Out of Africa

Ever since it was suggested to me, I haven’t been able to let go of the idea that foreign aid is bad. Medical advancement is a product of research and research is a luxury for wealthy countries. To impose the product of our research, medical advances, on other countries is not the natural way of things. The western world got to where it is without the aid of more advanced nations. The death of anyone is a tragedy, but before we had modern medicine, disease was rampant and death was inevitable for the sick. John Donne (1624) wisely stated in his poem, No man is an Island unto himself, that “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” I will not make an appeal against caring for individuals, but in the same way that people die fighting for a cause; people may need to die in the pursuit of development. I propose that foreign medical aid should be reduced in developing countries. Foreign aid attempts to provide advanced medical treatment to places that lack the infrastructural support needed to accompany these medical prectices.

I find fault in the assumption that this global health assistance is really helpful. In ecology we are taught that in order to understand a correlation or relationship we must sample an area, and then we can interpolate the results to the rest of the area, assuming we correctly sampled. However, we cannot extrapolate these correlations to outside the scope of our sampling. If I saw that rain is an important factor for microarthropod communities on moss samples from Southwestern BC, then I conclude that rain is important for micro-communities on moss in Southwestern BC. I cannot conclude that rain has a large impact on moss communities in China, nor can I assume that rain has a large impact on black bears (Ursus arctos) in Southwestern BC. In a similar way, what is an effective treatment for AIDS in Canada was determined by clinical trials in Canada. I would like to argue that what is good for Canadians is also not necessarily good for developing countries, even though the people are the same, the available services are different.

HIV is no longer the death sentence it used to be. A person who contracts HIV, if detected early on by a simple blood test, can be treated and may live for a long time without actually contracting AIDS. HIV is the human immunodeficiency virus, and with manageable, albeit expensive, drug cocktails, known as HAART people can live with few or no symptoms, but this is not a cure. AIDS is the autoimmune deficiency syndrome and is also very treatable, but again, not curable. Recent estimates show that cooperative patients can live for more than a lifetime without having HIV become AIDS and that on average it takes 9 years for AIDS to develop from HIV, at which point they have with medication approximately another 11 years to live.

A gift of 20 years is a gift I feel every individual deserves. I do no t wish to deprive people of the gift of health, but I am willing to be considered heartless and propose that HAART is not a cure for everyone. Developing countries are not ready for an AIDS treatment. They do not have the stability or infrastructure to keep healthcare available, leaving patients unmonitored and without complete treatment. An episode of West Wing spelt out the simple but devastating detail that even with unlimited and regulated drug availability, individuals in these places don’t have watches and will not be able follow the drug regiment. Furthermore, if treatment were to be provided, most developing countries are far from having universal healthcare and would experience an increased economic disparity as the rich monopolize the available medicine. There is no limit to how power may take advantage of having this treatment in their hands and no abundance of drugs will guarantee the provision of treatment to the poorest and most helpless. And the biggest kicker of all is that without actually curing AIDS, these treatments if they do successfully reach the population, will simply prolong the life of individuals who are carrying a frighteningly contagious disease. AIDS kills, it spreads, and it is rampant in developing countries. Increasing the time that people with AIDS live seems like the gift of life, but in reality without safe sex education, the treatment may just be helping the spread of disease.

To bring this back to ecology, I’d like to think of conservation enthusiasts. In conservation biology, essentially applied ecology, scientist attempt to return ecosystems to the way they used to be. There is an assumption that diversity is valuable and should be preserved. The ultimate goal is to reduce anthropogenic influences and to some extent, I wonder if the ultimate goal should be to reduce the maximum anthropogenic influence of western world culture on developing countries.

This is one perspective from one person. This is not everyone’s opinion, nor is it the right opinion, nor is it even my only opinion on the matter. It’s just one stream of consciousness.