NEWS
PHOTO: OSIRIS TEAM MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
face before its batteries died, cameras on the sides took images, but mission scientists do not think that the lander’s drill successfully extracted a sample and fed it to the two chemical analysis ovens. However, one of the ovens performed a gas measurement as the lander first bounced off the surface, and it may have sucked in and analyzed some dust as well. “There is a possibility that maybe we collected something,” says Hermann Böhnhardt, a lead lander scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. Philae, which came to rest on its side in a shadowed area, still has not been found. In December, Rosetta swooped in to 18 kilometers above the surface to scrutinize a 500-by-300–meter area where the lander is presumed to be. Combing through the images by hand, the OSIRIS team found many bright spots, but none that could be distinguished from boulders. Böhnhardt hopes that the OSIRIS team will now allow the wider Rosetta and Philae teams to study the images. “Looking by eyes, this is certainly the first approach,” he says. “It is just not as good as reading the pixel values and trying to do something with computers.” Knowing just where Philae ended up will help its science team assess their data and allow engineers to evaluate how precarious the lander’s situation is. The lander team is lobbying for ESA to schedule another close reconnaissance pass by the orbiter—but this becomes more risky as the comet wakes up and its jets of gas and dust become stronger. Another option is simply to wait. As the comet’s seasons change and more light falls on the lander’s solar panels, Philae could just wake up. Böhnhardt says there’s a good chance that its computer will boot up in May and that its radio will regain contact with the orbiter by June. “It can shift earlier, it could also be never,” he says. On 16 January, the lander steering committee agreed to resume science planning for later this year—a sign of confidence that Philae’s mission is not yet done. ■
Cracks in 67P’s narrow “neck” suggest the lopsided nucleus could be flexing and might someday split in two.
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
DEMOGRAPHY
Surveys reveal state of Afghan population From fertility to mortality, new data will help guide aid efforts By Mara Hvistendahl
L
ast winter, thousands of surveyors fanned out across Kabul to learn the state of the population after decades of turmoil. Key findings from that door-to-door exercise, part of a nationwide effort called the SocioDemographic and Economic Survey (SDES), were released last week. They show that Afghanistan, where U.S.-led forces formally ended combat missions last month, faces steep challenges as it seeks to rebuild: Newborns are dying in droves, and fully 64% of adults in Kabul had no meaningful income in the year before the survey. Scholars and aid workers welcome the hard data if not the bleak findings, because Afghanistan was once a demographic mystery. “All the reports of mortality for decades had basically been opinion,” says David Peters, a public health researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. Now, the SDES, which will run until 2018, and a slew of other surveys carried out by Afghan agencies in collaboration with overseas scientists are revealing a wealth of information about everything from fertility to mortality. The results will help government officials and aid agencies forecast population growth, assess the labor market, plan for education and other services, and analyze health programs. Such data are “critical,” Peters says, “to know if your programs are working.” Merely starting the SDES was a fraught process. In the 2001 Bonn Agreement, which followed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and laid out steps for establishing a transition government, parties called for a full census: a simultaneous tally of households in all 34 Afghan provinces. (Afghanistan’s last attempt at a census had been in 1979, on the eve of the Soviet invasion.) “Donors were pouring in aid for reconstruction,” notes Mercedita Tia, a statistician with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Kabul, and they needed to track results. But by 2010, with the Taliban dominating 23 JANUARY 2015 • VOL 347 ISSUE 6220
Published by AAAS
359
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on January 22, 2015
sampled in 2004—but the molecules Rosetta has detected are more complex than those seen on other comets. These organics form only in extreme cold, when ultraviolet light and cosmic rays strike various types of ice-coated dust. That suggests they formed when the comet did, instead of evolving later, says the spectrometer’s principal investigator, Fabrizio Capaccioni of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. The molecules could indicate that 67P formed farther out in the solar system than comets that lack them. “This comet is more pristine than others,” he says. Another spectrometer, looking just above the comet’s surface, found a diversity of gases emanating from it. In some places, the comet is emitting mostly water. In others, emissions are dominated by carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which sublime more quickly than water ice when the comet is warmed by the sun. The gas concentrations don’t always vary as the sunlight falling on the comet changes—evidence that they may be due to heterogeneous concentrations of different ices. The comet is still relatively quiet. Its jets are expected to become about a hundred times as active by the time 67P reaches its closest point to the sun in August. Pits will become geysers, cliff faces will tumble, and perhaps a more catastrophic shedding event awaits. “The fun thing is going to be seeing these changes,” Thomas says. Watching them will help investigators understand how much of the evolution can be explained by the sun and how much by underlying heterogeneity that was emplaced at the comet’s birth. “The answer, always, is: It’s probably both,” says Jessica Sunshine, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who is not on the mission. Rosetta’s envoy to the comet itself, the Philae lander, has not contributed to current papers. But the lander team is preparing a set of manuscripts for publication. During the 57 hours the lander spent on the sur-
Surveyors for the Socio-Demographic and Economic Survey at a training session in Bamiyan province.
southern Afghanistan, international experts recommended scrapping the census in favor of the SDES: a staggered, provinceby-province survey of households in all but the most dangerous districts. The SDES, which is being carried out by the Afghan Central Statistics Organization (CSO) with assistance from UNFPA, uses an unusual method. In every second household, surveyors collect detailed information on age, gender, education, literacy, employment, fertility, mortality, birth registration, and other indicators. In the others, they simply record the name of the head of household and the number of members by sex. That arrangement cuts costs while still giving reliable results at the district level, Tia says. Even so, the SDES is immensely time-consuming. In rural areas, surveyors have to set out by donkey or motorbike, and for months at a time snow makes parts of the mountainous country inaccessible. Earlier, more focused surveys gave glimpses of demographic and health conditions in parts of Afghanistan. In 2002, Linda Bartlett, then an epidemiologist and maternal health specialist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, set out on horseback with a team of health researchers to assess maternal and infant mortality in rural Afghanistan. Bartlett hired Afghan women as surveyors, but a Taliban restriction held they could only travel escorted by their husbands or male relatives. The team canvassed 13,000 households, asking family members for information on an 360
estimated 85,000 women. They later reconstructed how many maternal deaths had occurred from 1999 to 2002. Their findings were grim: The four districts surveyed showed an average of 1600 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births—a rate that would now be among the highest in the world. In one district in northern Afghanistan, Bartlett says, “there was no access to any kind of prenatal care, obstetric care, or postnatal care, and there was no family planning available.” Traditional practices included pushing on a woman’s belly during delivery. In the years that followed, the Afghan government made maternal and child health a priority, vastly expanding access to health care services. The number of midwives shot up from 467 in 2002 to more than 4600 today, according to UNFPA. And the 2010 Afghanistan Mortality Survey (AMS) of 24,000 households suggested that such efforts were paying off. It uncovered a steep drop in maternal mortality, compared with previous estimates: 327 deaths per 100,000 live births. But some researchers skewered the finding as the product of underreporting, possibly reflecting Afghan reluctance to discuss women who died. “It was pretty concerning for a lot of us, because we felt that it falsely represents what’s going on,” Bartlett says. The finding “may be on the low side,” says Fred Arnold, a demographer at ICF International in Fairfax, Virginia, which provided technical assistance for the AMS.
But it jibes with figures from neighboring countries, he notes. Earlier surveys in Afghanistan drew largely from areas with higher rates of maternal deaths, says Arindam Das of the Indian Institute of Health Management Research in Jaipur, which also assisted on the AMS. The survey is not nationally representative: Since 2008, volatile conditions have made it virtually impossible to collect data from areas like Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan covered in Bartlett’s survey. (On two occasions, the Taliban kidnapped AMS surveyors, despite the team avoiding rural areas in Kandahar and two other provinces.) Still, Das says, they covered a larger area than did previous surveys. Other studies have underscored how hard it will be to get a clear picture of demographic trends. In 2006, for example, Peters and his Hopkins colleague Gilbert Burnham set out to estimate mortality for children under 5. Available estimates had been derived from models relying on 1970s data and hadn’t been updated since 1993. Surveying more than 8200 households in 29 of 34 Afghan provinces, they found signs pointing to significant underreporting of girl births— and possibly girl deaths—meaning that any future child mortality figures would need to be adjusted. “People don’t like to talk about girls, period,” Peters says. The SDES has surveyed six provinces, says Mohammad Sami Nabi, director of the CSO’s field operations department, and data are still limited. Work in the other 28 provinces is projected to wrap up in 2018. Although survey costs in Afghanistan are skyrocketing with worsening security conditions—organizations now have to shell out for helicopters to circumvent roadblocks— plans for still more ambitious surveys are now being rolled out. In March, Arnold says, fieldwork is scheduled to begin on Afghanistan’s inaugural Demographic and Health Survey, part of a worldwide program that collects detailed population and health data for developing countries. Meanwhile, SDES investigators are learning all they can while minimizing risk. Because ethnicity is an explosive issue in the fractured country, surveyors aren’t including it in their questions. Even so, the findings are potentially charged. In 2012, survey results from Bamiyan province, home to a persecuted Shia Muslim minority, showed a smaller than anticipated population. Misconstruing the figure as a sign of prejudice, hundreds of residents took to the streets, shouting “death to the enemies of Bamiyan,” reported Pajhwok Afghan News. The incident prompted UNFPA to step up publicity campaigns for the survey, Tia says: “We have learned a lot.” ■ sciencemag.org SCIENCE
23 JANUARY 2015 • VOL 347 ISSUE 6220
Published by AAAS
PHOTO: © LORENZO TUGNOLI/UNFPA AFGHANISTAN
NEWS | I N D E P T H
PHOTO: OSIRIS TEAM MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
face before its batteries died, cameras on the sides took images, but mission scientists do not think that the lander’s drill successfully extracted a sample and fed it to the two chemical analysis ovens. However, one of the ovens performed a gas measurement as the lander first bounced off the surface, and it may have sucked in and analyzed some dust as well. “There is a possibility that maybe we collected something,” says Hermann Böhnhardt, a lead lander scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. Philae, which came to rest on its side in a shadowed area, still has not been found. In December, Rosetta swooped in to 18 kilometers above the surface to scrutinize a 500-by-300–meter area where the lander is presumed to be. Combing through the images by hand, the OSIRIS team found many bright spots, but none that could be distinguished from boulders. Böhnhardt hopes that the OSIRIS team will now allow the wider Rosetta and Philae teams to study the images. “Looking by eyes, this is certainly the first approach,” he says. “It is just not as good as reading the pixel values and trying to do something with computers.” Knowing just where Philae ended up will help its science team assess their data and allow engineers to evaluate how precarious the lander’s situation is. The lander team is lobbying for ESA to schedule another close reconnaissance pass by the orbiter—but this becomes more risky as the comet wakes up and its jets of gas and dust become stronger. Another option is simply to wait. As the comet’s seasons change and more light falls on the lander’s solar panels, Philae could just wake up. Böhnhardt says there’s a good chance that its computer will boot up in May and that its radio will regain contact with the orbiter by June. “It can shift earlier, it could also be never,” he says. On 16 January, the lander steering committee agreed to resume science planning for later this year—a sign of confidence that Philae’s mission is not yet done. ■
Cracks in 67P’s narrow “neck” suggest the lopsided nucleus could be flexing and might someday split in two.
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
DEMOGRAPHY
Surveys reveal state of Afghan population From fertility to mortality, new data will help guide aid efforts By Mara Hvistendahl
L
ast winter, thousands of surveyors fanned out across Kabul to learn the state of the population after decades of turmoil. Key findings from that door-to-door exercise, part of a nationwide effort called the SocioDemographic and Economic Survey (SDES), were released last week. They show that Afghanistan, where U.S.-led forces formally ended combat missions last month, faces steep challenges as it seeks to rebuild: Newborns are dying in droves, and fully 64% of adults in Kabul had no meaningful income in the year before the survey. Scholars and aid workers welcome the hard data if not the bleak findings, because Afghanistan was once a demographic mystery. “All the reports of mortality for decades had basically been opinion,” says David Peters, a public health researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. Now, the SDES, which will run until 2018, and a slew of other surveys carried out by Afghan agencies in collaboration with overseas scientists are revealing a wealth of information about everything from fertility to mortality. The results will help government officials and aid agencies forecast population growth, assess the labor market, plan for education and other services, and analyze health programs. Such data are “critical,” Peters says, “to know if your programs are working.” Merely starting the SDES was a fraught process. In the 2001 Bonn Agreement, which followed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and laid out steps for establishing a transition government, parties called for a full census: a simultaneous tally of households in all 34 Afghan provinces. (Afghanistan’s last attempt at a census had been in 1979, on the eve of the Soviet invasion.) “Donors were pouring in aid for reconstruction,” notes Mercedita Tia, a statistician with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Kabul, and they needed to track results. But by 2010, with the Taliban dominating 23 JANUARY 2015 • VOL 347 ISSUE 6220
Published by AAAS
359
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on January 22, 2015
sampled in 2004—but the molecules Rosetta has detected are more complex than those seen on other comets. These organics form only in extreme cold, when ultraviolet light and cosmic rays strike various types of ice-coated dust. That suggests they formed when the comet did, instead of evolving later, says the spectrometer’s principal investigator, Fabrizio Capaccioni of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. The molecules could indicate that 67P formed farther out in the solar system than comets that lack them. “This comet is more pristine than others,” he says. Another spectrometer, looking just above the comet’s surface, found a diversity of gases emanating from it. In some places, the comet is emitting mostly water. In others, emissions are dominated by carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which sublime more quickly than water ice when the comet is warmed by the sun. The gas concentrations don’t always vary as the sunlight falling on the comet changes—evidence that they may be due to heterogeneous concentrations of different ices. The comet is still relatively quiet. Its jets are expected to become about a hundred times as active by the time 67P reaches its closest point to the sun in August. Pits will become geysers, cliff faces will tumble, and perhaps a more catastrophic shedding event awaits. “The fun thing is going to be seeing these changes,” Thomas says. Watching them will help investigators understand how much of the evolution can be explained by the sun and how much by underlying heterogeneity that was emplaced at the comet’s birth. “The answer, always, is: It’s probably both,” says Jessica Sunshine, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who is not on the mission. Rosetta’s envoy to the comet itself, the Philae lander, has not contributed to current papers. But the lander team is preparing a set of manuscripts for publication. During the 57 hours the lander spent on the sur-
Surveyors for the Socio-Demographic and Economic Survey at a training session in Bamiyan province.
southern Afghanistan, international experts recommended scrapping the census in favor of the SDES: a staggered, provinceby-province survey of households in all but the most dangerous districts. The SDES, which is being carried out by the Afghan Central Statistics Organization (CSO) with assistance from UNFPA, uses an unusual method. In every second household, surveyors collect detailed information on age, gender, education, literacy, employment, fertility, mortality, birth registration, and other indicators. In the others, they simply record the name of the head of household and the number of members by sex. That arrangement cuts costs while still giving reliable results at the district level, Tia says. Even so, the SDES is immensely time-consuming. In rural areas, surveyors have to set out by donkey or motorbike, and for months at a time snow makes parts of the mountainous country inaccessible. Earlier, more focused surveys gave glimpses of demographic and health conditions in parts of Afghanistan. In 2002, Linda Bartlett, then an epidemiologist and maternal health specialist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, set out on horseback with a team of health researchers to assess maternal and infant mortality in rural Afghanistan. Bartlett hired Afghan women as surveyors, but a Taliban restriction held they could only travel escorted by their husbands or male relatives. The team canvassed 13,000 households, asking family members for information on an 360
estimated 85,000 women. They later reconstructed how many maternal deaths had occurred from 1999 to 2002. Their findings were grim: The four districts surveyed showed an average of 1600 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births—a rate that would now be among the highest in the world. In one district in northern Afghanistan, Bartlett says, “there was no access to any kind of prenatal care, obstetric care, or postnatal care, and there was no family planning available.” Traditional practices included pushing on a woman’s belly during delivery. In the years that followed, the Afghan government made maternal and child health a priority, vastly expanding access to health care services. The number of midwives shot up from 467 in 2002 to more than 4600 today, according to UNFPA. And the 2010 Afghanistan Mortality Survey (AMS) of 24,000 households suggested that such efforts were paying off. It uncovered a steep drop in maternal mortality, compared with previous estimates: 327 deaths per 100,000 live births. But some researchers skewered the finding as the product of underreporting, possibly reflecting Afghan reluctance to discuss women who died. “It was pretty concerning for a lot of us, because we felt that it falsely represents what’s going on,” Bartlett says. The finding “may be on the low side,” says Fred Arnold, a demographer at ICF International in Fairfax, Virginia, which provided technical assistance for the AMS.
But it jibes with figures from neighboring countries, he notes. Earlier surveys in Afghanistan drew largely from areas with higher rates of maternal deaths, says Arindam Das of the Indian Institute of Health Management Research in Jaipur, which also assisted on the AMS. The survey is not nationally representative: Since 2008, volatile conditions have made it virtually impossible to collect data from areas like Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan covered in Bartlett’s survey. (On two occasions, the Taliban kidnapped AMS surveyors, despite the team avoiding rural areas in Kandahar and two other provinces.) Still, Das says, they covered a larger area than did previous surveys. Other studies have underscored how hard it will be to get a clear picture of demographic trends. In 2006, for example, Peters and his Hopkins colleague Gilbert Burnham set out to estimate mortality for children under 5. Available estimates had been derived from models relying on 1970s data and hadn’t been updated since 1993. Surveying more than 8200 households in 29 of 34 Afghan provinces, they found signs pointing to significant underreporting of girl births— and possibly girl deaths—meaning that any future child mortality figures would need to be adjusted. “People don’t like to talk about girls, period,” Peters says. The SDES has surveyed six provinces, says Mohammad Sami Nabi, director of the CSO’s field operations department, and data are still limited. Work in the other 28 provinces is projected to wrap up in 2018. Although survey costs in Afghanistan are skyrocketing with worsening security conditions—organizations now have to shell out for helicopters to circumvent roadblocks— plans for still more ambitious surveys are now being rolled out. In March, Arnold says, fieldwork is scheduled to begin on Afghanistan’s inaugural Demographic and Health Survey, part of a worldwide program that collects detailed population and health data for developing countries. Meanwhile, SDES investigators are learning all they can while minimizing risk. Because ethnicity is an explosive issue in the fractured country, surveyors aren’t including it in their questions. Even so, the findings are potentially charged. In 2012, survey results from Bamiyan province, home to a persecuted Shia Muslim minority, showed a smaller than anticipated population. Misconstruing the figure as a sign of prejudice, hundreds of residents took to the streets, shouting “death to the enemies of Bamiyan,” reported Pajhwok Afghan News. The incident prompted UNFPA to step up publicity campaigns for the survey, Tia says: “We have learned a lot.” ■ sciencemag.org SCIENCE
23 JANUARY 2015 • VOL 347 ISSUE 6220
Published by AAAS
PHOTO: © LORENZO TUGNOLI/UNFPA AFGHANISTAN
NEWS | I N D E P T H
