Micro in the Media

¶ … technology and science have progressed so rapidly, a place where cell phones have become video cameras, where scientist can actually clone human life, you would assume medical advancements would progress in the same stride. This has not been the case in recent history, and although we have come a long way, there are many diseases for which there is no cure. Over the last century civilization has advanced in ways unthinkable to mankind, yet two things remain a constant reminder that humans are susceptible to anything. One such thing is Mother Nature and the other is the plague of infectious disease. Though we have found some ways to overcome these forces of nature, it is more like placing a Band-Aid over a cut artery. The article, which I chose to write about, gives a painful glimpse of reality. Unhappy Returns, featured in Time Magazine Asia on Monday, Dec. 01, 2003 illustrates the hardships of living with an infectious disease and the fight of physical and financial survival.

In a small village on the verge of extinction nearly everyone is infected with a disease called Schistosoma japonicum. This parasite spreads through the blood stream, lays eggs in the liver and bladder, wriggles into the brain or embeds itself in the spine. Although the are ways of living with this disease it is very expensive and there are many surgical procedures that must be done to have any positive effect. In this small village called Xinmin, the Chinese province of Hunan, many of the infected are people who can not afford health care, there is no such thing as insurance, and the capitalistic government of China is no longer funding local health bureaus. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Schistosoma is the second-most debilitating parasitic disease after Malaria.

As many countries provide basic health care plans for under privileged people, China is not one of them. According to a United Nations led survey in 1998, almost half of those that have fallen below China's poverty line did so only after suffering from a major disease. Today, just 15% of Chinese have health insurance. By the early 1990s, local health workers no longer had the budget to spray the antisnail pesticide around Xinmin, leaving the disease to infect village after village. Prior to the health care budget cuts in China, free Schitosoma check ups were provided to villagers however, this is no longer the case.