*Rather than reading a thing like this and concluding that one oughta jump off
a bridge to make life easier for global health providers, maybe it oughta cheer one up.
I mean, here's this dutiful little personage laboring away over her treadmill and her
tunafish sandwiches so that the rest of us don't drop dead of something sudden and
painful.
*Maybe this should give one a bright, happy, "pronoia" feeling, the sensation that
allies we scarcely know are working hard to help us. She seems morbidly certain
that overwhelming invisible menace is bound to do us in anyhow, but come on,
a little *honest gratitude* for a laboring bureaucrat isn't gonna kill us!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/16/swine-flu-pandemic-who-warning
(...)
British scientists admitted this week that they were taken by surprise by swine flu's sudden spread; (((swine flu, totally out of control, is now in140 countries and is officially the "biggest epidemic ever seen in human history," but, frankly, swine flu seems to be making zero practical difference to my quotidian daily life))) Chan is aware that while it could work itself out with comparatively minimal damage, she could also suddenly find herself dealing with a far more virulent, more deadly mutation.
And that, of course, would be on top of the myriad other epidemics and crises currently demanding her attention; the massive health impacts of climate change, for example, which she is in no doubt "will be the defining issue of the 21st century". (((Not exactly news for readers of the ol' blog here.)))
Declining food security will, she predicts, mean massive rises in people dying from malnutrition and diarrhoea, and probably more wars. More floods will mean more water contamination and issues with water security, and more deaths due to injuries and drowning. More waterlogged areas and changes in temperature will mean sharp rises in vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. ((("Bill Gates versus Malaria, Round Two: the Seattle Mosquito-Borne Epidemic.")))
"The prediction is that, within the next 10-20 years, food production in Africa will drop by 50%. If that's the case, how many more people will go hungry? Remember that malnourished, stunted children cannot reach their education potential, which will have a massive social and economic impact." (((Somebody trains these people to talk to journalists about suffering children; swine flu seems to be leaving the kids more or less alone and briskly wiping out middle-aged fat people, but nobody ever tearfully tells the press, "Won't somebody think about the middle-aged fat people?!")))
Chan worries, too, about massive rises in non-communicable diseases (cancer, diabetes, smoking-related illnesses) outside their traditional stamping grounds of the well-fed west. The trouble, from her point of view, is that these diseases attract nothing like the funds that, say, malaria or polio or HIV/AIDS do: "60-80% of the disease burden in developing countries is now due to so-called lifestyle diseases" – and yet, until the last two years when the Bloomberg and Gates foundations got in on the act, non-communicable diseases received no donor funds at all. (((Hey, thanks for the public-spirited efforts there, paranoia-inspiring ultra-rich silk-hat capitalist exploiters of the malaria-suffering masses!)))
Then, of course, there are the ongoing battles — malaria (at least seven African regions have reduced deaths by half), polio, measles, HIV and TB, where another crisis of global proportions threatens: "The challenge is drug-resistant TB. And this is really huge. If it gets out of control," Chan warns, "it will take us back to the pre-antibiotic era." (((Forward into the atemporal postantibiotic era.)))
And so her days begin at 7am, on her treadmill, and end hunched over her files late at night....
