The following
are responses and summaries of various readings related to Human Health,
Disease, and the Environment.
Under the Weather: Key
Findings and Recommendations
Many infectious diseases are
influenced by weather and climate change as can be seen by the varying
distribution of different diseases.
Temperature, precipitation, and humidity directly influence the behavior
of diseases and their carriers. Other
factors including government health services, clean water and properly
maintained sewage, population variations and travel, as well as land use can
affect diseases. Many models for
studying the dynamics of disease have been developed, however they are not
intended to be used as predictive or early warning systems. It is not currently known for certain what
impact global climate change could have on disease: while global warming could
alter the range of current diseases, other factors such as improved housing, sanitation,
and public health systems could offset any negative impacts from climate
change. New diseases may emerge from the
increased rate of evolution in pathogens due to climate change, though this is
highly uncertain. It is an extremely
slippery slope when attempting to extrapolate the data from one time and region
to a larger scale; global climate change may have an effect on regional or
seasonal climate patterns that is unforeseen.
The ever-increasing technological backing will only help to increase the
accuracy and speed with which models and predictive systems can be
developed.
The still
being devised early warning systems will help to combine the surveillance and
response of diseases with the prediction and prevention of diseases. The use of disease early warning systems is
dependent on the cost-benefit in certain areas of particular risk and should
not be implemented in areas of low risk or insufficient means. Disease early warning systems must be made up
of more than just climate data, such as meteorological, epidemiological, and
ecological data and should be initiated in a watch-warning type of system where
watches are issued for vulnerable areas which are thereafter analyzed in a more
scrupulous manner. The system’s end users
must be who the system is built with in mind, involving the local citizenry at
every possible route and making sure that they are informed of necessary
procedures and possible outcomes.
Much more
work must be conducted to link climate and disease. The behavior and activity of diseases needs
to be further analyzed in order to better know the potential risks of climate
or ecological changes in the future. The
amount of epidemiological data needs to be greatly increased and put into a
centralized location so that it may be easily accessed by many different
people. More effort needs to be put into
the cooperation of different agencies and fields so that all may progress at a
similar rate and in a similar fashion with like end goals. Even should we be successful in achieving our
goals, it is still very likely that disease will win in some instances due to
the highly unpredictable nature of disease, and so our goal should be an
overall improvement of people’s health and reduction of their vulnerability to
disease.
Rx for Survival:
Introduction
Recently we have begun to regress in our fight against
disease and in the pursuit of human health.
Historically, with an era of globalization come new bouts with disease
and disruption to society. Diseases,
just as goods do, travel at a much greater pace range today. It is not possible to separate the
transmission of goods and the transmission of disease. In this particular globalization, one disease
has grown out of control – AIDS – which is striking at the social structure and
the economic makeup of many nations.
AIDS reinforced the idea the our surveillance of disease had grown poor
for it had been around for at least fifty years and had been infecting humans
for at least twenty before it was recognized by accident by pharmaceutical
workers. Drugs that kill bacteria and
viruses are only temporary solutions because it is the nature of germs to
continually evolve and adapt and multiple, therefore it is requisite that our
fight against them will be always going on.
For today viruses and bacteria interact with one another more than ever
before, inside the bodies of animals and people, and the more interaction they
have the more likely it is that they will become a stronger and more versatile
enemy. Since the 1950s the conditions for
this rapid germ expansion have been present.
Increased travel was seen after World War II and even more so at the end
of the Cold War. It is very similar to
the time when people moved from tribes and villages to cities in ancient
civilization and experienced great epidemics then. The time of diseases to be able to initially
infect people to the time it has infected millions has shrunk from decades to
weeks. Due to our poor surveillance, old
diseases once thought vanquished have begun making a comeback. Recent terrorism has created a stir at home
to guard against possible biological attacks, but little to none of the money
appropriated has gone towards the much more likely threat of natural infectious
diseases. The bird flu which currently
persists on the Asian continent has two of the three abilities required to
result in a world pandemic: the ability to infect humans and to kill them. Though it has not yet been seen to move
between people only between birds and people.
Increased surveillance throughout the world, incentives for countries
that report problems, tests for early outbreaks, and the creation of drugs to
be used at the onset of an outbreak are needed for the onset of a global
pandemic. The amount of lives saved from
an outbreak will greatly outweigh the potential cost of preventing it. Any increase in disease has far greater
economic consequences than any terrorist could have. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
increased travel and contact between poorer and richer nations that followed
outbreaks were almost certain to occur and increase in number. Recent experience has proven that experts and
professionally trained workers are not required to have an effect on
disease. The world is now much wealthier
overall than decades ago and therefore it is completely within our grasp to
take care of the world’s greatest health problems. The wealthy must help the poor with these
health issues. Before the era of
medicine people could expect to live anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five
years. After thousands of generations of
this situation, human life was changed within only about five. This change was due to the medical changes
which were enacted in the last 150 years: sanitation being the greatest of them
all, combined with hygiene and vaccines enabled for the general health of the
modern world to be greatly increased.
The great medical era of the post WWII times led to the belief that
disease had been defeated which led to people resting on their laurels in
complacency. We forgot that disease,
just like everything else, will adapt and evolve in order to multiple. We now are in great position to bring
together everything that we’ve learned in the past in order to make life better
for the masses. Should we falter the
future does so look grim.
A Pinch, A Fist, A Cup
of Water
The best example of how money should be used to fund any aid
project is that of the Bangladeshi fight against diarrheal related child
deaths. On November 13, 1970 a great
cyclone hit on the coast of Bangladesh killed more than five hundred thousand
people. It was this event which caused
oil executive Fazle Hasan Abed to abandon his place of luxury and return to his
home country to help those in need. The
storm was forecasted, though the president of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, ignored it
and would later pay for it through the revolt against him that it caused. With the help of the Indian military eastern
Pakistan was freed from their western oppressors. Abed began working in the refugee camps
helping build bamboo houses and supplying tools and medical aid to those in
need. Abed created what has become the
world’s greatest NGO. It all started
with a budget of three hundred thousand dollars and six volunteers, the
Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.
It now has more than one hundred forty six thousand workers. Its mission is to provide health services,
schooling, and financial services to the poor women of Bangladesh. The project has helped to reduce the number
of child deaths from 248 in every thousand to 69 in every thousand as of
2003. This reduction in early child
deaths has resulted in a proportional reduction in family size from seven to
three. The average life expectancy has
increased from forty-four years to sixty-three years. Originally funded only from donations, the
BRAC now has a budget of over $235 million, with only twenty percent coming
from donations. Abed has built a nearly
self-sufficient aid agency. The primary
function of the group in its early years was the teaching of Bangladeshi
mothers to make a solution for those suffering from diarrheal illnesses which
would replenish the system with nutrients and fluids: this project which lasted
ten years saw the reduction in the death rates of babies with severe diarrhea
from fifty percent to less than one percent.
The method that has been taught to the mothers of Bangladesh is now a
part of the culture. After the success
of the solution teaching the next project was the immunization of the nation’s
children. In the 1980s only about two
percent of Bengali children received immunizations and now over eighty percent
receive them. The solution project cost
around $9.3 million from 1979 to 1990.
When in 1991 a great epidemic of cholera struck Central and South
America, the usual death rate of one-third to one-half was avoid by the local
people using the homemade method. From
this program we are taught that local programs such as these can be very
effective on a large scale, though they require continual surveillance and
adaptation, with those who carry them out believing in what they are
doing.
Forty-Nine Thousand
Grandmothers
The people of Nepal suffer from a great deficiency of vitamin
A in their diets. The Nepali National
Vitamin A Program has as its goal that it gets vitamin A drops to every child
who needs them. The administration of
vitamin A is perhaps the simplest and cheapest way to save lives in human
history. Night blindness, which many
have suffered throughout Nepal, is a sign of vitamin A deficiency. Alfred Sommer did work in much of eastern
Asia on the effects of vitamin A deficiency.
His work determined that nearly five hundred thousand people per year in
just Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and the Phillipines suffer from
xerophtalmia, night blindness. Many of
the deaths were caused by diarrhea which was allowed entrance into the body
through a lack of vitamin A. His
research showed that a lack of vitamin A could be allowed for infections and
diseases to enter the body of children much more easily than into a healthy
body. The skin cells which help to keep
out and ward off infectious diseases feed off of the nutrients of vitamin A,
and therefore a lack of it allows for easy entrance into the body. Sommer found that measles which depletes the
body of vitamin A, while not the direct cause of illness or death, allows for
other infections to enter and kill. From
Sommer’s work the world had become convinced that vitamin A supplements could
help to solve many of the unnecessary child deaths throughout. In Nepal volunteers were recruited in
villages who would carry the much needed vitamin A drops and administer them to
children twice a year. The officials of
the program made sure that the volunteers would get recognition for the work
they performed. The volunteers were made
the most important and most highly regarded persons in every village. The program has seen some 3.5 million
children getting their vitamin supplements per year. The death rate of infants has decreased from
133 per thousand in the 1980s to 64 deaths per thousand in 2002. The volunteers now assist in other forms of
health aid such as iron tablets and iodized salt instruction and oral
rehydration treatments. While this
system has been useful up to this point, it is unclear how much more could be
tacked on.
One House at a Time
The greatest health project in human history is the world’s
current campaign toward the elimination of polio. Because polio does not show itself in every
case of infection all those at risk must be immunized. It is estimated that the countries of the
world benefit from about $1.5 billion each year because they do not need to
diagnose or treat smallpox, or lose the services of those afflicted with it
since its eradication in the late 1970s.
Similar results could be seen with the eradication of polio. The polio virus shuts destroys nerve cells,
causing paralysis and potentially death.
Children who survive polio are marked as weak and strange for the rest
of their lives. Many places, such as
North America and parts of Europe, freed themselves of polio only to have it
reappear from poorer still infected nations.
The worst hit and hardest to treat places were found in India and
Nigeria. Muslims often rejected the
vaccine which was thought to have been created and sent by the Americans who
wanted nothing more than to harm them, make them sterile and such. They had difficulty understanding why there
were cures for polio being offered but they could not receive adequate health
care from their local clinics. The approach
of the polio booths would not work for these people, for these people the
vaccine would have to be brought to their doorstep; each one needing to be
convinced personally. With much
marketing and governmental and local backing the vaccine drives were able to
succeed, though only barely.
Changing Minds
AIDS is a scourge on the Sub-Saharan African nations. The area holds nearly sixty percent of HIV
cases. When Botswana declared its
independence in 1966 it was seen as one of the three poorest nations on
Earth. Through the use of its great
diamond reserves it has been able to build a stable democratic government,
schools, roads, and clinics. It held the
highest growth rate in the world from 1966 to 1996 and saw an increase in the
average life expectancy of more than twenty years over the same period. By 2000 nearly forty percent of the Botswana
population was infected with HIV. With
the revolution of AIDS treatment drugs in the mid 1990s an infected person
could expect to add ten healthy years or more onto their lives. The drug companies however decided to set the
prices of these medicines at an exorbitantly high rate and they would pay for
it with the approval of their customers.
In the late 90s the leading drug companies decided to combat this distrust
with an initiative to rid Africa of its AIDS problem. They chose Botswana for this experiment. The AIDS problem in Botswana stems from their
highly-mobile culture: often families spend much time apart and develop
alternative sexual relationships. Wives
are taught to accept their husband’s misdeeds and affairs which have allowed
for HIV to be transmitted at a much greater rate than elsewhere. In Botswana more than twenty percent of the
adult population is infected with some form of HIV. The greatest issue that the project faced was
the bureaucracy of the Botswani government.
Months would pass on an issue while it was fed from committee to committee
and from ministry to ministry. The most
influential change that did get enacted was the mandatory HIV testing at
hospital visits. Once testing was made
easier more and more people began coming in for testing and treatment. The number of people affected by the project
has increased from 3000 in 2003 to 43000 in 2005.
Internet Research
NGO
An NGO is a non-governmental organization. NGOs are organizations which are privately
funded, though partial or total government funded is allowed only if the
governmental representatives are refused admission to the operational
executive. There are around 40,000 NGOs
operating internationally across borders.
Some of the first international NGOs are Rotary International and the
Peace Corps. Many international NGOs
work closely with international or regional cooperatives such as the United
Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NGOs can vary by sector and include business,
civics, environmentalist, and humanitarian related goals. Operational NGOs can be relief-oriented or
development-oriented and are often divided between religious or secular, public
or private, and scale – local, regional, or international - interests and
funding. Some NGOs work to promote
causes or make aware governments and agencies of issues. These NGOs are usually referred to as
advocacy groups and generally merely choose to educate and inform rather than
to act, though this is a requisite part of any change. NGOs often find themselves influencing
national and international policy-making, but generally as a goal are more
involved in local action. Some of the
larger NGOs have budgets upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars. The American Association of Retired Persons
had an annual budget of over $500 million in 1999. Many different types of organizations can
fall under the NGO heading, such as non-profit organizations, not just for
profit organizations, community foundations, civil societies, and charitable
organizations. There has been a great
movement in recent years to attempt to distance the negative sounds of the
“non” affiliation with positive words such as citizen sector organization,
especially considering that many NGOs are actually funded by governments.
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