On this August Friday afternoon, you're surely looking for a distraction or two if you are unlucky enough to be at the office like the rest of us. Look no further than FP's latest (first?) interactive quiz: Spot the Fake Drug. Given a choice between real medicines and counterfeit ones, can you recognize the dangerous fakes?

And check out Roger Bate's fascinating -- and disturbing - (subscribers-only) look at the growing global fake drug trade in the latest issue of FP. He reveals how counterfeiters in India and China mix chalk and dust into phony Viagra pills and cancer meds that are sold around the world. After taking the quiz, you may be more worried than ever about these fakes winding up in your neighborhood pharmacy.

We try to keep the focus here on international issues, but some items are too good to pass up. I hope taxpayer dollars aren't paying for this billboard in Kansas City, or anywhere else:

Via Matt Yglesias, who comments:

If anything, characterizing the sex-engineering link in this manner seems overwhelmingly more likely to reduce interest in engineering than to reduce interest in sex.

World Toilet Expo 2007; Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

This spring, Beijing Olympic organizers went to extraordinary lengths to ensure athletes had the most comfortable sanitation facilities. When foreign athletes at test events complained about the squat-style toilets at key venues, such as the Bird's Nest and Water Cube, officials initiated "toilet alteration projects" (as an organizer described it to Reuters) to replace as many as possible with sit-down commodes.

If only others around the world were so lucky -- to have hygienic toilet facilities of any type.

In this International Year of Sanitation, some 2.5 billion people don't have access to improved sanitation, according to a recent progress report (big pdf). So, in this week's FP List, "The Hardest Places in the World to Find a Bathroom," we highlight five countries, by geographic region, where safe sanitation is in short supply. Yes, there's a "yuck" factor, but sanitation is crucial for public health and is likely one of the most important health advances ever.

Cate Gillon/Getty Images

If you plan on being in London any time soon, you might end up disappointed if you try ordering Peking duck at a restaurant. Inspectors have been going around with tape and sealing shut the special ovens used to prepare the Chinese delicacy.

The ovens, which—surprise—are made in China, lack a Conformité Européenne (CE) mark indicating that they comply with safety regulations on carbon monoxide emissions as established by Eurocrats in Brussels. For the record, there have been no reports of injuries, accidents, or other health problems caused by the 6-foot-tall ovens.

It's another example of Brits being pushed around by EU diktat. Last year, the contentious issue was whether Britain would have to sell beer by the liter, rather than the beloved pint.

In other questionable food regulation news, Italy's anti-immigrant Northern League party has proposed a law in the Lombardy region that would ban Chinese restaurants and Middle Eastern kebab vendors from historic city centers, on the grounds that such eateries would mar their unique character. (Ironically, that logic is also what got Starbucks to withdraw from Beijing's 600-year-old Forbidden City last year.)

Back in London, it may be a month until restaurants can get CE-marked ovens installed and put Peking duck back on the menu.

WorldPublicOpinion.org just released a poll that reveals some surprising insight on what people around the world want from their government when it comes to one of the most touchy subjects of all: abortion.

The poll's 18,465 respondents hail from 18 countries, including China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and the United States. Although the results might not always shock you -- British and French respondents overwhelmingly say that their governments should "leave the matter to individuals" -- they do shed some new light on countries that don't get polled too often.

Forty-seven percent of Egyptians, for instance, want their governments to take a hands-off approach to abortion. So do 67 percent of China's respondents and 48 percent from Turkey and Azerbaijan. Just 28 percent of Iranians say that abortion should be a matter for individuals, but 38 percent want the procedure to be discouraged using "non-punitive measures" such as education and adoption services. Indonesians are far less forgiving: A full 60 percent say that those who have abortions should be criminally prosecuted.

What if you group respondents by religion? Some schools of Islamic law permit abortion in certain cases, such as pregnancies induced by rape, but Muslims in the survey show the strongest support for government measures to discourage abortion, both punitive and not. As for Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church still takes a firm line against abortion, yet Christians as a group are extremely liberal toward the practice: 65 percent favor individual choice in the matter. (Read on -->)

MARIO LAPORTA/AFP/Getty Images

Burnt uncollected rubbish in a street of Fuorigrotta, a district of Naples on May, 20, 2008. Tens of thousands of tons of waste have piled up since late last year as a 14-year problem over a lack of incinerators reaches a new peak. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi held a cabinet meeting for the first time in Naples yesterday, calling the rubbish Italy's "gravest and most urgent" issue and vowing to resolve the crisis.

In December 2006, Jeremiah S. Johnson, 25, began serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Rozdilna, Ukraine, a town near the border with Moldova. When he started, he was HIV negative. In January of this year, he had a midservice medical exam in Kiev and agreed to an HIV test. It came back positive. The Peace Corps told him to pack his bags and return to the United States.

Johnson says the Peace Corps director for Ukraine told him he had to go home because Ukraine doesn't allow HIV-positive foreigners to work there. (If so, this isn't unique. As blogger Andrew Sullivan has pointed out repeatedly, the United States has its own fair share of restrictions on HIV-positive immigrants and tourists.)

Back in Washington, Johnson had an end-of-service medical exam and received written notification that he was being "medically separated" from the Peace Corps. He contacted the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the organization sent a demand letter to the Peace Corps saying that it is violating the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination based on disability. (The State Department, by the way, changed its policies just this February to permit HIV-positive Americans, on a case-by-case basis, to work in the Foreign Service.)

Johnson doesn't have any physical symptoms of HIV. He and the ACLU say the Peace Corps did not assess him to determine if he could continue serving with reasonable accommodations. Additionally, his requests to be assigned to another country were denied.

What do you all think? A few questions come to mind:

• How easy would it be for Johnson to receive medical monitoring of his condition in a poor country (granted, the medical infrastructure in some Peace Corps countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria, is probably stronger than in, say, Burkina Faso and Guinea)?
• What if living in an underdeveloped country aggravated his condition -- would there be liability issues?
• Does how he contracted HIV -- for example, if he was injecting recreational drugs -- make a difference (the manner in which he became HIV positive hasn't been disclosed)?

For more on controversies about the Peace Corps, check out "Think Again: Peace Corps" and some of the reactions the piece prompted.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Due to skyrocketing rice prices, Liberians are switching to pasta and learning how to twirl spaghetti on a fork. In India, the government has restricted rice exports, and moms are choosing between eating and paying for their children's schooling. Meanwhile in the United States, Wal-Mart's Sam's Club warehouse stores are limiting the sale of 20-pound (9 kg) bags of jasmine, basmati, and long-grain white rice to four per customer.

In the developed world, food shortages might be overhyped. The head of the California Rice Commission told Reuters, "Bottom line, there is no rice shortage in the United States. We have supplies." Plus, how many Americans buy 80 pounds of rice per shopping trip? (Apparently, it's restaurant owners and small-business owners who typically buy in bulk.)

But for people in developing countries, outrageous food prices and shortages are a serious reality. Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, which provides food aid to the needy, told FP in this week's Seven Questions, "This is a silent tsunami." Video, audio, and prepared remarks from her recent talk on global food insecurity at the Center for Strategic and International Studies is also available here.

By the way, if you want to help hungry people get rice, play the Free Rice vocabulary game.

"Only one country in the world has eliminated the shortage of transplant kidneys," Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok reports. "Only one country in the world has legalized financial payments to kidney donors."

What country is that? You'll never guess. Click the link to find out.

www.miss-landmine.org

Dignity, a restored sense of beauty, and the spotlight on a serious issue: The goals for Angola's Miss Landmine pageant brought together 18 contestants, all land mine survivors, representing the southwest African nation's provinces. On a television special Wednesday night, the ladies posed in gowns and swimsuits -- and their artificial limbs.  The winner, Augusta Urica, was presented $2,500 USD by Angola's First Lady Ana Paola dos Santos, and will receive a customized artificial limb. You can see some of the contestants' profiles at the event's Web site. (Pictured above is Cuanza Sul, one of the runners-up.)

Each year, between three and four-hundred people are maimed by mines in Angola -- remnants of a 27-year civil war that ended six years ago. Even though significant effort has been put forward to get rid of them, the country remains one of the most mine-laden in Africa.  

There are 80,000 amputees in Angola, most as a result of landmines, according to the International Herald Tribune. Candida Celeste, Angola's minister of family, said, "They showed that they can, that they are able... This will provide encouragement to all those left invalid by the war."

The pageant came ahead of International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action which falls on April 4 each year.  As the tens of thousands of Angolans can attest, mines are not weapons that can be easily and completely undeployed, and they continue taking lives and livelihoods for generations after hostilities cease. Though, as these women prove, there can be life after landmines as well.

The government of the Philippines wants its citizens to know that crucifixion can pose a health risk:

Philippine health officials Wednesday warned people taking part in Easter crucifixions and self-flagellation rituals to get a tetanus shot first and sterilise the nails to avoid infections.

Every Good Friday in this predominately Roman Catholic Southeast Asian nation dozens of men re-enact the crucifixion of Jesus Christ by having themselves nailed to wooden crosses.

Should we be worried that the Web site for Iraq's Ministry of Health has turned into a conglomeration of dating websites and online car-insurance deals?

The U.S. Department of Commerce and the Library of Congress still link to it, while the World Health Organization offers its own link farm of choice:

Warning: Passport recommends against exploring these Web sites, as your computer could become infested with spyware, or worse.

MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

Yesterday was a good day for the NIMBYs in Shanghai as Mayor Han Zheng announced that a controversial maglev train is not on the list of projects to begin construction in 2008. Protests in January reflected significant public opposition to the plan. Xinhua reported that the project had not passed evaluation and that there is still feedback pending from the public and "national experts." The train is off the table until at least next year.

In another case of protest yielding results, construction of a Xiamen chemical factory has been blocked due to public concern. Mayor Liu Cigui said:

Faced with the choice of becoming a chemical industry base or a coastal scenic city, we think we should stick to the latter."

So, are we seeing hints of local democracy in China? Liu's move could be seen as part of a growing trend to consider the public's views on big construction decisions. Zhou Shengxian, director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, has said that major projects will involve public input in the future. And beginning in May, new transparency laws will go into effect essentially mandating government release of environmental information within 15 days of a public inquiry. To what effect that mandate will be carried out remains to be seen, but the tone and direction of such a change is inarguably positive.

This all reflects a new emphasis in China on the quality of economic development. China is now aiming for 8 percent GDP growth in 2008 -- as opposed to the double-digit targets of recent years. Wang Xiaoguang, a Beijing-based economist, interpreted the change this way:

This is also a clear message to local governments: that they should focus their attention on the quality, rather than pace, of development."

TEH ENG KOON/AFP/Getty Images

Zhao Baige, the Chinese vice minister of family planning, announced yesterday that though the details still need to be ironed out, the government would like to gradually amend its controversial one-child policy. The system today is much more fluid than the original name intended. In practice, rural families and ethnic minorities can have more than one child, as can urban couples who are both from one-child familes. For the most part, so can families with money

In its desire to stay in power, perhaps the Communist Party is following Richard Cincotta's advice about mature populations giving rise to democracy. The more mature the Chinese population gets, the more stable society becomes which can yield a definitive, lasting transition to democracy. China seems to have missed the boat in multiple senses. The student protests of 1989 were a bit too early on the national democracy cosmic calendar, and according to Cincotta’s numbers, the People’s Republic passed the democracy threshold in 1998. 

This one-child policy amendment may be an attempt to assure a robust, young generation whose workforce wages will pay for the aging generation; but the higher proportion of youth would also create the unsettledness necessary to prevent democracy. It could be an act designed to draw diplomatic brownie points ahead of the Olympics by easing one of the most intrusive government policies still in place. As controversial as the system has been, population control has definitely been an important factor in curbing poverty and fostering development. It will be interesting to see what the Chinese government's new target will be for a sustainable population in the next century.

iStockphoto.com

Ireland may be one of the best places to be an immigrant, and now there are so many newcomers from right-hand-traffic countries that an Irish senator has proposed that the Emerald Isle switch to driving on the right, too.

Such a change would be "not even remotely feasible," the country's Automobile Association told the Independent. But the senator, Donnie Cassidy, cited the case of Sweden. It switched from left to right in 1967 after spending $120 million in preparations, and it was two entire days before a fatality ensued.

Senator Cassidy isn't all about changing the country's ways to accomodate foreigners' driving habits, however. He has also proposed a special lower speed limit of 80 kmh (50 mph) for noncitizens, compared with speed limits up to 120 kmh (75 mph) for the Irish.

But perhaps it's the senator who needs to slow down and think things through. He admitted to Reuters:

I know when I go to America it takes me five or six days to adjust.

To our U.S. readers: If you happen to see an Irish politician barrelling at you head-on at 75 miles an hour, please e-mail Passport.

When Mayor Mike Bloomberg raised New York city's tax on cigarettes from 8 cents a pack to $1.50 in 2002 (putting the total tax on a pack at about $3), a lot of my friends simply went out of state to buy cartons. But, faced with the prospect of $7 packs, a lot of them quit, too. Steep tax hikes on tobacco have always seemed to me to be the only way to depress smoking rates, a feat that smoking bans never really accomplish (though they do leave your clothes smelling far better at the end of an evening at the bar).

Bloomberg, a former smoker himself, has been a vocal anti-tobacco advocate since quitting more than two decades ago. He recently gave $2 million to finance the most comprehensive report on smoking around the world to date, which was unveiled by the WHO Thursday. He's also pledged $125 million more over the next two years for global anti-smoking efforts.

While progress has been made in many countries thanks to higher taxes and bans in public places (the unbelievable smoking ban in Paris cafes, for example), smoking is on the rise in the developing world. The WHO projects that one billion people, 80 percent of them in the developing world, will die of smoking-related illnesses by the end of the century if trends continue on their current trajectory.

Nearly two thirds of the world's smokers live in just 10 countries. In China, with about 30 percent of the world's smokers, perhaps 100 million men under the age of 30 will die of tobacco use unless they quit.

SEAN GALLUP/Getty Images

The excitement aroused by the World Cup soccer tournament in Germany in 2006 may have increased that country's birthrate as much as 15 percent nine months later. But the intensely emotional matches have now also been correlated with a spike in the number of cardiac emergencies.

A study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine examined the number of cardiac emergencies in the greater Munich area in the summer of 2006. It compared that number with the numbers in similar periods in 2003 and 2005, and for several weeks before and after the 2006 World Cup.

On days when the German team played, the incidence of cardiac emergencies was 2.66 times higher than during the comparison periods. For men, the incidence was 3.26 times higher; for women, it was 1.82 times higher. People with a history of heart disease were particularly affected.

The study's authors say emotional stress was the main trigger, but they add that sleep deprivation, excessive consumption of junk food and alcohol, and smoking might also be contributing factors. They suggest that spectators with heart problems should take preventive measures, such as consulting their doctors about increased medication dosages during intense sports events.

So should Americans be worried about this weekend's Super Bowl? Study author Gerhard Steinbeck says:

It's reasonable to think that something quite similar might happen.

Though if the Vegas odds-makers have it right, the greater danger on Sunday may turn out to be irate New York Giants fans.

There's a sad new chapter in the sad story of the state of the U.S. military's mental health care, as I've been writing about here at Passport. Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside, the 25-year-old Army reservist who was facing a court martial for pointing a gun at a superior, then shooting herself last year in Iraq, attempted suicide again on Monday, as reported by the Washington Post Thursday. Her mental health had been in better condition lately, as she went public with her story, but she began to deteriorate as her case dragged on. Ironically, she learned on Wednesday, as she was recovering in the hospital, that all the charges against her were dismissed.

Record numbers of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have committed suicide. Last year, 121 cases were recorded—20 percent more than 2006.  Thankfully, Whiteside has not been added to those numbers. Let's hope she never is. And let's hope that any soldier who needs quality one-on-one care gets exactly what America owes him or her.

CHRIS HONDROS/Getty Images

In previous posts, I've lamented the lack of proper health care (particularly mental health) for veterans returning from Iraq in Afghanistan, lauding both the Washington Post for its "Walter Reed and Beyond" series, and the New York Times for its "War Torn" series. The Post chose to tackle the story of vets from the beds of one hospital, whereas the NYT chose to report on veterans who had been charged with killing after returning home.

Now the NYT is under attack for its approach to the story. It is accused of more or less painting veterans as murderers and sensationalizing the plight of those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Lt. Col. Bob Bateman, normally a staunch defender of journalists, says that the NYT is playing a dangerous game with statistics, overstating the 121 cases that the newspaper uncovered as a "quiet phenomenon," when there is a population of 700,000 returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, of those 121 cases, 22 were DUIs, two were speeding accidents, and five cases resulted in exonerations of the accused killers. Hardly a trend. Bateman parses more numbers and says one could make an equally faulty argument: that veterans of active combat in Iraq and Afghanistan are, in fact, less likely to commit homicide than the population at large. (With the likely reasoning being that military training teaches young men and women to become more responsible citizens.) Bateman accuses the Times of "sloppy thinking... that does not help anyone." 

After much outcry, Clark Hoyt, the NYT public editor, basically agrees with the newspaper's critics in his Sunday column:

[T]he questionable statistics muddy the message. A handful of killings caused by the stresses of war would be too many and cause for action. Sometimes, trying to turn such stories into data — with implications of statistical proof and that old journalistic convention, the trend — harms rather than helps."

Both Bateman and Hoyt acknowledge that PTSD is a serious problem. But, Bateman concludes, "fear-mongering and drawing specious conclusions from incomplete data is no help."

Indeed, it's unfortunate that the the NYT's "creative" use of statistics opened the story up to valid criticism such as Bateman's. In effect, it undermines the point that most people will draw from its series: that seeing combat has very real effects on the mental health of veterans, and that there simply needs to be more effort put into their care. Witness the State of the Union address on Monday. President Bush got the most sustained applause from both sides of Congress when he mentioned honoring veterans. A new study released today finds that PTSD, depression, and stress (but not brain injuries, as previously thought) are drivers behind symptoms afflicting returning vets. The stigma needs to be removed. The real health problems need to be addressed. And there needs to be no more sensationalizing about what it all means.

Via Tyler Cowen, some grim news from Haiti:

At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.

Apparently, dirt cookies are a traditional remedy used by pregnant women to combat hunger pangs. But with food prices on the rise, more Haitians are eating the cookies—which are made by mixing clay with salt, flour, and vegetable shortening—to fill their bellies. More at this AP video: