevented them from working, shame and depression.

In a narrow, modest laboratory in Michigan State University’s Giltner Hall, graduate and undergraduate students in MSU’s Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Program pore over African skeletons from the Middle Ages in an effort to learn everything they can from them.

“This is generally an unknown group of people, so what we get to do with the skeletal collection is really make the bones speak,” said Carolyn Hurst, a doctoral student in physical anthropology who is leading the lab this academic year. 

Bacteria infections -- most of which are preventable via vaccines readily available in the developed world -- and not malaria are the leading cause of death for children in sub-Saharan Africa.