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From: LC@dinkerson.com
In article , penny@pen.rhys
says...
>
>>But aren't the evil pharmacutical companies pushing satanic poison anyway,
>>so shouldn't you be extolling the wonders of homeopathy ?
>
>
>Why ever would you think that.
I wouldn't, I'm just probing the depths of your nuttiness
> Pharmaceutical drugs often work well
>for many people. And I'm sure that homeopathy does also.
Homeopathy seems to work well as a placebo for many people, too bad placebo
effects wear off and usually culiminate in psychological crisis.
> We're all very different and since sicknes is said
>to be 70% emotional then it's different strokes for different folks.
>
Damn those emotional cancer patients, what's their problem? Bunch of
whiners,
eh? Or at least, 70% of them?
>The mega pharmaceuticals are too obsessed with profits to serve the
>people of the world well.
>
Open your eyes, grow up, and re-direct your righteous indigation back at
yourself where it belongs. Or at least read this:
Don Cayo
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, March 13, 2004
BORONO, Burkina Faso - You need to see three pictures in your mind's eye to
understand this story. The first one is pleasant enough. But the second is
eerie, and the third will make your skin crawl.
The first picture is of many tiny villages and a few towns, like this one,
nestled into the savannah and sparse forests bordering the rivers that
crisscross the dry, dusty expanse of the West African Sahel, the region
between
the Sahara desert and the West African rainforest.
They're rustic places, even the towns. Few buildings -- only a mosque or a
church in some of the larger towns -- rise above the mud-brick huts or
slapped-up market stalls.
The villages are just a scattering of low-walled compounds. Each has a few
tiny
buildings, some square with flat tin roofs, and some round and topped with a
traditional cone of thatch.
In the rivers, men fish and women pound clothes clean on the rocks. When
school's out, children frolic.
On market days the towns bustle. But the villages mostly just doze. A woman
may
cook in the shade of a tree while her little ones play nearby. Others of all
ages stroll the footpaths or, if it is the season, work in the fields. Cows
graze. Chickens scratch.
In the dry season, the dun colours of the mud bricks and a few weathering
sticks or boards melt into the arid landscape. Timeless and serene, these
places look as if they've been here forever.
But they have not.
The second picture could be from the 1970s, or any time up to the mid-90s.
The
land is the same -- the well-spaced trees and scrub of the Sahel. But there
are
no homes -- just crumbling remains of those that used to be.
And there is no one. No people. No cows. No chickens.
The third picture, from a still earlier time, looks a little like the first.
But only from afar.
Up close you see so many children walking slowly, each holding one end of a
stick. An old man shuffles behind clutching the other end. His eyes are
closed,
and if by chance they flutter open, they're colourless and blank.
So common was the sight of a child leading a blind elder that it became an
iconic image of Burkina Faso, often carved in wood or cast in bronze for
tourists to take home.
What no sculptor could replicate, however, was even more horrible in its
way.
It was a mother trying to nurse a child, or to cook a meal, but scratching
with
mad frenzy, even with a stone or a knife, until she bled.
It was young adults of both sexes with welts and sores and wrinkles that
aged
them far beyond their years.
It was teens scratching and idle by the hut because they could neither
concentrate in school nor bear the taunts of other kids.
All were victims of onchocerciasis -- the scratchers in the early stages and
the blind in the late. Known as oncho or river blindness, it's caused by a
worm
-- a parasite spread by river-breeding, people-biting flies.
Once in the body, it breeds. As larvae spread out under the skin, an
incessant
itch begins. It's so bad that people fear it even more than the blindness
that
follows when the worms reach the eyes.
Even before they lose their sight, victims can't work, can't sleep, can't
maintain normal relationships. Some go mad, even kill themselves.
And when the infection level hits 60 per cent, the whole village falls
apart.
Everybody flees to the slightly lesser horror of hawking cheap wares on the
street or begging in a town away from the rivers.
Oncho was the worst here in Burkina Faso, or Upper Volta as it was known at
the
time. But it made life hell across a broad swath of sub-Saharan Africa.
Today, here and in nine countries nearby, the scourge is no more. It's
getting
hard to find an oncho-blind man -- or even a sculpture of one.
How that came to be is a story all too rare in the annals of foreign aid.
West African countries that often quarrel worked with each other instead.
Donors -- Canada among them -- started a thing right and stayed with it. A
big
drug company stepped in with unprecedented generosity. Unschooled peasants
were
given -- and accepted -- responsibility for their own well being. Not just
health, but also economics, was factored in from the start. And science
advanced.
But this isn't just yesterday's story -- it's also today's and tomorrow's.
To
wit:
* Oncho has been all but wiped out in 10 of the original 11 countries, so
the
eradication program is expanding to all of the 19 others where it's still
found.
* The no-cost network of volunteers set up in oncho-prone areas can also
deliver other health benefits at very low cost.
* The outsiders who helped set it up are bowing out, leaving Africans to
follow
though.
* And oncho eradication stands as a model for the world of how to make a
small
program big and how to focus on a job until it's done.
It was Robert McNamara, a former U.S. defence secretary but then the
president
of the World Bank, who decided to tackle oncho in a big way back in 1972. It
wasn't just altruism he had in mind.
McNamara went to Upper Volta to look for ways to spur development, he
recalled
in an interview with The Vancouver Sun.
"The prime minister of the day told me we'd be wasting our time unless we
were
prepared to deal with onchocerciasis first."
So McNamara flew to the heart of the oncho-stricken country. There he saw
for
himself the deserted river valleys and the many, many blind people. And he
met
two scientists who told him that spraying to kill the flies could lick
oncho if
an agency was willing to keep at it for 20 years.
When he got home he wrote personally to the World Health Organization, the
UN
Development Program and a handful of donor countries. They agreed to back
him.
"We made a terrible mistake at the start," McNamara says now. "We started by
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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