The very real threat of malaria

From the Sonoran Alliance (emphasis in original):

…Today, in this 24 hours, while you are reading this, more people worldwide are dying from malaria than a year of war in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.  The media can make time if they want to.  We had wealthy suburbanites outside of Washington DC earnestly ask us if we were afraid of the avian flu. With the real deal, malaria, cholera, yellow fever, dysentery, meningitis, dengue fever … well avian flu … wildly mild in comparison, bordering on a joke … has a lot of serious real-world competition.

What was going on alarmed us: WHY are so many Americans today terrified of computer modelswhile ignorant of common brute reality? Africa is not a country, it’s a huge continent plagued by malaria. America is actually in the minority of the planet which isn’t affected by malaria … thanks to the efforts of Americans.

In America, Malaria-free wasn’t a natural gift, it had to be accomplished.

With battle triumphs under America’s belt in the war against malaria, how goes the war today?  When Bill and Melinda Gates announced their Gates Foundation’s support of anti-malaria efforts, they discovered their one gift had nearly doubled the entire world’s funding for that sector. So many people at risk and affected, yet so underfunded.

President George W. Bush committed billions to fighting and treating malaria and HIV/AIDS in Africa. When Africans came to the White House to thank him, the media mentioned not the funding, not the diseases, not Bush’s unprecedented efforts to help Africans have a better quality of life, but that he was an awkward dancer.

Decades ago, Americans broke the back of malaria parasite transmission in the United States with a massive integrated public health program.  America’s astounding transformation of Panama a hundred years ago during the construction of the Panama Canal from a deadly, disease-ridden zone to a beautiful, healthy,  tropical settlement is a tour-de-force of Occam’s Razor applied up and down to cut malaria and yellow fever out of the area, a superb case study on how it’s done.*  The anopheles mosquitoes continued on … but no longer infected with the deadly malaria parasite, yet the drive was cut short in Africa before that critical tipping point had been reached so malaria came back with a vengeance.

Read the whole thing.

hat tip: Instapundit

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When healers are replaced with bureaucrats

… it can become ridiculously hard to get help.

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Book review: A Special Mother Is Born

Gerard Nadal writes:

This book addresses one of the burning issues of our day. With prenatal diagnostics leading to the abortions of the less-than-perfect among us, with parents who are frightened into paralysis by these diagnoses and a medical establishment increasingly surrendering to the cowardice of eugenics, over thirty mothers and three fathers of special needs children have stepped forward to share their journeys.

If one is looking for a feel-good easy read, this book isn’t it. This book tells the story of fear, bewilderment, broken hopes and dreams, and the triumph of love in all of its raw and untamed beauty. It is a window into the human soul, into souls that have been forever transformed by children whose needs call forth what love demands most:

Sacrifice.

For those of us who have known the unspeakable beauty of being loved by another, we know that the love we have experienced has come at a cost to the one who has loved us. They have given us their time, attention; material, spiritual and emotional substance. They have accepted us with our strengths and pursued us in spite of our weaknesses–even because of our weaknesses. They have wrapped us in their love and esteem, and lifted us to heights we never could have attained by our own efforts.

That is the sort of love that flows through this book like a rampaging river, overflowing the banks that would contain it, and flooding the surrounding countryside. It is the sort of love that is desperately sought after in a world desperate for authentic love, and purpose, and meaning.

The stories in this book are the stories a frightened and weary world needs to hear, a world that has bought into the counterfeit culture for so long it mistakes love’s essence–sacrifice–with servility, and fails to see its reciprocity…

Read the whole thing.

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Dakotas doing well

John Hinderaker shares good news out of North and South Dakota. (If for no other reason, follow the link to take a look at the photos of a children’s hospital built to look like a castle.)

hat tip: Jack Niewold (Facebook)

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Washable ties…

… seem to be catching on thanks to an innovative company in North Carolina. (This is good for hospital settings, amongst other things.)

Even if you’re not a fan of ties, it’s an interesting story about a family with a drive for excellence, and a desire to build a regional industry.

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Countries without abortion…

… are also the safest for mothers.

Hats off to Chile, Poland, and Ireland. Well done.

(If you haven’t watched the video embedded in the above-linked Thomas Peters’ post, I suggest you take a couple of minutes and watch. Delightful ads.)

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Boy Scouts in Libya…

… rise to the occasion.

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7 Quick Takes Friday

I haven’t participated in Conversion Diary’s 7 Quick Takes Friday in while. But here goes:

1. While hanging around a Catholic hospital’s emergency room earlier this week, I saw on the wall a cross with Jesus on it, but Jesus was oversized for the cross, was fully robed, and wasn’t nailed to the cross. His hands were held out, in consolation and victory. I love the symbolism: the risen, living, loving, triumphant Lord with the cross behind him. But I have no idea what to call such a thing. Surely it’s not called a crucifix? (That would be confusing.) Help me out, here. This sort of cross with Jesus in front of it is called a… what?

2. A loved one was due to go in for heart tests next Monday (yes, Valentine’s Day – that’s when they had an opening), and was expected to get a stent at the same time, if not open heart surgery.  But this last Tuesday, as it happened, a number of diseased or damaged hearts all said phooey on schedules at the same time – including my loved one’s diseased heart – and the hospital to which my loved one got transferred was swamped with heart patients. Triage was necessary. My loved one wound up getting a stent in a late-in-the-day battle (his very hard, 99.9-percent-blocked artery gave the doctor a difficult time of it). He is already home, doing surprisingly well. Amazing. Praise God.

3. I would like to thank Subway for having a store inside the hospital. More specifically, I’d like to thank them for having a $2 English muffin egg and cheese melt available all day.

4. Although I have much good to say about the three (count them, three) Catholic hospitals I have been in during the past week, the one in which we wound up for The Mighty Stent Battle has something called an Interfaith Reflection Room (I think that’s right), for people to use for prayer and meditation – and on the sign outside the door, it asks people to respect this “sacred space.” I feel it incumbent upon myself to suggest that a room that violates the First Commandment cannot be sacred space. What would it be sacred to? Not the God Who has gone to a great deal of bother over the last few thousand years to teach us that ‘thou shalt not hedge your bets.’ As in, ‘thou shall have no other gods beside me.’ Sigh. If they provided a ‘Quiet Room’ for worried people to use, that at least would leave the matter between the individual and God, instead of officially seeming to recognize no difference between prayers to God and prayers not to God.

5. I am reading in a Kindle edition of The Godly Man’s Picture, by Thomas Watson, a 17th century Puritan preacher. Nearly everything I had understood about Puritans in my younger days was wrong, by the way.

6. The snow is nearly gone. There has been plenty of it in the right places this year. It’s looking good for farmers around here who have to irrigate to get a crop in.

7. We don’t usually have elk around here, but this winter we did, off and on for weeks, which has caused a regional sensation. And so, when people have heard where I live, they have been asking me, “Have you seen the elk!?” To which I have said, “I can watch them out my kitchen window, sometimes more than a hundred at once,” which has been good fodder for small talk. Shortly before the elk showed up, we had a herd of more than a hundred pronghorn antelope pass through (also unusual, that was). I haven’t seen the elk in days, though. I suspect they’ve moved upland, as the snow has melted. I can only hope they are gone for now. The hay fields are muddy. Elk could do much damage to them, in their present condition.

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Toddler survival story

How about some good news? How about a little boy who survived after about 25 minutes under water? More than survived, actually. He’s back to keeping his family hopping. (He’s two. He hasn’t learned the fear thing yet.)

For two days, he didn’t show brain activity, but doctors didn’t give up. They used an experimental hypothermia treatment (lowering his body temp), and that likely helped get him through the early phases. But pretty much everyone agrees that it’s miraculous the boy recovered.

hat tip: Thomas Peters

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Cracked crystal ball update

Our friend who was in a coma a couple/three months ago, with his parents standing between him and medical experts who thought it would be best to “pull the plug”, moved home earlier this month. The last we’d heard before yesterday was that two of the biggest problems his parents were having were, one, that he was upset they wouldn’t let him go play basketball with his buddies, and, two, he was freaking people out by asking if they wanted to feel the part of his face that was damaged in the motor vehicle accident. (gruesomeness alert) What I’m told is that the accident demolished one of his eye sockets, leaving him with his eye tethered to his head but not at all where it should be (specifically, I was told, at second hand, that it was lying on the road). The eye got put back in, and the ridge of bone under his eye got put back together somehow, and I’m told the plastic surgeons did an amazing job. (/gruesomeness alert)

I still haven’t seen “J” yet, but his family tells us via phone that if you didn’t know what had happened, you’d never guess there had been any damage to his face. Amazing. But I guess J is fascinated by the fact you can’t see evidence of what happened to him, and so he was going up to people and asking ‘Do you want to feel my face where it was messed up?’ This reportedly wasn’t going over too well, especially with people who saw him before the surgical repairs. His eyesight, miraculously enough, has come back nicely and might come back completely. Simply amazing.

Yesterday, my husband talked to J’s dad. J isn’t up to full speed and finesse, but he said he’d like to go back to work, and a doctor has cleared him for working part time, and a mill where he used to work has agreed to take him on, providing him with a ‘watcher’ at first, until they’re sure he’s nimble enough and steady enough to be safe around conveyor belts and machinery. If he can’t handle his old job, they said they’d try to work him in somewhere else.

Please pardon me while I go cry some more tears of joy.

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