Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds by Paul Farmer

Author:Paul Farmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

If martial measures were unbuttressed by evidence of effectiveness in slowing the diverse epidemics to which they were indiscriminately applied, they reliably deepened mistrust of the colonial medical service.

The control-over-care tactics of the Pasteurians left indelible social residue. Interviews with elderly men some forty years after Senegal’s last outbreaks revealed many to have vivid memories of plague-control efforts of French authorities. What these men didn’t recall were efforts to provide care for the afflicted, even after American military medics showed up with both pesticides and antibiotics. “Armed with DDT and sulfa drugs,” writes Echenberg, “American medics were prepared to entirely transform plague control and therapy, providing they could overcome the bureaucratic and political obstacles placed in their way.”110 They could not. Prevention had finally worked, thanks to DDT, but the case-fatality rate of plague was as high in Senegal’s last outbreaks as it was in its first documented ones.

Neither were American medics able (or their superiors willing) to help Liberian authorities link disease control to care. U.S. support for President Tubman’s health plan came to an end just as it was beginning to yield results—at least as measured by disease-control enthusiasts anxious to protect American troops stationed there. The State Department canceled the medical mission to Liberia not long after the war, citing a lack of funds. (This must have sounded like satire in Monrovia and theater of the absurd in the hinterlands.) The mission’s leaders hadn’t much concerned themselves with training health professionals, even though the army medic leading it reported only six doctors practicing in a country the size of Virginia. A Liberian returning from medical training in the States counted, just after war’s end, a dozen physicians practicing there. Not one of them was Liberian.111

One assumes that Firestone’s Nazi doctor had been let go during these interesting years. But it’s too bad Werner Junge was.

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