Month: May 2009

Flu and Mortality

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I am far from an expert on medicine but was interested in the difference in mortality in Mexico and the United States on this latest outbreak of swine flu. After reading many of the accounts I noted that many of the individuals in Mexico did not have access to health care and / or delayed going to the doctor and used home remedies or self-medicated until their situation was very bad.

The victims seem to be dying of what is basically pneumonia. Pneumonia is a serious condition, and if left untreated (or not treated until far into its course) it can be deadly, even here in the US. I know several individuals who have gotten some form of pneumonia (or their children) in recent months here in Chicago – and while they missed work and obviously had high concern for any youngsters with the symptoms, they all were treated and came back fine after being ill or out of work for a while.

What you likely are seeing in the difference in mortality is the difference between a broadly based, functioning health care system from a rich society and one for a semi-functioning health care system for a poorer society. Mexico is a pretty developed country – if this sort of flu broke out in Africa it probably wouldn’t even be noticed among the endemic diseases and preventable fatalities that happen every day, sadly enough. As I note in a recent post about Angola, one of the richer African countries (they have oil revenues), a significant portion of their total health care budget goes to sending the richest friends and family of their leader off for foreign doctors overseas, to show where their priorities lie.

The media won’t come out and say it directly because it may be perceived as offensive to Mexican sensibilities but the mortality rate seems to be almost solely due to the differences in the effectiveness of our overall health care systems.

Two Items…and Two Questions

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1) A Palestinian man has been sentenced to death by hanging for the “crime” of selling land to Jews.

Will the people who endlessly denounce Israel for its supposed interference with “Palestinian rights” have anything to say about the rights of this Palestinian man?

I think you know the answer.

2) Palestinian military forces are now being trained–at a cost of tens of millions of dollars to American taxpayers–by United States personnel.

Why on earth should we assist the development of a military which shields a regime under which atrocities such as the one above are a matter of policy?

Note also: The Obama administration is requesting changes to U.S. law which would permit aid to continue flowing to the Palestinian Authority even if officials backed by Hamas become part of a unified Palestinian government. (Since Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization, aid would not be permitted under U.S. law as it stands.)

Delayed Vindication

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Shannon Love was taken to task by the anti-war left way back in 2004. The reason why he drew their ire was because he dared to question the wisdom of a suspicious study that appeared in the Lancet. The study claimed that about 100,000 civilians died in Iraq during the first year after US forces invaded.

Why was this suspicious? Mainly because the authors of the study laid the blame for the deaths at the feet of the Coalition, the number of deaths were ten times higher than any other credible estimate, and because it was released just in time to effect the 2004 US elections.

(If you are interested in the back and forth, this post is a roundup of all essays discussing the study.)

Strategypage reports that the Iraq government has just released the findings of a study of their own.

“The government has released data showing that 110,000 Iraqis have died, mostly from sectarian and terrorist violence, since 2003.”

So the 100K figure is finally correct, only five years after it was first reported. And the Coalition forces didn’t cause the majority of the deaths but terrorists, criminals, and blood feuds are to blame.

Does this matter now, five years after the fact?

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