PEPFAR saving lives in Africa for 20 years

Bet you never heard about a program called PEPFAR.

Why? Because it was proposed by a Republican president. (and continued by the presidents who came after him).

But mainly because it only saved a couple of million Africans.

We probably had HIV when I was working in Zimbabwe, because we had people with Kaposi's sarcoma and people who died of what seemed to be a failure to fight ordinary infections in what should have been healthy people.

It wasn't until I had returned to the USA  in the 1980s, that they discovered that this was HIV. And for years, this slowly killed people in Africa. And even after there were medications that slowed the progress of the disease, it was simply too expensive for most people in Africa to afford.

Until President Bush decided to do something about it.

One of my friends in Zimababwe lost both her brothers, but later the wife and daughter of one of them was placed on medicine and survived. Alas, the daughter, who was in the first year of college, died with a different infection, but withouth PEPFAR she would have died as an infant.

Some criticized the program because it took resources from other programs, and the PC criticized the stress on abstinence (and polygamy rather than sharing prostitutes) as part of the program, being clueless that these were consistant with African customs.

Here is the CDC page on PEPFAR in Zimbabwe:

you have to test people, and test their contacts, and put them on treatment.

The hospital where I had worked had an outreach program, and our sisters had a clinic in Harare, until it was destroyed by Mugabe in his Operation Murambatsvina program which was explained as a way to clear out the slums, but in reality destroyed the areas that voted against him.

Right now, the international public health programs are getting a lot of hostility, much of it hysterical and political in origin. 

The coverup of the Covid origin and the initial denial of the WHO head that it could be spread person to person is part of the reason, as is the over reaction by governments to the epidemic that shut down the economy, something that will kill a lot more people than covid.

like the boy who cried wolf, the WHO has lost credibility and some see their plea (send us oodles of money ) as another power grab.

Yet it was the USA, not the WHO, who started the program to treat people with HIV in Africa. Public health is not a monolith, although groups do cooperate with each other in providing medical care.

Yet one does have to remember that this program has saved millions of ordinary Africans.

malaria: a big killer but hey who cares? /s Report from Uganda

 

I had malaria when I was in Liberia: I was on chloroquin but the local Falciparum was resistant to it, so when I developed fever and pain, they put me on alternative treatment, a sulfa drug.

In Zimbabwe, we had few cases because we were at a high altitude, but those from lower altitudes, or who visited lower altitudes, could have it, and I know two of our sisters (one European, one Africa) who caught cerebral malaria but managed to survive.

so we routinely tested for it. Alas the blood test might not pick it up, as he discusses here, so we treated suspected cases just in case.

he is showing the immune test, but back then we had to look at a blood slide for the parasites, but in malaria they are only present intermittantly.

Babies are especially vulnerable to die of malaria, but even adults who don't have immunity from previous infections can die.

The white gov't for example had moved some of our people to a different area so they could sell the land to white farmers, and many of those who were moved developed malaria and died because the new area was in lower altitude.

it starts benignly, but what happens after 30 years?

 

... 

A good explanation about three parent babies. If you believe life begins at conception, the first one would be okay, but the second one would not, although he explains that maybe conception hadn't happened yet so that is iffy.
 
The problem? 

Essentially this is experimenting on a child, who cannot give his permission to be experimented on. And what happens if it doesn't work? Will they simply abort the kid or wait until he is born to do it?

This is the same problem as we see in test tube babies.

When the first such baby was conceived, they asked the "smiling' pope what he would say to her parents, and he said something like congratulations on your child.

But the technology behind this distorted having children on many levels.

One: it made having a child a right. 

Two: it ignored the risk to the child (IVF children have a high rate of miscarriage and problems).

Three: because it is expensive, doctors will implant several embryos, and then abort the extra ones. 

Four: like birth control, it removes the link between sexuality and having children, so the problems forseen by Paul VI about artificial contraception have come true, and this is just one furthur step on that path.

Five: it commodifies having a child.

Nowadays you can pay a woman to carry your child for you. This exploits poor women who carry the child. One reporter went to the Slums of Manila and asked a tricycle (taxi) driver is he would mind if his common law wife would do this for money, and he said no problem. She got angry and corrected him: I even care if I lose my cell phone. How would I feel about losing a child that I carried for nine months?

Six: Often these IVF babies for older women buy eggs from women: college students or Eastern European women. This puts their health at risk.

Seven: there are tens of thousands of unwanted and unused embryos sitting in freezers. What do you do with them? The dirty little secret is that as they get older most die. Ironically, they can't be used for stem cells etc. (thank the Lord: because a mom who okayed her child to be experimented before it is killed )

The sexual revolution didn't start with the pill or Human Vitae: It started in the USA with easy divorce, meaning women had no guarantee they wouldn't be discarded. Then welfare made it easy for women to discard abusive, lazy, or just boring husgands. Then welfare and the change in public opinion made it possible for women to have babies out of wedlock, leaving men out of the picture completely. Then since sex wasn't about babies and families, so why not gay sex, perverted sex, polyamory for pleasure, etc.

In the case of fixing a genetic problem, Catholics would oppose it, because even if the first case no life was taken, because it interferes with the normal pair bonding in marriage where having children is considered something good: The old phrase was the fruit of the womb.

In a world with chemical pollution being opposed by green movement, hardly anyone discusses the hormones and manipulation in IVF.

Heck they don't even discuss the problems of hormones for trans kids (I took some hormones for gynecological problems. The emotinal side effects are real, and then there is the metabolic problems etc.).

But that's another problem to be discussed at a later date.

we need to talk about the loss of trust in our public health authorities

 cross posted from my other blog.

 The NIH is restoring funding to EcoHealth so they can fund bat virus reseach in the Wuhan lab.

Nature:

NIH reinstates grant for controversial coronavirus research

Researchers who spoke to Nature applaud the renewal, adding that this type of research is essential to avert the next pandemic. They claim that the NIH’s termination and subsequent suspension were politically motivated, and that, although long overdue, this renewal ends — for now — a drama-filled exchange between the agency and EcoHealth.

Yes it was just politics... 

but WTF? 

Scientists at Boston University have developed a form of coronavirus that killed 80 per cent of the mice they tested it on — reigniting the debate over the use of experimental lab research involving deadly pathogens. Amid the furore, the university hit back at “false and inaccurate” media coverage that “sensationalised” the research.....

a lot of the articles still assume that no, the virus didn't accidentally come from the Wuhan lab so there was no reason to stop such experiments. But they also ignore lab leaks and infections from these labs in the past.

As for Wuhan: One argument against the accidental release is that two variations of the virus spread from the wet market to people.

So how could a leak travel a mile from the lab to the market if it were a lab leak?

That was puzzling, until I read an article that some lab personnel were diverting lab animals to be sold (either live but infected, or dead, what we in the Philippines call double dead meat).

to tell you the truth, corruption is a problem in China to a degree that would shock the average Yank. But those of us familar with corruption that is common here in the Philippines just laugh at that rumor, because it is believable.

as for EcoHealth: Last Sept there was a report that Eco health wanted to build a lab here in the Philippines.

three projects currently being undertaken in the Philippines. This includes PREDICT, bat conservation and EIDR (Emerging Infectious Disease Repository). The PREDICT project seeks to “identify new emerging infectious diseases that could become a threat to human health” while EIDR seeks to “unravel the origins of Emerging Infectious Disease (EID) events.”

The PH Government should look into the extent of these projects in the Philippines, particularly EIDR, as it is funded both by the US DTRA and USAID, both agencies which have various program objectives other than purely scientific research.

Biolabs are important, both for human and animal health. They are needed to identify ordinary germs and then advise how to stop the spread, or maybe devise a a vaccine to stop the disease. (FMD, African swine flu, and bird flu to just name a few that are affecting the animals here in SEAsia, and other diseases that are a chronic danger, like Anthrax or brucellosis).

But the lies and coverup by China and the lies of the US experts to coverup that the US was funding this dangerous research ( because it was banned in the USA) have lowered the trust of ordinary people.

that is why conspiracy theories about the Ukraine biolabs is floating around, pushed by a Russia who has had it's own problems with lab leaks in the past.

But there is a fine line between investigating disease that could cause an epidemic, in order to stop it, and doing research for biowarfare. 

but the dirty little secret of biowarfare is blowback: You can't keep it from killing your own people.

That is why no one outside of really rabid conspiracy theorists think that Covid was a deliberate biowarfare attack by the Chinese government.

Finally, the decline of trust in the Public health establishment is a problem. We see it here after the Dengue vaccine debacle, where a few kids died from the vaccine given to the wrong kids, but the result was a mistrust that resulted in parents deciding against routine vaccines, and that resulted in hundreds dying of easily preventable diseases.

and we see it now, where a lot of folks are horrified that the same WHO types who stopped many epidemics (yellow fever and Ebola come to mind) have lost public trust because they seemed to lie to coverup the Wuhan virus. 

yet now we are reading that the WHO wants to tell all the world's governments that they need to obey the WHO policies. This would be needed for example if a new smallpox epidemic or black plague (or super flu) hit. But their credibility is now low, and so the usual suspects are seeing this as a power grab.

No I am not going to post a Tucker Carlson video about this: just read the article for his rant.

But thoughtful people are worrying about this too.

Here is Dr. C's video of a UK MP discussing the problem of the WHO's latest power grab;

Censorship in youtube

... you know, I keep getting emails about Youtube rules. About one a week. Wonder what that is about.

As for medical societies: They have long been taken over by activists who ignore the grass roots docs.

That is why the AMA, who used to have 70 percent of docs belonging to it, now has less than 40 percent.

As for the AAFP: They also have activists running the place: Their support of Obamacare over the desires of their membership for example, was done because their health care panels who make such decisions was stuffed full of activists.

And not good activists, like myself, who actually had first hand knowledge of the problems of the uninsured, of racism, etc. But by liberal activists who followed the script.

Sigh.