One advantage to staying home
Aljazeera.Net – EU ‘must face TB threat’ — This all stems from lax health care monitoring and now is a serious threat everywhere.
Markku Niskala, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said:”The drug resistance that we are seeing now is without doubt the most alarming tuberculosis situation on the continent since World War Two.”
“Our message to EU leaders is: Wake up, do not delay, do not let this problem get further out of hand.”
About 450,000 people get infected with tuberculosis each year in and around Europe, including Eastern Europe and Central Asia, said Pierpaolo de Colombani, a medical officer for the World Health Organisation (WHO).Almost 70,000 of these cases have contracted strains that are resistant to the two main tuberculosis drugs, raising fears the disease could lead to epidemics in Western Europe on the scale of that seen in the 1940s.
related links:
Problems in South Africa too
Problems in India
Background info
My friend got consumption when he was studying abroad in Spain. It is interesting how this disease continues to thrive in a developed nation-bloc.
#1
My wife doesn’t need to go all the way to Spain to get that… Whenever she enters a shopping mall, she gets a severe case of consumption… 😉
These kind of maps always tick me off, since entire nations are colored one way or another – which gives the impression that risk is more wide-spread than it really is.
i.e. All of Russia, China, India, etc has higher rates than the Saharan desert? But the Saharan desert has higher risk than Greenland?
I have equal risk of catching TB in New York City as I do in Northern Canada, or the middle of the outback in Austrailia?
Same reason I dislike the red state/blue state maps – since it gives the impression that the area of a state has something to do with how many people voted.
As an example:
http://tinyurl.com/od248
I remember a co-worker looking at one of those red/blue US maps after the 2000 election, and he couldn’t understand why it was such a close race – since so much of the map was colored red… 🙁
According to this map, the Red Cross needs to complain to Russia, China and a lot of Africa, not to the E.U.
#3, Mike, excellent point. I too have had the same complaint. In the last election, 54% voted one way. Does that colored map mean that 46% of our state now are irrelevant?
And yes, the TB should be addressed where it is most prevalent, not on the fringes where they already have good health care. Go to the source if you want to stop it.
5 I too have had the same complaint.
It is even more striking when seen on a county-by-county level:
http://tinyurl.com/4tw7e
The same site has an excellent writeup – w/ maps – on how these maps would have to be adjusted if population was taken into account…
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
The maps that blend the red & blue into shades of violet/purple seem familiar to me, probably from discussions posted here after the 2000 elections.
The “~mejn” site I linked to in #6 also links to this page of world maps – adjusting the size of the countries to match the relative magnitude of the fact being discussed.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cartograms/
I really like how the 2nd map, charting population, has Russia squeezed into a thin swath across the top of the map by the expanded size of China & India. 🙂
Canada is also “squeezed” by the US – but South America doesn’t seem too distorted in this map?