Malaria vs. Death

Malaria and Death or DDT and Life: Pick Just One

Suppose we could save a million (human) lives a year, 85% of which were children’s lives, or lose the brown pelican forevermore. The vast majority of us would opt for the million humans over a bird, I would hope.

Sub-Saharan Africans don’t have much of a choice between people over birds. There the scourge of malaria kills one child every 30 seconds, according to the African Environmentalist Association: http://bit.ly/WE8DQ

Malaria is sometimes called “Africa’s common cold,” but it’s not quite the equivalent of a mild cough, sniffles, and a sore throat. The debilitating disease causes high fevers, severe headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, brain damage, and, often, death.

Chicken soup or Vick’s VapoRub have no salutary effect on its victims.

There is an effective remedy for the deaths and the billions spent on treating malaria in African nations where costs can exceed 40% of health allocations. Those countries can afford the deaths but can ill-afford the billions spent to treat malaria victims.

The catch? The remedy is frowned upon by the UN’s World Health Organization, WHO.

As a mosquito-borne disease, logically, malaria is best prevented by the eradication of ’skeeters but the best preventative, DDT, is verbotten by WHO . . .

(Read the rest at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1322)

Swine Flu and Government-Induced Panic

Swine Flu and Swine: Government-Induced Panic

In academia, it’s called “publish or perish,” unwritten, university-imposed requisites that untenured professors publish something, virtually anything, to get the university name some publicity, and for the professors to avoid being canned.

It results in profs rushing into print some of the most godawful tripe no matter its relevance, no matter its accuracy.

Our present government, which revels in panic of all sorts, engages in similar ploys to arouse needless public “agina” over the economy, health care, and the environment hoping voters will agree on quick legislative action in lieu of enacting intelligent laws.

Get it done, “publish” it, before the electorate catches on and ousts the enactors in the next election.

The tactic was working until Obamacare hit the fan.

Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, got into the panic act with its dire warnings and predictions on the Swine Flu, officially known as H1N1.

A governmental agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC and its dedicated people won’t exactly perish if they don’t publish claptrap.

They’re protected under Civil Service laws and, much like meteorologists forecasting the weather, they’re aware that when their claptrap is proven woefully wrong, the average joe will have forgotten what they said.

Besides, panics afford them some limelight and may help their climb up the promotional ladder.

The CDC latched onto the Swine Flu, H1N1, in 2008 as if it represented the onset of a pandemic worse than the bubonic plague melded into the Black Plague.

Far worse than contracting H1N1 could be the vaccinations the CDC is now advocating. Some sources are alleging it is as ineffective as it is deadly: http://euro-med.dk/?p=9152. . . .

(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com)