For the first time in history, annual deaths around the globe from measles have fallen below 100,000, the World Health Organization announced this year. As recently as the 1980s, measles killed 2.6 million people a year.
it is a killer of malnourished children. Some cynics suggested that since measles only killed malnourished kids, whose IQ from malnutrition was low anyway, we should not bother to vaccinate the kids in rural Africa, since they would probably die of something else or end up as low IQ workers.
This was 40 years ago, and gives you an idea of how apartheid's Nazi links morphed into other nearby countries.
Indeed, many of our malnourished kwashiorkor (protein malnourished children) died of measles. Our solution was to encourage spacing of children, to improve the length of breast feeding, measles shots, protein supplements, and have our village health workers weigh children and refer them to our nutrition village to feed up and show moms cheap high protein food (e.g. hybrid chickens who both had the disease resistance of local chickens and the high egg volume of imported varieties. We also taught how to keep them in cages, so the eggs would not be lost).
But even in the US, I saw measles encephalitis.
No comments:
Post a Comment