Marzieh Ghiasi

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

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6776
Also featured on: http://www.ntdsociety.com/among-the-neglected/

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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The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized.
-Hans Rosling

This is one of the best gems that I’ve stumbled upon in recent memory, thanks to /.. Recently it was reported that Google has snaped up Karolinska stats tool for an ‘undisclosed sum’ ;). This tool was developed by the Hans Rosling (a professor of international health at Swedens’ Karolinska institute) and his son under the wing of Gapminder. The objective of the tool, called the Trendalyzer software, is to gather and present a variety of data from public data-bases that are normally inaccessible to the public in the same place in a comprehensive yet elegant manner.

So what? Companies spend millions of dollars a year attempting to improve their statistical analysis tools to compete in the market– after all, you don’t want to sell to the individual, the individual varies too much, you want to sell to the masses, and to do that you must understand the mind of the population. Good statistical analysis tools are even more important in the public arena where the report quotes Rosling stating that “public organizations around the world invest 20 billion dollars a year producing different kinds of statistics.”

What is apparently fantastic about the Trendalyzer is its ability to present a multitude of data in a way that is simple and visually attractive, and really expresses the association between different parameters. You can view a sample “graph” at Google:

http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

The video below, however, really shows Rosling’s tool in action. Watch Rosling (and his dynamic personality) in a few slides essentially dispel the notion of a divided world and show the diversity that is present in regions that are often ‘lumped’ together… to those of us who would rather die than attempt to understand statistics. It’s fascinating!!

http://ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=hans_rosling

I thought maybe they know everything I am going to teach them about. So I did a pretest, when they came. And one of the questions from which I learnt a lot was this one: Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs. And I put them together so that one in each country has twice the rate of mortality as the other… so I got a confidence interval which was pretty narrow. And I got happy of course. At 1.8 out of 5 answers possible, that means that there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course. But one late night, when I was compiling my reprot I really realized my discovery. I have shown the Swedish top students know, statistically less significant about the world than the chimpanzees. Because the chimpanzees would score half right. If I gave them two bananas, with Sri Lanka and Turkey, they would be right half of the cases. But the students are not that. The problem for me was not ignorance, it was pre-conceived ideas. I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Karolinska Institute that have some of the noble prizes in medicine, and they are on par with the chimpanzees there. So this where I realized that there was a need to communicate…

-Hans Rosling

So much potential! First, I am very excited to see how Google will expand this project (I still can’t get over the awesomeness that is Google Earth ) and second, man, someone please give me a ticket to Sweden! I am very impressed with their international health program… and I need to take Dr. Rosling’s lectures.