Category: Health and wellness

Data Point A – Air travel as a vector for the spread of disease.

Data Point B – Renewed warnings about the likelihood of a flu pandemic

Data Point C – number 3: Chance of a viral pandemic in the next 70 years – very high.

Fascinating story in the news today (here and here) about a man who was found wandering, dripping wet, by the sea last month. Unable, or unwilling, to speak, his only method of displaying his emotions thus far is by playing a piano in the psychiatric unit where he is being cared for. Do you know who he is?

Update: This is who he is…

Read the story of the Orange Man and understand why alternative medicine that is ineffective is not harmless.

Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, delivered a speech at the University of Pennsylvania’s Summit on Global Issues in Women’s Health on April 26, 2005. He took as his theme Women and HIV. His speech is well worth reading, because it conveys some of the seriousness of the issue, together with his anger and despair at the inability of the world to grapple with it. A short extract:

Just a few weeks ago, I was in Zambia, visiting a district well outside of Lusaka. We were taken to a rural village to see an "income generating project" run by a group of Women Living With AIDS. They were gathered under a large banner proclaiming their identity, some fifteen or twenty women, all living with the virus, all looking after orphans. They were standing proudly beside the income generating project … a bountiful cabbage patch. After they had spoken volubly and eloquently about their needs and the needs of their children (as always, hunger led the litany), I asked about the cabbages. I assumed it supplemented their diet? Yes, they chorused. And you sell the surplus at market? An energetic nodding of heads. And I take it you make a profit? Yes again. What do you do with the profit? And this time there was an almost quizzical response as if to say what kind of ridiculous question is that … surely you knew the answer before you asked: "We buy coffins of course; we never have enough coffins".

It’s at moments like that when I feel the world has gone mad. That’s no existential spasm on my part. I simply don’t know how otherwise to characterize what we’re doing to half of humankind.

Do yourself a favour. Read the speech and think about what you can do to help make a difference. Then do it.

The BBC News web site is carrying a story at the moment saying that: "South Africa’s health minister has called for good nutrition to become the frontline treatment for HIV saying it was vital for people living with Aids" (my emphasis added).

Frontline treatment? I would have thought that Anti-RetroViral (AVR) drugs were the frontline treatment. It may well be that Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is being quoted out of context. However, since she is previously on record as promoting garlic and beetroot as a treatment for HIV, I fear that once again she has opened her mouth merely to change feet.

It would be funny, were it not for the fact that she holds the power of life and death over those unfortunate enough to be HIV+ in South Africa. She is a misguided woman who is doing great harm to those she is supposedly serving.

The Observer and the BBC News web sites are today both carrying the story that a new strain of HIV may have been detected in New York. See the items here and here. Both stories stress that it is far from clear that a new strain has in fact emerged (there is only one case known at the moment). To me, the really worrying thing is that the new strain has been found in a man who "has been having unprotected sex for years". It would seem that the safe sex messages that managed to change our behaviour back in the 1980s are now being increasingly ignored.

Having lost a number of friends to AIDS back in the 1980s, it depresses me that there’s a new generation of people around for whom "safe sex" is a mantra that has lost its power. We should not forget that despite all the advances in anti-retroviral drugs, not one of them will destroy the virus – in combination, they can only serve to hold it in check.

– I think I’ve gone and done it in! Started at lunchtime – a feeling of pain whenever I moved, and it’s got rapidly worse and more painful since then. I was hoping to goto the gym today, but that’s right out now. I went out for a gentle cycle ride, but I think rest is called for… That, and probably a paracetemol if the pain gets any worse.

Old age, who wants it?