This is an excerpt of the the article, which was first published in Stanford News. You can read the whole article here.

A Stanford-led study in China has revealed for the first time high levels of a potentially fatal tapeworm infection among school-age children. The researchers suggest solutions that could reduce infections in this sensitive age range and possibly improve education outcomes and reduce poverty.

The study, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, focuses on Taenia solium, a tapeworm that infects millions of impoverished people worldwide and can cause a disorder of the central nervous system called neurocysticercosis. The World Health Organization estimates that the infection is one of the leading causes of epilepsy in the developing world and results in 29 percent of epilepsy cases in endemic areas. It is thought to affect about 7 million people in China alone.

Science Magazine writes about REAP's work on early childhood development in rural China. Read the full article here.

Glasses askew and gray hair tousled, Scott Rozelle jumps into a corral filled with rubber balls and starts mixing it up with several toddlers. The kids pelt the 62-year-old economist with balls, and squealing, jump onto his lap. As the battle rages, Rozelle chatters in Mandarin with mothers and grandmothers watching the action. 

Elsewhere in this early childhood education center in central China, youngsters are riding rocking horses, clambering on a jungle gym, thumbing through picture books, or taking part in group reading. Once a week, caregivers get one-on-one coaching on how to read to toddlers and play educational games. The center is part of an ambitious experiment Rozelle is leading that aims to find solutions to what he sees as a crisis of gargantuan proportions in China: the intellectual stunting of roughly one-third of the population. "This is the biggest problem China is facing that nobody's ever heard about," says Rozelle, a professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Surveys by Rozelle's team have found that more than half of eighth graders in poor rural areas in China have IQs below 90, leaving them struggling to keep up with te fast-paced official curriculum. A third or more of rural kids, he says, don't complete junior high. Factoring in the 15% or so of urban kids who fall at the low end of IQ scores, Rozelle makes a stunning forecast: About 400 million future working-age Chinese, he says, "are in danger of becoming cognitively handicapped."

Bloomberg quotes REAP's research on China's healthcare system. Read the original article here. 

The outlines of China’s demographic challenge are well-known: By 2050 almost 27 percent of the population will be 65 or older, up from around 10 percent in 2015. Less recognized is that the crisis will hit hardest in rural villages.

China’s cities attract a disproportionate share of government health spending, along with the best doctors, so rural residents must put up with care that is expensive but shoddy. The average cost of a hospital visit is 50 percent of the annual income of a city dweller; for rural residents it’s 1.3 times annual income. Meanwhile, a 2014 survey by Stanford’s Rural Education Action Program found that patients at village health clinics received an accurate diagnosis only about one-quarter of the time. Overprescription of drugs is rampant. 

About 60 percent of China’s senior citizens live in rural areas, where poverty is widespread and health care is poor.

REAP's social enterprise, Smart Focus Vision, along with several other global vision care startups, wins the 2016 Clearly Vision Prize. Read the original news release here.

The winners of the Clearly Vision Prize will share cash prizes totaling $250,000 to help them accelerate their progress and move us another step down the road towards a world where everyone can see.

Smart Focus

Smart Focus is uniting the powers of industry, government, hospitals and schools to provide high quality, low cost eye exams in China. They bring eye care directly into schools to make sure that students get the treatment they need. The country has a real problem with low awareness of the need for vision care. By focusing on serving youngsters in rural areas that might otherwise get left behind, Smart Focus is improving the vision of the next generation.

Visit Smart Focus

Liat Clark from Wired writes about REAP's vision care social enterprise, Smart Focus Vision, winning the Clearly Vision Prize for startups that bring low-cost vision care to rural communities around the world. Read the original article here.

Smart Focus Vision

Stanford, CA

The US-based startup has partnered with eyewear company Luxottica OneSight to help scale eye care to ten million people in China that do not have access to affordable services. According to research conducted by Stanford University, only one out of six rural children in China has a set of glasses and most rural students have never had an eye exam. The for-profit ran a pilot operation in conjunction with the Chinese Academy of Sciences before launching in the provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu, where it distributes low-cost glasses, trains doctors and teachers, and constructs clinics. Teachers can test vision directly in classrooms and use mobile phones to automate patient referrals and prescriptions. Smart Focus argues the nonprofit route would never have been a sustainable or scalable way of helping the number of children that need eye care.

As well as a share of the prize money, the winners will have access to mentoring and be invited to a series of one-day events - Clearly Labs - around the globe where they can meet optometrists and other entrepreneurs. The campaign has a number of high-profile advisers onboard, including cofounder of Warby Parker, Neil Blumenthal and founder of Shanghai Tang, David Tang, who commented: "Access to good sight should not be a luxury. Yet, 2.5 billion people are still forced to go without clear vision. Radical new thinking is necessary to rectify this.”