Aquest inici de setmana ha estat ple de notícies sobre l'incompliment reiterat de l'assoliment dels drets més elementals per a moltes persones (tornen les morts a Iraq, l'acusació de les ONG'S sobre l'incompliment de compromisos solidaris dels paissos rics, la informació sobre el constant creixement de morts d'infants per la manca d'aigua potable a l'Àfrica i Àsia, ...)
Tot i així, he preferit penjar una notícia que apareix avui al The New York Times.
Aquests dies s'està parlant molt sobre el boicot a la Xina. Però ningú s'enrecorda de la situació a Sudàfrica: durant molts i molts anys s'ha marginat i maltractat a moltes persones, simplement pel color de la seva pell. I quan això passava, els privilegiats occidentals que dominaven aquest país (molts d'ells amb origen europeu) podien competir en els millors torneigs de tennis, golf o campionats internacionals rellevants, sense cap boicot per part de cap país, federació o organisme olímpic.
Avui sembla que tot això ha canviat. Però ara mireu la notícia sobre un Hospital a Sudàfrica i les condicions indignes i de repressió en les que han de viure els pacients.
La foto fa referència a la mateixa notícia.
PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa — The Jose Pearson TB Hospital here is like a prison for the sick. It is encircled by three fences topped with coils of razor wire to keep patients infected with lethal strains of tuberculosis from escaping.
"The balance is achieved by the simple application of J.S. Mill's 'harm principle' -- i.e. a person should be free to do what he wants provided his acts harm no one else. "James Montgomery, New York
But at Christmastime and again around Easter, dozens of them cut holes in the fences, slipped through electrified wires or pushed through the gates in a desperate bid to spend the holidays with their families. Patients have been tracked down and forced to return; the hospital has quadrupled the number of guards. Many patients fear they will get out of here only in a coffin.
“We’re being held here like prisoners, but we didn’t commit a crime,” Siyasanga Lukas, 20, who has been here since 2006, said before escaping last week. “I’ve seen people die and die and die. The only discharge you get from this place is to the mortuary.”
Struggling to contain a dangerous epidemic of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, known as XDR-TB, the South African government’s policy is to hospitalize those unlucky enough to have the disease until they are no longer infectious. Hospitals in two of the three provinces with the most cases — here in the Eastern Cape, as well as in the Western Cape — have sought court orders to compel the return of runaways.
The public health threat is grave. The disease spreads through the air when patients cough and sneeze. It is resistant to the most effective drugs. And in South Africa, where these resistant strains of tuberculosis have reached every province and prey on those whose immune systems are weakened by AIDS, it will kill many, if not most, of those who contract it.
As extensively drug-resistant TB rapidly emerges as a global threat to public health — one found in 45 countries — South Africa is grappling with a sticky ethical problem: how to balance the liberty of individual patients against the need to protect society.
It is a quandary that has recurred over the past century, not least in New York City, where uncooperative TB patients were confined to North Brother Island in the East River in the early 1900s and to Rikers Island in the 1950s.
In the early 1990s, when New York faced its own outbreak of drug-resistant TB, the city treated people as outpatients and locked them up in hospitals only as a last resort.
Most other countries are now treating drug-resistant TB on a voluntary basis, public health experts say. But health officials here contend that the best way to protect society is to isolate patients in TB hospitals. Infected people cannot be relied on to avoid public places, they say. And treating people in their homes has serious risks: Patients from rural areas often live in windowless shacks where families sleep jammed in a single room — ideal conditions for spreading the disease.
“XDR is like biological warfare,” said Dr. Bongani Lujabe, the chief medical officer at Jose Pearson hospital. “If you let it loose, you decimate a population, especially in poor communities with a high prevalence of H.I.V./AIDS.”
But other public health experts say overcrowded, poorly ventilated hospitals have themselves been a driving force in spreading the disease in South Africa. The public would be safer if patients were treated at home, they say, with regular monitoring by health workers and contagion-control measures for the family. Locking up the sick until death will also discourage those with undiagnosed cases from coming forward, most likely driving the epidemic underground.
“It’s much better to know where the patients are and treat them where they’re happy,” said Dr. Tony Moll, chief medical officer at the Church of Scotland Hospital in Tugela Ferry. It is running a pilot project to care for patients at home.
Some 563 people were confirmed with extensively drug-resistant TB last year in South Africa and started on treatment, compared with only 20 cases in the United States from 2000 through 2006. A third of those patients in South Africa died in 2007; more than 300 remained in hospitals.
Further complicating matters, South Africa’s provinces have taken different approaches to deciding how long to hospitalize people with XDR-TB. In KwaZulu-Natal, the other province with the most cases, the main hospital is discharging patients after six months of treatment, even if they remain infectious, to make room for new patients who have a better chance of being cured. The province is rapidly adding beds, part of a national expansion of hospital capacity for XDR-TB.
“We know we’re putting out patients who are a risk to the public, but we don’t have an alternative,” said Dr. Iqbal Master, chief medical officer of the King George V Hospital in Durban.
