Category Archives: History

World AIDS Day 2011

Posted on by ninjanurse

Education, Empowerment, Prevention

Our generation has seen the global eradication of one devastating disease, Smallpox, and the emergence of another, Human Immunodeficiency Virus. HIV has been uniquely merciless in its reaping of the young and the healthy in their prime, in its mutations and transformations into a thousand awful ways to die. It was almost two decades into the pandemic before there was a glimmer of hope, with the synthesizing of effective antiviral medications.

After so many lost and so much deepening despair, there is some bright news. The same treatments that save lives reduce the risk of transmission. Although we do not yet have medications that eradicate the virus, we have medications that reduce the viral load. These medications, when used correctly, not only save the lives of those infected, but reduce the incidence of infection between partners and from mother to baby.

This development makes the ambitious goal of ‘getting to zero’ more than a wish.

“Getting to Zero”: UNAIDS Milestones For 2015

Zero vertical transmission and a 50% reduction in AIDS-related maternal death
A 50% reduction in the sexual transmission of HIV
No new HIV infections among drug users
Universal access to antiretroviral therapy for people living with HIV
who are eligible for treatment
A 50% reduction in deaths caused by tuberculosis for people living with HIV
Improved national social protection strategies and access to essential care and support for people with HIV and households affected by HIV
A 50% reduction in the number of countries that have punitive laws and practices around HIV transmission, sex work, drug use or homosexuality that block effective responses
A 50% reduction in the number of countries with HIV-related restrictions on entry, stay and residence
The HIV-specific needs of women and girls are addressed in at least half of all national HIV responses
Zero tolerance for gender-based violence

Social justice is integral to fighting an epidemic on this scale. Prevention is vital. The growing list of effective medications does not change the fact that HIV is a terrible disease that currently has no cure. All the ‘safer sex’, education, vigilant infection control in medical care still stands. In fact, it matters even more, now that we have a hope that this pandemic may finally be defeated.

AIDS Project RI is offering free rapid HIV testing today.

The rapid HIV test is done with a mouth swab with results on the same visit, another small piece of good news. No blood draw, no waiting weeks to find out.

More information may be found at www.aidsprojectri.org, by calling 401-831-5522, or emailing takecharge@aidsprojectri.org.

Occupy Providence to Be Evicted Sunday Evening, October 30, 2011

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

A notice has been given to Occupy Providence members and has been posted around Burnside Park: they have 72 hours to vacate or they will be evicted. Given that so many other groups have expressed solidarity with the Occupy movement, it is unclear how this is going to play out. My hope is that it plays out non-violently, and also that the movement is not diminished in its importance. There is so little space for people to rally around an important cause at this point, and corporate pressure is increasingly squeezing out the voices of the 99%. We need to keep our ears and eyes open to what the opposition is saying or we will be increasingly dominated by corporations and their single-minded goal of increasing profits.

All You Need is Love….And Unions

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Just read this long piece by Kevin Drum about why unions improve life not just for union members, but for the entire middle class. The ultimate fact, as research in Drum’s article shows, is that politicians don’t do things for the middle class or the working class. We like to think Senators Whitehouse and Reed just love us because we’re their li’l peeps and they want to take care of us, but the truth is that politicians respond to powerful lobbying forces, and the past 30 years has seen a marked decline in powerful lobbies for the middle class. Drum presents two things you need to understand to get why our politicians have become so unresponsive to the needs of the middle class:

The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-’70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

Second, American politicians don’t care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early ’90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that’s not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don’t respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that’s not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don’t respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

The Distortionists

Posted on by David Jaffe

dis•tor•tion•ist (di stôr´ shə nist), n. 1. One who twists and bends reality into strange and unnatural positions.  2. One who twists or denies facts to fit their preferred political ideology, religious beliefs, or opinions.

* * * * * * * *

A dear friend of mine, whom I shall call Vicki in order to preserve her anonymity, endured repeated sexual abuse during childhood.  She was one of three children raised in a churchgoing, upper-middle-class family.  At night, her father, the man who should have been her protector, would quietly enter her room and molest her.  Then, like a wraith, he would slip out and return to his wife’s side.  When day dawned and the family gathered together for breakfast, it was as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.  No one spoke of the abuse.  Not Vicki, not the father who was her tormentor, and not the mother who preferred to turn away.

Many years later, well into adulthood, Vicki abandoned her silence and confronted her parents.  She decried her father’s actions and gave voice to long-suppressed feelings of hurt and anger and betrayal.  In response, her parents expressed shock and offered denials.  They insisted that nothing of the sort had occurred and suggested that Vicki was deluded or disturbed.  They accused her of being malicious and ungrateful.  They refused to acknowledge the incest.  They were so adamant and still had enough psychological power over her that she soon began to question what was real and what was not.  She felt confused and crazy.  Worse, Vicki started to doubt herself and what her memories and heart knew to be true.

* * * * * * * *

In 1610, Galileo published a short scientific treatise in which he detailed and expounded upon his observations through a telescope.  In so doing, he gave new life to the teachings of Copernicus, who first proposed the theory that the Earth revolved around the sun.  In 1616, for his advocacy of such beliefs, Galileo was subject to an Inquisition by the powerful Catholic Church.  He was ultimately rebuked, and the theory of heliocentrism was denounced.  A commission of theologians known as the Qualifiers declared that “this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture.”

In 1632, after publishing a book which further challenged the geocentric view of the universe, Galileo was accused of heresy and ordered to stand trial “for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world.” The Church found him guilty, and he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest.  It was not until 1835, more than two centuries later, that Galileo’s writings were removed from the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.

* * * * * * * *

According to the Institute for Historical Review, “an awareness of factual history is essential to an understanding of the great issues of our age.” This organization was founded in 1978 and describes itself as “an educational research and publishing center that works to promote peace, understanding and justice through greater public awareness of the past.” In particular, the Institute “informs the public about the Jewish-Zionist grip on America’s cultural and political life, World War II lies, distortions of Middle East history, myths about the Israel-Palestine conflict, the corrosive impact of “Holocaust” propaganda, and much more.” The IHR cites the work of many “revisionist scholars” who have “presented considerable evidence to show that there was no German program to exterminate Europe’s Jews, that numerous claims of mass killings in ‘gas chambers’ are false, and that the estimate of six million Jewish wartime dead is an irresponsible exaggeration.”

* * * * * * * *

One week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told intelligence officials in his country that “the September 11 incident was a big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan.”

* * * * * * * *

From today’s New York Times:

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state. [full article]

In the Huffington Post, Jeff Schneider writes “An Open Letter to the Texas Board of Education: Stop Rewriting History.”

* * * * * * * *

Vicki knows what happened to her—just as Galileo knew what he saw in the telescope and the Jews at Auschwitz and Buchenwald knew what was being done to them.  The refutations of others cannot alter the truth.  Yet the distortionists persist in their efforts to twist whatever facts they find inconvenient or discomfiting to fit their parochial values or beliefs.  And they seek to impose their views on the rest of us.  That is contrary to the best interests of a diverse and democratic society.  When will we learn?

Lia Lee

Posted on by ninjanurse

Another Square in the Quilt

A much-visited Google query is, ‘where is Lia Lee today?’ Anne Fadiman’s book, ‘The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down’ is a powerful work of journalism, years in the making, that analyzes step by step the failures in communication and a clash of cultures that left a little girl in a chronic vegetative state– caught between life and death.

There were many mistakes, and even more missed opportunities to prevent this catastrophic outcome, but no villains. That is, unless the villain is war itself. Specifically, the war in Southeast Asia where the Hmong were recruited as soldiers and then left stranded in refugee camps or dropped into a life in the US they weren’t prepared for. The following passages are from Marcy Sheiner, taken from her website Dirty Laundry. Check out the whole article for insight into the history that brought the Hmong to the United States, and Lia Lee to Merced, California. Thank you to Marcy for letting me quote her here.

For assisting the CIA in Laos, the Hmong were promised they’d be welcome in the U.S.—but when the troops left the country, they jetted only generals and hotshots out, leaving the rest of the populace to fend for themselves. With the Laotian army hunting them down as enemies of the state, Hmong families set off on foot, carrying whatever they could manage. Many, particularly the old and the young, died along the way. Most possessions were eventually shed.

When they arrived in Thailand they were put into refugee camps, where they waited to be rescued by the Americans. Those who were finally brought to the States were ‘resettled’ all over the map, without regard for family cohesion or transferability of survival skills: Detroit, Minneapolis, Utah, Vermont—the Hmong were distributed all over the country so as not to unduly ‘burden’ any one locality.

A recent article on the fate of the Hmong left behind is here. For supporting the United States they are fugitives and nationless.

The Lee family settled in California, and Lia was born American. She should have had the best medical care in the world. Her doctors and nurses were well-intentioned, her care expensive. But mis-communication thwarted the best efforts of all the people involved in her care.

From an interview with Anne Fadiman—

Q: Can you talk a little about Lia’s doctors (Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp) as doctors?
They are as excellent in the medical sphere as Lia’s parents are in the parental sphere. Neil and Peggy are warm, competent, highly skilled clinicians, both Phi Beta Kappa graduates of Berkeley who chose Merced because they wanted to serve the underserved. If I lived there they would be my children’s pediatricians. Communication between them and the Lees was defeated when the culture of medicine ran up against the culture of the Hmong: two very strong, stubborn, uncompromising cultures. The impasse had nothing to do with any professional or personal shortcomings on the part of these excellent doctors.

Unlike many American patients, Lia Lee had continuity. Her pediatricians, Drs. Ernst and Philp, were husband and wife. They alternated taking call at night. They lived just a few minutes from the hospital and responded many times to Lia’s medical emergencies. Lia was not shuffled from doctor to doctor, but had the care of experienced doctors who knew her from infancy. This shouldn’t have turned out so badly. From Mai Na M. Lee, Professor of History at University of Minnesota, via Hmongnet…

When Fadiman arrived in Foua and Nao Kao Lee’s apartment in 1988, she found Lia, their seven-year-old daughter who was pronounced brain dead two years earlier by her American doctors, alive and lovingly cared for. Lia had her first epileptic seizure when she was just three months old. According to the Lees, recent immigrants from the Secret War of Laos who did not speak English and could not even communicate their infant daughter’s sickness to the doctors, the seizure stemmed from spiritual causes. After several seizure episodes, and only when Lia was brought in still convulsing did the doctors properly diagnosed her as suffering from epilepsy. From the American doctors’ perspective, Lia’s condition was biological in origin and could be alleviated with drugs. Over the next four years Lia’s anticonvulsant prescriptions changed 23 times. Gradually, the Lees doubted the effects of these complicated multiple prescriptions. When they refused to administer the drugs to Lia, the doctor had Lia placed in foster care. A few months after returning home to her parents, Lia had a massive seizure which left her brain dead. With death imminent, the doctors allowed the parents to take Lia home. Two years later, when Fadiman arrived to investigate the story, the Lees still harbored hopes of reuniting Lia’s soul with her body and arranged for an elaborate pig sacrifice.

I cared for a child in a vegetative state, and heard her grandparents calling to her, “Wake up, wake up.” It’s unbearable to witness. It seems so impossible that a child could be living and breathing but unreachable forever.

Lia Lee was 5 years old when she suffered her brain injury. She must be 27 years old now.

Lia’s family allowed Anne Fadiman into their home and their confidence. It’s all the more striking that they have not followed the American way of seeking attention, for vanity or for a cause. They don’t have an internet presence. It seems like everyone close to Lia or her family protects their privacy.

Anne Fadiman’s book is now used as a text for health professionals. Lia’s doctors teach other doctors how to care for patients across cultures.

UPDATE: Many are wondering how Lia and her family are doing now. They are very private people. Follow the Dirty Laundry link and scroll down to a comment by Janice K. for the most recent news I could find on the net.

I’m pasting a book review on Amazon.com here– the writer has not identified herself except as Lia Lee’s sister, it was posted in 1997…

I don’t think I should be writing in here since I am a part of the book. This book was amazing! It took me two days to read it and of course I shed a few tears on the way. My sister, Lia Lee, is doing well although she will never be able to see the bright sunlight or the incredible stars that we see everyday and everynite. She is an incredible child with so much love and affection from her family and the many friends she have encountered during her hardships. I was only 7 when all this happened, but I do recall everything from the door slamming incident to the day the doctors told my family that it was okay for her to come but she will not live pass 7 days. I will never forget that week or those many years of pain my family or the doctors had to go through. This book has given me a better view of what can really happen when two different cultures have their own ways of interpreting medicine or life in general. We must understand that different cultures have different ways of curing a person and doctors have their policy they must follow. To avoid another incident like this, we must work together as a whole and not blame each other for not cooperating with one another. Lets hope this book tells us what can happen in the future if we don’t work with this now. Anne did a great job on this book! My family couldn’t have ask for more. She has become a great friend of my family and we are greatful for it. Anne-thank you !

Amazon is worth visiting for an intense discussion including people who were close to the case.

Professor Mai Na M. Lee’s article on HmongNet is excellent, and not to be missed if you want the perspective of a Hmong-American writer familiar with both cultures.

Yeng M. Yang, MD has an insightful review of the book in Hmong Studies Journal, Spring 1998.

RELATED NEWS: One of the soldiers murdered in the Fort Hood shootings was Kham Xiong a Hmong-American serviceman waiting to be deployed to Afghanistan.

CONNECTIONS: I gave my copy of ‘The Spirit” to a Hmong-American student who is training to become a medical assistant. She says she likes the book. She showed it to her family and she said she would email me their comments on it.

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND: On the way to a community garden party I saw some Hmong ladies walking together. They were dressed in their traditional clothes. South Providence was home to my Irish grandparents, now to Asian, Central American and African immigrants. We’re the smallest state with the richest culture.

A PRAYER: To always strive to listen to my patients, across whatever differences divide us.

Cattle Mutilations Back in Style?

Posted on by ninjanurse

Angry Cosmic Jellyfish

I remember this kind of thing from the 70′s…

Four calves have been found dead in a pasture just north of the New Mexico state line in recent weeks.

The dead calves had their skins peeled back and organs cleared from the rib cage. One calf had its tongue removed.

But rancher Manuel Sanchez has found no signs of human attackers, such as footprints or ATV tracks. And there are no signs of an animal attack by a coyote or mountain lion. Usually predators leave pools of blood or drag marks from carrying away the livestock.

Two officers from the Costilla County Sheriff’s Office have investigated the mutilations but say they don’t know what’s killing the calves.

I wonder if the Phantom Hitchhikers are back. I’m not a vegetarian, so I’m not going to get all PETA about this. I hope that no one tortured the animals. It’s a sure thing that something from this planet took them out. Any other planet an alien might have traveled from is very far away. So the unfortunate calves were probably done in by something mundane.

ALTERNATE EXPLANATION: They went out for a cup of coffee, and given the relativistic time-dilation effect their coffee break brought them back thirty years later, Earth time.

All Souls

Posted on by ninjanurse

Almost a hundred years ago, a teenage girl named Constance Witherby died suddenly of heart failure while hiking in the Swiss Alps. Her bereft mother commissioned a sculpture and dedicated a small park on a quiet street near the Blackstone River.

As the years passed, the neighborhood fell on hard times and the park into disrepair. The statue, made of bronze and granite, endured.

The end of the century brought a revival of public parks, and the lovely statue was moved to Blackstone Boulevard. Constance’s brother, now very old, had greenery and flowers planted around it, and came to water the garden himself.

A short history is here. I never knew the Witherbys, but one day while walking on the Boulevard, I found an iron railroad spike. My mother told me that there once was a trolley rail there, and my great-grandfather was a conductor.

So the past is felt in the present.