A Simple Solution

Ok so I'm cheating a little by just putting my class assignment for this week up rather than writing something original, but it's temporary, I'll write something original soon. Anyhow, this assignment was a reflection on several articles, including one titled "A Simple Solution" by Andrea Gerlin, which appeared in Time magazine in October of 2006. I encourage you all to look it up if you can. Anyhow-- this is my rant...

It was interesting to read this week’s articles from the perspective of someone who has lived in one of the places frequently mentioned in them, Bangladesh. I remember arriving to Bangladesh and receiving my medical kit containing, among other things, multiple packets of Oral Rehydration Salts, something I had never used before. When I first became ill (as we all did at some point or another) with diarrhea, my host mom kept telling me I needed “slime”. I eventually figured out she meant saline and I brought out my Oral Rehydration Salts, which she mixed with some Sprite-like soda for me to try to make it taste better.
Bangladesh made me very aware of how important public health measures and preventative health are in the context of the developing world. Having grown up in a place where every year we were warned not to collect water in open containers in order to avoid breeding the mosquito that carries dengue and not to swim in standing water to avoid the “bilarcia” parasite, I was exposed to some of this early on. But, as the Gerlin article says, in Bangladesh many children still die from diarrhea and this somehow shocked me more than acquiring an illness from a mosquito bite—perhaps because of exactly how preventable diarrhea related deaths could be.
In Bangladesh, most people don’t boil their water—some can’t afford to, many more don’t know to. Food is stored on a shelf at room temperature, which can be quite warm in the monsoon season. Many people don’t wash their hands with soap after using the toilet (again some can’t afford to and many more don’t know to) and subsequently don’t wash their hands again before handling food. All this leads to a country whose health risk section on their Lonely Planet guide reads like an infectious disease textbook- hepatitis, cholera, dysentery, giardia, amoebiasis, ring worm, tape worm, pin worm, etc, etc, etc. And the sad part is that educating people on hygienic practices, giving out water filters, giving out soap, deworming children, and all the other myriad of programs that could be done to significantly reduce diarrhea-related mortality in Bangladesh (and in the rest of the developing world) would probably not cost that much compared to other healthcare initiatives that we fund domestically and worldwide but, as Gerlin points out, diarrhea is just not that popular—and until the publicity is there, the funds will not appear.