BY ROBERT KENNEDY

Associated Press writer

KABUL, Afghanistan — An outbreak of a tropical disease caused by sand fl y bites that leaves disfi g-uring skin sores has hit Afghanistan, with tens of thousands of people infected, health offi cials said Friday.

Cutaneous leishmanisis is a parasitic disease transmitted by the female phlebotomine sand fl y — an insect only 2-3 millimeters long that requires the blood of humans or animals so its eggs can develop. Treatable with medication and not life-threatening, cutaneous leishma-nisis can leave severe scars on the bodies of victims.

The disease threatens 13 million people in Afghanistan, the World Health Organization said, and many impoverished Afghan victims can’t aff ord the medication to treat it.

In Kabul — described by the

WHO as “the world capital of cutaneous leishmaniasis” — the number of cases jumped from an estimated 17,000 a year in the early 2000s to 65,000 in 2009, WHO said.

Peter Graaff , WHO represen-tative to Afghanistan, told The Associated Press on Friday that the stigma and shame attached to the disfi guring disease results in underreporting, and the number of infected people is likely much higher.

“This number is likely to be the tip of the iceberg as cases are grossly underreported,” said Graaff .

An outbreak has occurred in a small village in western Herat province’s Kohsan district with 63 people infected since August, Graaff said.

The cause of the outbreak was unknown and a WHO team has been dispatched to investigate, he said.

The insects thrive in unsan-itary conditions such as piles of garbage and debris and proliferate from June to September. The sand fl ies bite at night, though using bed nets can keep them away. As the disfi guring sores grow larger, many suff er social stigmatization.

“The high cost of treatment makes it diffi cult to integrate anti-Leishma-niasis drugs,” said Dr. Suraya Dalil, acting minister of public health. “I urge donors to take this cause seriously, as it causes unnecessary suff ering amongst a large number of Afghans.”

According to the WHO as many as 12 million people are infected worldwide with the disease, with about 1 million to 2 million new cases annually.

On the Web:http://www.who.int/

leishmaniasis/en/

Disfi guring tropical disease surges in Afghanistan

AP photo

A baby suffering from cutaneous leishmanisis, a parasitic disease transmitted by the female phlebotomine sand fl y that causes disfi guring skin sores, sits with scars before being treated at the Kabul national malaria and lieshmaniasis clinic in Afghanistan.

BY ALEX RODRIGUEZ

Los Angeles Times

CHAIL, Pakistan — People here remember when hundreds of Pakistani Taliban militants roamed through the forested ridges fl anking the Chail River, armed not with AK-47s but with axes.

The militants felled and carted away vast swaths of Himalayan cedar, blue pine and oak, leaving mountain-sides dotted with stumps.

Through illegal logging, the Taliban generated quick cash to keep its arsenals stocked. But nearly a decade of tree-cutting by militants and 35 years of deforestation by unscrupulous timber businesses and landowners have had an unforeseen consequence.

Deforestation along the Swat Valley’s waterways made destruction caused by this summer’s fl oods measurably worse, experts say. The loss of dense woodland made stream and river banks much more prone to erosion. Riverside forests that could have stemmed the force of raging fl oodwaters were gone.

No amount of forest could have averted the disaster wrought by the monsoon downpours that in a matter of days equaled Pakistan’s annual average rainfall. But many forestry experts and environmen-talists say several decades of deforestation in north-western Pakistan and the southern province of Sindh contributed to the toll the fl oods took in those regions.

“Deforestation played a tremendous role in aggra-vating the fl oods,” said Ghulam Akbar, director of the Pakistan Wetlands Program, an environment protection group funded by the United Nations and other international organiza-tions. “Had there been good forests, as we used to have 25 years back, the impact of fl ooding would have been much less.”

Nestled between the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush and the bread-basket plains of Punjab

province, Swat Valley has long been Pakistan’s emerald Shangri-La. Miles of persimmon, apple and peach orchards line meandering mountain lanes where the air is crisp and rivulets and streams run with water clean enough to drink in a cupped hand.

Look closer, however, and the scars left by the Pakistani Taliban earlier in the decade and by illegal loggers known locally as the “timber mafi a” are easily seen throughout the valley’s highlands.

Loggers, with the help of local offi cials who look the other way for a price, have been fl outing legal quotas and illegally felling and shipping Swat timber to the rest of Pakistan for decades. When the Taliban gained strength in Swat in 2003, its leaders saw logging as a revenue source. The militants either cut trees themselves or made timber mafi a outfi ts pay for access to forests.

Environmentalists estimate that timber sales brought in thousands of dollars for the Taliban.

Because the militants had run police out of the region, laws that ban the movement of timber out of

Swat couldn’t be enforced. As much as 15 percent of the forest cover disappeared while the Taliban controlled Swat. Village elders and local environmentalists who spoke out against illegal logging risked being put on the Taliban’s hit list.

A large-scale off ensive waged by the Pakistani army fl ushed Taliban commanders and militants from Swat in the summer of 2009, but by that time the damage to the region’s verdant landscape had been done.

In Sindh province, where fl ooding from the swollen Indus River damaged more than 1.1 million homes, large-scale deforestation along the banks occurred for a diff erent reason.

In the early 1990s, landlords ordered teams of workers to clear vast stands of acacia, poplar and desert pine throughout much of the Indus Valley for the planting of cotton, sugar cane and wheat.

Though Pakistani law protects forests from illegal logging, it is rarely enforced, experts say.

The Sindh landlords either enjoyed cozy ties with government power brokers or were in the government themselves.

Illegal logging adds to Pakistan’s problems

McClatchy photo

Fazl Raheem, 70, lost his home, a guesthouse, his belongings and his poultry farm during catastrophic fl oods that swept through his Swat Valley village of Chail and much of the rest of Pakistan this summer. Many Swat Valley mountainsides and ridges like the one behind Raheem were illegally logged by Taliban militants.

BY BARBARA DEMICK

Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Soft-spoken and so benign that his nickname is “Grandpa,” Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has emerged in recent weeks as the lone champion within the top ranks of the Communist Party for political reform.

At a time when the Communist Party seems confi dent with its handling of its burgeon-ing economy, Wen has developed a habit of speaking out on political reform. “The people’s desire and need for democracy and freedom are irresistible,” Wen said in an interview — one of half a dozen similar comments uttered by Wen since late August.

It’s hardly the language

of a fi rebrand, but by the standards of today’s Communist Party, these are inspiring words that have inspired faint hopes among reform-minded Chinese.

As a four-day meeting of the party’s 300-plus central committee members opened Friday, more than 100 intel-

lectuals released a petition calling for the body to follow through on Wen’s promises of reform. “We call upon the Chinese authorities to make good on their oft-repeated promise to reform the political system,” said the letter, which is being circu-lated online.

Chinese calls for reform fi nd support

Wen JiabaoChina’s premier

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