Ghiasi.org

Article #2, finally– the fruit of our collective effort!

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6776

Among the Neglected
By Marzieh Ghiasi and Hannah Thomas
Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Marzieh Ghiasi and Hannah Thomas explore the chasm between the enormous human cost of Neglected Tropical Diseases and funding for research and drugs

“The parasite gets inside the nose and it completely destroys the face.”

Professor Greg Matleshweski, a parasitology expert, is describing the fate of 12 million people afflicted with Leishmaniasis, a highly prevalent condition in parts of South America. “When you have that kind of affliction you can’t function in society. You are outcasts, really lepers.”

Leishmaniasis is just one of 14 infections known as Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). Sometimes called the “biblical diseases,” or the “diseases of poverty,” they have persisted for centuries. Along with HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, NTDs pose a huge challenge to global health – but because they almost exclusively affect the world’s poorest, their plight has been neglected in public discussion, investment, and research.

NT-What?

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of NTDs includes leprosy, elephantiasis, Chagas disease, cholera, dengue, and sleeping sickness. Categorized as viral, bacterial, or helminthic, they thrive in regions far beyond the tropics.

According to the WHO’s numbers, one billion people are afflicted, 2.7 billion are at risk, and between 500,000 and one million die each year of NTDs. If a 670-person classroom were a microcosm of the world, these diseases would plague 100 people.
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This is a peice I wrote about 4 years ago (10^th grade) about a book that remains one of my favorites, and a subject that I sill find intriguing.

The twentieth century will be marked in history for its many civil rights movements, none of which was more tremendous than the anti-apartheid movement of South Africa. Alan Paton was an author and a political activist who created the South African Liberal Party, and who would later become one of the most prominent voices of opposition to apartheid; the South African government’s policy of racial segregation and discrimination against the black majority population of the country.

Born to a white farming family in South Africa in early twentieth century, Paton grew sympathetic to the anti- apartheid cause as he watched first hand a socially frayed country where “fear loomed over everything.”¹ Throughout his life, Paton published his views on apartheid, crime, and justice in South Africa in a body of works, of which the novel Cry, the Beloved Country would become the most renowned. Thought by many as the initial and the most compelling novel to emerge out of the crises in South Africa; Cry, the Beloved Country brought into spotlight the problems that plagued Africa’s southern tip, and set a precedent for other critical South African pieces of literature that would later surface.

In Cry, the Beloved Country, Paton deals with three different accounts, one of the land of South Africa and the great tribes that once presided across its plains; another of the search of a father, Stephen Kumalo, an old rural black minister for his son Absalom in a large corrupt city; and finally an old rural white man, James Jarvis’s confrontation with the loss of his son. The story combines all of these elements to illustrate a glimpse into, and an explanation for, the condition of South Africa during the 1940’s and beyond.
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For anyone here in Montreal, this event held on the global day for Darfur looks to be very promising and informative. Hope you can make it!

More info

By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.

- William Osler (Father of Modern Medicine)

http://www.filmloop.com/cgi-bin/bv/bv.py?ticket=jpH7ym5Xwgey458JA08v7io-g-HfdDx0&flash=1&extAds=1&px=FL

I found this link on the imdb site for “Sometimes in April“… a movie that after a year and a half I still can’t stop thinking about.

Today is April 6th, 2007. Here I am, sitting somewhat comfortably in my chair on a pinpoint in the North American continet. Among the concerns I have are the upcoming exams and my plans for the summer. It’s difficult to imagine that nineteen years ago I could have, all of us could have just as easily been born somewhere else, where the destruction of our lives, families, homes, everything we knew was all reduced to a red spot on a map, a small yellow headline — flickering for a few moments on a television screen to the rest of the world.

In 1994, in a short stretch of 100 days, beginning on April 6th and continuing to mid-July, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed. The link shows a stretch of picture taken at Rwanda January this year. Like the calm after the storm, these pictures show such a serene place that it is almost impossible to imagine that these luscious green fields are where only 13 years ago the blood of thousands of human beings was shed while everyone either stood by or did not care.

Sometimes I just wonder whether the most horrifying thought is the apathy, the massive failure of humanity– 13 years ago, when I’m certain if everyone, citizens, the international community had cared, had pushed hard enough, at the very least a million lives would not have been lost… or that 13 years from now, we’ll sigh, looking back at today and the things that plague our world, and wish we had cared about something, wish we had done something, anything… when it was not too late.