Posted on 01/08/2008 12:06:41 PM PST by forkinsocket
MASERU, LESOTHO -- A neighbor shaved Matsepang Nyoba's head with an antiquated razor. Blood beaded on her scalp. Tears trickled down her cheeks, but not because of the pain. She was in mourning, and this was a ritual.
Two days earlier, her newborn baby girl had died in the roach-infested maternity ward of Queen Elizabeth II, a crumbling sprawl that is the largest hospital in Lesotho, a mountainous nation of 2.1 million people surrounded by South Africa.
Nyoba, 30, whose given name means "mother, have hope," has AIDS. But that is not what killed her baby daughter, Mankuebe.
Nyoba owes her own life to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has given $8.5 billion to global health causes. Through its grantees, including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the foundation underwrites, inspires or directs major efforts to prevent, cure or treat those diseases. The fund pays for Nyoba's costly AIDS medicine.
But when she gave birth on a recent Sunday morning, her baby was suffering from a different kind of distress. The infant was limp and barely breathing. A nurse rushed her to the nursery, packed with sick babies, some two to a crib. Jury-rigged stethoscope tubes let six of the babies share lifesaving oxygen from a single valve.
There was no oxygen tube for Mankuebe. She asphyxiated for lack of a second valve. It would have cost $35.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
We should stop all aids money since it is a self inflicted disease and spend more effort on real diseases.
Okay, really stupid article.
$650M went to treating X instead of Y, therefore anybody who dies because of Y is a victim of the expenditure of money on X.
Anybody ever think that if money hadn’t been spent on X there still might have been no money available for Y?
Some economist a few years back did a comparative study of how much money spent on various objectives it would take to save one human life. If I remember correctly, it varied from about $100 if spent on certain emergency equipment for hospitals to tens of millions spent trying to remove the last tiny traces of certain pollutants. Yet we never hear about pollution control causing deaths in emergency rooms.
Since the Gates foundation cannot solve all medical deficiencies in Africa instantly, they obviously must set priorities. And those on the low end of the priorities won’t do as well.
Whether they’ve set their priorities correctly is an entirely different question.
Unless the men are being promiscuous with each other (which is a possibility), the women are not necessarily all totally innocent victims of male misbehavior.
I fail to see how this is the fault of any charitable foundation. Because Bill Gates didn’t full staff and equip 1000 hospitals in Africa, all death is his fault? The stupidity is frightening.
It’s not frightening, it’s just run of the mill libthink.
Actually, now that I think about it, it IS frightening...
“Unless the men are being promiscuous with each other (which is a possibility), the women are not necessarily all totally innocent victims of male misbehavior.”
It is statements like this that cause most self inflicted pencil shoved into the ear incidents.
Yeah, this is so dumb as to be offensive. A girl dying is not a “victim” of the Gates Foundation unless the Foundation substantially contributed to her death — not that they merely didn’t do a specific thing to help her. By that definition, she’s my “victim”, too (and also the article author’s, I strongly suspect).
Here is how the Liberals Think:
Gates is one of the richest men in the world.
He gives hundreds of millions each year to charity.
But because he doesn’t give his ENTIRE income to charity, he is causing other people to die by default.
Therefore the Liberals must FORCE Gates to give all of his money to everything, making the world a better place.
The End.
Casual promiscuity is very common in traditional African, Latin American and other third world countries. But it is denied to the death by the people in those countries.
To be fair, a great deal of it is upper-class male promiscuity, with these guys living essentially a polygamous lifestyle as a perk and display of their status.
BTW, it is likely that AIDS infection rates are greatly overstated in Africa, as activists have been claiming 25% to 50% rates there for decades now. If true, these countries would essentially be empty now, since there has until recently been very little treatment available, and the victims would have died quickly.
Brought on by behavior and not genetics. I am less than sympathetic when we have people/kids dying of arrays of other diseases like cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers (sp? ), Cystic Fibrosis, and others.
Just like other SDT’s just more lethal.
Just that way.
They do have a point about the salary increases. Since there is so much AIDS money, salaries for doctors and nurses who are AIDS caregivers are 3 to 4 times what salaries for other health care providers are. This draws away good employees and leaves a few lower quality workers left who are willing to work for the much smaller salaries for non aids workers. On one night 100 women giving birth were taken care of by 3 midwives and no doctors or nurses.
It was either you or the butler that killed her. Or Col. Mustard, in the closet, with a monkey wrench.
Oh, heck, its all Bush’s fault, everybody knows that.
There was no oxygen tube for Mankuebe. She asphyxiated for lack of a second valve. It would have cost $35.
***The original charter for the Gates foundation was that they would focus on medical issues where a little bit of money would go a long way, like 10cents worth of vitamins for each child in a whole county, combatting simple diseases like Malaria and smallpox, that kind of thing. The fact that this baby died due to such poor resource handling is evidence that the foundation has gone off its intended track, in a big way.
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