Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues by Farmer Paul

Author:Farmer, Paul [Farmer, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Health
ISBN: 9780520229136
Google: gnWc1e0-7tAC
Amazon: 0520229134
Barnesnoble: 0520229134
Goodreads: 10233
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2001-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

They say he went [to South America] to study the science of bacteriology. He learned how to create microbes and then traveled to [North] America to study germ warfare. . . . They can now put microbes into the water of troublesome places. They can “disappear” all the militant young men and at the same time attract more [international] aid in order to stop the epidemic.

1988: NEW DISORDER, OLD PARADIGMS

In Do Kay, an increased concern with sida fit neatly into the almost apocalyptic winter of 1987–88. A military dictatorship was declared. Manno was dead, and Anita was dying. Why was it, several villagers queried, that Do Kay alone of the villages in the area had people sick with sida? If the disorder was indeed novel, as most seemed to believe, why should it strike Do Kay first? Some cautioned that the mysterious deaths of two persons from nearby villages may not have been due to “sent” tuberculosis, as had been suspected: perhaps they had died, undiagnosed, from sida. Other questions were asked in more hushed tones: was it true that others, such as Dieudonné Gracia and Calhomme Viaud, were also ill with the disorder? Was it really caused by a simple microbe, or was someone at the bottom of it all?

Rumors flew. Some said that Acéphie, another young villager back from Port-au-Prince, had contracted the disorder by sharing clothes with Germaine, a kinswoman from another village in the plateau. A voodoo priest in a neighboring village was reported to have signed a contract with a North American manufacturing firm to “load tear-gas grenades with mò sida.” Demonstrators who found themselves in a cloud of this brand of tear gas would later fall ill with a bona fide case of sida. One person with tuberculosis was cautioned not to cross any major paths, stand in a crossroads, or walk under a chicken roost, lest his malady “degenerate into sida.”

At the same time, one noted the parallel activities of the village health workers. At the January 1988 meeting of the village health committee, there was talk of initiating a much-needed antituberculosis project—one that would also include the task of HIV education. The community health workers from Do Kay and surrounding villages also held a second conference on sida. But these attempts at activism were mired in a widely shared resignation that cast the new disorder as a ruthless killer against which “doctors’ medication” could offer little comfort. Dispirited physicians and nurses seemed to feel that any assertions to the contrary were hollow ones, that there really was nothing they could do. The mood was grim and affected us all.

Anita’s death in mid-February coincided with an obvious dampening of discussion about the political disorder. What had once seemed a sort of struggle for preeminence between politics and sida, with the former eclipsing the latter whenever the political situation was “hot,” now appeared to be more like a symbiotic relationship between the two. When the muzzle was off, it was off for everything; when it was applied with new force, those with the most to lose simply spoke less.

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