Okay, everyone loves a weird disease that makes people's limbs fall off and blood pour from their eye sockets. Or is that just me? Perhaps it is.
The Virus Hunters deals with a bunch of these kinds of diseases. It was written by the guy who discovered/named the Ebola virus, and has spent most of his career running around chasing viruses and trying to prevent them from spreading and such, in his job for the US Centre for Disease Control. It's co-written by his wife, who is in the same line of work... but to be honest I found her writing style quite annoying for some reason, so I skipped those chapters.
Blood pouring from eye sockets aside, the real story behind this book (which the authors themselves don't even seem to have realised) is the relentless tension between the latest scientific advances which these chaps know, and the way medicine is practised in some of the poorest parts of the world. There's something slightly dismissive about the way McCormick refers to "The white man's medicine" and the awe in which it's held by the diseased masses (the action mostly takes place in various countries in central and western Africa). I know what he means to some extent - the infrastructure isn't there at the front line, there's a lack of trained doctors around (some of these countries don't have a single medical school), and all the time you have some thoroughly nasty diseases doing the rounds. Hospitals are in a dire state.
But it's not "the white man's medicine". It's evidence-based, modern, scientific medicine. When done properly it does a lot of good, but the major problem in the background of these stories seems to be that a little bit of modern medicine is a very dangerous thing. Frankly "traditional" medicines may not do much good (except for the occasional discovery of something that actually works) but they don't tend to do all that much harm either. Once people get the idea that sick people need to have injections, because that's the western thing to do, and there isn't a supply of sterile, disposable needles available... well you can imagine where it goes from there. (I should add that this was published around 1995, so things may have moved on. Hopefully they have. If nothing else, the situation with Aids may have taught people that using the same needles on everyone in the ward isn't a good plan. Hopefully.)
So what's interesting about this book, I think, is that it doesn't seem to be about what the authors think it's about. They present it as sexy science, weird diseases, and a bunch of dead people. What comes across, though, are these cultural tensions. You are very, very conscious that there are double standards. The horror of a member of the CDC squad being accidentally exposed to infection is supposed to chill you to the bone, while all the time Africans are getting sick and dying. I suppose that's the way of the world - aid workers surely eat better than the refugees they're helping, or they wouldn't offer to go out there in the first place. There's no doubt that these CDCers aim to do good, and do save many lives. I think it's the fact that it doesn't get commented on that bothers me. Or perhaps the fact that I wouldn't want to leave the comforts of home to go out there and do it myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment