By: Joe Hitchcock,
on 1/15/2016
From about 1964, there was increasing excitement that dialysis might become a major life-saving treatment for chronic renal failure, not just for acute renal failure. Transplantation was also in its infancy, but despite some promise, overall success rates at this time were very poor.
The post Dialysis and hepatitis appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Lauren,
on 2/2/2011
The recent Cholera outbreak in Haiti reminds us that this is not simply a disease of the distant and unsanitary past. The current outbreak is both unique and typical. Caused by a disease that has a long and devastating history, this Haiti outbreak has much in common with the outbreaks of the nineteenth century and twentieth century. History helps us keep in mind five key factors:
The Role of Media Coverage in our awareness of cholera: In our current age, as well as in the past, the combination of rapidity and deadliness has made cholera epidemics into media events. In fact, much of the tragedy of global diarrheal disease happens beyond the public gaze. Vibrio cholerae accounts for only a small fraction of global diarrhea deaths. The microbe is widely distributed around the world. Most cholera cases are mild, often they will be unnoticed. Unfortunately these, and particularly those many diarrhea deaths, have become part of our normal.
Epidemiological Monroe Doctrinism: In the months preceding the Haiti outbreak there were outbreaks in Pakistan (following floods) and in parts of Africa. Western hemisphere outbreaks are news because they seem to threaten the sanitary sanctity of the U.S. Some reporters ask outright whether cholera will come to us; others hint. But how serious a problem cholera is conceived to be usually depends more on where the outbreaks are than how many are affected.
“Withering Othering”: This is a phrase I used in the book to indicate the ease, which came to prominence in the nineteenth century, with which we use presumed sanitary status to group human populations. Cholera epidemics are occasions for magnifying distance between a clean “we” and a dirty “they.” Cholera is rightly associated with poor sanitation, along with the host of social, economic, political, and cultural factors that contribute to its spread. But often, blaming unsanitary conditions is an excuse to lose sight of that bigger story. Haiti has often served as default abjectness for the western hemisphere. When something bad happens, we shrug and say “Well, it is Haiti.” Cholera reinforces that abject ahistorical identity. I have taught a bit of Haitian history, am an admirer and minor collector of Haitian art, but certainly no expert. But the historian’s business is to explain both the perception of abjectness and the complicated antecedents of this cholera. Earthquake destruction is part of that latter story, but diarrheal disease was high in Haiti even before that. Haiti is a poor country, with a difficult political past. All this is coming to bear tragically in a large number of individual lives.
Pretense of Order: As an outside observer, most of the information I get is though press conference statements. In these, whatever has happened and however many have just died, is equalized as grey fact. Nothing ruffles bureaucratic prose, well organized web-sites, or well-dressed spokespersons. Effective response, it seems, requires emotional control, and, somehow, an overlooking of tragedy. This is not new – historians of epidemics will have often been struck by the disparity between the chaos of mass disease and the need to project that those in charge have things in hand — but I was shocked to see it happening. The cholera riots in Haiti too are wholly typical – people in cholera-stricken cities have rioted throughout the world both in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Often, in various ways, the pretense of normal seems to be at the root of their anger.
Preparation and Distribution of Resources: Cholera’s status in
By: Rebecca,
on 5/5/2009
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The
Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at “swine flue”. Read his previous OUPblogs here.
“Swine flu” or a strand of influenza A subtype “H1N1?” Try as federal officials might, the media continues to resist their call to term the “swine flu” the new strain of “H1N1″ virus.
At a press conference last Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was at pains to say, “This really isn’t swine [flu], it’s H1N1 virus.” He also explained why: “and it is significant because there are a lot of hard-working families whose livelihood depends on us conveying this message.” (At least ten countries have placed bans on the import of pork even though the World Health Organization has attested that H1N1 is an air-borne and not a food-borne virus.)
The hegemony of “swine flu” over “H1N1″ is even more peculiar given that the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) reports that the particular strand of H1N1 virus (which typically infect pigs) that is causing the current epidemic has not previously been reported in pigs and actually contains avian and human components. It was only on May 2, long after “swine flu” had gained rhetorical currency that the strain was found in pigs at a farm in Alberta, Canada. Even there the story has a twist - the pigs had gotten infected because of their contact with a farm worker who had recently returned from Mexico, and not the other way around - prompting some to suggest that the proper nomenclature ought to be “human flu” or “Mexican flu.”
But the media’s job is to transmit the news in the best way that rolls of one’s tongue, not deal with the fallout of their infelicitous use of words. To be fair, administration officials were slow to catch on. As late as April 26, two days before Vilsack’s press conference, the White House and Richard Besser of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) were still referring to the “swine flu.” Clearly, the pork lobbyists aren’t going to win this battle and the malapropistic epidemic will continue. Administration officials should know that if they really wanted a working alternative to “swine flu,” they would have to do a lot better than a robotic scientific abbreviation.
Our current malapropism has an ancient pedigree. The 1918-1920 H1N1 pandemic called the “Spanish Flu” didn’t start in Spain (and probably started in Kansas). This is ironic, because the “Spanish Flu” acquired its name only because Spain was a neutral country in WW1 and with no state censorship of news of the disease, was offering the most reliable information about it. This ended up generating the impression that the disease originated and was particularly widespread in Spain. Even when the media is not trying, it defines and shapes our reality.
Why does any of this matter? Because words characterize an issue in such a way as to insinuate a cause and to frame our reactions. Sometimes, words can even drive mass hysteria. Consider the “swine flu” outbreak in 1976, which claimed a single life at Fort Dix, NJ. Because this particular strain of virus looked a lot like the one that caused the “Spanish Flu” of 1918-1920 (also misleadingly named), public health officials convinced President Gerald Ford to commence a mass immunization program for all Americans. The use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut was not without consequences. Of the 40 million Americans immunized, about 500 developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing neuromuscular disorder.
So let us pick our words carefully, lest our slovenly words presage our slovenly deeds.
