I haven't posted here for a while, and I know how disappointing this must have been for many of you. But forgive me for saying that's been the least of my concerns. Last Friday night I fell asleep reading this HighBeam Research article titled Recent spate of doomsday predictions range from pandemics to killer asteroids, but I didn't realize I'd fallen asleep. Has this ever happened to you? Where the ensuing dream merges so seamlessly with reality that you don't notice, well... the seam? Yeah, it was one of those. All of a sudden everything went dark. I was so freaked out that it took me until just now to get out of bed, having finally realized the sun had not gone out, but that, rather, I'd had the covers pulled over my head for three days. Such is my joy at recovering from this terrified state that I have been perusing atlases non-stop for the last several hours, just to reacquaint myself with the beauty of the world. Although it presents a far more daunting prospect, I'm working up to taking a walk outside. Wish me luck. I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm so excited that we have a new Pope. Having been raised, myself, in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, I know, better than most, the dangers that can beset the world in those darksome days when there is no Pope at all. Why, for such a situation to continue would be like having no Dalai Lama. The entire publishing industry might fail overnight -- His Holiness the DL currently accounting for some 42% of all books produced in the Free World. Catholics are not so prolific. When it comes to publishing, that is. In other respects, prolific isn't the half of it. Bunnies come to mind. Where would South America or India be without the guidance and unfailing injunction of the Holy Father to go forth and multiply?

True, there have been some bad Popes. There's always one bad apple that spoils the whole bushel. But fortunately, this is rare. Usually, you can tell the bad ones by the size of their noses, as the picture above right demonstrates. This is where the Italian folktale Pinocchio originated, as explained by Nobel Laureate Italo Calvino, one of most pious and devoted of Catholic authors. Another way you can tell is by their real names. The new Pope is named Ratzinger, so I guess we can all breathe easy.

Following up on yesterday's post, I think Zygmunt Bauman's Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts applies very well to the people of Angola and their current plight -- the tip-of-the-iceberg result not only of a quarter century of hugely destructive internal warfare, but also of the economic and social globalization dynamics Bauman writes about so brilliantly. However, the following comment, somewhat tangential to the direct object of the book at hand, and delivered as an en passant observation by the reviewer, struck me as genuinely profound. Aimed at the "First World" rather than the "Third," it seems worth pondering deeply.

from: Wasted Lives, book review by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
source: Tikkun, 1 July 2004
via: HighBeam™ Research

Bauman has long been a penetrating critic of the self-help and counseling booms so endemic to life in the overdeveloped world, through which women and men become convinced that they can find biographical solutions to problems that are in fact much more systemic than individual.

Here's a clip from the book itself...

...consumables embody an ultimate non-finality and revocability of choices and an ultimate disposability of the objects chosen. More importantly yet, they seem to put us in control. It is we, the consumers, who draw the line between the useful and the waste. With consumables for partners, we can stop worrying about ending in the refuse bin.

Inadvertently, marketable consumables incarnate the ultimate paradox of the culture of waste:

First, it is the horrifying spectre of disposability -- of redundancy, abandonment, rejection, exclusion, wastage -- that sends us to seek security in a human embrace.

Second, it is from that expedition that we are diverted to the shopping malls.

Third, it is disposability itself, magically recycled from terminal disease into therapy, that we find there and are prompted to take home and store in first-aid boxes.

[p. 131, emphasis mine]

Heidi Marsh... looked like what a Bellevue Square shopper is supposed to look like, I think, except that she was wearing flip flops.

"I get dressed up for Bellevue or Alderwood, but this is like my daily mall," she said.

Marsh, blond, blue-eyed, slender, was wearing khaki capri pants and one of those sweaters with a hood that I saw a lot of at Bellevue Square earlier in the day.

Before I went to Southcenter, I sat outside the Bellevue Square Nordstrom jotting down descriptions of the people walking by.

There were people who were stylishly dressed and coifed, with perfect makeup. But there were also lots of folks who didn't look that way.

Both malls had a wide spectrum of shoppers, though one leaned more toward coifed and the other toward comfort.

Your hairstyle, the clothes you wear, the way you carry yourself are all full of messages that other people use to place you in the social spectrum. That's been true as long as people have had a choice about their appearance and for as long as we have lived in large, stratified societies, but the lines are often blurred nowadays.

People with money wear styles that originated with poor folks, and people without money can use a credit card to dress up.

[incredulous emphasis mine]

from: Mall mogul says: You are where you shop
source: The Seattle Times (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service), 18 April 2005
via: HighBeam™ Research

Cases of Marburg haemorrhagic fever began appearing in Uige province in Angola last Fall, but initial response from local government agencies was slow. Way too slow. By yesterday, as many as 250 deaths had been reported. This is twice the number who died in the previous outbreak, in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2000. Uige is only 180 miles from Luanda, the capital of Angola, which has a population of four million, many living in conditions of severe crowding and dire poverty -- a nightmare waiting to happen, should the virus show up in that coastal city. Marburg has a 90 per cent mortality rate. The scenario is not unlike that depicted in Outbreak, the 1995 movie made from Robin Cook's medical thriller. Or, closer to home -- because it's nonfiction -- the African Ebola epidemic described in The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Here's a bit of background from less than a year ago...

from: Ebola and Marburg Viruses: a View of Infection Using Electron Microscopy, book review by Pierre Rollin
source: Emerging Infectious Diseases, 1 August 2004
via: HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 2004 U.S. National Center for Infectious Diseases

More than 25 years have passed since the discovery of a filovirus, Marburg virus, which caused an epidemic of hemorrhagic fever among laboratory workers in Marburg, Germany, in 1967. The persons affected had contact with the blood or tissues of monkeys or with other infected persons. Marburg virus has reappeared only three times since its discovery, with the largest and most recent outbreak occurring in 1999 in Durba, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ebola virus, another filovirus, was first described in 1976 during two hemorrhagic fever epidemics in Zaire and Sudan. Since then, Ebola virus has caused large hospital outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever in Kikwit, Zaire, in 1995, and Gulu, Uganda, in 2000. Ebola virus has also been implicated in small chains of transmission among persons with direct contact with intermediary hosts, mostly nonhuman primates in the central African countries of Gabon and Republic of the Congo.

The reservoirs for both viruses are still unknown...

What is meant by reservoir in this case is the natural non-human carrier-host of the disease: a bat or an insect, for instance. As Richard Preston describes in The Hot Zone, researchers combed the cave in Zaire where the Ebola virus was suspected to have originated, but despite an intensive search, and analyzing every possible life form they encountered, none was found to harbor the pathogen. Strange. Is it for a lack of funds -- read political will -- that the source of this deadly virus has never been identified? Or is it perhaps because there isn't one in the normal sense. The World Health Organization's Communicable Disease Surveillance and Response pages that list Marburg and Ebola press releases also link to Preparedness for Deliberate Epidemics. Stranger still. Unless you think about it for a second.

The Sunday New York Times reports: "For the people of Uíge, rampant death is now joined by the near equivalent of a space invasion: health workers encased in masks, goggles, zip-up jump suits, rubberized aprons and rubber boots as they collect corpses in the stifling heat. The garb is all white, a symbol of witchcraft here."

Not so strange at all. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," said science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. To the people of Angola who are dying today, it matters little whether the "reservoir" for Marburg is witchcraft, a tick, or some super-secret biowar lab. If the last possibility seems farfetched, consider that the West Nile virus is now doing very well in Colorado thanks to a hurricane that partially destroyed just such a U.S. government laboratory a mere two miles off the coast of Long Island. For all the mind-blowing details, see Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory.

This facility, once the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is now under the management of the Department of Homeland Security. I feel safer already.

In 1994, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett warned the world of the threat from new and deadly diseases including Ebola and Marburg haemorrhagic fevers in The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. In the same vein, so to speak, she followed this in 2000 with an even stronger warning -- Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health.

In 2003, Tracy Kidder, best known for his book, The Soul of a New Machine, wrote a very different sort of book: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. Here's a review clip...

from: The heart of charity; A doctor's efforts to save the world, one patient at a time
source: The Christian Science Monitor, 4 September 2003
via: HighBeam™ Research

Haiti ranks as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. A quarter of Haitians die by age 40... Yet in a place where even cement must be transported by donkey, Farmer defies limitations to build a healthcare center. Thirty-five miles north of Port-au-Prince, along a boulder-strewn road, a walled citadel rises from a barren landscape. Inside, tropical greenery surrounds two clinics, a hospital, an Anglican church, a school, a laboratory, and a kitchen that serves 2,000 meals a day.

By Farmer's decree, no patient can be turned away. But medical aid alone is not enough. He also emphasizes the need to eliminate problems that contribute to illness: dirty water, inadequate nutrition, poor sanitation, illiteracy.

Shuttling between Haiti and the Boston hospital where he works part of the year, Farmer dreams of ending the disparities that define the two worlds of poverty and privilege. As Kidder explains, "He'd leave peasant huts full of malnourished babies and, arriving in Miami Airport, overhear well-dressed people talk about their weight-loss diets."

Farmer subsequently published Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, of which The New England Journal of Medicine wrote:

There are many kinds of gifted physicians: clinicians, researchers, and those who build institutions. Paul Farmer is the rarest of all: a prophet. Pathologies of Power is a jeremiad on how the "structural violence" of denied opportunities, economic deprivation, violent despots (and the powers supporting them), and international financial organizations harm the health of billions of people who are so distant that they are glibly and uncomprehendingly referred to as living in a "third world."

On Saturday, the website of Médecins Sans Frontières, which is in charge of operations at Uige's Provincial Hospital reported that several cases of Marburg have already been reported in Luanda -- a nightmare waiting to happen indeed. And it may have waited long enouigh already. Another page reprints an Economist article from January, 2001, which begins...

Imagine two countries. The first, with one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, will receive $3.5 billion of investment from the international oil industry each year for the next ten years. By 2005 it will have become Africa's largest oil producer. The second is rated by the UN's Human Development Index a dismal 160th out of 174 countries.With a third of its children dying before their fifth birthday, and with two-fifths suffering from malnutrition, it is considered by Unicef to be "the worst place in the world to be a child". Both descriptions fit Angola, home to shocking juxtapositions.