SCIENCE science.org 3 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6597 1033
Epidemiologist Ifedayo Adetifa, head
of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control,
says the country receives undue attention
because it does more surveillance than
its neighbors and shares what it finds.
“There’s too much emphasis for whatever
reasons in Western capitals and news
media about trying to hold somebody re-
sponsible for a particular outbreak,” he
says. “We don’t think those narratives are
helpful.” Adetifa says that although Nigeria
has recently seen “an uptick in cases,” he
is confident it’s not missing a large num-
ber of them. “We are literally rattling the
bushes to see what comes out.”
African countries’ ability to deal with
monkeypox was improving even before the
current outbreak. The DRC has stepped
up its surveillance across the vast country,
which is key to isolating infected people
and tracking the virus’ moves. INRB and
a lab in Goma can now diagnose samples
using the polymerase chain reaction assay,
and researchers ultimately hope to develop
rapid tests for use in clinics nationwide.
INRB and labs in Nigeria can also sequence
the full genome of the virus, and Nigeria
plans to make public genomes of several
recent monkeypox isolates, Adetifa says.
Those and other sequences from Africa
could help researchers pinpoint the source
of the international outbreak by building
viral family trees.
For now, Africa lacks medicines to pre-
vent and treat monkeypox. In the United
Kingdom and the United States, high-risk
contacts of cases are being offered a vac-
cine produced by Bavarian Nordic that was
approved for monkeypox by the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration in 2019, but it’s
not available anywhere in Africa. The U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
and collaborators in the DRC are testing the
vaccine in health care workers; the 2019 ap-
proval was based on animal studies.
In the CAR, 14 people with monkeypox
have received an experimental drug, teco-
virimat, as part of a trial launched by the
University of Oxford in July 2021. “We’ve
had very good results,” says Nakouné, who
says he expects the data to be published
within the next few weeks. The drug’s man-
ufacturer, SIGA, has pledged to provide up
to 500 treatment courses to the country.
Although the international outbreak
has—again—highlighted global health ineq-
uities, it has also brought much-needed at-
tention to the smoldering disease in Africa.
“It’s been really hard to get the resources to
do the kind of background work that really
needs to be done and that isn’t hair-on-fire,
in the context of an emergency,” Rimoin
says. “We cannot keep hitting the snooze
button. Now, the stakes are really high.” j
T
wo weeks before professors were set
to administer spring final exams at
the University of Illinois, Chicago
(UIC), 1500 graduate teaching as-
sistants went on strike to demand a
wage increase. Union representatives
had been at the bargaining table with the
university for a year, since April 2021. But
the two sides hadn’t been able to agree on
a new contract. “The raises that they were
offering at that point were far less than
inflation,” says UIC math Ph.D. student
Matt DeVilbiss, a member of UIC’s gradu-
ate workers union who helped coordinate
picketing during the strike. “As inflation
got worse, it became more important.”
The strike lasted 6 days, fi-
nally ending just before mid-
night on 25 April when a
tentative deal was reached.
Graduate workers won a 16%
raise, which will bring their an-
nual stipend up to a guaranteed
minimum of $24,000 over the
next 3 years. They also secured
limits on increases to student
fees, which can eat away up to
$4500 of their take-home pay.
“It doesn’t eliminate the prob-
lem of graduate student poverty in one
swoop,” DeVilbiss says, but “I think we won
a really good contract, perhaps the best we
could have done under the circumstances.”
Ph.D. students, who work as researchers
and teaching assistants, have decried miserly
wages for decades. Now, amid rising cost of
living, the problem is taking on new urgency.
“There’s no question that students are strug-
gling to survive,” says Michelle Gaynor, a
Ph.D. student studying botany at the Univer-
sity of Florida. “We’re really selecting against
people who are low income or from margin-
alized communities,” she adds. “We can’t talk
about DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion]
and not talk about this.”
In the United States and beyond, gradu-
ate students strain to get by on wages that
aren’t sufficient to meet their basic needs.
“A third of our students ... struggle to af-
ford rent and 15% struggle to afford food,”
Jane Petzoldt, an entomology master’s
student, says of her department at NorthCarolina State University (NC State) in
Raleigh, where rents have risen by more
than 20% in the past year. A survey of
3000 U.S. graduate students conducted in
2020 found that more than one-quarter
of respondents suffered from housing or
food insecurity.
Some universities have taken steps to
address the situation. At Princeton Uni-
versity, for instance, Ph.D. students in the
natural sciences and engineering will see
their largest ever raise when the 2022–
academic year commences: $8280, bring-
ing the total annual stipend up to $40,000.
And at Yale University, student parents
are now eligible for a $7500 subsidy for
their first child and $2500 for each addi-
tional child, in addition to a $2000 annual
pay increase that all gradu-
ate students in the sciences
will receive.
But students still feel
pinched. “I’m happy that we
are getting a raise,” says Arita
Acharya, a fourth year Ph.D.
student studying genetics at
Yale. “But this is the first time
we’ve had a raise of this mag-
nitude in my time here at Yale.
And I can tell you, at least for
myself, my living expenses ...
have all gone up way more.”
At some universities, graduate students
are picking up protest signs. In Califor-
nia, where the largest protests have taken
place so far this year, representatives of
the University of California (UC) graduate
workers unions are currently at the bar-
gaining table, asking for pay increases that
reflect the high cost of living in the state.
More than 90% of UC student employees
are “rent burdened,” meaning they pay
more than 30% of their wage on rent, says
Ximena Anleu Gil, a biology Ph.D. student
at UC Davis and one of the graduate stu-
dents bargaining with UC representatives.
It shouldn’t be that “only people who come
from wealthy backgrounds or who have
some sort of other support” can make it in
academia, she says.
In Florida, Gaynor has tried to jump-
start conversations about graduate student
salaries within her department by crowd-
s o u r c i n g s t i p e n d d a t a. S h e p u t o u t a r e q u e s tPh.D. students in science
demand living wage
Inflation intensifies long-standing issue of low student pay
WORKFORCEBy Katie Langin“There’s no
question that
students
are struggling
to survive.”
Michelle Gaynor,
University of Florida