intermezzo

Bij het nalezen van wat pediatrische topics in de 'Oxford handbook of Clinical specialties', stuitte ik op volgende tekst... Het is misschien wat zwaar om te verteren, maar zet aan tot nadenken...

Voor een vertaling kan je binnenkort surfen naar Eva's blog (evadewaele.waarbenjij.nu) die de moed had om dit stukje tekst in het nederlands om te zetten.

Hier gaan we...

Southern diarrhoea is only an excuse for Northern amnesia

"As you read this page two events unfold: in the Northern hemisphere a child is born with a silver spoon in his mouth – his future assured thanks to incubators, ventilators, wealth, and family planning: and diametrically opposed to this birth another occurs in the Southern hemisphere where the silver was mined for that silver spoon. The child, according to our stereotype must ‘Wait for his future like a horse that’s gone lame To lie in the gutter and die with no name.’ We assume that his death is from diarrhoeal diseases that we are all working, more or less efficiently, towards controlling – and we are pleased to blame non-human agencies for these deaths. This model of our imperfect world does not stand up to scrutiny for two reasons: one is easy to understand (the diarrhoea was the mode of dying not the cause of death, which was poverty) and the other is impossible to understand – we didn’t just let him die. We wanted him to die: in fact we killed him: in some cases literally. Follow this well-documented thought sequence: there are too many homeless living in my back yard → This threatens health and hygiene → How do we deal with this? → Other threats to health and hygiene are vermin → Street children are a sort of vermin → Vermin need eradicating → Let’s shoot the vermin → Extrajudicial shooting of children – as occurred in Rio de Janeiro in 1994 and Sao Paulo in 2004. In the former case, most ‘ordinary decent folk’ approved of the killings when they phoned a local radio station, as the events unfolded… ‘I killed you because you had no future.’ The point of all this is to illustrate that if we want to do something for children it is no good just doing something about the big killers, such as diarrhoea, and it’s no good simply attacking poverty, for there is something dark in our human heart which needs addressing before purely statistical or biological interventions have a chance of success. There is only one way of influencing human nature, and that is through dialogue. So in this sense, the treatment of diarrhoea is dialogue."

Uit: Oxford handbook of clinical specialties, p. 169