32 Comments on Distributing Anti-Malaria Bed Nets in the Sudan
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Bill Gates hits the nail on the head with this TED Talk. He speaks about malaria and how more money goes into researching baldness for rich men than goes into research for malaria. At least Gates is trying to change that. This video is a perfect complement to Rudd’s report and offers some hope.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html
Bear 1 : Have you seen Joanne around?
Bear 2: You mean the Colan girl?
Bear 1: Too many mosquitoes around…
Bear 2: What’s that supposed to mean?
Bear 1: Just keep drinking and don’t ask too many questions fatso.
Even with an area the size of Pennsylvania, 2 years seems like an awfully long time to distribute those mosquito nets.
I’ve been roaring for help for years. Simple fact is, these people aren’t a priority.
Not for Ban Ki Moon. Not for WHO. The leaders of the EU or those wonderful leaders participating in the G20 Summit. I’m just a lion, there’s a limit to how many mosquitoes I can swallow. Or crap, for that matter…..
Now is this timely, or what, I was just about to fall asleep.
New malaria drug fights resistance, helps others
08 Apr 2009 21:22:12 GMT
Source: Reuters
* Drug stops parasite from evolving resistance
* Also helps other malaria drugs work better
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON, April 8 (Reuters) - U.S. researchers said on Wednesday they had designed a new kind of malaria drug that kills the parasite that causes the disease and keeps it from becoming resistant to the drug.
Tests in mice show the compound also helps other malaria drugs work better, the researchers reported in the journal Nature.
Now they are looking for funding to step up development, Jane Kelly and colleagues at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center and Oregon Health and Science University in Portland said.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that kills 880,000 people a year, most of them in Africa and most under the age of 5. There is no vaccine against the parasite that causes the illness and it quickly evolves resistance against drugs.
Kelly and colleagues set out to design a drug that could stop the parasite.
“When the parasite invades the human body, it takes up the red blood cells,” Kelly said in a telephone interview. “They take the hemoglobin from our red blood cells and they chew it up.”
The iron-containing heme in these cells is toxic to the parasites but they can convert it to a nontoxic form.
Chloroquine and other drugs stop this process but the parasite can develop the ability to pump these drugs out of its stomach.
“We engineered a new scaffold with both features incorporated into one molecule,” the researchers wrote in Nature. It is called by its chemical name for now, T3.5 (3-chloro-6-(2-diethylamino-ethoxy)-10-(2-diethylamino-ethyl)- acridone).
The new drug works in the same way as the older drugs by keeping heme toxic to the parasite, plus it stops them from pumping it out of their bodies, Kelly said.
“On its own it is intrinsically potent, and in combination with other antimalarials it is synergistic,” Kelly said. “It helps the other antimalarials.”
I think Joanne is in a monastery!
A battery & some spooge will keep the mosquitos away:
http://mosquitocentral.com/Repellents1.htm
Get thee to a nunnery!
http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o287/imadadog69/nun.jpg?t=1239336030
Come Back Little Sheba!
Merely as a reminder, Sudanese government is on the satanization program of the US State Department, backed by many Hollywood celebrities specialized in squinting concern on human rights (George Clooney comes to mind, since Tibet was already garrisoned by Richard Gere and his PR team). This goes on under the Obama administration, not less than Bush’s. Guess how helpful it must be to counter malaria in the country, since it usually results into international isolation and drying up of the aid sources. Most US and European NGOs have already left Sudan.
The Tubers are just beside themselves today. How to make sense of such a serious topic as malaria. Their reptilian brains just can’t handle it.
Really, really outstanding shot of the tubers!
Speaking of malaria, remember all those wonderful reports on Dubai?
Well, this is how its being built. ( Exerpt from a British newspaper.)
300,000 foreigners are essentially enslaved in Dubai
Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.
Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means “City of Gold”. In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.
Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. “To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell,” he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal’s village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they’d pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.
As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don’t like it, the company told him, go home. “But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket,” he said. “Well, then you’d better get to work,” they replied.
Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.
He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is “unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night.” At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.
The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn’t properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. “It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink,” he says.
The work is “the worst in the world,” he says. “You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable … This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can’t pee, not for days or weeks. It’s like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren’t allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer.”
Hell, that’s really awful of Dubay. Just one step down and they could stay as bad as the paperless workers in Western Europe or the Latinos fled illegally across the Rio Bravo to Texas, Florida, California and so on. God forbid it!
I spotted Joanne…
taking off…
I’ll take that weight off your heart, B-Man: she should be back soon.
That boat is very looking like mine.
Why, did you run off with her to Italy? Well a postcard would be appreciated.
No, I’m on the shore waiting for the boat.
Lucky B——-D. !!!! Hope you have a good bottle of vino with you. Oh I forgot, Joanne doesn’t really drink, well sometimes, post some pictures.
I guess it’s No Casual Good Friday Day today….
Hey C-C where you hiding?
Up here behind the rocks keeping an eye on Leo & waiting for Joanne to come back too. When she does I’m going to swoop down there with my hang glider, scoop her up (sorry Leonardo - it must be done) and whisk her back to RB studios in NYC. I’m doing it for the greater good of all regular RB commentators.
With Joanne over here and now Ellie off jet setting on the west coast I can just hear the crickets and see the tumbleweeds blowing around the RB studio. Oh sorry, maybe those are dust bunnies and the sound of Drew tapping his fingers on a desk contemplating his next move.
Thanks for showing up C-C I was starting to hear my own echo in here. All of which brings me to the real story behind FAKE BOOBS. FAKE BOOBS. FAKE BOOBS….(luv those mt. echoes)
Law professors won’t tell their female students this, but one method some women use to get ahead in the corporate world has nothing to do with grades, professionalism, or hard work. Just fake boobs.
In a recent Bitter Lawyer poll, 58 percent of those asked said that implants could only help a woman’s career, the remainder of respondents were split on the matter. Just over 23 percent of those polled said such cosmetic changes were “irrelevant;” nearly 20 percent thought it was “career suicide.”
Read the entire article here:
http://www.bitterlawyer.com/index.php/columns_detail_comment/the_real_story_on_fake_boobs/?cat_id=12
Hey C-C, how do you know Ellie’s jet setting around LA? I think she’ll need an escort, for protection….hint, hint, hint Sir D.
Don’t tell me they both took off to get FAKE BOOBS!!!
re: Ellie; it’s on her blog in no specific detail. She further north than LA, like more WA & OR - looking for Bill Gates maybe?! And Bob the camera guy pulled the short straw as escort; lucky guy! (or maybe NOT!) Do tell Bob - what’s jet setting with Ellie really like; besides fine dining at Denny’s?
Ellie is in my neck of the woods? Hmmm, where did I put that shaver?
I guess Bill Gates was right. Nobody gives a fuck about malaria cause it’s just Africans dying. Only 5 people left a comment. C ya Monday.
The problems of the world just get too overwhelming.
Sure us westerners should be ready for anything with our comparably luxurious, idealistic, resource-rich life styles. But the truth is, we have come to think of our life styles as the answer and we spend all our time working for life style and cloaking ourselves in life style and feeling helpless short of prescribing same for others who are in trouble.
Maybe more of us should join the peace corps. But then, what country, what issue, what objective?
Maybe more of us should be politically active. But then, what is the death toll of global warming, health care inequities or the “war on terror” versus African mosquitoes.
The fact is, until we live in global society where a brain surgeon at a children’s hospital is exactly equal in value to an unskilled laborer pulling weeds, there are going to be serfs, slaves and disposable people somewhere in the system. They will usually be the people most logistically incapable, like the uninsured in the U.S., of representing themselves.
And societies don’t change quickly. The current system claims that the surgeon sacrificed much to train for doing good works that only the most qualified could accomplish for innocent children facing extreme consequences. There is no claim in society that the weed puller sacrificed much by not doing other things to perform a back breaking task well where it is still matters in places to eliminate weeds while avoid chemicals.
The weed puller is suppose to be either slow or working his way up. Otherwise there is no equity for him in any system. But that is still not perfect equity. The social model for perfect equity outside of, I believe, the Star Trek model does not yet exist. Communism and socialism failed. The tribal model is not, in my opinion, all that some make of it. We are still divided into rivaling cultures, classes and countries.
When both the surgeon and the weed puller feel important and free to do what makes the most sense to them and be equally compensated for their efforts to contribute to society, we will have arrived. Maybe we will decide to live with more weeds, but where need remains, they will be assuredly pulled with excellence and without exploitation.
The global society where people are not dying for want of the resources of somebody else’s hair implants, is the world of that perfect equity. We haven’t yet learned how to do it except in futuristic science fantasy.
I don’t know about others, but I just can’t get upset every time I see people dying in the news. It is just too much.
I know people right here who I care about who are having worse troubles than I. But my life is still taking up most of my effort. I labored real hard this week and ended up, in frustration, giving too much of my wealth and dignity to some bar owners on Friday and Saturday night.
(Luckily for my future charitable donations, people tend to buy me drinks all too often.)
But we should all speak up. Lip service is a part of it. So thanks B-Man. I’ll try to cover it sometime.
8/
For Mastah Ook…
That was beautiful. Thank you B-man!
Whatever is this this has nothing to do with the Baghavad Gita, has it?
I can’t rememember the mention of this host of half naked women in the poem.
This twit is Secretary of State? Laugh it up Hillary, I’m sure the family of the US captain taken hostage and threatened with murder is also laughing it up. I said twit, but there’s another word I’d use to describe her. “We’re gonna work together…” She called in the FBI to negotiate with these terrorist thugs. This is a military matter, not some domestic kidnapping. What a moron.
I guess the Prez who I’m told is a big Rocketboom fan read the above comment and decided to act after watching Hillary’s stun gun performance. I’m glad the captain is safe. And happy for his family too. Now if Kam & Bre could put together another rocket and save all the other hostages, that would be a coup for the boom. They’d build an RB Wing to The White House.
Well if you hold people to too strict of behavior standard, then they will simple adopt a false behavior to keep you off their back.
People need to laugh, regardless of what it may look like at times. I’ve laughed in the emergency room during my visits and during the visits of others. And at a funeral. It helped.
ddt. It worked for white america and white europe, but is denied by same (in guise as UN) to black africa. But don’t worry, bed nets will make the UN feel better about that.