By Rosie Collyer in Kpong

The women have begun delivering health-related materials to isolated communities around Lake Volta. They drop specially designed aerodynamic packages containing information on how to prevent schistosomiasis, which is classified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a neglected tropical disease.

“The disease is particularly prevalent around the lake due to poor sanitation,” Lester Chihitsulo, a WHO expert, told RFI. “The communities that are worst affected lack access to potable water and hygiene education.”

Humans become infected with schistosomiasis through contact with snails that live in stagnant water. Symptoms include fever and passing blood in the urine and faeces.

Children are particularly at risk because of their play habits. Infected children suffer from stunted cognitive growth due to the parasite eating away at their internal organs.

Although the WHO strategy for combating the disease is increased access to the drug praziquantel, Chihitsulo says, “We also encourage organisations to collaborate with the ministry of health in a given country to assist in delivering hygiene education.”

Many of the villages around Lake Volta are several hours from a tarmac road and others are completely cut off during the rainy season. So the easiest way for communities to be reached is by air.

The trainees are not only being taught to build, maintain and fly light aircraft, the four-year training course also includes modules in community health care. While schistosomiasis prevention is the organisation’s main focus, it also hopes that, once the women graduate, they will be able to fly to villages and give basic healthcare.

“We are convinced that by training women, as opposed to men, they will be compelled to serve their communities,” Jonathan Porter, Medicine On The Move's founder told RFI. “Men tend to leave rural areas and go to the city or abroad when they obtain these kinds of skills.”

Earlier this month Patricia Malwali - who is one of only a handful of Ghanaian women to hold her pilot’s license - with the assistance of a co-pilot dropped information on how to prevent schistosomiasis to more than thirty villages. “The packages are dropped above school playgrounds to ensure they are picked up by teachers who can read,” Malwali explains.

For now Medicine On The Move’s contribution to the eradication of schistosomiasis in Ghana may only represent a drop in the ocean.

Access to medication in the form of praziquantel has a much bigger impact with more than 33.5 million people being treated with the drug in 2010 as opposed to 12.4 million in 2006.

But praziquantel doesn’t prevent reinfection, which is why education remains a key component in the complete eradication of the disease. tags: Airplane - Disease - Ghana - Health - Report

Born in 1706, Emilie had three pieces of great good fortune in her life. The first was to be born with a remarkable brain. Her greatest work was to translate the “Principia”, the path-breaking work on physics by the secretive Cambridge brainbox, Isaac Newton, who died when Emilie was 20. She did not just translate his writing from Latin to French; she also expressed Newton's obscure geometric proofs using the more accessible language of calculus. And she teased out of his convoluted web of theorems the crucial implications for the study of gravity and energy. That laid the foundation for the next century's discoveries in theoretical physics. The use of the square of the speed of light, c², in Einstein's most famous equation, E=mc² is directly traceable to her work. Emilie's second piece of luck was that her father allowed her to use her brain: not much, admittedly, but certainly far more than most bright girls of her time and country. She was not sent to a convent. He was wealthy and liberal-minded enough to buy her books and talk to her about astronomy. He married her to Florent-Claude, Marquis du Châtelet-Lomont, who was a touch dull but decent—and unbothered by his brainy wife's intellectual and amorous adventures. Indeed, he liked and admired Voltaire.

Her third great good fortune was her array of mind-expanding, appreciative lovers. They may have been unsatisfactory mates by today's standards, but they were rarities in an age when few men looked for intellectual companionship from women. Emilie started by bedding the Duc de Richelieu, the “most sought-after man in France”. He bolstered her intellectual confidence, dented by an isolated childhood and early marriage. Even when she dumped him, they remained friends. Then came Voltaire, needy, self-indulgent, unreliable and self-centred—but still the love of her life and its great intellectual and cultural stimulus. Even when passion cooled, they remained great companions. Finally, she fell in love with Jean-François, Marquis de Saint-Lambert, a much younger poet. He filled the emotional and physical gap left by Voltaire. But he also proved careless in what passed for contraception in those days. That led to pregnancy and the infection that killed Emilie when she was only 42. It is tempting to speculate what heights of discovery Emilie might have achieved in a healthier and more open-minded age. But that would be to miss the point. The remarkable thing is that she managed so much, and with such good humour and reflective self-knowledge. It is her biographer's good fortune that there is a great deal of accessible material about her life. Voltaire was spied on energetically; a thicket of secret police reports remains. So too do many of her letters, both sent and received.

The book may strike some readers as slightly lubricious in its attention to Emilie's sexual habits and predilections. A more serious shortcoming, explicable only by authorial laziness (unlikely) or publisher's stinginess (all too probable) is the startling and inconvenient lack of an index. That is just the sort of slap-happy approach to which Voltaire was prone, and which so pained Emilie.

Particle accelerators, popularly known as atom smashers, whip sub-nuclear particles like protons and electrons to high speeds and then force them to collide. The collisions generate a storm of particles flying in many directions.

Some of these short-lived particles have not existed since the Big Bang created the universe nearly 14 billion years ago, and identifying them and charting their behaviour have been principal goals of modern high-energy physics.

With his invention, the multiwire proportional tracking chamber, Charpak vastly improved the ability of physicists to measure and record what goes on inside particle accelerators. Earlier detectors, like the cloud chamber and bubble chamber (which also earned Nobels for their inventors) depended on taking photographs of the tracks left by particles as they emerged from collisions.

Charpak's chamber, by contrast, used many minuscule wires to capture electric pulses, thus generating vastly more information. The data was instantaneously fed into a computer for interpretation. No longer did scientists have to scan thousands of photographs.

The invention meant that hundreds of millions of particles a second could be sensed, evaluated and recorded. It allowed scientists testing theories to search out the one particle in a billion for which they were hunting.

Two Nobel Prizes were awarded for identifying sub-atomic phenomena using Charpak's device before he received his. Variants of the device now contribute to the Large Hadron Collider put into operation this year at Cern, in Geneva, where Charpak worked for decades. That project aims to explain the origins of the universe.

Leon Lederman, Charpak's former boss at Cern and a winner of the Nobel physics award himself, said in 1992 that Charpak's instrument worked by very indirect means. "No one's ever seen an atom, really," he said. Accordingly, he said, Charpak measured the infinitesimal electric impulses that particles leave as they race through one of his devices. Dr Lederman compared the phenomenon to hearing a noise in the sky and looking up to see a vapour trail, then reasoning that an aeroplane had passed.

Charpak was born in a village in Poland that is now in Ukraine. The family moved to Paris in 1932 when he was seven. After France surrendered to Germany in June 1940, his family refused to wear the yellow star the Nazis demanded Jews wear. They obtained false identity papers under the name Charpentier.
As a teenager, Charpak became active in the French Resistance and was imprisoned by the pro-Nazi French government in 1943. In 1944, he was transferred to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany. In an article he wrote in 1994, he said that at

the first camp, in France, prisoners took two spoonfuls of the thin broth they received to give to "the weakest and sickest among us". He wrote: "It was a gesture that gave us a sense of great dignity."

After the war, Charpak became a French citizen and got a degree in mining engineering from the École des Mines, then a PhD from the Collège de France. While pursuing his doctorate, he worked in the laboratory of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

He joined Cern in 1959 and stayed until his retirement in 1991. He was part of a team that in 1961 determined that a particle known as the muon was not a separate particle of the nucleus, but just a heavy electron. In an interview in 2009, he called this his proudest accomplishment. In 1968, he invented the multiwire proportional tracking chamber.

After winning the Nobel Prize, Charpak tried to apply its principles in biology and medicine. One of his first projects was to study electrical impulses in rats' brains.

His research led to the development of a camera used by Nasa to monitor astronauts' hearts. He developed an X-ray machine that uses one-tenth the radiation of a conventional X-ray. He also worked on ways to reprogramme cancerous cells so they would no longer be malignant.

Charpak, who had earlier investigated using radiation to find subterranean minerals, recently developed a radon detector to help predict earthquakes. He was a strong advocate of nuclear power, which provides more than three-quarters of France's electricity.

When he became alarmed that only 3 per cent of French primary schools introduced their students to science, he started a programme in 1996 to encourage students to learn by doing their own scientific experiments. It spread to 12 other countries.

In 2004, Charpak and Henri Broch wrote a jaunty, sardonic book titled Debunked, deriding ESP, telekinesis, Ouija boards and other phenomena they regarded as pseudoscience. They said astrology was inaccurate because the earth's axis shifts, making heavenly signs inherently imprecise.

Asked what he planned to do with his prize money in 1992, Charpak absentmindedly replied that he had hoped to buy a pair of shoes that afternoon, but guessed he would not have time. He soon received gifts of shoes from all over the globe.