Wampum

Earlier this year a group of parents with at-risk (unvaccinated) children met with local authorities. When the meeting ended, four of the parents were dead from gun fire and one member of the local law enforcement was treated for a superficial knife wound. It was in one of the 44 local administrative areas in the Kano state of Nigeria, and other than the brief note in Le Monde, which drew attention to the exotic beliefs of the parents, it wasn't news anywere outside of ... one of the 44 local administrative areas in the Kano state of Nigeria.

The sectarian oddity -- the parents belong to a sect which rejects the trapings of modernity -- applies to about 500 children in that area. But that isn't the sole reason why parents choose not to vaccinate. The entire town of Ungogo. also in Kano state, also choose not to vaccinate -- they were promised water and sewage infrastructure -- poliomyelitis (polio) most commonly spreads through contaminated drinking water. Shed through the stool for weeks after a person is infected, it enters through the mouth and multiplies in the intestine -- just like cholera. Ungogo has cholera too. The town council of Ungogo is on record that they want safe water. Every year cholera kills several hundred people in Kano state. Polio and cholera aren't the only pathogens endemic to the human population centers of Kano state which have a fecal-oral transmission vector. The parents of Ungogo don't want the grandparents, parents, children, and infants to be forgotten after the WHO passes out an oral univalent type I vaccine to infants, and continue to have to drink shit soup.

Still larger numbers of parents in Kano state do not want their children to get needle sticks. One concern is the risk of HIV transmission from needle sticks. Another concern is the risk to girls from ... distant, possibly non-altruistic actors. Pfitzer's defense in a case being tried in the US, for deaths that occured in a field trial in Africa, for an anti-meningital product, is that meningitus would have killed as many or more people, so they shouldn't be liable for the people who died as a direct result of having taken Pfitzer's product. Dumping isn't something the Third World, even rural men and women in the most isolated part of Nigera are surprised by, they expect it, it is how the world is.

This can all be tarted up as ignorant Islamic mumbleism, but polio vaccines can be, and are obtained from Moslem Indonesia as from Xtain Europe or North America, and "buy Moslem" is no sillier than buy Blue or buy Coop, or any other top-down affiliate marketing, or bottom-up community preference, and there is a very good case for buying pharmacuticals for Third World consumers from Third World producers. Kano state is the polio hotspot in Nigeria, and Nigeria and Yemen the globe's polio hotspots.

John Kenedy said he was updating the latin civis Romanus sum claim to universality of the human condition, but the the point of his going to West Berlin, surrounded by the Soviet Zone, was to recognized that in the age of fission-fusion weapons delivered by ICBMs, Kansas City was just as "front line" as Berlin divided by die Innerstädtische Grenze. Overkill and prompt mortality had become the universal human condition.

Are we Africans? Outside of the condemned to accelerated death for addiction and/or moral turpitude, IV drug users, First World needle stick does not carry significant HIV risk. First World transfusions have -- over 4,000 hemophiliacs in France, nearly 200 in Iran. It is a long list of killed by medicine, prioir to the systematic heating of blood products in the early 1980s, in the First World. It goes downhill from there, the Second World, Socialist Eastern Europe had both needle stick and transfusion risk much later than the First World, and in sub-saharan Africa, the shared needle for "vitamins" and "medicines" is so close to the present that not all the infected cohort are dead yet.

Our form of "African medicine", the shape of the shared needle in the First, and other Worlds, is the standard multi-dose vial, a vial that is made "safe" by the adulteration of the vaccine by a mercury-based preservative to prevent the growth of bacteria and fungi introduced into the vial by first and subsequent needle penetration of the barrier cap.
As we think through the policies and politics of public health, in particular, polio causation and vaccination, we need to be aware what are the unstated presumptions, the limits of the box. An program of oral uni-valent,type I vaccine that eradicates poliomyelitis, but leaves girls education unimproved, the shit soup no less shitty, the haves undisturbed by the have-nots, and Thimerosal in a significant portion of the vaccine delivery system, and its manufacturers liability proof, has some beneficiaries other than the infants in Kano state Nigeria.

How should Kano authorities handle the polio outbreak? Would you support a Kano law requiring that children of the "simpletons" be vaccinated against polio? Would you support a Kano law requireing the children of Ungogo be vaccinated against polio? Would you support a Kano law that "simpletons" and Ungogo towns people be provided uncontaminated water and functional sewage systems?

Het woord apartheid komt uit het Afrikaans. Het woord is als leenwoord in bijna elke andere taal onvertaald opgenomen.

Een Afrikaner, wat is dat eigenlijk? Ik ben Afrikaaner, en ik ben Afrikaans.

What are we going to do about public health, in America and in Africa? Apartheid is a loanword in many languages other than Afrikaans. Can Apartheid work? If so, for whom?