ANGELA MERKEL will make history next month as Germany’s first woman chancellor and the first East German to hold the post. The 51 year-old conservative politician and specialist in quantum chemistry has consistently refused to draw attention to her uniqueness, underlining instead her ambitious reform programme for kick-starting the flagging German economy and fighting rising unemployment.

Questioned about her determination to steer clear of demands that she campaign for the interests of women and fellow easterners, Merkel has often replied that a ‘chancellor has German interests’.

But as she prepares to become the country’s first Bundeskanzlerin — female chancellor — Merkel is under increasing pressure to stand up for German women seeking to break the glass ceiling and start climbing up the political and executive ladder.

Merkel’s refusal to be drawn into gender politics is not surprising given her upbringing in the former East Germany where women had equal rights, guaranteed by law, both at home and in the workplace.

But reunited Germany is no paradise for working women.

Europe’s most powerful economy has done much less than other industrialized countries in promoting the cause of working women. As a result, combining family and work remains a daunting challenge for millions of women.

Women in Germany face deep-rooted cultural attitudes and structural hurdles in their struggle to be counted as politicians, workers and business executives.

Women hold only nine per cent of top and middle management jobs in German companies. A lack of day-care facilities for infants and traditional half-day schooling force many new mothers to stay at home. Women can by law return to their jobs for up to three years but those who do often find they have lost ground to men.

Government figures show that only one in five children under 3-years gets a place in day care. As a result the proportion of women working drops after the age of 30. Only 58.8 per cent of all German adult women worked in 2002, compared with more than 66 per cent in Britain or the US. And only 1.3 babies on average were born to German women of childbearing age, much lower than the 2.3 babies born in the US.

Unlike other European countries, German women still have to choose between having children and opting for a career. Merkel clearly opted for the second alternative by having no children although she is divorced and remarried, a fact that many German women say makes her unqualified to stand up for the real problems facing working mothers.

True to form, the new German government Merkel announced this week has only a limited number of female ministers. Annette Schavan, a close aide and friend of Merkel’s, will get the education portfolio. Another state minister and rising star in the Christian Democrats, Ursula von der Leyen, will become minister for families.

Von der Leyen, Merkel said, ‘stands for the ability to combine career and family’.

Interestingly, although Merkel avoided women’s issues for most of her campaign, she did zero in on her gender just before the September 18 elections by assertively courting women voters. The change in tack was preceded by a change in her appearance. Long known for her frumpy look, Merkel underwent a radical make-over, including a new haircut courtesy of Berlin’s most-famous hairdresser, more modern trouser suits and the application of a generous amount of tasteful make-up.

However, that did not prevent her from being attacked by a number of women leaders and politicians, including Doris Schroeder-Kopf, the wife of outgoing German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who said she could not understand the problems faced by working mothers because she had never had children.

Green Party cabinet leader Renate Kunast urged voters to be careful with Merkel with the warning, ‘just because she’s a woman doesn’t mean she’ll act like one’.

Much of this criticism can be dismissed as party politics but Merkel has also been taken to task by women in her own party. Imgard Karwatzki, a member of parliament with the CDU (Christian Democrat Union), complained recently that “the word ‘woman’ doesn’t make an appearance at all in the (CDU) platform”.

Merkel’s ‘grand coalition’ of CDU ministers and representatives of Schroeder’s Social Democrats (SPD) faces a tough, uphill task in breathing new life into the German economy. Given the enormity of the task ahead, the problems facing women in Germany is unlikely to get more than a passing hearing.

The new chancellor has already entered the history books as the first woman to run Europe’s biggest and most powerful nation. She could leave an equally important legacy as the first German chancellor to undertake the kinds of reforms needed to improve the lives of other German working women.

MUZAFFARABAD: There may no longer be any government to speak of, but in Kashmir’s earthquake-ravaged mountains, villagers are taking order into their own hands, making sure the neediest are fed.

A deep solidarity reigns in the hamlets of Azad Kashmir, ensuring survival for far-flung communities where government assistance is yet to come and which aid helicopters have never reached.

Villagers who have come to Azad Kashmir’s devastated capital Muzaffarabad from the hills some 40 kilometres away say they have lived off donations, often from relatives, that are channelled through to those who have nothing.

And sometimes, they are willing to go without to ensure the most vulnerable are taken care of.

Dozens of trucks, decorated in gaudy colours in typical South Asian fashion, race in each day to Muzaffarabad, handing out to anyone, anywhere the food, tents and bedding so needed in a region that has 3.3 million homeless after the massive October 8 earthquake.

The trucks are often met with mad scrambles, with people taking whatever scraps they can to make it through until their next chance.

But in Monassa village, residents decided that whatever comes their way should be divided up equally. They created a committee to distribute the donations fairly among the 65 surviving families.

“We have the names of the families. When donations come in, we go to them and make deliveries door to door,” said villager Nadim, 25.

When a truck from the UN World Food Programme came through with biscuits, the committee was ready to split them up. But the elders said no — they should go to the more distant hamlets.

“It’s really hard for people way up in the mountains. They can’t be reached by car so let’s go and find them,” Nadim remembers the elders saying.

A bit further up in the mountains, the 15 families in Baglota have a similar pact. In the town, bags of donated rice and sugar are stored under a mat amid the rubble. It’s also the supply depository for 30 more families living in the mountains and cut off from the world.

Hassan Zahoor, an 18-year-old student, is in charge of distribution and he tries to make sure it’s done fairly.

“Each family gets 10 kilos of sugar and rice. For the time being there’s enough for 15 days. For water, everyone goes to get it from a well that’s an hour by foot,” he said.

The aid came from relatives in Rawalpindi near Islamabad. Everyone in the village also retrieved whatever plates and dishes they could salvage from the ruins and are sharing them. They pitched in to buy three tents.

In Balandkot village, residents firmly refused an offer of aid brought from visiting university students and instructors in Islamabad, redirecting them to a hamlet on the other side of the mountain.

“Three villages refused aid. They said they had enough. They talked about the hamlet of Attayasa that you could only reach by climbing the mountain. It was totally destroyed — 10 families completely abandoned,” said teacher Arif Khattar, 30.

They asked the survivors of Attayasa to come down to their trucks and the villagers went back with supplies on their backs like Sherpas.

“The big problem is reaching little mountain hamlets that are completely destroyed but still have two or three houses,” said World Food Programme spokeswoman Mia Turner.

Even if goods and vehicles seem to be getting through via the village network, what is sorely lacking is tents. Most people are sleeping in the wide open or on makeshift mats despite rains and an approaching winter.—AFP

VANCOUVER: When babies receive shots against diseases like polio and measles, their vaccinations may in the future include protection against getting fat, according to researchers.

Infection by certain pathogens triggers rapid increases in fatty tissue in animals, Nikhil Dhurnadha told the annual meeting of NAASO, the Obesity Society, in this western Canadian city.

At the same time, the discovery that many more obese people than normal-weight people have been exposed to a certain virus suggests a link between obesity and viral infection.

“Not all obesity can be explained by infection,” said Dhurandhar, of the Pennington Biomedial Research Center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “Infections can be one of the causes.”

Popular opinion has long held that most obesity is caused simply by overeating, underexercise and a lack of will power. But viruses are just one of many contributing factors that scientists have recently discovered.

Researchers are reporting at the conference on other fat triggers that include a genetic tendency to store fat among groups whose ancestors survived famines, medications such as treatments for psychotic mental disorders, toxins in the environment like organochlorines, and infectious agents like bacteria, viruses and prions.

“Obesity is multifactoral,” Dhurandhar told scientists at the conference.

In an interview with AFP, he said there is proof that at least 10 different pathogens cause obesity in animals. They include canine distemper virus, RAV7 and MAM1 avian viruses, the Borna virus in rats — which is also linked with depression in humans, types of scrapie, three adeno viruses including AD5, AD36 and AD37 which cause fat gain in several species, and chlamydia pneumonae bacteria.

Scientists have also found that when mice are infected by general bacteria from the guts of other mice, the recipients body fat increases.

Dhurandhar became interested in viral causes of obesity while working as a family physician in Bombay in the 1980s, during a severe outbreak of SMAM1, an adeno virus that kills chickens.

A friend noticed that the dead chickens were unusually fat, with enlarged livers, kidneys, low cholesterol levels and an atrophied thymus gland.

Dhurandhar wondered how the virus affected people. He tested his own patients, and found 20 per cent of his obese patients had been exposed to SMAM1, and that those people were significantly heavier with lower cholesterol levels.

He moved to the United States to conduct more research, and started working with Richard Atkinson at the University of Wisconsin. Because US authorities refused permission to import the Indian avian virus, the pair decided to work with adeno virus AD36.

First, they infected laboratory chickens, mice and monkeys, all of which grew significantly fatter and had lower cholesterol.

Then, because they could not test the virus on humans, they examined stored blood from 500 people in Wisconsin, Florida and New York. They found antibodies for AD36 in 30 per cent of the obese people, but only in 11 per cent of people with normal body weight.

And, just as Dhurandhar earlier discovered among his Indian patients, the obese who had been exposed to the virus were 20 per cent heavier than other overweight people. The scientists also studied 26 pairs of twins, and found that in cases where one twin had been exposed to AD36, in all cases their weight was significantly greater.

“In 10 years, people may be able to walk into a clinic and be told that their obesity is due to X cause, such as genes, the endocrine system, or pathogens. That may have a more productive outcome than a blanket treatment right now, (which) is not very successful,” said Dhurandhar.—AFP

ON September 26, 2003, an earthquake measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale hit the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. This earthquake was several times more powerful than the one that has decimated many cities and towns in AJK and the Hazara and Kohistan regions. But quite miraculously not a single person died; 236 people were injured. Given that Hokkaido has a population of close to six million and is heavily urbanized, the zero death toll should be seen as remarkable.

Clearly, the reason for this is that the Japanese know that their island nation is located in one of the most earthquake prone regions of the world and have had the sense to ensure that all their tall buildings and other structures are designed to be earthquake-resistant. The term ‘earthquake-resistant’ means that though the structural damage to a building in the face of a major earthquake (of a magnitude greater than 7.0) cannot be ruled out, chances that such a structure will buckle and collapse are very low.

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), the earthquake of Oct. 8 was caused when the Indian tectonic plate (a piece of the earth’s crust - the globe is divided into 16 such plates) collided with the Eurasian plate. In other words, the South Asian subcontinent moves at the rate of 40 millimetres per year and collides with the Eurasian land mass and this makes the whole region quite prone to seismic activity. The USGS, on an average, records 50 earthquakes every day and the majority of these take place where the tectonic plates meet. In Pakistan’s Northern Areas meet three of the highest mountain ranges in the world - the Hindukush in northwestern NWFP (and extending all the way to western and central Afghanistan), the Karakoram (the mountains in the Gilgit and Skardu regions and further north, east and west) and the western edge of the Himalaya range. That this an area of considerable earthquake activity can be seen by a cursory look at newspaper archives or better by accessing the USGS website which lists all recorded earthquakes.

In fact, those who live in Peshawar, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and other cities in the region will themselves attest to the fact that they have experienced earthquakes of moderate intensity at one time or another. The point here is that much of the Northern Areas, AJK and cities such as Peshawar and Islamabad are all in a region that is prone to earthquakes but nothing seems to have been done to introduce an element of safety in the way structures are built. If this had been done, the devastation may not have been so terrifying.

Muzaffarabad, which according to the USGS lies a mere 10.3 kilometres southeast of the earthquake’s epicentre, is very close to where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet. Engineers and geologists employed by the government, especially those working for the Geological Survey of Pakistan, must be aware of these facts but it seems that such information is not disseminated to those government officials who are in charge of overseeing the planning and construction of buildings. The way structures have collapsed in Muzaffarabad - a reasonably large town even by Pakistani standards - seems to indicate that no effort was undertaken at any level to make the buildings earthquake resistant.

One of the things that will need to be examined at an appropriate date is the role the Geological Survey of Pakistan (GSP) should play in this regard. After all, knowledge that a city lies in a zone with considerable seismic activity should have prompted government planners to include a provision that all structures should have some semblance of devices or design features which could minimize its chances of collapsing in the event of an earthquake. But that has not been done - in fact, a visit to the website of the GSP on Oct. 11 showed that it contained no information on the earthquake, with the site last updated on September 24.

Japan is situated in an as much, if not more, seismically active region. And its population density is in fact greater than Pakistan’s but despite that earthquakes there seem to affect far fewer people. Hopefully, the Pakistan government will learn from this and keep these facts in mind when reconstruction begins.