Just a quick note for our loquacious readers (many of whom also enjoy blogging): the Asian American Action-fund blog is sponsoring an essay contest centered around the healthcare debate. Specifically, how do we fix our system? Given the number of healthcare professionals in the South Asian American community I am guessing there are a lot of thoughts out there. Have at it:

AAA-Fund proudly announces its 2009 Healthcare Blogathon. Please send us your blog post on the following topic

How can we fix our healthcare system so that everyone can get access to quality, affordable healthcare? Please share your thoughts and personal stories on why we need healthcare reform now (500 words or less).

HOW TO ENTER:

Send your entries to Richard Chen (rchen [at] aaa-fund.org).

But hurry! The deadline: Friday, September 25, 8 pm ET. [Link]

I think I will end up being one of the judges. Prizes are as follows

First Place: One Hundred Fifty Dollars ($150), 2 free tickets to the 2010 AAA-Fund Gala (a $200 value), and an exclusive invitation to become a featured AAA-Fund Blogger

Second Place: 2 free tickets to the 2010 AAA-Fund Gala (a $200 value), and an exclusive invitation to become a featured AAA-Fund Blogger

Third Place: Lunch with a AAA-Fund leader, and an exclusive invitation to become a featured AAA-Fund Blogger [Link]

Good luck SM-ers!

As I blogged about a couple of days ago, the Republican party sees the health care health insurance debate as “Obama’s Waterloo.” They intend to break him. As part of that campaign they have been circulating the following flyer which they title, “House Democrats’ Health Plan.” The purpose is to try and communicate that the Democrats’ plan is a hot mess that will be the end of the world. Scary things like “IRS” are prominently highlighted. It is by no means the Republicans alone that put out unhelpful propaganda like this, but this example is a particularly disgusting commentary on how far our political discourse has sunk:

Click for higher res image

My eagle-eyed friend Ankur, a physician, spotted that the icon of the doctor in the bottom right corner looks like a desi woman. She does to me too (but it makes no difference even if she is Hispanic for the following point). Now take a look at the yellow box with the arrow feeding in to the doctor. It reads “Cultural and Linguistic Competence Training.” This training is important because it allows doctors to better serve under-served minorities. However, the implication here is flipped. The woman is a minority so a mere glance would imply that the Democrats’ health care plan would use taxpayer dollars to teach language skills to foreign doctors. Or cultural skills maybe? The entire poster is a menu of scare tactics but this one is particularly ill-conceived. I wonder if AAPI has any opinion about this.

If you are in Southern California this weekend, I highly recommend stopping by USC to check out the following conference on cancer in the South Asian community.

According to the California Cancer Registry, the top cancers affecting South Asians in Los Angeles include breast, colorectal, corpus uterine, ovarian, thyroid, prostate, lung, leukemias and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Recent research conducted by Saath …has uncovered very low screening rates among South Asians for top cancers affecting them. As a result, Saath, with its goal to collaborate with communities to improve the health of South Asians, has developed programs to increase awareness and screening in the community and support those who are affected by cancer. [pakistanlink]

Health disparities for the broader Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities are relatively stark and it’s not surprising to hear that in the sub-ethnic group of the South Asian American community that the disparities are just as striking. These disparities often revolve around issues of access to screening or lack of education which is also related to a need for in-language resources and culturally competent providers. Saath, a Los Angeles based non-profit organization, focuses their work on researching and outreaching to assist South Asians afflicted with cancer.

What exactly are the cancer disparities? Well this is the tricky part - there hasn’t been much research done on cancer in the South Asian American community. In my opinion, a large reason why there hasn’t been targeted research is because the standard traditional research methods is not able to a) capture the sub-South Asian categories properly or b) capture a statistically significant sample population i.e. the “n”. This is the perpetual catch-22 cycle when it comes to researching our community - how to develop research using both culturally relevant and statistically significant methods that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the research.

A few days ago, I received a press announcement for a new line of luxury bottled water: B’eau Pal. (Oo la la!) But the fine print was a little less enticing:

The unique qualities of our water come from 25 years of slow-leaching toxins at the site of the world’s largest industrial accident. To this day, Dow Chemical — who bought Union Carbide — has refused to clean up and whole new generations are being poisoned.

An explanation? Suffice it to say that The Yes Men have been at it again.

This week’s New Yorker has another article by doctor and health care policy expert Atul Gawande. In the article he attempts to probe why medical costs in this country are spiraling out of control, singling-out one particular outlier in Texas:

It is spring in McAllen, Texas. The morning sun is warm. The streets are lined with palm trees and pickup trucks. McAllen is in Hidalgo County, which has the lowest household income in the country, but it’s a border town, and a thriving foreign-trade zone has kept the unemployment rate below ten per cent. McAllen calls itself the Square Dance Capital of the World. “Lonesome Dove” was set around here.

McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns. [Link]

By systematically eliminating all the likely suspects (e.g., it’s the lawyers and their malpractice suits that cause health care costs to soar), Gawande comes to a conclusion that many doctors probably already grudgingly realize through experience. It is doctors (not all, just the ones who increasingly advocate for tests that the patient probably does not need) who are driving up health care costs for everyone:

“McAllen is legal hell,” the cardiologist agreed. Doctors order unnecessary tests just to protect themselves, he said. Everyone thought the lawyers here were worse than elsewhere.

That explanation puzzled me. Several years ago, Texas passed a tough malpractice law that capped pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Didn’t lawsuits go down?

“Practically to zero,” the cardiologist admitted.

“Come on,” the general surgeon finally said. “We all know these arguments are bullshit. There is overutilization here, pure and simple.” Doctors, he said, were racking up charges with extra tests, services, and procedures. [Link]

An African-American friend of mine on Facebook recently jubilantly posted a link to this article about a recently-discovered problem with the BMI Index, a number widely used to determine body fat levels — whether people are underweight, healthy, overweight, or obese.

The BMI index was calculated with reference to caucasian body types. But people from different ethnic backgrounds have bodies that might be constructed slightly differently, so one BMI might not accurately determine everyone’s body fat level. A more direct measure of body fat can be found through Dual X-Ray Absorptiometry (DXA or DEXA), which measures body fat directly, rather than as an index. Here are the basics:

BMI is a formula that estimates a person’s body fat using only his/her weight and height. The result is then used to determine weight categories: 18.5 and below is considered underweight; 18.6 - 24.9 healthy; 25 - 29 overweight and 30+ obese.

“This scale was created years ago and is based on Caucasian men and women,” says Bray, “It doesn’t take into account differences in body composition between genders, race/ethnicity groups, and across the lifespan.” (link)

The good news for African Americans and bad news for Asian Indians is after the jump:

In the most recent edition of The New Yorker, Atul Gawande has an absorbing article titled “Hellhole,” in which he reviews the effects of extreme isolation on the human mind. In particular, his article focuses on prisoners in America’s SuperMax facilities that spend upwards of 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. He also uses as examples, prisoners of war/hostages such as Terry Anderson and John McCain (who were isolated as a form of torture). American prisons purportedly use solitary confinement as a last ditch deterrent against the “worst of the worst”: that segment of the prison population which continues to commit crimes inside of the prison, gives the guards a hard time, or has successfully escaped previously. The problem is that the data shows that this approach simply doesn’t work. What’s more, it is as bad as any form of torture in that it irreversibly destroys the human brain:

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result… . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of prisoners in the general population. Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.

…EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury. [Link]

I find that last sentence particularly important given our modern culture of incessant Twittering and Facebook updates. If you think the reaction of the brain to social deprivation is bad now, just wait until you see the next generation of prisoners who not only have their friends and family but also their Twitter circle stripped from them. The most disturbing observation that Gawande makes is that none of this is a revelation. On the scientific front, Harry Harlow and his cruel experiments proved in the 1950s what harm isolation causes in monkeys. On the legal front, the U.S. Supreme Court opined in 1890 that solitary was no way to re-habilitate a criminal mind:

Justice Samuel Miller noted… “serious objections” to solitary confinement:

A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community. [Link]

Mutineers, have you been the victim…of strange assumptions and blatant stupidity?

Are you confused? Uneasy? Constipated?

You may be suffering from PSSD. Post-Slumdog Stress Disorder is a very real ailment, with devastating consequences for its sufferers. Victims of PSSD often, on a daily, if not hourly basis, endure flashes of rage, manic ranting, rocking back and forth while twitching slightly in the corner, and a smug proclivity to email links to anti-“Slumdog Millionaire” news stories with the subject line: “HA! Look who agrees with me! LOOK!!”.

If you have been accosted by allegedly well-meaning but clearly oblivious, pink cylons who initiate insensitive conversations about this movie with you, DO SOMETHING. Instead of being harmed by that dangerous trauma trigger, show them this educational video, so that they leave you the fuck alone, then you can go back to being bitter about not going to medical or law school, in peace.

Link courtesy of old skool mutineer SexyGultiHo. And yes, that’s his screen name.

The San Jose Mercury News has an article highlighting some soon-to-be-published findings by economists at both Columbia University and the University of Texas who were studying Asian immigrant communities. The findings indicate that the practice of sex selection among Asian immigrants does not stop at American shores as many of us would like to believe:

Researchers are finding the first evidence that some Asian immigrant families are using U.S. medical technology to have sons instead of daughters, apparently acting on an age-old cultural prejudice that has led to high ratios of boys to girls in parts of China and India.

The new research, produced by independent teams of economists who arrived at similar conclusions, focused on Indian, Chinese and Korean families who first had girls and then used modern technology to have a son…

For some South Asian couples, having a boy is a “status symbol,” said Deepka Lalwani of Milpitas, the founder and president of Indian Business & Professional Women, a nonprofit business support network. “If a woman has male children, she feels in her family, certainly with her in-laws, that her status will go up because now she is the mother of a male child…”

Such cultural pressures may explain the recent findings. A Columbia University study suggests that Chinese, Indian and Korean immigrants have been using medical technology, most likely including abortion, to assure their later children were boys. And a soon-to-be published analysis of birth records by a University of Texas economist estimates there were 2,000 “missing girls” between 1991 and 2004 among immigrant families from China and India living in the U.S. — children never born because their parents chose to have sons instead. [Link]

Perhaps I’ve just been very naive but I was quite surprised by this finding. Given that the prime reason for preferring sons in Asian countries is that sons serve as a social security net, I just assumed the practice would be swept aside in America given that there are alternate means of obtaining social security and that women here have a greater ability to rise up the socio-economic ladder and support the family. I guess I did not put enough importance in the desire some of these families have to preserve their names through a male heir.

News that Sanjay Gupta has been offered the position of Surgeon General has produced the classic trifecta of Golidlocks responses: Is he too sexy for the job, not sexy enough, or does he have the right amount of smouldering sex appeal to keep pace with Obama, Biden, Daschle and Hillary Clinton?

Too sexy for this job:

My friend Dr. B objects to the idea that SG could be the SG, saying that he lacks the gravitas for the job, and that she would have preferred a more established, less erotically charged nominee in the C. Everett Koop mold.

For those of you too young to remember, despite Koop’s mad pediatric surgical skillz, he was as attractive as Bill Gates on a bad hair day. Nobody, no matter how intense their uniform fetish, ever had an erotic dream about Dr. Koop or Joycelen Elders, and Dr. B thinks that precedent should be maintained.

Similarly, when Dr. Amonymous asks for SG’s policy qualifications, pointing out that “The Surgeon General functions under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for Health and operationally heads the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the USPHS, a cadre of health professionals who are on call 24 hours a day, and can be dispatched by the Secretary of HHS or the Assistant Secretary for Health in the event of a public health emergency.” [wiki], it’s clear that what he’s really saying is … “how can I take him seriously when he’s so pretty?”

(Manish has a variant of this argument, claiming not that Gupta is too sexy for the job, but that the job isn’t sexy enough for him, calling it a step down from his current position to one that pays less and has less influence.)

They do have a point since “Gupta was named one of the Sexiest Men of 2003 by People magazine.” [wiki] It’s hard to see what more objective measure of sexiness there might be.

Not sexy enough for this job:

There are those, however, who reject People Magazine’s imprimature as if it were some illegible doctor’s scrawl on a prescription pad, arguing brazenly that Dr. Gupta doesn’t have the intellectual honesty sex appeal necessary for the position.

By about 3:30p.m. eastern this afternoon, every South Asian American in the country (and their mother) had already heard that Sanjay Gupta was on the verge of being announced the next Surgeon General of the United States:

President-elect Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and correspondent for CNN and CBS, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.

Gupta has told administration officials that he wants the job, and the final vetting process is under way. He has asked for a few days to figure out the financial and logistical details of moving his family from Atlanta to Washington but is expected to accept the offer.

When reached for comment today, Gupta did not deny the account but declined to comment.

The offer followed a two-hour Chicago meeting in November with Obama, who said that Gupta could be the highest-profile surgeon general in history and would have an expanded role in providing health policy advice, the sources said. Gupta later spoke with Tom Daschle, Obama’s White House health czar and nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, and other advisers to the president-elect. [Link]

The choice of Gupta is very obvious when you think about it. It adds a touch of star power to Obama’s administration, will get lots of kudos (and donations) from the South Asian American community and, perhaps most importantly, adds another health care policy wonk to the dream team to be headed by H&HS Secretary Tom Daschle. You know all those rich Indian doctors that tend to vote Republican? Maybe not anymore.

CNN released a statement saying, “Since first learning that Dr. Gupta was under consideration for the surgeon general position, CNN has made sure that his on-air reporting has been on health and wellness matters and not on health-care policy or any matters involving the new administration…” [Link]

Taking this job, which will result in a large paycut for Gupta, will also set him up very nicely to run for office in Michigan in the future. Through some contacts I heard the rumors a few months back that Gupta at least thought about or was encouraged to run for mayor of Detroit to replace the disgraced Kwame Kilpatrick.

As a college senior I once invited Dr. Gupta to the Midwest Indian American Students’s Conference at the University of Michigan (he is an alumnus). It was before he hit the big time but I remember him being really genuine and laid back. And of course who can forget his exploits with the Devil Docs at the beginning of the war where is switched between reporting for CNN and scrubbing in to brain surgery.

There is another really good potential outcome as a result of this appointment. I know a lot of desi doctors who look a lot younger than they really are. Patients always make comments to them like, “uhhh…are you old enough?” Now these desi doctors can point to Sanjay Gupta who is the top doctor in the land and also looks pretty young and say, “umm, like yeah.”

What I really wanted to do was to end this post with the really funny Gupta/Dobbs CNN ad from a few years back. Can someone find me a working link…STAT?

While we are busy debating the merits of one potential Obama appointee and fawning over another (ok, I know, I am the only one fawning), there is a third that might end up having the most substantive role of all in Obama’s administration. Neera Tanden, who I first wrote about back in 2004, in all likelihood is about to occupy a position that will greatly influence this nation’s health care policy. First, remember that Tom Daschle will serve a new dual role. He will not only be named as the cabinet level head of Health and Human Services, but will also be director of a new WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF HEALTH REFORM. This essentially gives him the powers of a Health Czar and indicates that we will see a major legislative push in the direction of comprehensive health care reform. Tanden is a member of the transition team’s health advisors, having come over from Clinton’s campaign. She is a battle-hardened survivor of Hillary-care and knows the lessons learned and can be a great asset to Daschle. Here is an interesting footnote about Tanden’s role at the inception of Hillary’s campaign:

On a cold midmorning in January 2007, Hillary sat in the sunny living room of her house on Whitehaven Street in Washington, a well-to-do enclave off Embassy Row where she lived with her mother and, on occasion, her husband. She was finishing a last round of policy prep with her aides before getting on a plane to Iowa for her first big campaign swing. In a moment of quiet, she looked around the living room and said, to no one in particular, “I so love this house. Why am I doing this?”

Her policy director, Neera Tanden, and her advertising director, Mandy Grunwald, laughed, a little too lightheartedly. Clinton went on. “I’m so comfortable here. Why am I doing this?”

Tanden spoke up. “The White House isn’t so bad,” she said. [Link]

The New York Times had a good article on Tanden way back in 2000 [via Manish]:

How smart is the smart kid in Hillary Clinton’s Senate bid?

From all appearances — including a law degree from Yale — very.

It was Ms. Tanden, signing on with the exploratory committee in July 1999, who moved to New York from the White House and worked with Mrs. Clinton, researching and developing policies. She was 29.

It was Ms. Tanden — with, she wants you to know, her staff of six — who challenged Rick A. Lazio’s first major policy proposal, a tax-reduction plan, in August. In two hours Ms. Tanden prepared a detailed financial response. Finding the facts and figures to defend her candidate’s position is a large part of her work.

Watching Ms. Tanden in action at the Hillary 2000 headquarters on 34th Street is not permitted.

But you can accompany Ms. Tanden, informal, fast-talking, connected to her cell phone as to a body part, across the street to the restaurant she frequents these days, the cafeteria in Macy’s basement. She works 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. Her husband hates her work, Ms. Tanden allows in an unguarded moment. She makes a quick, politic adjustment: he doesn’t hate the work; he hates the way she brings the work home, the stress. [Link]

…lest you wish to spend the rest of the day with your legs tightly crossed, doubled-over with sympathy pain and terror (thanks, JTMoney!). Via our news tab:

A 2cm long fish apparently found it’s (sic) way into the penis of a 14-year-old boy from India in a bizarre medical case.

The patient was admitted to hospital with complaints of pain, dribbling urine and acute urinary retention spanning a 24-hour period. According to the boy, the fish slipped into his penis while he was cleaning his aquarium at home.

Uh…I’ve either had or been around home aquariums since I was a toddler. I have never had a fish slip anywhere, while I was cleaning anything. Hell, I haven’t even had one of these bizarre pedicures.

Professor Vezhaventhan and Professor Jeyaraman, who treated the boy and later wrote a paper on the case, explained: “While he was cleaning the fish tank in his house, he was holding a fish in his hand and went to the toilet for passing urine. When he was passing urine, the fish slipped from his hand and entered his urethra and then he developed all these symptoms.”

Okay, mens. Here’s the part which will have you wincing:

After detecting the fish in the boy’s bladder, Vezhaventhan and Jeyaraman used a technique known as cystourethroscopy to insert a special set of forceps down the patient’s penis. Unfortunately, the fish was just too slippery to grip, so they resorted to using a rigid ureteroscope with a tool attached that is normally used for removing bladder stones.

Yeesh, even I am crossing my legs at this point. One of the most awesome aspects of being female is knowing what a speculum is, whether one is involved with medicine or not, and by awesome, I mean “atrocious”. Owww.

The fish the urologists removed, which Practical Fishkeeping believes to be a small member of the Betta genus, measured 2cm long and 1.5cm wide.

By the way, bettas aren’t just “Siamese Fighting Fish”, even though many people refer to the latter (a.k.a. Betta Splendens) by just its genus name. For those who may be wondering about it, the image enhancing this post is a picture of my dearly departed “Kir Royale”, a betta splendens who traveled to that great pond in the sky, earlier this year.

He was later admitted into counseling to help him overcome any trauma.

Speaking of trauma, aren’t you glad I didn’t play the caption game, with this one? ;)

For one women it seems, the biological work of mothering continues even well after menopause:

A woman said to be 70 years of age has given birth to twins in India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state after taking IVF treatment… The couple were so desperate for a male heir that they spent their life savings and took out a bank loan for IVF.

Omkari Panwar already has two daughters and is a grandmother to five children. “We already have two girls but we wanted a boy so that he could have taken care of our property. This boy and girl are God’s greatest gift to us,” Omkari said. [Link]

That’s right - she got pregnant at age 70 so she could produce a male heir! This boy isn’t even going to be able to take care of its parents in their old age, they’re already there. The sole reason for his conception was so that he could inherit the property.

While I shake my head in confusion at this (why do you care who inherits after you’re dead - you’re dead, right?), is the average American any better? It turns out that they have a strong preference for female children when they adopt:

… there are about 105 boys for every 100 girls in the general population of biological children under the age of 18. Adopted children … [however, have] 89 boys for every 100 girls. What’s more, adopted children under the age of 6 constitute a group where there only are 85 boys for every 100 girls…. the sex ratio of adopted children goes still further off-kilter if you look only at international adoptions… Girls make up about 64 percent of all children adopted by Americans outside the United States. That’s a mere 56 boys for every hundred girls. [Link]

When adopting abroad, Americans have a 2:1 preference for girls over boys. And that’s not a matter of supply, it’s purely demand:

It doesn’t matter if they’re adopting from China, where girls far outnumber boys; from Russia, where the numbers are about even; or from Cambodia, where there is typically a glut of orphan boys and a paucity of girls. Everywhere, demand tends to favor the feminine. [Link]

There are good reasons to tsk over the desi preference for boy children. Should we do the same when it comes to the American preference for girl children when adopting?

I recently wrote about the worldwide food price crisis, which has the potential to leave millions in the Indian subcontinent malnourished in the upcoming months and years. A number of commenters then wrote in to point out that middle-class Indians, who can afford to eat high-calorie, processed foods, have pretty unhealthy eating habits, and are rapidly growing obese.

It’s true, but it’s not only diet. The BBC has a recent article summarizing the findings of a recent study suggesting that 50% of people of Indian descent carry a gene that predisposes them to obesity.

The gene is located near the MC4R sequence, which has been linked by some scientists with binge eating:

The gene sequence sits close to - and possibly influences - a gene called MC4R, which regulates energy levels in the body by influencing how much we eat and how much energy we expend or conserve, and which has been directly implicated in rare forms of extreme childhood obesity.

The researchers discovered that the sequence is associated with a 2cm expansion in waist circumference, a 2kg gain in weight, and a tendency to become resistant to insulin, which can lead to type 2 diabetes. (link)

(Incidentally, a while ago we wrote about the growth of Type II diabetes amongst South Asians: here)

New Kerala actually gives a much more technical summary of the results of the study, for those who are interested:

Yet another “bizarre ritual” from the desh…but to be honest, I’ve never heard of this at all before. Have you? Anyone know anything about this?

Muslims in western India have been observing a bizarre ritual - they’ve been throwing their young children off a tall building to improve their health. The faithful have been observing the ritual at a shrine in Solapur, in western India’s Maharastra, for more than five hundred years. They believe it will make their children strong and say no accidents have ever happened. link

We may be seeing the end of the ubiquitous Nalgene bottle, like the one sitting on the corner of my office desk that I drink from continuously throughout the day. The Canadian government is about to declare bisphenol-a, or B.P.A, a toxic chemical:

The Nalgene is dead.

B.P.A. is widely used to make polycarbonate plastics, which are rigid and transparent like glass but very unlikely to shatter…Because animal tests have shown that even small amounts of the chemical may cause changes in the body, however, researchers have focused on food- and drink-related applications of B.P.A., like the popular Nalgene brand beverage bottles. [Link]

The US government may be moving in the same direction, albeit more slowly:

… a draft report from the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ National Toxicology Program endorsed a scientific panel’s finding that there was “some concern” about neural and behavioral changes in humans who consume B.P.A. [Link]

The debate about the health impact on humans will probably continue for a while, but one way or another, Nalgene’s days as the dominant water jug are over as people decide that they’d rather be safe than sorry. I’m probably going to be one of them, since I don’t have the expertise necessary to evaluate the health claims myself.

So how will I keep myself hydrated? Well, I’m thinking of rocking it old school. What would be better than a stainless steel jug and tumbler to keep in my office? You know, the kind with the rough edge that you can feel on the underside of your lip as you drink the water with the slightly metallic tang? Nalgene never induced nostalgia like this.

Now if only I could replace my office chair with a charpoy …

Recently, I’ve read three articles by brown doctors (Darshak Sanghavi, Atul Gawande, and Sandeep Jauhar) all of which claim that there is something systematically wrong with the practice of medicine today. All three argue that we pay too much and get too little; Gawande goes the furthest by claiming that doctors and nurses routinely fail perform simple tasks they claim to be carrying out, thus endangering lives [Thanks Rahul].

Jauhar argues that poor incentives lead to gigantic amounts of waste in almost all medical practices:

In our health care system, where doctors are paid piecework for their services … overuse of services in health care probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars last year

Are we getting our money’s worth? Not according to the usual measures of public health. The United States ranks 45th in life expectancy, behind Bosnia and Jordan; near last, compared with other developed countries, in infant mortality; and in last place … among major industrialized countries in health-care quality, access and efficiency. [Link]

The other two go deeper than just the reimbursement system. They argue that doctors are not doing the routine tasks of their profession well, which reduces the quality of health care across the board and even kills patients:

… a team of researchers … reviewed children’s medical records from 12 major American cities and found that fewer than half of children got the correct medical care during doctor visits…A similar study of adult quality of care was published in 2003 with similar results. [Link]

This story broke last week, but I’m just starting to catch up on it now: in Las Vegas, more than 100 people have tested positive for Hepatitis C and HIV after being treated at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada. Apparently, investigators have found that anesthesia needles were re-used on different patients without adequate cleaning, and in some cases, portions of the same dose of anesthesia was injected into multiple patients.

The person who founded the Center, who has also been its majority owner, is a doctor named Dipak Desai. Three class action lawsuits have been filed against the center, with more than 100 plaintiffs total. Doctor friends tell me it might be the biggest medical malpractice case in recent history (I have not been able to directly confirm this… any docs in the house?).

I haven’t come across anyone saying that Desai himself gave the order to use the syringes this way, though I gather that the anesthetists employed at the Endoscopy center were nurses rather than doctors (might be a little corner cutting there). Since the investigations started, the nurses employed at Desai’s clinics have given up their nursing licenses. As of now Desai has not given up his own medical license, though he has voluntarily agreed to not practice medicine until the investigations are complete. My own inclination is to “wait and see” before piling on against Desai: he ran several clinics, and employed many other doctors, nurses, and technicians. This particular policy, which has caused so much harm to so many people, may not have come from him.

Before this mess started, Desai was a very well-respected doctor in the state of Nevada; he had a $1 million contract with the University Medical Center, where he directed the gastroenterology department; and the governor had appointed him to the State Board of Medical Examiners. All of that is not to excuse him; rather, it helps give us some sense of the scope of this case. Incidentally, when two doctors working at his clinics had earlier complained about unsafe hygiene with syringes, the claims weren’t investigated.

I’m curious to know what people think about this case. Obviously, it doesn’t reflect the practices of Indian doctors more broadly (and I come from a medical family, so I’m quite proud of the contributions Indian-Americans have made in medicine in the U.S.). But it does seem like a terrible tragedy, and for the employees of this particular Endoscopy Center, a huge mess.

I am often amazed at the claims that so-called experts make, even in a court of law. For example, the government of Ontario recently defended its policy that Sikhs riding motorcycles should wear helmets (not a requirement in BC or Manitoba) by claming that turbans would unravel in the breeze, thus posing a risk to other motorists.

Born to be wild

… the Crown declared that an expert it had hired proved that turbans unravel rapidly in 100 km/h winds. The Crown’s test had been carried out by a professional engineer who purchased a mannequin head, mounted it on a stick and then placed the assemblage in a wind tunnel. [Link]

Say what? Turbans unravel at 60 mph? Have they ever seen a Sardar riding a motorcycle? Or riding a roller coaster? Or even sticking his head out of a moving vehicle? The paag stays on tight my friend.

To test this claim, the plaintiff, Baljinder Badesha of Brampton (can you say that 10 times fast?), tried to replicate the study. He drove down the Cayuga Speedway at … gasp, 110 kmh. Did his turban unravel and flutter into the wind like a wayward plastic bag? Ummm … no. It was fit to be tied.

Mr. Hutchison [Baljinder Singh’s lawyer] was unable to find a documented case anywhere in the world where a Sikh motorcyclist’s turban had unravelled. Skeptical, he persuaded the OHRC to authorize its own test. After he confronted the Crown with the dramatically different test result, prosecutors conceded that their engineer had grossly miscalculated the force of the wind he had generated to batter the imitation head, Mr. Hutchison said.

In fact, the device had been subjected to a 300 km/h wind. [Link]

That’s right - they used 180 mph winds in their test, more of a gale than the stiff breeze you get at 60mph. And even so, I’m not entirely convinced. I’ll bet if they used a real person with a real turban going 180 mph, it might still stay on. But in any case, given that driving at 300 kmh is illegal, the point is moot.

The folks over at Cinematical.com have been taking an early peak at some of the films that will be playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin. This one immediately caught my eye as a film that more people need to know about:

FLYING ON ONE ENGINE captures the story of the severely disabled Dr. Dicksheet, a man who has donated his surgical skills to the cause of alleviating suffering among India’s poor. The film both highlights the problems of cleft lip and other congenital deformities, and also tells the dramatic story of a person risking his life to help those in need. Emphasizing Dr. Dicksheet’s frailty, his surgical brilliance, and the spectacular effects of his actions, this film juxtaposes the Nobel Prize nominated surgeon’s godlike status alongside the incredible desperation of the Indian community in which he serves.

The website of The India Project which Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet (from Brooklyn) runs is filled with inspirational pictures and stories, so I am glad someone has made a documentary about his work to spread the word. He is an eight-time Nobel Prize nominee and although he is himself hobbled by sickness, his patients think of him as a “God” for the help he brings to their lives.

As a person who appreciates his time at the gym (and advocates fitness in general), I knew I had to post this story as soon as I read it earlier today. Meet India’s Aditya ‘Romeo’ Dev, the world’s smallest bodybuilder:

Unlike many dwarfs, Romeo is well proportioned, with a head circumference of 15in and a chest measurement of 20in.

Romeo said: “I’ve been training as a bodybuilder for the last two years and by now I think I must be the strongest dwarf in the world.

“I have always been fit but since I started working out, I have become famous for my strength. [Link]

I doubt very much that he is the strongest dwarf in the world, but I do admire his ambition. What I appreciate most about “Romeo” is that he just does his thing with confidence. One big fear some people have about going to the gym is that they will look weak in front of the rest of the “big muscle-bound” guys. As you can see from the pictures, Dev isn’t even afraid to wear Calvin & Hobbes shorts while working out:

Don’t stare without pinhole sunglasses

Finally, the media will have something from India besides the Little Superstar to talk about. At least this guy is a certified pimp.

A British politician has caused quite a stir with his statements regarding the defective results of the arrangements Asians accede to…

A minister who warned about birth defects among children of first cousin marriages in Britain’s Asian community has sparked anger among critics.

Phil Woolas said health workers were aware such marriages were creating increased risk of genetic problems.

The claims infuriated the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) which called on the prime minister to “sack him”. [BBC]

As far as Woolas is concerned, he’s bravely confronting a worrisome issue which is politically incorrect; he has been quoted as saying he has an obligation to bring this up. He isn’t attacking the marriages as illegal or even a religious problem, his point is that this is a cultural practice which should be examined. Children of such unions are 13x more likely to suffer from recessive disorders.

“The issue we need to debate is first cousin marriages, whereby a lot of arranged marriages are with first cousins, and that produces lots of genetic problems in terms of disability [in children]. If you talk to any primary care worker they will tell you that levels of disability among the… Pakistani population are higher than the general population. And everybody knows it’s caused by first cousin marriage….Awareness does need to be raised but we are very aware of the sensitivities,” [BBC]

Critics wonder about his motives, since his political position deals with the environment instead of health. The timing for this hullabaloo in the empire’s orchard is awesome:

His comments follow the storm sparked by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who suggested some aspects of Islamic Sharia law could be allowed in Britain. [mirror]

Anti-green team, please note, both Woolas and the the cabinet minister who has his six, Geoff Hoon, are taking pains to point out that this conniption about cousin-coupling doesn’t involve the “wider Muslim community”; oh no, this backwardness is alll Asian.

The junior Minister has other vocal supporters besides Hoon:

There is an old and familiar urban legend about kidney thieves that prey upon unsuspecting travellers, stealing their bodily organs. The most common version involves a business traveller who goes out for a drink, gets knocked out, and wakes up in a bathtub full of ice with his kidneys missing.

According to Snopes, there have been no documented occurrences of travellers’ kidney being stolen. The roots of this story are probably an incident in 1989 where a Turkish man falsely claimed he had been lured to England with the promise of a job only to find his kidney removed. The story fell apart once it was revealed that he had advertised his kidney for sale, but not before the account had mutated and spread.

So you’ll have to understand that I was shocked, and a bit skeptical, to hear about roughly 600 kidneys stolen from poor people in India for transplant in rich foreigners:

Many of the donors were day laborers… picked up from the streets with the offer of work, driven to a well-equipped private clinic, and duped or forced at gunpoint to undergo surgery… The men said there were no postoperative medical checks and no discussion of money or other compensation.

Four doctors, 5 nurses, 20 paramedics, 3 private hospitals, 10 pathology clinics and 5 diagnostic centers were involved… The officials suspect that several private hospitals in Delhi and its suburbs were quietly complicit in Dr. Kumar’s work and treated patients recovering from kidney transplants.[Link]

Beyond my moral revulsion, I was also a bit confused as to why they were robbing people of body parts when there was already a voluntary (and still illegal) trade in kidneys. Generally speaking, one would prefer to buy rather than steal kidneys because the donors are less likely to go to the cops and because you’re less likely to have your gundas stage a coup and take all your money.

As much as left-coast-born-and-raised me loves living on the right side of this vast country, there is one situation which inspires a reaction which is more pathetic than independent— being sick. I’m not talking about the sniffles or an errant sneeze or three, I mean, 102 degree fever, rhinitis which resembles a broken faucet and exhaustion which is so powerful, Ambien is envious of its ability to force sleep. I mean, sick sick.

When you’re sick and at home (or near it, even), parents can do what they love to, they can fuss and scold while they bustle about making clucking noises and shaking their heads. There’s something so comforting about the cadence of a mildly-irritated, slightly-worried parent. I tune out the actual words and just follow along until I’ve reached the portal to that ever-running game of subconscious Chutes and Ladders, and then I slide back to baby-hood in a blissful blur.

Don’t hate. You totally do it, too. When you can, that is. But when you are 3,000 miles away, and you are surveying the destruction which is a charitable way to characterize one kleenex-strewn, studio apartment, there is no such succor. We modern, vesternized children who think we know so much, who move so far from mummydaddy, we do the only thing we can. We wallow during those brief moments we’re conscious, reconsider our stubborn and proud refusal to get married already and then, when it’s 4am and we’re awake because the drugs have worn off, we update our Facebook status with something miserable. What, you don’t? Well, I’m kinda glad I did that last thing. I woke up to a post on my wall which immediately cheered me…

I can only suggest the concoction foisted by many mother on her sick, jaded-by-alopathy children, kashayyam:

…and then there was a fantastic link to the substance he suggested.

Inji kashayam, a medicinal drink made with fresh ginger,pepper,coriander seeds and jaggery.This is mother in law’s famous recipe to make us all feel better when we are down with cold,indigestion or even nausea.Simple and easy to make…[link]

Ginger? Pepper? Jaggery? Awww, yeah. You know, I don’t know anything about cricket, I don’t watch Bollywood, I’ve never seen any of those 2nd gen experiments on celluloid which contain various combinations of “American”, “Desi” or “Chai”, but I’m brown in some very persistent, weird ways and this is one of them; I’m talking about the home remedy, the more random and bizarre, the better.

Back when I was a disdainful ten-year old, if you had told me that one day I’d be drinking, nay, CRAVING Jeera-vellam I wouldn’t have believed it. No way. Eeew. Not me. I was too cool for amber-colored water with icky masses of cumin seeds lurking at the bottom of a glass. And yet, there I was last year, 21 years older and determined to steep this mysterious drink, just so. Yes, I know it’s a brew so simple an idiot can make it, but that doesn’t lessen my anxiety, hokay? I was born here. That fact alone has me convinced that I will never be able to replicate my Mother’s legendary Meenkari-with-no-meen.

Anyway, thanks to a darling friend’s sympathetic post on my “wall”, here was another recipe which required ingredients from a store which probably also stocked ladoos (mmm…ladoos), a recipe which would probably work, if for only one reason (but it’s a powerful one, so one is all we need)— it was desi. And someone’s Mom used to make it. And it has nothing to do with medicine, over the counter or otherwise.

Placebo effect? Sure, I won’t dispute that at all. I also won’t dispute the ridiculously smug sense of satisfaction such a concoction summons, as if we have a secret, cultural-velvet-rope-thang. Those moments, when my brain is being boiled by a fever, and when I’m dazed, crazed and amazed at how good pepper, sugar and something I can’t pronounce which was allegedly smuggled in someone’s suitcase can taste…those are the moments when I am consummately down with my brown.

If you’re a scientist, you say that your own understanding of the world comes from standing on the shoulders of giants. If you’re a doctor, it turns out that your knowledge comes from standing on the pilfered graves of dead Indians:

Alas poor Yorick

Medical students across the world rely on anatomical models to become informed doctors. What many don’t realize is that a large number of these models are stolen from graves in Calcutta, India. For 200 years, the city has been the center of a shadowy network of bone traders who snatch up skeletons in order to sell them to universities and hospitals abroad. In colonial times, British doctors hired thieves to dig up bodies from Indian cemeteries. Despite changes in laws, a similar process is going strong today. Throughout parts of Calcutta, many of the cemeteries have been empty for generations. [Link]

Last week Scott Carney broke the story of the human bone trade in West Bengal, with accounts at Wired, NPR and his own blog [Photos here].

Why Indian bones? Well, skeletons are hard to get in the west, so medical schools look elsewhere:

In the US, for instance, most corpses receive a prompt burial, and bodies donated to science usually end up on the dissection table, their bones sawed to pieces and destined for cremation. So most skeletons used for medical study come from overseas. [Link]

In 1985, the Chicago Tribune reported that India had exported about 60,000 skulls and skeletons the year before. The supply was sufficient for every medical student in the developed world to buy a bone box along with their textbooks. [Link]

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta is just too damn perfect. He is a doctor (including combat neurosurgery), a journalist, a University of Michigan grad, has a perfect smile, and speaks out against drug use. I really believe that the Universe has a way of balancing out the existence of such people with Doppelgängers, “anti” people, who use their skills to aid the dark side. The story about Sona “Doc 420” Patel, posted on our News Tab, makes me wonder if we have finally found the anti-Sanjay Gupta of the Indian American community.

Chances are you’ve never met a doctor like Sona Patel. She’s the cover girl for medical marijuana. We first interviewed her at a medical marijuana convention in Los Angeles.

“I’ve always believed in the medicinal effects of marijuana,” says Patel, a medical marijuana doctor.

Six months ago, she started calling herself Doc 420 — 420 is the street slang for smoking marijuana.

“That’s just kind of a bit of a fluke, just kind of happened that that phone number was available and the Web site was available. So, I became Doc 420,” says Patel.

Yes, she has a toll-free number, a Doc 420 Web site and a MySpace page with a picture.

Dan Noyes: “What did you hope to accomplish with this image?”

Sona Patel: “Well, you know what, it was just something that a marketing team had come up with for me…” [Link]

Thoughtful readers NKN and Daniel sent in this delightful wideo and we are all smilier for it. It’s catchy! Err…wait, I think it’s supposed to prevent that…

Achtung, babies: it is NSFW, especially if you work with Telugu people. ;) Otherwise, it seems so innocent, the stars of the clip reminded me of Boobah or the Teletubbies…well, until they get to the graphically illustrated part about gay sex. But we won’t go there! I mean, hasn’t Tinky Winky endured enough?

Now sing it with me one time, “I am sealed with lubricant!” Ah, this song is going to be in my head, all day. Happy Monday to all and to all, check the manufacturing date.

P.S. The next time you’re blue (heh), make like our dancing friend Nirodh and tell yourself, “Turn a deaf ear to others, I am very good.” I know I will!

When it comes to “hot fields of scientific research”, obviously desis are at the forefront of discovery and innovation; that’s not chauvinism, that’s just logic. Millions of brown people exist and a solid chunk of them are in science, so the odds are just stacked in our favor. But I digress. And there’s exciting stuff regarding Proteome Research to get to, so let’s get back on topic! [Via MSNBC]:

A small study links the type of bacteria living in people’s digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate’s allure.

That may be the case for other foods, too. The idea could eventually lead to treating some types of obesity by changing the composition of the trillions of bacteria occupying the intestines and stomach, said Sunil Kochhar, co-author of the study. It appears Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Proteome Research.

This study isn’t biased at all:

Kochhar is in charge of metabolism research at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. The food conglomerate Nestle SA paid for the study. But this isn’t part of an effort to convert a few to the dark (or even milk) side of cocoa, Kocchar said.

Here’s my favorite part of the study:

In fact, the study was delayed because it took a year for the researchers to find 11 men who don’t eat chocolate.

BWAH! In your face, people who think chocolate craving = pre-menstrual misery and weakness. MEN! They couldn’t find eleven MEN who don’t indulge.

Kochhar compared the blood and urine of those 11 men, who he jokingly called “weird” for their indifference to chocolate, to 11 similar men who ate chocolate daily. They were all healthy, not obese, and were fed the same food for five days.

The researchers examined the byproducts of metabolism in their blood and urine and found that a dozen substances were significantly different between the two groups. For example, the amino acid glycine was higher in chocolate lovers, while taurine (an active ingredient in energy drinks) was higher in people who didn’t eat chocolate. Also chocolate lovers had lower levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL.

That does it. I’m having red wine and Cadbury for dinner tonight. What to do? It’s the healthy choice.

The levels of several of the specific substances that were different in the two groups are known to be linked to different types of bacteria, Kochhar said.

They’re still not sure if it’s the bacteria that wants to be startin something, gots to be startin something or if diet affected the bacteria blah blah chicken egg.

How gut bacteria affect people is a hot field of scientific research.

I think my tummy is always warm, but that is based on highly unscientific rubbing of it, while attempting to pat my head simultaneously.

Wots this? A reference to my bellowed alma mater? GO AGS!

As Amardeep mentioned, the bunker is exceptionally quiet these days, because a few of us are consumed with our day jobs (as opposed to this, our beloved virtual one). For me, holidays like the one we just had are difficult to enjoy, because it zimbly means I’m going to be forced to squeeze five days worth of work in to four. No, I’m not bitter at all, despite how that read. :) I’m swamped, but I’m not salty. Do you know why? Perspective.

I am constantly reminded of how I am one lucky person; other people have real problems, challenges which threaten their very lives.

Many of you remember Vinay, who needed a marrow donor, whose friends and family coordinated an extraordinary operation which found him (and a few others!) matches, even though his wasn’t “perfect”. SM constantly posted about the drives which were happening everywhere, and so many of you stepped up to give a little bit of yourself, for someone who could have been your little brother, your best friend, your cousin.

Well, we need your help again.

Another young person is fighting for his life, and despite the outstanding increase in South Asian donors in the national database thanks to Team Vinay, there is no match for him…yet. His name is Bevin and in the picture above-left, he is (of all things) wearing a “Gimme ur spit/get registered” tee-shirt in honor of Vinay. You see, as someone who was in remission, he took Vinay’s cause to heart and felt it was his obligation to do all he could to help spread the word, donate funds, convince people to get swabbed, since he knew first-hand what Vinay was up against.

Scrap the past tense; now, he is facing the same adversary Vinay is. Bevin needs our help and he needs it soon. But I’m not going to lose hope; if there was one thing I learned from Team Vinay, it was that negativity should be banished. Let’s focus on what’s good: Bevin’s friends are holding drives in New York City, within the next few days. Info on that below, the link to Bevin’s facebook group is here.

I’m sorry this post is so rushed, but I wanted to publish it ASAP, because the first drive is tomorrow. GO. PLEASE. HELP.

SWAB FOR BEVIN

All it takes is 12 seconds and you might be a match for Bevin…..

Please join us this Thursday at Bar 13 and/or Saturday at Katwalk for a Bone Marrow Drive for our dear friend Bevin Varughese. Below are the details of the events.

Date: Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Time: 6:30-9:30pm
Location: Bar 13
35 E 13th Street (Corner of University Place)
New York, NY 10003

————————————————————————————

Date: Saturday, October 13, 2007
Time: 6:00pm-9:00pm
Location: Katwalk
2 West 35th Street (Btwn 5th & 6th Ave)
New York. NY 10001

As we said back in the day, nothing beats a good, solid success story. Well, I’m happy to report to the Mutiny that in BOTH Vinay and Sameer’s case, we’ve got some pretty solid success.

Team Vinay reports - Hello everyone, this is Bharath (Vinay’s brother). Sorry for keeping many of you in the dark about Vinay’s progress. …Day Zero is fondly known as “your new birthday”. That day was August 24, and the day Vinay received his transplant. …For the good news…it appears that the bone marrow transplant is “engrafting”. His counts are showing signs of recovery and it is clear that the wonderful donors cells are now taking seed in his own marrow.

Sameer reports - …Ladies and gentlemen, I was informed today that, through a miracle of God, a 10 out of 10 match has been found for me!! Let that sink in for a second…this is truly a miracle that came through literally at the last minute. If this match had been found even next week, it’s not clear that it would have been in time given that I need some sort of transplant within 4 weeks. …This match appears to have come from the 400+ bone marrow registration drives that Teams Vinay and Sameer have put forth, registering nearly 24,000 donors to-date. …The result? An increase of South Asian representation in the national bone marrow registry by 20%.

A hearty SM congrats to both of them.

Mutineers - keep your fingers crossed and these guys in your thoughts & prayers — as far as they’ve come, they’ve still got a long way to go and can use the help. And, for every Vinay and Sameer that we write about, there are thousands of others we don’t so if you haven’t been swabbed yet, there are still opportunities to get it done.

When the topic comes around to traditional vs. western medicine, I tend to side pretty consistently with the western medicine camp. It’s not that I’m anti-Ayurveda in particular; I just believe in a firm line between science and faith. In my view, one or another medicine cited in Ayurveda might actually be effective, but until it’s been tested in a well-designed double-blind trial, and the results published in a rigorously peer-reviewed journal, I’m generally not interested in using it as anything other than a supplement.

Now, however, the line between eastern “folk remedy” and western science is getting just a bit blurrier, as accredited scientists have recently begun to formally study the effects of things like Turmeric using the scientific method, and blogger Ashutosh has an interesting post at Desipundit summarizing a recent article in Cell on the active ingredient in Turmeric, Curcumin. First, the hype, which is considerable:

Turmeric’s beneficial effects as recorded in Ayurveda are impressive. It is a multitalented molecule, and in its particular case, many of its effects have stood up to the hype. It shows among other things, potential antiinflammatory, anticancer, digestive, respiratory, pro immune system, and cardio and neuroprotective (anti-Alzheimer’s) effects. With such a profile, curcumin would be extremely alluring as a drug, almost seeming like a magic cure. (link)

That’s a lot of potential benefits! Emphasis on “potential”: there are some serious scientific hurdles that have to be jumped before the drug’s effectiveness can be fully understood, or deployed to best possible use, and Ashutosh outlines those as well. Indeed, the fact that Curcumin’s benefits are so generalized might actually be part of the problem:

There’s an article in the New York Times about the problems faced by doctors in India who want to prescribe morphine to terminally ill patients, especially those who are suffering from cancer.

The centerpiece of the article is a Dr. Rajagopal, who runs a palliative care clinic in Kerala, the one Indian state where morphine tends to be accessible. Dr. Rajagopal has been lobbying to make morphine more accessible to ordinary Indians nationwide.

About 1.6 million Indians endure cancer pain each year. Because of tobacco and betel nut chewing, India leads the world in mouth and head tumors, and has high rates of lung, breast and cervical cancer. Tens of thousands also die in pain from AIDS, burns or accidents.

But only a tiny fraction — Dr. Rajagopal estimates 0.4 percent — get relief.

Clinics dispensing morphine are so scarce that some patients live 500 miles from the nearest. Calcutta, a city of 14 million, has only one. (link)

Ironically, India grows the poppies from which much of the morphine used in western countries is derived. But government regulations (a highly familiar villain, in the Indian context) make it virtually impossible for ordinary people who are seriously ill to get access to it:

A slightly Anonymous Tipster operating via the chimney which is our News tab gifted me with a robust cup of breakfast-reading which perked me right up.

How’s that for two utterly unrelated metaphors? Huh? Yeeeah, boyee.

Now you are surely not asking, “what got you all twitchy and agitated, Anna?”, but I am going to gift you with an answer anyway! I’m hyper thanks to the latest advice column from Cary Tennis, which is published at Salon.

Today’s edition of Cary-wisdom is inspired by a letter writer (LW) who can be neatly summed up by the title of the column:

I don’t want to be a doctor!

Fair enough, LW. A good number of us did or didn’t, but I want to know more about you, even as part of me groans, knowing I will regret it and get all uber-bitch on your ass by the end of this.

Aug. 28, 2007 | Dear Cary,

I am 20 years old, go to a state university, and am severely confused on what I want to do in life.

When I was little, I wanted to be an “artist.” With the beret, paintbrushes and canvas. Then, I moved on. Sure, I loved art, and enjoyed it, and was good at it, but I realized I wasn’t exceptionally creative in that sense. So I wanted to be a journalist. That idea left as soon as it entered my mind in high school. Then, toward the lag end of high school, I got interested in becoming a doctor. It wasn’t out of some desire I had to cure the world or make lots of money. It was because of my parents.

My parents and my family are from the Indian subcontinent and are Muslim. In their minds, the best thing to be is a professional. Especially a doctor. My father always tells me that I should be a doctor to help people and to be independent. My dad works away from home and flies back to my family every three to four weeks. It’s a hard life for him, because he misses out on our lives. It’s important to him that I become independent and have the ability to work wherever I want to. So, in high school, I took some medical classes. I enjoyed them; they weren’t my favorite classes, but they were, I suppose, “all right.”

When I started applying for university, for my possible majors, I would alternate between political science and English. My mother would ask me to write “pre-medicine” next to the others. Therefore, when I got accepted, I was put into the pre-professional advising. I never truly desired to become a doctor. The only reason I wanted to become one was to help people. To fix them. So I kept going. I took biology, chemistry, bioethics.

Then, my sophomore year, last year, I fell apart. I took physics and organic chemistry. I was doing terribly in both. I made a 48 on my first exam in physics and a 63 in organic. I had to decide whether or not to drop physics. I eventually did, and I was so disappointed in myself. You see, I did well in high school. I took many Advanced Placement classes, made A’s, and was an excellent student. And I got burnt out. I just couldn’t force myself to work. I tried, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t care enough. So I eventually made a C in organic.

It was during this semester that I would get these sort of panic attacks. I would just cry and cry when thinking about how badly I was doing in life, in organic, in everything. This is what really scared me the most. I always prided myself on not stressing out, not freaking out, and doing well in what I was studying for. But here was a class that just broke me down into tears. I couldn’t study when I was like that.

Then, the spring semester began. I took the second part of organic. Struggled through it and was averaging a C in the class. Then I fell apart again. I made a 48 on my last test, which dropped me to a D. I had to make an amazing grade on the final. I didn’t start studying for the final until the night before because I had basically given up. I failed the class with an F. In all my other classes that semester, I made A’s and B’s.

So I’m reading Jezebel, where they wittily illustrate their take on a certain news story with a photograph of a turtleneck…

…and I realize that obviously, what is being discussed there MUST be blogged here, because if there’s anything which is widely relevant to the brown Diaspora, it is the wearing of, ahem, turtlenecks. On your pee-pees. And for those of you who are sporting one such fleshy outfit, take heed— today’s Grey Lady has some filthy words for ya.

A study in Uganda has come up with a surprising finding about sex and H.I.V. Washing the penis minutes after sex increased the risk of acquiring H.I.V. in uncircumcised men.

The sooner the washing, the greater the risk of becoming infected, the study found. Delaying washing for at least 10 minutes after sex significantly lowered the risk of H.I.V. infection, Dr. Fredrick E. Makumbi reported on July 25 at an International AIDS Society Conference in Sydney, Australia.

The researchers do not have a precise explanation for the findings, which challenge common wisdom and the teaching of many infectious disease experts who urge penile cleansing as part of good genital hygiene. Health experts have suggested that washing the penis after sex could prevent potentially infectious vaginal secretions from entering the body through the uncircumcised penis.

A lubricious error (and what inspired the picture I chose to go with this post)!

Because of a slip-up, the researchers did not ask details of how the cleansing was done or directly about using soap, said Dr. Ronald H. Gray, a co-author from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Some soaps used in Africa are more irritating than those used elsewhere.

See? That’s why you should take happy little soap’s advice and rub…never mind.

Monsoon rains come every year, but the flooding caused by this year’s downpour has been some of the worst in decades for India, Bangladesh and Nepal.

19 million people have been displaced by the deluge. That’s roughly the entire population of New York State, the 3rd largest state in the union, or around the entire population of Sri Lanka.

Put another way, these monsoon floods have already produced nineteen times as many refugees as Katrina did. Katrina scattered up to one million Americans, and that was the largest American population displacement in 150 years.

The biggest danger from the rain isn’t drowning, it’s the disease that it brings once water supplies get contaminated:

“Entire villages are days away from a health crisis if people are not reached in the coming days,” … UNICEF’s health chief in India, said in a statement.

The threat of waterborne disease is high because wells have been contaminated by floodwaters … In Bangladesh, there were 1,400 reported cases of diarrhea in the past 24 hours… [Link]

The danger is worse because floodwaters have closed the roads to many villages, so aid workers can’t easily distribute food and clean water. The Indian air force has air dropped food for 2 million people in Bihar. This is going to be a serious task, one that will require both government and civil society working together, something they are lousy at doing.

While I do not hold a naive and idealistic view of the Indian government, I was still saddened to recently hear about the extent to which the GOI has gotten into bed with the odious dictators of Burma. Is this really much different from US-Pakistani relations? Both are justified by realpolitik, national interest, and claims that the end justifies the means.

In this case, India is circumventing the EU arms embargo on Burma by selling them attack helicopters made from EU parts:

Last week, India sparked fresh cries of outrage from human rights groups when a report surfaced saying that it plans to sell an unknown number of sophisticated Advanced Light Helicopters (ALH) to Burma (also known as Myanmar).

According to a report by Amnesty International and other international organizations, the helicopters should be covered by the embargo because they are made with components from at least six EU countries and the United States… the Advanced Light Helicopters include rocket launchers from Belgium, engines from France, brake systems from Italy, fuel tanks and gearboxes from Britain. [Link]

Nor is it the first time - India has made several weapons sales to Burma in the last few years. [Note - India has neither confirmed nor denied the helicopter sale] The Burmese government is the kind of government that is perfectly willing to attack and kill its own civilians to maintain its grip on power, so selling weapons to the Burmese junta is serious business.

What does India get from this? Just like the USA, India arms and supports dictators so they can help India with its security problems:

India says it needs Burma’s help. There are at least 20,000 guerrillas from five major militant groups in India’s northeast - all fighting the Indian government for sovereignty or independence - who have training camps in the dense jungles of Sagaing in northern Burma. New Delhi has been deliberating with Yangon over plans for a military offensive against such groups.

Counterinsurgency operations in India’s northeast, says an official from India’s Ministry of Defense under conditions of anonymity, cannot succeed unless neighboring countries refrain from supporting the separatist groups based on their territories. [Link]

And of course, trade in general between India and Burma is increasing, as is Indian investment in Burmese gas even though the Burmese government is notorious for using forced labor when building pipelines and other infrastructure.

In latex, India’s women should trust (thanks, Jeet). So much for treating one’s husband as if they were a deity, hmmm? Via TimesNow.TV:

Women’s welfare minister, Renuka Chowdhury, has asked women to trust condoms more than their husbands.

Chowdhury commented on Monday (July 16) that Indian men can’t be trusted in their sexual behaviour. According to Chowdhury, men also play a pivotal role in fuelling the country’s HIV epidemic – so women, she said, should protect themselves by keeping condoms as straying husbands might bring the virus home.

I’m sure that will go over VERY well.”Honey, I don’t trust you and these business trip-ships you are always having. Please be covering up, thank you, come again”. (Oh, like you could have resisted that last bit…it’s Rahul’s influence, I tell you.)

“Half our problems stem from hypocrisy. We women are too shy to ask our husbands to use a condom. At one time it was considered immoral to even use the word. People still feel reluctant to say it. And this shyness costs women dearly,” she said.

Whenever I read the word “shyness”, I think…

Shyness is nice, and Shyness can stop you From doing all the things in life You’d like to So, if there’s something you’d like to try If there’s something you’d like to try ASK ME - I WON’T SAY “NO” - HOW COULD I ?

Ah, that was lovely. If women in India take Renuka’s advice, here’s hoping that last sentence is what they are met with, in response.

“Men can’t be trusted and everyone knows this,” she said adding “with due apologies and exemptions to the current company - most husbands can’t be trusted at different levels. They stay away from home for work purposes for long periods, often falling prey to temptation and then making their wives also victims. The onus lies on women to stop the deadly disease (AIDS).”

The onus lies on WOMEN? What, like we don’t already have enough to do? Chey! OUR TO-DO LISTS NEVER END!

…a move to introduce sex education at the school level has been net with stiff resistance from many politicians, with several state governments opposing it saying it will go against Indian culture - and this has also been a big headache for Chowdhury.

Wait, what kind of resistance was sex ed met with? ;)

Renuka Chowdhury’s refreshing candour is perhaps more indicative of the emerging Indian woman - and stands at odds with some of the more conservative, regressive views that have been voiced by some of our mass leaders who seem to be out of touch with reality…

Out of touch with reality, indeed. Read on, for what inspired the title, picture and my general silliness…

Madhya Pradesh School Education Minister Narottam Mishra even suggested “Instead of imparting sex education to school students, they will be taught yoga.”

Fantastic. Then everyone will be flexible, in great shape AND in the mood to knock Batas. Perrrfect.

Ummmm.

An Indian firm has launched a paan-flavoured condom designed to evoke the pungent taste of the betel nut and tobacco concoction chewed and then spat out by millions of South Asians, newspapers reported on Tuesday. [Link]

Yeah, so like, is this so women will chew it and spit it out? So…many…jokes…cannot…type. I mean seriously, do we really want a condom to taste like something that you typically chew for an hour and grind down to a pulp? What if one acts instinctively when the aroma begins to entoxicate (although paan makes me want to vomit)? Well, at least nobody gonna mess with the prostitues who will be the test market for this product:

The company ran taste tests with sex workers, including prototypes with chocolate, banana and strawberry flavours, but the paan flavour came out tops…

The condoms will at first be made available only to prostitutes, but will we launched to the general public in a few months, the newspaper said. [Link]

I know some of you guys are thinking what I’m thinking but I am going to just come out and say it. Think I can bid for these on Ebay? During the limited release trial period the prostitutes would make a whole lot more money selling these to paan-flavored condom collectors like me, than they would using these with their clients. We’d both be winners. They’d get to skip work for a long time and I’d have something really cool for show-and-tell the next time I have a party.

Dirty Mouths Come Clean.

Ultrabrown posted some picts from last weekend’s cheek swab fest in NYC. Vinay Chakravarty and his wife showed up and, as Manish points out, it’s almost weird how much revelry the event managed to create…

Additional events are happening all over the country to help Vinay, Sameer and countless others in the future.

In particular, this weekend, Bay Area volunteers are hosting their MEGA DRIVE spanning over a dozen sites.

So here’s a little game to liven things up & help get the word out — snap a pict or 2 of you and your friends getting your cheeks swabbed and/or holding up your donor cards, send ‘em to ME (vinod@vinod.com), and, in the spirit of the Desi Dad project, we’ll post some of our fav mug shots on SM and Ultrabrown alongside these folks -

I was getting ready to post a friendly, pushy reminder about a fantastic event which is taking place tomorrow, in DC at Tony and Joe’s (read: Sequoia ;)— but when I went to Vinay’s excellent website, something else caught my attention.

Something wrong.

All of us have at some point or another, met self righteous folk, very often rich entrepreneurs, who act like they’re God’s gift to the rest of us. Here’s where they become even more obnoxious if you can imagine what that might look like. TiE Seattle approached me last year to do a story on them for a prominent CA Indian paper which I promptly did. I didn’t play any games with them, didn’t dangle them for weeks. They asked, said their story had not been told before, I promptly, gladly did a story on them. Period.

Afterward, at every single TiE event I went to, their president (who shares his name with a Bollywood superstar) would drop as I’d be right in the middle of dinner, and demand right away, “So when are you doing another story on us?” At first I thought he was making small talk, then I thought he was just some overeager zealot but then I heard from many people that his malaise was something else. He just suffered from a bad case of pushy Swagger, EGO and a of lack of good manners. So I did what every journalist does. Ignored his prattle and stopped going to TiE Seattle…

I approached TiE asking them if they’d be kind enough to circulate an email to their member base telling them about Vinay and the bone marrow drive for him in Seattle. Just an email. I didn’t ask them for money or anything else. Just an email. 15 days out and what do I get? Zilch. Not even the courtesy of a, “Right now we’re too busy counting our dollars and won’t be able to email our members. Thank you for asking.”

Is it too much to ask to help a dying man? [SeattlePI]

Can I buy a round of WTFs, straight up? I’ve been called some…interesting things on SM these past few days, but maybe one of the trolls should have hurled “naive” my way. How could anyone say no to this cause? I can understand why the blogger, Priyanka Joshi, whom I quoted above, said this:

Corp-Social Responsibility? Hahaha![SeattlePI]

Would it have been THAT difficult to forward Priyanka’s email to their members? Maybe there are good souls in the Seattle chapter who would’ve wanted to help Vinay. It’s a shame that certain people are too…I don’t know what to put here…to help another human being.

Disclaimer for those who need it:

I am not denigrating TiE, its chapters or even its Seattle members. I’m just echoing another bloggers shock and disappointment in whomever decided that a wee email wasn’t important enough to pass on…okay?

I mean, it’s not like I sent the following words heavenwards…

So, in spirit of human dignity, as I pray for Vinay tonight, I’m also saying a prayer for TiE Seattle. “May TiE’s swagger and a lack of concern for other people be replaced by genuine compassion for the rich and the middle class alike.” Amen. [SeattlePI]

…but that’s only because I didn’t think of them, first. Amen.

Many of you have offered your good wishes for Vinay’s health— some of you have even taken the next step and become part of the database. Others— especially when they read these posts I keep beating you about the head (and hopefully heart) with— are reminded of their intention to get registered; they think, oh, I’ll make it to the next drive and do it then.

A very special opportunity to get swabbed is available to desis in what I still think of as the brownest city of them all— even if it’s a big apple and not a mango. This Sunday, in NYC, from 4-8 pm, show up at Pianos and not only will you increase the possibility of saving someone’s life, you may get to meet the man who has inspired this incredible campaign to paint the national database sepia. Vinay might be there. :) Please wish him a happy second wedding anniversary (July 3) for me, if you go.

If you can’t attend or you are not in the NYC area, please harass your loved ones. Get every South Asian person you know to consider becoming a committed donor; a list of the drives which are happening all over the country is here. While my constant posting about Vinay may insinuate otherwise, this is about all of us, not one of us. It’s scary to consider how close this can hit to home; I’ve lost two family members in three years to this disease. I may not know Vinay, but I don’t have to, to believe in what he and his team are going to do.

::

Which diseases can be treated by marrow transplant?

Over 70 diseases including the leukemia’s, aplastic anemia, severe combined immune deficiency, sickle cell anemia and radiation poisoning are treated by marrow transplant.

::

What exactly is a marrow / stem cell transplant?

Simply, it is the replacement of diseased blood stem cells from a health donor infused into a patient’s vein just like a blood transfusion. Within four to six weeks the transplanted marrow / stem cells begin to produce normal blood cells in the patient.

::

Who can become a marrow / stem cell donor?

You must be between 18 and 60 years old, have no history of hepatitis, heart disease, cancer or AIDS, and sign a consent form allowing the Registry to include your HLA tissue type in its confidential files for future matching. See NMDP link below for more details: Donor information (NMDP) and Donor Eligibility Guidelines.

::

How do I know if I am a match?

If you are found to be a possible match with a patient, the center in which you tested and/or the NMDP will contact you immediately and give you the option of proceeding to the next level/s of testing to insure final HLA compatibility with the patient.

::

Who pays for these tests?

Not you - the patient or his/her medical insurance does.

Meanwhile, that Sunkrish Bala is a slice of adorable, isn’t he? I wouldn’t kick him…off the couch…where we would be demurely seated on opposite sides. And not touching. With vada on the coffee table as our witness. And our parents there, too. Ah, I digress.

But while I’m digressing, you should know that “Notes from the Underbelly”, which SB starred on, was one of my favorite shows of the past season. :) Go on with your bad self, Sunkrish, whose name leaves me puzzled. And let me just say that I heart you more, for trying to help Vinay and others like him. “I’m registered…are you?” should become our new pickup line at the clubs, because I would’ve hurled my digits at THAT, for sure.

I was proud to see several of you get swabbed at the last Subcontinental Drift event. Drives are still happening all over the country.

There is still time— one of you could be the one.

Remember Vinay? I blogged about him because he direly needs a bone marrow transplant and his best chance at finding a match lies with us. Unsurprisingly, several of you said you would step up and get swabbed, if only you had the opportunity to do so. Well, after throwing more meetups than any other mutineer, I know for a fact that DC has a TON of SM readers— now make good on your word to help.

You can even do so TODAY— look:

* * *

THURSDAY, JUNE 14 - DOWNTOWN D.C.

4:30p to 7:30p
Asian American Justice Center
1140 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 1200
Washington, DC

Contact: DCdonorDrive@aol.com or Rachna at (202) 256-4326

Can’t make it? Live in the burbs? Try these:

* * *

SATURDAY, JUNE 16 - LANHAM, MD

10:30a to 3:30p
Sri Shiva Vishnu Temple
6905 Cipriano Rd.
Lanham, MD

Contact: Aditya at aditya.raghavendra@gmail.com or (617) 872-0081

* * *

SUNDAY, JUNE 17 - BALTIMORE, MD

9:30a to 5:00p
Greater Baltimore Temple
2909 Bloom Rd.
Finksburg, MD

Contact: Seema at indiaseema@hotmail.com or (949) 291-2545

5:45 PM UPDATE—

* * *

Jane says (she’s done with Sergio) that a NEW YORK Drive commences in 15 minutes;

Hey in NYC tonite as well….

Public House

141 East 41st St (between Lexington and Third Avenues), New York, NY

Thursday, June 14, 6:00pm to 10:00pm

One of our longtime readers lost a parent to this tragic disease last week. Some of you know whom I’m referring to and if you haven’t already given a little bit of yourself, maybe this message from their family will move you:

In lieu of flowers, please help save a life and register with the national bone marrow registry or get someone else to register (www.marrow.org).

How many people whom we know and love must we lose before you register?

Until recently, the best estimates for the number of HIV+ Indians was 5.7 million, although estimates ranged from 3.4 million to 9.4 million. However, a new study puts the number of Indians with HIV/AIDS at roughly half of the previous estimate:

Early analysis of the figures suggests that India really has between two and three million victims, according to several sources, including American epidemiologists who know the data and the Health Ministry here.

The lower figure for India would imply that India has managed to keep its epidemic more like that of the United States, in that the virus circulates mostly within high-risk groups. In India’s case, these are prostitutes and their clients — especially truckers; men who have sex with men; and people who inject drugs, especially in the northeast, on the borders with Myanmar. [Link]

The big improvement in the quality of the numbers comes from the third National Family Health Survey:

The third National Family Health Survey was a gigantic exercise in logistics. Research organizations had to interview 124,385 women and 74,369 men in 3,849 villages and urban centers across India…. NFHS-3 was the first large scale nationwide survey to collect dried blood samples for HIV testing. Nearly 110,000 women and men were tested for HIV and more than 200,000 adults and young children were tested for anemia. [Link]

One surprise result of the new numbers- infection rates are much higher in the South than in the North:

But Ashok Alexander, director of Avahan, the Indian AIDS program of the Gates Foundation, says that while “it’s good news that overall the numbers are down, the real danger of this is it masks the real prevalence in one third of India: the south.” The study … found that infection rates in southern India are significantly higher than in the north of the country. [Link]

When ER first came on TV, I remember thinking it looked completely unrealistic because it was too damned white. Now I finally have some numbers to back up my instincts:

Plenty more like her

From 1980 to 2004, the fraction of medical school graduates describing themselves as white fell from 85 percent to 64 percent. Over that same period, the percentage of Asians increased from 3 percent to 20 percent, with Indians and Chinese the two biggest ethnic groups. [Link]

S. Balasubramaniam … recently queried 50 medical schools and calculated that 12 percent of the class that entered in 2006 is of Indian heritage. The highest percentages are in California, Texas, New York, New Jersey and New England. [Link]

While the article doesn’t indicate anything about Balasubramaniam’s sampling methodology, the numbers are consistent with my gut feelings about the number of brown faces I’ve seen amongst med students. When asked to explain why she went into medicine, one desi doctor said:

“We were never forced into medicine … But in the Indian community in Chicago, everyone was a professional. Everyone was a doctor or an engineer…” [Link]

Although there have always been many desi doctors, the numbers of current brown medical students represent a sizeable increase over past years since roughly 5% of all doctors are of Indian origin, and many of them studied abroad:

In the US, Indians and Indian-Americans make up the largest non-Caucasian segment of the American medical community, where they account for one in every 20 practicing doctors. [Link]

There were several opportunities to join the NMDP’s database today; how many of you got swabbed? Tomorrow, there are drives in Fremont, Torrance and Cerritos— leave a comment and let us know if you went. More drives are planned, all over the country, during the next few weeks. Find more information about that here.

This reminds me of voting; it involves registering and we say we’re going to do it, but then we don’t always follow through. It’s one thing to be aware of Vinay’s situation, quite another to have actually done something about it. Don’t you want to be in the latter camp? :)

Because Akka loves you, she feels like nagging your misbehaving kundis about something you should not do (via the AP and one anonymous tipster on the news tab):

Smoking a hookah may be as dangerous as cigarettes, the World Health Organisation said, adding that more research was needed into the link between the use of the water pipe and several fatal illnesses. It said that a person can inhale a hundred times more smoke – a mixture of tobacco, molasses and fruit flavours – in a hookah session than in one cigarette. Hookah, or shisha, smoking is a tradition in North Africa and the Middle East. [Linkaya]

I’ve heard so many people declare that smoking a hookah is “nowhere near as dangerous” as “regular” smoking, I had to post this. I hope those delusional darlings are reading this and realigning their thoughts accordingly.

Also, while the blurb states that Shisha is popular in North Africa and the Middle East, it is also popular with brown people, especially the annoying ones who won’t quit staring at Prince Cafe in Georgetown, at 3am when all a girl is trying to do is innocently get her mirchi Aloo Chole on. What is it with our people and the shameless gawking?

It would be one thing if this were Iowa circa 1968 and two lonely Namesake-era desis were curiously gazing at each other in a room full of Amreekans, the desire for recognition, i.e. that knowing “gang recognize gang”-moment apparent on their homesick visages, but this is D.C. and out of the sixty people at Prince, the only white guy is the Romanian Orthodox dude behind the counter. We have taken over. The “Arrrre you Yindian??”-bit is thus uncalled for in this uberdesi day and age.

Wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah. QUIT EFFING SMOKING. That hacking cough ain’t attractive, y’all. Back to your regularly scheduled troll-baiting, spelling bee-dissing and witty comment-making then.

A tragedy, in five lines;

This is Vinay and his wife Rashmi.

They were married in 2005.

He was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in 2006.

He is 28.

He needs a bone marrow transplant, in the next six weeks.

If you aren’t already part of the National Marrow Donor Program registry, please consider what you would be going through if this were your little brother, childhood friend or husband. Wouldn’t you want as many desis as possible to be in the database? Vinay’s greatest hope lies with someone like him, but the number of us who are registered is so low, it’s pathetic.

All it takes is a few minutes of your time. A swabbed cheek. And maybe, with that selfless gesture, you increase the chances that this person who probably has so much in common with you goes on to live the life we all deserve.

This is what Vinay’s parents have to say:

We cannot express in words what this is like. All we can do is implore you to close your eyes for a moment, and imagine that this is your son, your brother, your best friend. We are guessing you would move heaven and earth to help save his life…

Vinay is the world to us - he is warm, funny, loving. We have watched him grow from a little baby, to a young boy playing sports, to a fine young man determined to be a doctor, to a man marrying the girl of his dreams. Please help us help our son have a chance to live - to be with his wife, with us, and his friends. [Hema and Partha]

Drives are planned in Fremont, Cerritos, Anaheim and Livermore; additional information may be found here. Speaking of additional information, when I numbly surfed through Vinay’s website, the following three points made me cringe:

When a Caucasian is looking for a match they find 15 matches on an average where as opposed to an Indian they might find one match or none.

This can happen to anyone at any age and god forbid if you get into similar situation then this will be the only registry that will come to rescue.

There is no such registry in India and when an Indian kid is looking for a marrow match this registry is the only resort. [HelpVinay.org]

We’ve written about others whose lives were similarly threatened by our failure to represent in such a vital way. What would it take to move you to get involved? Would it matter if I told you that like every 8th desi, he’s from Fremont?

That he went to Ardenwood and eventually UCB (though not this UCB)?

That his favorite books were The Hobbit and Midnight’s Children?

That he liked The Godfather (but only 1 and 2), Garden State and Million Dollar Baby?

That he’s Seshu “Tiffinbox” Badrinath’s cousin?

He listens to Coltrane, Miles Davis and 2pac?

And yes, like every male I know, he likes to watch Scrubs and Sportscenter?

Do you identify with him yet? I pray you do. Because one of you could be his match and that would be the sweetest thing. My Uncle died of Leukemia and I’m sure each of us knows someone else who has been similarly affected.

Back when I took yoga classes regularly there was one teacher whose classes were too early on a Saturday morning for me, but who was one of the best teachers around. She was great at explaining things, had really excellent form, was really present in the moment … oh yeah, and she was really hot.

Given how incredibly healthy she seemed, I was surprised to find out that she was 8 years HIV+ . There are a number of reasons for her health - she was an athlete before she was infected, she was on ARVs, but she gave a lot of credit to her yoga practice. She taught a class for the HIV+ which probably increased the quality and also possibly the quantity of their lives.

I concede up front that Yoga can be a very important thing for people whose lives have great challenges (as American PC-speak would put it).

Still, there’s a time and a place for everything. I’m a bit weirded out by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s proposal to bring Yoga to the war torn Iraqi city of Najaf.

That does look like Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I) to me

Maybe I’m reacting a bit harshly. The Art of Living foundation does work in a number of different war zones teaching yoga as part of their “peace work.” It’s just that people’s needs are so large, and given the opportunity costs involved I would rather see efforts directed towards the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In short, I can’t imagine teaching corpse pose to people whose main worry is avoiding becoming a corpse themselves, teaching the Art of Living to those whose worry is the Art of Dying.

On the other hand, I’m far more favorably inclined towards the Indian Army’s yoga classes in Lebanon:

In the village of Ebel es-Saqi, in the farm country of Southern Lebanon, a new subject is being taught at the local middle school: yoga. The instructors are from the Indian army, members of the U.N. peacekeeping force. Three times a week, Lt. Col. Rajesh Kumar of the 1st Battalion Punjab Regiment instructs about 50 students and their teachers at the school. [Link]

Most of you have heard about the tainted pet food, right? A simple Google search yields more than 7,800 stories about the Chinese rice and wheat gluten that contained melamine to increase the apparent protein content of the food. While American pets may have died, the risk to humans posed by this, even if used as feed for chickens or fish, is pretty low.

Contrast that with the tainted cough syrup that has probably killed thousands children in the Third World. What? You haven’t heard about this? Of course not. It’s not as sexy a story. There are over 40 times as many stories about the tainted pet food in America than about tainted cough syrup overseas.

Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world … Researchers estimate that thousands have died… Beyond Panama and China, toxic syrup has caused mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and twice in India. [Link]

The Bangladesh incident happened 15 years ago, yet this kind of mass poisoning continues to happen in different parts of the world, most recently in Panama:

In Bangladesh, investigators found poison in seven brands of fever medication in 1992, but only after countless children died. A Massachusetts laboratory detected the contamination after Dr. Michael L. Bennish, a pediatrician who works in developing countries, smuggled samples of the tainted syrup out of the country in a suitcase. Dr. Bennish … said that given the amount of medication distributed, deaths “must be in the thousands or tens of thousands…” [Link]

The bones of the story are the same in both cases. FDA issues recent warnings after a Chinese manufacturer cuts corners and substitutes a cheaper lethal ingredient for a more expensive one. With the cough syrup it was diethylene glycol for glycerine.

When you next encounter everything-comes-from-India Auntie or Uncle, you can turn their fixation to your advantage.

Beti: Auntieji, you know, there is another area where India was ahead of the rest of the world.
Auntie: Yes, beti?
Beti: And it was mentioned in the Vedas, ages before any western source mentioned it.
Auntie: Yes yes, that is how it always is. What area of scientific advancement are you talking?
Beti: Auntieji, I am referring to kissing. Snogging. Mouth Mashing. Tonsil Field Hockeying. Two desis each kissing the apple sequentially in a Bollywood movie, except there is no apple and there was no Bollywood.
Auntie: Hai Ram! Chi!
Beti: But it’s in the Vedas, Auntieji! The very first written references to kissing. It was written about, in Sanskrit, long before it was written anywhere else! How can it be a bad thing then?

Unsurprisingly, this news isn’t something that is coming out of a BJP research center, it’s coming from Texas A&M University anthropologist Vaughn Bryant who says:

The earliest written record of humans’ kissing appears in Vedic Sanskrit texts — in India — from around 1500 B.C., where certain passages refer to lovers “setting mouth to mouth,” [Link]

“References to kissing did not appear until 1500 BC when historians found four major texts in Vedic Sanskrit literature of India that suggested an early form of kissing. There are references to the custom of rubbing and pressing noses together. This practice, it is recorded, was a sign of affection, especially between lovers. This is not kissing as we know it today, but we believe it may have been its earliest beginning. About 500 to 1,000 years later, the epic Mahabharata, contained references suggesting that affection between people was expressed by lip kissing. Later, the Kama Sutra, a classic text on erotica, contained many examples of erotic kissing and kissing techniques.” [Link]

When I was little, I went to India for my Mamaji’s wedding. At that point, we still drank the water, although it was very the last time we did so. I got very sick and lost enough weight that my ribs were visible. In fact, I became so emaciated that I could tickle my bottom few ribs from the inside, much to the horror of my parents. To make things worse, it was hot in Amritsar that year, over 100 degrees, and we were in an old house without air conditioning.

Throughout it all, as the adored foreign child, I was coddled and comforted. It wasn’t that bad for me. Still, it gave me some compassion for those who have to drink water far worse, such as the 2 million children who die each year for want of proper water and sanitation.

The big policy debate over water privatization seems to have ground to a halt. In poor countries, governments do a lousy job of getting water to their people (maybe 30% of Indians have access to clean water), and while de facto privatization proceeds apace, formal privatization schemes seem to have done poorly enough to reduce earlier corporate enthusiasm.

Still, two of the more imaginative schemes I’ve seen in the past year have argued for extreme privatization, decentralizing the provision of clean water down to the sub-village, or even personal level.

For example, the Lifestraw is designed to give each person their own personal water purification system:

… a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.

Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea. [Link]

The original Lifestraw was field tested amongst the earthquake refugees in Kashmir.

Although the idea is pretty cool, it has its detractors. Critics argue that there is no market for such a product - that at $3.50 (or possibly even $2), it is still multiple days work to pay for each person’s straw, and it still only lasts a year. They also argue that it doesn’t reduce the long distances people have to travel to get water, thus reducing its appeal, and that local water projects are more effective because of economies of scale [Link].

This week NPR has been running a series on the “War against Meth ” as part of Morning Edition. These stories state that new laws restricting the retail sale of Sudafed — the same laws that gave birth to the “Operation Meth Merchant” prosecutions (see 1, 2, 3, 4) — have have been effective and meth production has drastically plummeted. With 44 states restricting the sale of various meth precursors, and a new federal law on the books:

The impact on meth labs was swift and dramatic, especially in the Midwest, where meth makers were especially prolific. Meth lab seizures are down 55 percent in Missouri, 73 percent in Iowa and Kansas and 88 percent in Nebraska [Link]

However, with a decline in domestic meth production has come an increase in imports of more dangerous crystal meth from Mexico:

Meth seizures at California’s ports of entry rose 40 percent in the last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Meth seizures at the border at El Paso, Texas, jumped 479 percent since 2002. [Link]

The Mexican government recently recovered more than $205 million from a safe house in Mexico City as part of a crackdown. Interestingly enough, they found the safe house while trying after busting a company importing pseudoephedrine … from India:

Prosecutors said the raid was part of an investigation into a pharmaceutical company suspected of importing chemicals to make the drugs from India. The investigation began with the seizure of 19.5 metric tons of pseudoephedrine in the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, they said. [Link]

So US cops are blaming Indians for supplying American meth producers and Mexican cops are blaming Indians for supplying Mexican meth producers. We’re lucky that in Canada they’re just blaming Indians for bhang.

In the past, discussions of domestic abuse have run aground because of the lack of good information. In general, we end up agreeing on three points:

• Women are assaulted by their partners in South Asia
• South Asian women are assaulted by their partners in America
• Non South Asian women are assaulted by their partners all over the world as well

but we always lack the numbers to talk about how bad the problem is in different places and for different communities. For that reason, I thought it was worth flagging this statistic I saw in the recent NEJM article on AIDS in India:

That’s more than 1 in every 3 women in India who has had a husband at some point. The numbers in the article varied by state, and unfortunately they provided these figures for only a handful of states (those where they had HIV figures). Still, here’s what it says:

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a short “perspective” piece on the state of HIV/AIDS in India. This is the first article in what appears to be a series, the next one is on the challenges involved in containing HIV in India. Here are a few points from the piece:

We don’t know how many people have HIV in India

The best estimate right now is 5.7 million HIV infected Indians, that’s one in every eight cases world wide (India has one in every six people in the world). However, there is a great deal of uncertainty around this number:

The epidemiologic data for India (estimates of the number of infected persons range from 3.4 million to 9.4 million) are far less precise than for South Africa … In 2005, no data were available for many of India’s more than 600 districts. [Link]

See the image to the right? The data come from the National AIDS Control Organization. The northern states are all blank because there isn’t enough data. That’s really distressing.

Estimates indicate that rates are not (yet?) high in the general population:

The estimated HIV prevalence among people 15 to 49 years old in India is 0.5 to 1.5%, whereas in South Africa it is 16.8 to 20.7%. [Link]

But higher in high risk subgroups:

Female and male sex workers, men who have sex with men, and injection-drug users have the highest rates of infection — surveys typically find a prevalence of 10 to 20%…. [Link]

Prevention faces many hurdles, especially amongst women:

Across India as a whole, only 35% of women know that consistent condom use can reduce the risk of infection. However, since 37% of women who have been married at one point have experienced sexual abuse, not all women have much leverage to negotiate.

Hello, I’m Namrata, a new contributor. I broke into the North Dakota headquarters a few months ago and ANNA decreed I was too small to be kicked out into the winter cold. When it warmed up everyone had gotten used to me, so finally Abhi and Ennis said I might as well earn my keep since I keep stealing their magazines out of the mailbox. One of the ones I like to steal is New Scientist, and there was some sad news from the desh in the latest issue:

Last month Abdul Ghani Khan, a senior Pakistani doctor, was killed by a remote-controlled bomb shortly after urging villagers to vaccinate their children. [link]

According to the Daily Times of Pakistan Dr. Khan was killed in Bajur Agency after trying to convince addressing a convening local jirga, or council; he was greeted angrily in an area where opposition to the vaccine has spread by word of mouth and radio sermon.

“As soon as we reached there, an armed prayer leader warned us against visiting the area. Some locals said: ‘On one hand, our enemy (a reference to the United States) is bombing us for no reason while on the other hand you are coming here disguised as polio campaigners to spread vulgarity,” [an injured companion of Dr. Khan] told Daily Times at the hospital. (link)

Absolutely zero Desi Angle (TM) here per se, but a whole heap o’ relevance for anyone who frequents the comment threads here (and if you are one of those happy souls who only reads Sepia Mutiny for the blog entries, feel free to skip this one, as I’m about to get a little parochial). But I noticed that today one of the most-emailed articles from the New York Times is an essay by Daniel Goleman on the scientific explanation for why people say, uh, intemperate things online that they would rarely say — or at least say the same way — in person. So if you’ve ever wondered what it is that causes folks on discussion boards to insult each other, call each other idiots or worse, flagrantly mis-characterize each other’s points in order to drive home some strident and ill-conceived argument of their own, and generally stink up the joint — and if you’ve perhaps caught yourself doing so, whether here on in any other online exchange — you need look no further for your answer than your orbitofrontal cortex. (I trust that one of y’all medical/scientific macacas can explain the details to the rest of us, or indeed, critique the article — politely, natch.)

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track. (…)

Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.

But wait, what about :) and :P and ;) ???

True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way.

And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail.

TWA - Typing While Agitated. Never happens to me. No, sir. I keeps cool calm and collected. But just in case…

Our site administrator Paul tips us off to an article over at the BBC today that highlights a unique new program launched by the government of India:

The Indian government is planning to set up a network of cradles around the country where parents can leave unwanted baby girls.

The minister for women and child development, Renuka Chowdhury, told BBC News the cradles would be “everywhere”.

It is the latest initiative to try to wipe out the practice of female foeticide and female infanticide. [Link]

In my opinion anything that will help mitigate the foeticide and infanticide scourge is a good thing, but the imagery of little cradles set up around the country is kind of bittersweet.

“We will have cradles strategically placed all over the place so that people who don’t want their babies can leave them there,” Ms Chowdhury told the BBC News website.

The cradles could be in places as diverse as the local tax collector’s office, or where local councils meet.

Ms Chowdhury said parents would be able to leave their babies secretly. The important thing was to save their lives…

“They will be collected and put into homes,” she said. “There are plenty of existing homes and we will be adding some more also…” [Link]

Apparently there is actually a precedent for this type of program (in Japan):

The drop-off at Jikei Hospital in southern Japan will consist of a small window in an outside wall, which opens on to an incubator bed, officials say.

Once a baby has been placed inside, an alarm bell will alert staff. [Link]

New York City has just released preliminary results of a health study that shows that more than one in eight adult New Yorkers have diabetes, while twice as many have abnormally high blood sugar that could be a sign of conditions leading to diabetes. Moreover, of the city’s diabetes sufferers, at least one-third do not know that they have the disease, while many of those who know they have it are not managing to treat it properly. Here’s the NYC health commissioner quoted in the New York Times today:

“This confirms that we as a society are doing a rotten job both preventing and controlling diabetes,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city health commissioner. “We can do a much better job helping people with diabetes get their condition under better control. The fact that there are over 100,000 New Yorkers with seriously out-of-control diabetes, and over 200,000 who don’t even know they have diabetes, is a real indictment of our health care system.”

As disturbing as the overall figures are, he said, they were not unexpected. They resemble estimates made by public health officials, who expected that the disease would be more common in New York City than nationally; diabetes is less prevalent among whites than among most other groups, and New York is a mostly nonwhite city.

Which brings us to the Desi Angle (TM), and it’s a deadly serious one:

But Dr. Frieden said he was startled by some of the specific findings, including the very high numbers among Asian-Americans, especially those from South Asia. The study indicates that more than half of the New Yorkers whose families are from the Indian subcontinent have either diabetes or prediabetes.

Here’s more:

Asians have the highest rates in the city, 16 percent diabetic and 32 percent prediabetic. The city’s report does not differentiate Asians by region, but officials said that the data in their study and others show that East Asians have below-average rates of diabetes, while South Asians have by far the highest of any large group.

Diabetes afflicts about 14 percent of the city’s non-Hispanic black population, 12 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of whites.

If I can get a hold of more details I’ll update this post accordingly. Tomorrow the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC (93.9 FM in New York, and live and archived online) will be discussing this topic including the specific case of the South Asian community.

Since we have been talking about California doctors I thought I would share a news item that just came to my attention. Do you knows which desi male is in such high demand in Hollywood for his magic hands? He’s not a yoga instructor or a masseur, instead he’s Dr. Raj Kanodia, surgeon to the stars!

What do Jennifer Aniston, Ashlee Simpson and Cameron Diaz have in common? When Aniston recently underwent rhinoplasty, she turned to Dr. Raj Kanodia, the plastic surgeon behind Simpson’s and Diaz’s new noses. [Link]

Would you trust a bald barber?

Aniston’s rep confirms the operation. “Jennifer had a procedure done to correct a deviated septum that was incorrectly done over 12 years ago,” [Link]

While the official story is that she hated her original nose job and came to Kanodia for correction, nosy parkers insist that that a broken nose is just balm for a broken heart.

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that all these famous actresses are coming to a desi doctor to get demure little noses? I imagine him doing these operations with an cartoon angel on one shoulder and a cartoon devil on the other. The angel tells him to just do what the client wants, and the devil tells him to go ahead and do what he really wants - to give these women beautiful, majestic desi schnozzes instead. The poor doctor’s hands twitch, caught by conflicting impulses, until he leaves the room crying and his associates finish the surgery instead.

More on Kanodia: Champa And Tulsi Go to Hollywood

Our earlier post on him: Of Course…A Desi Doc on Dr. 90210

This is a week of good news and bad. The good news is that Goldman Sachs thinks the Indian economy is growing even faster than previously expected:

India could overtake Britain and have the world’s fifth largest economy within a decade as the country’s growth accelerates, a new report says… By 2050 India’s economy could be larger even than America’s, only China’s will be bigger, the bank predicts. [Link]

The bad news is that child malnutrition rates are still startling high in India. This week the PM felt a need to deal out thapars:

“Our prevalent rate of under-nutrition in the 0-6 age group remains one of the highest in the world,” Mr Singh said. “These are startling figures and the situation calls for urgent action.” [Link]

The situation remains astonishingly dire:

Last year the UN children’s agency, Unicef, said that the average malnutrition rate in some Indian states - such as densely populated Uttar Pradesh - was 40%. That is higher than sub-Saharan Africa where it is around 30%, Unicef said. [Link]

… Unicef report said half of the world’s under-nourished children live in South Asia….”South Asia has higher levels of child under-nutrition than Sub-Saharan Africa, but Sub-Saharan Africa has higher rates of child mortality…” [Link]

Most striking is the fact that the economic growth of the past 15 years hasn’t necessarily translated into better child nutrition, and that malnutrition has actually risen in some places:

A recent health ministry survey said that the number of undernourished children below the age of three had actually risen in some states since the late 1990s, despite higher incomes and rapid economic growth. [Link]

Arnold Schwartzenegger has a new opponent, and this time he’s battling a desi [Thanks Chick Pea!]. The governator’s latest adversary is the head of the the California Medical Association, Dr. Anmol Mahal.

The Fremont, Calif., gastroenterologist admired Schwarzenegger’s goals—coverage for all of the state’s 36 million residents and improving health care for kids. “It’s in some ways very visionary,” Mahal said later. But Mahal’s admiration soured when Schwarzenegger revealed that his plan would force doctors to give up 2 percent of their gross incomes to help fund coverage. “We are very discouraged and disappointed,” Mahal complained. “We had no warning.” [Link]

It is strange enough for me to see two of the highest profile Republican governors in the country pick up Hillary Clinton’s banner of universal healthcare, but stranger still for me to see a turbanned face (wearing a turban almost the same shade of blue that Manmohan Singh wears) staring back at me from the pages of the MSNBC article on the subject.

The racial aspect of this is striking because this is a plan designed, in part, to cover the health expenses of illegal aliens. This is a complete about face from former Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s strategy of demonizing illegal aliens. Having a desi doctor as the face of the opposition adds another twist, framing this as a debate between wealthy legal immigrants and poor illegal ones. That makes the politics more interesting, but also more complex.

The crux of the doctors’ disagreement with the plan is the way in which it will be funded:

… nearly 30 percent of the plan’s costs [will be covered] by levying a $3.5 billion “coverage dividend” on doctors’ (and hospitals’) gross revenues. “Why not tax teachers to provide money for better schools?” complains Dr. Samuel Fink, a Los Angeles internist. [Link]

Some medical practices would suffer more than others, doctors complain. Assessed on gross revenues rather than net income, the 2 percent fee hits doctors with high overheads harder, including oncologists, pediatricians and general practitioners—whose overhead costs may amount to 50 to 60 percent of their revenues. [Link]

Last November, India Today (with AC Neilsen and others) reported on their fourth ever national sex survey [Thanks reader sohwhat!]. This time round they focussed on India’s youth. Here are some highlights (from behind the subscription wall, although you can see a summary of their findings in this Reuters article):

• “46% single 16-25-year-old males have had sex, 10% higher than the 2004 survey”
• “37% single young men have had a homosexual experience, compared to 31% in 2004”
• “The average age of first sexual encounter for men has come down from 23 in 2004 to 18.”

Some of these findings, by the way, don’t quite add up. For example, while only 46% of young males claimed to have had sex, “49% young men have had sex with sex workers. In Ludhiana, it as high as 63%.” That seems a bit bizarre. After all, if you’ve had sex with a sex worker, you’ve had sex.

Also, the idea that close to 50% of all males have had sex with a sex worker, if true, is trouble from the perspective of the spread of HIV.

As for the women, some admit to having sex, but not as many, and they’re starting later than the boys:

• “In 2005… only 24 per cent single women between the ages of 18 and 30 … had had sex.”
• “42 per cent [of single women] said they had their first sexual encounter between the ages of 19 and 21.”

Despite this busyness in the sack for both sexes, both men and women say women should stay virgins until they are married:

• “63% single young men expect the woman they marry to be a virgin, 10% lower than in 2004”
• “In the 2005 survey of single women, 66 per cent agreed, saying women should remain virgins till they are married.”

The most disturbing finding was one about the prevalence of incest, which implies that a large number of females are having forced sex with family members:

• “14 per cent [of single males] claim to have had sex with family members.”

That number is horrifying enough, but when you consider that there was likely under-reporting, it’s even more disturbing.

All quotes from the India Today Sex Survey Cover Article, “Men in a Muddle”

Listen, my children to your Akka so old,
For she has a story, which today should be told.

Once upon a time, well over a decade ago
Akka received a call from a voice whispering low…

“Help. Oh my God…I don’t know what to do…”
“Wait—Gigi? What’s happening to you?”

“Anneka, I can’t take it anymore; I just want to die…”
“Shhh, stop…you’re a devout Catholic, I know that’s a lie.”

“What…no smile? That’s hilarious, G. Laugh.”

But my own laugh faltered and fell back in my chest,
This was no cry for help, this didn’t feel like a test.

“Anneka, I love you, please always remember that,”

“You stupid bitch Geee, stop, take that back!”

“I won’t let you say Good-bye, this isn’t the end,
I refuse to let you take away my best friend.

I know you feel like you are already dead,
I know about the demons in your heart and your head.

But please, don’t do this, it’s a permanent answer
To a temporary—-

She sobbed, “This is worse than cancer,”

“At least then people would feel sorry for—”
“Screw them, and if they judge you…well, fuck them more.
I know; they and your past are impossible to ignore…

But I also know that I’ve never met anyone with a purer heart,
That you are spun from light and goodness, unlike this tart.

Gigi, where are you, I’m already in my car
Damnit, this is Davis, you can’t be that far…”

“No, please, don’t. I’ve been enough of a burden to you—”

“Gee, I swear to God, I’m going to find you and slap you.”

“Anneka, please don’t hate me for what I’m about to do,
Promise me you’ll forgive me, I’m so sorry…I love you.”

Click.

“GIGI!” I screamed in to an ominously silent phone,
yanking the german car she loved over to the shoulder, alone.

Redial, redial, redial, at least twenty times
Tachycardiac beats and my breath form rhymes.

“Tasty curry might have a fringe benefit,” headlines USA Today… today. The article is more specifically about the reported health benefits of turmeric. It’s not exactly a scoop, as a scientific paper on the topic was published two years ago and picked up by Manish in this January 1, 2005 post. Still, given the attention span of the typical USA Today reader (and who is that reader, anyway, other than the nameless masses of khaki-panted, cellphone belt-clipped, laptop warriors waking up each morning in the Marriotts of the land?), I suppose it’s information worth recycling from time to time. Plus we get a heart warming story to go with it:

Then Jayne took an Indian cooking class that emphasized fresh vegetables and curry spices.

She began to whip up an Indian dinner once or twice a week — and soon she noticed she wasn’t always looking for a late-night snack. And the curry in the food offered her a bonus: It seemed to ease the pain and swelling in her joints.

“I have arthritis,” says Jayne, 55. “But I’m moving better now.”

Preliminary research suggests Jayne may be right. A study in the November issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism suggests turmeric, one component of curry spice, almost completely prevented joint swelling in rats with arthritis. Other studies have suggested that the spice could protect against diseases such as heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s…

Tipster Adi points us to the article as picked up on the news aggregator site RedOrbit.com, where we get the benefit of reader comments. Made-up Indian names, comparisons of desi food to the excrement of various animals, and discussions of desi body odor and penis size are all on the menu. I won’t reprint any of it here but those of you who think racism against desis is no big deal might find it instructive to take a look.

Meantime, pass the lime pickle.

Yesterday Siddhartha informed us all of the first Indian American governor to ever hold office in the U.S. (even if it will only be for a few days). It is a proud step forward. I mean, the only powerful desi politician right now is Bobby Jindal, and we all know there are mixed emotions regarding him. The situation in New Jersey got me thinking as to whether or not there is any other back door action to be taken advantage of out there. Can us desis (who often face an electability hurdle because of the pronunciation of our names and our brown faces) get our hands on the levers of power by “non-traditional” means instead?

As most of you are aware, South Dakota’s senior senator, Tim Johnson, fell ill a couple of weeks ago:

In Washington, D.C., on December 13, 2006, during the broadcast of a live radio interview with WNAX radio in Yankton, South Dakota, Johnson suffered bleeding in the brain caused by cerebral arteriovenous malformation, a congenital problem that causes enlarged and tangled blood vessels. He underwent surgery at George Washington University Hospital to drain the blood and stop further bleeding. Johnson’s condition was critical after the surgery. Johnson’s physician, Admiral John Eisold, said that day that “[i]t is premature to determine whether further surgery will be required or to assess any long-term prognosis.”

As of December 28, 2006, Johnson remained hospitalized in George Washington University Hospital. According to a neurosurgeon on the hospital’s staff, Johnson was being weaned from the medication used to keep him sedated, and he was opening his eyes and responding to his wife. [Link]

Johnson’s health is critical to the balance of power in our country. The Senate has 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and two Independents that caucus with the Democrats. This equates to a 51-49 majority for the Dems. If Johnson is permanently incapacitated then the Republican governor of South Dakota can appoint someone to fill the vacancy. He will most definitely appoint a Republican. Thus, we will be at 50-50 again and Vice President Cheney (a.k.a. Lord of the Sith) would become the tie-breaking vote. The Republicans would then control the Senate as before the recent election. Enter Dr. Vivek Deshmukh:

The surgery on Johnson was performed by Dr. Vivek Deshmukh, a neurosurgeon with special expertise and subspecialty training in cerebrovascular and endovascular neurosurgery, the statement said. The surgical team included Caputy and Dr. Anthony Venbrux, director of cardiovascular and interventional radiology. The surgery was a success, the statement said. [Link]

“Senator Johnson is sedated to allow his systems to rest and recover from the hemorrhage, and we anticipate no further tests or procedures in the near future,” neurosurgeon Vivek Deshmukh said in a statement issued by Johnson’s office.

“This is expected to continue through the holidays,” Vivek added. [Link]

Here is what I am slowly leading to. Rather than trying in futility to get desis to win political office, maybe we should try a more circuitous approach to the problem. Can anyone contest that Dr. Deshmukh is currently the most powerful man in America? What I am advocating is that we encourage young desis to perhaps go into non-traditional fields like medicine. We might be able to make more of a political impact that way.

READERS are blowing up the tip line asking us to cover the story below. Here’s a sampler:

• “Where to even start?”
• “I think the title says enough”
• “I think this one is fairly obvious”
• “interesting/ridiculous contrasts between public health awareness vs. outrageous journalism”
• “I think it’s pretty self-explanatory why this is interesting. Scientific fact? Post-colonial subjugation through emasculation? What do desi women (or gay men) think?”

You asked for it. And here it is, via the BBC:

A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men. …

Over 1,200 volunteers from the length and breadth of the country had their penises measured precisely, down to the last millimetre.

The scientists even checked their sample was representative of India as a whole in terms of class, religion and urban and rural dwellers.

The conclusion of all this scientific endeavour is that about 60% of Indian men have penises which are between three and five centimetres shorter than international standards used in condom manufacture.

This news is the top item in William Saletan’s science round-up this morning in Slate, which offers a translation of the key finding for any macacas that aren’t down with the metric system:

Thirty percent of Indian men are 1 inch short, and another 30 percent are 2 inches short.

Cue up another round of outrage, snark, statistics, exotification and sundry manifestations of sexual anxiety. As you can see, two of the tipsters left comments questioning the reporting of this story. Media hype? Colonial plot? Lou Dobbs?

Speaking of sexual anxiety: For those of you who read this site because you are considering becoming involved with a diasporic macaca, I would caution that you not jump to any conclusions about his member until you’ve had a chance to inspect it for yourself. Emigration leads to changes in diet and other health factors, which results in changes in body type. Just because your macaca’s grandpapa might have had a teeny weeny doesn’t mean your wholesome, corn fed, suburban cul-de-sac raised American desi shares the predicament. Whew!

Discuss. [Previous Sepia jimmyhat analysis here.]

THE VIRUS. The fever. The disease. The cocktail. The alphabet soup. The death. By any other red ribbon or name, today is December 1, World AIDS Day, and much of the day’s significant news on the topic comes, for better or worse, from India. (Photo: “An Indian sex worker wears AIDS symbols as she takes part in a rally in Siliguri,” AFP via Yahoo! News.)

For better, former US president Bill Clinton announced yesterday in Delhi a deal to dramatically reduce the price of effective treatment for children with HIV/AIDS. Among other things this is a fascinating example of a new approach to achieving health outcomes that combines public action with market tools. With funding from five countries, three European and two South American, the foundation has negotiated volume discounts on behalf of 40 destination countries. Thanks to the bulk purchase, the Indian generic manufacturers Cipla and Ranbaxy can sell single-pill tri-therapy drugs at 460 for a whole year’s supply. So the $35 million put up by France, Britain, Norway, Brazil and Chile ends up going a long, long way. $35 million! That’s NOTHING. Imagine if, say, the United States tossed in a little spare change from its daily Iraq expenditure. Grrrrr…..

Anyway, here’s a news story with details:

Only about 80,000 of the 660,000 children with AIDS who need treatment now get it, the United Nations AIDS agency estimates, and half the children who do not get the drugs die by the time they turn 2 years old. The United Nations Children’s Fund, or Unicef, has described children as the invisible face of the AIDS pandemic because they are so much less likely than adults to get life-saving medicines. …

Cipla and Ranbaxy Laboratories, Indian generic drug manufacturers, will be providing pills that combine three antiretroviral drugs into a single tablet, a formulation that is easier to transport, store and use than multiple pills and syrups. The combination tablets also need no refrigeration, an important advantage in poor countries lacking electricity, and can be dissolved in water for babies and infants too young to swallow pills.

Sandeep Juneja, the H.I.V. project head for Ranbaxy, said in a telephone interview that the company was able to provide the lower prices because of the larger volume of sales and because the Clinton Foundation, buying on Unitaid’s behalf, would consolidate many small purchases. He explained that the market for pediatric AIDS drugs was relatively small, fragmented and spread thinly across many countries.

“It would be a nightmare handling those small orders,” he said.”Imagine 40 to 60 countries buying a few hundred bottles individually, with no way to predict how many bottles would be needed.”

The new prices for 19 pediatric AIDS drugs are on average 45 percent less than the lowest rates offered to poor countries in Doctors Without Borders’ listing of AIDS drug prices, and were more than 60 percent lower than the prices the World Health Organization reported were actually paid by developing countries, the foundation said.

On the other hand — and here’s the “for worse” part — even the most abundant supply of inexpensive drugs can’t overcome poor distribution networks and, even worse, bonehead ignorance, especially when it comes from the people in charge of administering AIDS programs. Here’s a horror story this week from rural Gujarat:

A friend working in public health once told me that while mortality rates were highest in Africa, morbidity rates (the rate of non-fatal illness) were highest in India. If I remember correctly, she told me that this had to do with relatively high rates of innoculation - which cut all the nasty childhood diseases that lead to low life expectancy at birth - but a poor health system over all.

While I’m not sure if this is still true, what I do know is that getting sick is expensive, anywhere. Consider the impact of illness on financial health in the USA:

50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses… Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem. [Link]

And this is even though “68 percent of those who filed for bankruptcy had health insurance” [Link].

If illness wipes out the savings of relatively high (by world standards) earning Americans, you can imagine what it does to the poor in India. While the cost of medical care is cheaper in absolute terms in India, it is still a large share of already meager resources. Couple that with lost earnings, and the impact can be dire.

About one-fourth of hospitalized Indians fall below the poverty line as a direct result of their hospital expenses, according to a 2002 World Bank report. Many people take out steep loans or sell their homes in order to pay. And for the poor, losing even a day’s wages while waiting in the hospital can be devastating.

“A health event is a bigger risk to farmers than an unsuccessful crop. Once they sell their land or livestock, they become indentured laborers. That takes a generation to fix,”… [Link]

The Philadelphia Inquirer has the first in a series of articles about an illegal prescription drug network that was busted in 2005, as part of “Operation Cyber Chase.” The ringleaders of the network were the Bansals, a family based in India, though part of the business was run out of a warehouse in Queens.

Here’s how the business worked:

Akhil [Bansal] oversaw the family’s North American operations, shipping roughly 75,000 pills a day via UPS. In a little more than a year, the network had smuggled 11 million prescription tablets to more than 60,000 American addresses, an operation that grossed at least $8 million. These numbers did not include the steroids or the kilo shipments of the tranquilizer ketamine, a club drug called “Special K.”

The family’s Internet business represented a dark slice of the global economy so new, and so widespread, that national governments were still struggling to understand it, let alone police it.

Laws were vague, outdated, inconsistent. Technology - new medicines and ways to deliver them - was outpacing regulation. (link)

Unlike Operation Meth Merchant, where a number of the defendants pleaded guilty because they were going to be deported anyway, these guys clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and what they were doing was definitely illegal. In contrast to Operation Meth Merchant, which disproportionately targeted Indian immigrant store clerks, I’m not at all bothered at the take-down of the Bansals — they deserve to be in jail. Rather, it’s an intriguing case study that shows yet again how India’s entry into the globalized, internet-based economy goes well beyond the rosy picture suggested by talk of outsourcing and call centers.

At the same time, I don’t think the Bansals are especially “evil” for smuggling imitation prescription drugs, though it’s definitely dangerous for these drugs to be floating around. (According to NPR, at least one person died after purchasing drugs from a website based in Mexico.) If anything, the Bansals were evil because their business was based on spam, which wreaks havoc with email and is the bane of many a blogger’s existence.

As election day nears we notice that one of the most polarizing of ballot issues is back. No, not gay marriage and not stem cell research. I am talking about that licentious girl Mary Jane.

With a measure to legalize the possession of up to one ounce of pot on the ballot in Colorado and a measure to allow the regulated sale of marijuana and the possession of up to an ounce in Nevada, Tuesday could be the first time voters in any American state have embraced an end to marijuana prohibition. At this late juncture, most polls are painting it as an uphill fight, though organizers have reasons why they believe the polls may be off. The odds are looking better in Nevada than Colorado.

The only state in which marijuana possession is legal is Alaska. There, it was the courts, not the voters, who made the decision. [Link]

Maybe its inevitable that we will have to legalize marijuana in order to reduce our out of control prison population. However, that still doesn’t make smoking pot ok in my opinion. As South Asians, where can we go for advice if tempted (especially you younger readers)? Fortunately our community has a doctor we can trust. He’s a Michigan grad and has an all-American smile to go with his neurosurgeon creds. Let’s see if Dr. Sanjay Gupta has any advice for us before we go into the booth:

… marijuana isn’t really very good for you. True, there are health benefits for some patients. Several recent studies, including a new one from the Scripps Research Institute, show that THC, the chemical in marijuana responsible for the high, can help slow the progress of Alzheimer’s disease. (In fact, it seems to block the formation of disease-causing plaques better than several mainstream drugs.) Other studies have shown THC to be a very effective antinausea treatment for people—cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, for example—for whom conventional medications aren’t working. And medical cannabis has shown promise relieving pain in patients with multiple sclerosis and reducing intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients.

But I suspect that most of the people eager to vote yes on the new ballot measures aren’t suffering from glaucoma, Alzheimer’s or chemo-induced nausea. Many of them just want to get stoned legally. That’s why I, like many other doctors, am unimpressed with the proposed legislation, which would legalize marijuana irrespective of any medical condition.

Why do I care? As Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, puts it, “Numerous deleterious health consequences are associated with [marijuana’s] short- and long-term use, including the possibility of becoming addicted…” [Link]

I am totally against drug use (unless its in a dark jungle in Peru under the watch of a trained Shaman). Its amazing how many people think that its okay to drive stoned even if they would be against driving drunk. In any case, please consider Sanjay’s advice before the election on Tuesday.

I recently learned that people that are more in attune with their ethnic identity are also less prone to mental health issues.

Ethnic pride can help teenagers maintain happiness when faced with stress, according to a new study by a Wake Forest University psychologist published in the October issue of Child Development. [...] Those with higher ethnic regard rated their daily happiness level higher.

"Adolescents with a high ethnic regard maintained a generally positive and happy attitude in the face of daily stressors and despite their anxious feelings," Kiang said. "So, having positive feelings about one's ethnic group appeared to provide an extra boost of positivity in individuals' daily lives." [link]

Despite integration being healthy, segregated local communities and same culture friendship groups are common. A previous study reported that traditionalism was more common among women but this study did not explore the relation with mental distress or health.33 Traditional friendship choices may minimise the stress related to facing new dress, beliefs, diets, attitudes, religion, and lifestyle. [...] Bangladeshi and South Asian pupils with integrated friendship choices had lower levels of mental health problems than white pupils. [link]

So...the way I see it... Sepia Mutiny helps people of our ethnic identity with being more in touch with issues around the South Asian American diaspora. I would even propose that people that, oh say, click the refresh button repeatedly for www.sepiamutiny.com may actually not be psychotic, but actually exemplifies exceptional mental health. Additionally, reading Sepia Mutiny will make you happier.

Sadly, the South Asian American community is still a little confused on how they identify their racial identity here in America. Historically, the U.S. Court Ruling for ethnic individuals from South Asian since the 1920s has gone from: Hindu to Caucasian to Non-white to White and finally to Asian Indian.

The confusion goes much deeper into the self-identification of the South Asian American community - according to research around the 1990 Census, the first time Asian Indians were given a separate identity, we see the following.

When all Asian Indians from the 1990 census sample are considered, regardless of age or household status, and the children of all Indian household heads are included as well regardless of their reported ancestry and birthplace, 83 per cent of this sample of 7,758 describe themselves as South Asian. Among the US-born segment of this sample, however, only 65 per cent use a South Asian term. Instead, 25 per cent of the second generation is identified as `White' , and 5 per cent as `Black' . [link]

Allright... So maybe not everybody in our community is as in touch with with their ethnic identity as most of the people that read this site. 25% of South Asian Americans think of themselves as white, for goodness sakes. Granted this was taken back in 1990, and I firmly believe that 9/11 and the years after have significantly changed racialization in this nation. All the same, there are people in our community confused with their racial categorization. So it seems... Sepia Mutiny is additionally providing a service to this 30% identity confused population to further decrease their identity confusion.

I had no idea that SM was providing such a service - shouldn't the government be funding us for providing this kind of service for society? Seems like we here in the bunker could use a new and improved tagline to reflect these results: Sepia Mutiny: Decreasing your confusion, increasing your happiness, integrating friendships, and lowering mental health issues.With the simple click of the refresh button!

Until recently, most of what I knew about autism came from Rain Man. I was surprised to learn, therefore, that a desi is one of the most famous people with autism in the world. Tito is rare - he is both highly autistic and highly articulate. He can explain himself and his behaviors to doctors, thus providing a window into a condition that is still poorly understood:

Born and raised in India, Tito speaks English with a huge vocabulary. His articulation is poor, and he is often hard to understand. But he writes eloquently and independently, on pads or his laptop, about what it feels like to be locked inside an autistic body and mind…

“I’ve seen Tito sit in front of an audience of scientists and take questions from the floor,” said … an autism expert at Cambridge University. ”He taps out intelligent, witty answers on a laptop with a voice synthesizer. No one is touching him. He communicates on his own.”… [Link]

Tito is one of the most famous individuals with autism in the world, perhaps even more famous than Dr. Temple Grandin:

Several of his poems were published in the National Geographic, the New York Times and Scientific American have published feature stories on him, and BBC has aired an Inside Story documentary about him. His book, Beyond the Silence, which contain writings from when he was between eight and eleven years old, covers the first part of his life story and a special selection of his philosophical texts that were featured on BBC. [Link]

In fact, he’s so prolific that I’m surprised he doesn’t have a blog:

”I need to write,” he said recently, scrawling the words on a yellow pad. ”It has become part of me. I am waiting to get famous.”… [Link]

Yesterday I made the stupid mistake of forwarding this article as an internal memo to my SM bunker-mates:

Scientists at Stanford University say the United States is loaded with Internet addicts who are possibly as clinically ill as alcoholics.

The nationwide study suggests that more than one in eight adults has a hard time staying away from the Internet for more than a few days at a time. And one in 11 tries to hide his or her online habit…

The survey, conducted over the phone, found that nearly 70 percent of respondents were regular Internet users and 14 percent found it hard to stay offline for several days at a time…

According to the research, the typical Internet-addicted user is a single, college-educated, white male in his 30s who spends approximately 30 hours a week on nonessential computer use. [Link]

Minutes later the thirty-something Ennis sent out an earnest email indicating that he would not be logging on to SM for the rest of the day and asked us all to look after his post. In retrospect I realize that I should have followed the example of Kim Jong Il and kept a lid on such information. Too much knowledge decreases worker productivity. I realize also that this article might make some readers a bit anxious and reflective. Please don’t reflect. I assure you that SM falls under the essential use category.

Thanks to a couple of tipsters I also wanted to point you all to a relatively new website. CNET has a review:

That one raised eyebrow makes her an intimidating desi woman. I like it a lot.

Talk about an interactive search engine. A new search site called Ms. Dewey features a sultry woman who makes wisecracks related to the keywords that are typed in. The search results appear as a long, scrolling list in a window that pops up on the upper right.

Set against a futuristic cityscape background, Ms. Dewey—with her hair pulled back—probably represents a digital-age librarian. Her name refers to the Dewey Decimal classification system used for cataloging books in libraries.

Her quips relating to keywords range from mundane and silly to provocative. For instance, during a search for “George Bush” she mentioned how easy it was to make jokes about the president. For a search for “sex” she picked up a yellow ergonomic exercise ball and said “Safety first, and make sure you get it on film…” [Link]

So what does the first article about internet addiction have to do with the sultry Ms. Dewey? Isn’t it obvious? I’ve been reading the many neuroses laid bare on that other thread and I thought I’d offer my wise perspective on dating desi. I know that in reality nothing works. Why bother? Instead, I have found comfort in the arms of Ms. Dewey. She is the strong, beautiful, witty, articulate (sometimes verbose), and smarter-than-me desi woman I’ve been searching for my whole life. If any of you fools linger too long on her site I will hurt you.

Every time we’ve discussed domestic violence on this blog we end up having the same debate - “Is domestic violence worse amongst desis?” - without having any facts. However, thanks to a recent WHO study of 24,000 women in ten countries, we know a bit more about the way that one desi country (Bangladesh) stacks up to nine others outside the region:

Domestic violence in urban Bangladesh is worse than any of the six other countries where urban domestic violence was measured, and domestic violence in rural Bangladesh is the third worst of the relevant eight countries, after Ethiopia and Peru.

How bad is it?

In Bangladesh, a cross-sectional survey of women aged 15-49 years was carried out, with 1603 interviewees in the capital city Dhaka and 1527 in the rural area Matlab….

Combining data for physical and sexual violence, 53% of ever-married women in Dhaka and 62% in Matlab had ever experienced physical or sexual violence. [Link]

Nor is this the kind of violence that apologists can simply wave away:

In both sites, one in four women who had experienced physical abuse by a husband reported that they had been injured at least once in their lifetime; a third of them in the past 12 months.

Among women who had been injured, 68% in Dhaka and 80% in Matlab needed health care at least once as a result of their injuries.

10% of ever-pregnant women in Dhaka and 12% in Matlab were physically abused during at least one pregnancy. Of these, 37% in Dhaka and 25% in Matlab were punched or kicked in the abdomen. [Link]

Much of this violence is hidden from view:

In both sites, 66% of women who were physically abused by their husband never told anyone about the violence…Only 5% of physically abused women in Dhaka and 7% in Matlab ever sought help for the violence. [Link]

Why is domestic violence so high in the one SouthAsian country tested, and is it representative of the region as a whole? My guess is that domestic violence in Bangladesh is high because women have relatively low levels of education and therefore few economic opportunities outside the home.

Though people have children all the time, when I went through it it was still astonishing. Even in the merely supporting/cheerleading role of the father, I can’t remember ever experiencing anything quite as frightening and, in the end, exhilarating. The everyday can still be mindblowing, when it happens to you: giving birth to a child is still difficult, painful (even with local anesthesia), and dangerous. So many things could go wrong, and yet somehow they don’t, most of the time. And at the end of the day you have in your hands the most uncanny result of all: new life.

In a way I was lucky that S. went into labor last Friday, before I came across the latest issue of the New Yorker, with a typically excellent Atul Gawande piece on the evolution of obstetric medicine. In effect, the story Gawande tells isn’t really an alarming one, though it still might have filled my mind with thoughts better avoided. Childbirth in the U.S. has become fairly safe over the years (though the threat of infant mortality and maternal mortality is still real). But what is a bit disturbing is that until fairly recently so many women (1 in 100) and newborns (1 in 30) died going through this. Interestingly, it was a woman doctor named Virginia Apgar who formulated a rating system (the Apgar scale) which gave doctors a set of criteria by which to evaluate newborns who seemed a bit iffey immediately after delivery. According to Gawande, the Apgar scale has dramatically reduced the infant mortality rate and revolutionized neo-natal care. The procedure that has made the difference with maternal mortality is the modern Caesarian section:

In the United States today, a full-term baby dies in just one out of five hundred childbirths, and a mother dies in one in ten thousand. If the statistics of 1940 had persisted, fifteen thousand mothers would have died last year (instead of fewer than five hundred) —- and a hundred and twenty thousand newborns (instead of one-sixth that number). (link)

It’s worth noting that there are disparities along racial and ethnic lines; infant mortality rates for African Americans and Native Americans are appreciably higher than for other groups. The statistics in India aren’t quite as good, though they have also improved dramatically in recent years.

In recent weeks, what is fast looking like an epidemic of dengue fever has been spreading in different parts of India. Delhi is over 600 reported cases, with 16 fatalities; Kerala has over 700 cases; Gujarat, 200; West Bengal, 300. At India’s top hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), one medical student has died and 20 nurses are infected. In today’s news, it appears that two of the grandsons of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have also contracted the disease and have been admitted to the hospital.

Dengue fever, you ask?

Here’s the scoop. It’s transmitted by mosquitoes: not the Anopheles, which carries malaria, but the Aedes — especially the Aedes aegypti, which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) describe as a “domestic, day-biting mosquito that prefers to feed on humans.” There are two strains of dengue. Regular dengue fever (DF) produces fever, headache, back ache, joint pains, nausea, eye pain and rash. Dengue hemorragic fever (DHF) is nastier and potentially deadly:

Dengue hemorrhagic fever is characterized by a fever that lasts from 2 to 7 days, with general signs and symptoms that could occur with many other illnesses (e.g., nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and headache). This stage is followed by hemorrhagic manifestations, tendency to bruise easily or other types of skin hemorrhages, bleeding nose or gums, and possibly internal bleeding. The smallest blood vessels (capillaries) become excessively permeable (“leaky”), allowing the fluid component to escape from the blood vessels. This may lead to failure of the circulatory system and shock, followed by death, if circulatory failure is not corrected.

There is no vaccine and no specific medication for dengue. Cases of DHF in particular require rapid hospitalization and fluid replacement therapy for the patient to pull through. This requires, obviously, a medical infrastructure that permits rapid hospitalization, not to mention hygienic hospital conditions, never a given anywhere in the world.

Mosquitoes are the only vector of the disease, meaning that anyone who contracts it in a hospital environment likely did so from mosquitoes hanging out there. The best way to prevent dengue, therefore, is to reduce mosquito breeding opportunities and infestation settings like standing water. In the immediate, the authorities in Delhi (and presumably other places as well) are carrying out a fumigation campagn with pesticides. At the same time, it seems that the country was also insufficiently prepared to deal with a disease that has been endemic for a long time.

The spread of dengue — as well as chikungunya, which has now killed 71 people in Kerala — comes at a time when health experts are revising their longtime opposition to DDT. The WHO has lifted its ban on DDT, and the US government also supports wider use of the once-dreaded chemical. This is controversial, obviously; this article, for example, makes the opposing case.

Dengue has been spreading worldwide as the Aedes mosquito makes itself at home in more and more places. Here is a map that shows the reinfestation of Aedes in the Americas since 1970. As a side note, there is also a hip band out of Los Angeles called Dengue Fever. They play a blend of psychedelic rock and Cambodian pop.

We at Sepia Mutiny would like to extend a very snarky hearty welcome to the newest Sepia Macaca: Puran Singh. That’s right - Deep is a daddy! [Mothers everywhere want to know what the rest of us are waiting for]

Puran Singh (“Master P,” as my brother is already calling him) was born yesterday at 8pm. He’s 8 pounds, 2 ounces (3.7 Kg), and both he and his mother are doing well. We have lots of family around helping us out and giving support (thanks, everyone), and the hospital experience has been pretty good, though the final stage of labor was difficult (I guess it always is).

The name means “fulfillment,” “completion,” or “perfection.” No one in our family has been named “Puran,” but there are a couple of famous people who have had this name: including Bhagat Puran Singh and also a famous Punjabi poet. In the Sikh tradition, the first letter of a baby’s name is usually chosen by opening the Guru Granth Sahib at random, and taking a “Vakh.” The first letter of the page opened is supposed to be the first letter of the baby’s name. In our case, we got “P,” and I immediately thought of “Puran…” [Link]

P is for Perfection

Articles like this are always saddening to read. Delhi is facing an extreme water crisis. Even middle class people are foraging from tankers, and the millions of gallons of untreated sewage emptied into the River Yamuna every year are killing it.

One of the main figures cited in the article is Sunita Narain, of the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), the same people who brought us the summer pesticide/soda controversy. I know some readers will find her a controversial figure, but I don’t think the scale of Delhi’s water problem is really in dispute. Here are some of the stats Somini Sengupta brings to our attention:

• 25 to 40 percent of the water sent into Delhi’s water pipes leaks out before it reaches its destination.
• 45 percent of Delhi’s population isn’t connected to the public sewage system, and all of their waste runs back into the Yamuna untreated.
• 2.1 million (Indian?) children die every year because of inadequate sanitation. [The article is unclear as to which children exactly are dying from sanitation related problems]
• The river water is so polluted with fecal coliform that it’s not even remotely safe for bathing, which is required for devout Hindus.
• Sewage plants have been constructed to treat waste, but have thus far have “produced little value.”

Better management might well make a difference:

Yet the most telling paradox of the city’s water crisis is that New Delhi is not entirely lacking in water. The problem is distribution, hampered by a feeble infrastructure and a lack of resources, concedes Arun Mathur, chief executive of the Jal Board.

The Jal Board estimates that consumers pay no more than 40 percent of the actual cost of water. Raising the rates is unrealistic for now, as Mr. Mathur well knows. “It would be easier to ask people to pay up more if we can make water abundantly available,” he said. A proposal to privatize water supply in some neighborhoods met with stiff opposition last year and was dropped. (link)

Privatization is, I think most people would agree, the wrong direction to go in for an essential resource like water. But the government seems to have been so thoroughly incompetent, it’s hard to see how simply pumping more money into the system will make a big difference. Government money is, like water, prone to “leak.”

There’s a big article in the New York Times today about diabetes in India (thanks, Gitanjali and Builder). It’s impressive partly because of some surprising statistics given about the spread of both obesity and diabetes in India, and because of some touching individual interviews that illustrate some of the particular difficulties faced by Indians dealing with the disease.

I would recommend people go read the article, but here’s a summary of some of the stats I found notable:

• There are probably about 35 million people in India with Type 2 Diabetes (adult Diabetes) now. In a few years, there could be as many as 75 million. The current rate is 6 percent of adults have the disease, but that number is higher in Indian cities (in Chennai, Kleinfield reports, 16 percent of adults have Diabetes).
  
• Even middle-class Indians tend to remain uninsured, so Diabetes can be a financially crippling disease.
  
• Indians are genetically predisposed to contract Type 2 Diabetes, and they tend to get it 10 years before people in other parts of the world get it. (Which means, the danger is also high for NRIs; apparently this has already been observed with the earlier generation of immigrants)
  
• One of the biggest dangers in India in particular is that Diabetes, which leads to loss of sensation in the legs, often results in infections that can end in leg amputations. Since so many people go barefoot in India (even occasionally: as in, when visiting temples), the risk of foot and leg infections is much higher than in the west.
  
• In the world as a whole, there are now more people who are overweight than undernourished.
  

Any thoughts on this article, or recommendations for other things to read that will educate people on the danger of diabetes in the Indian subcontinent? I did find the tone a little irritating at some moments (“Diabetes — the dark side of India’s success”), but the research and the personal interviews were very informative.

The FDA has recently approved two drugs that will have a huge impact to the desi woman community; a) earlier this summer, the approval of the cervical cancer vaccine (or known as the HPV vaccine) and b) last week the approval of Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, as an over the counter drug for anyone over the age of 18. I think that both of these are huge landmark moments for the advancement of reproductive justice in our community.

According to a policy brief distributed by the National Asian Pacific Women's Forum (NAPAWF)...

The vaccine, Gardasil, is 100% effective in preventing the infection of human papillomavirus (HPV) which causes 70% of all cervical cancer cases worldwide. The FDA approved the vaccine for safe use among girls and women ages 9-26. Asian Pacific Islander (API) women will greatly benefit from this new HPV vaccine, given their high rates of cervical cancer, particularly among Vietnamese and Korean women.

In fact, in the U.S. cervical cancer is relatively rare. For many API women, however, lack of health insurance, lack of knowledge about Pap smears and preventive care, and lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate services prevent them from equally accessing the health care system, contributing to their higher rates of cervical cancer.

Although abstinence or faithful lifelong monogamy are the only real full-proof ways to protect against HPV infection, these may not be realistic. Regular Pap smears are perhaps one of the most effective measures to protect oneself against developing cervical cancer. Because HPV is sexually transmitted, experts argue that the vaccine should be administered before adolescents have their first sexual encounter.

To me, it feels like an enormous injustice to know that a disproportionate amount of women in my community will have a higher chance of getting a preventable cancer because of the social stigmas attached to sex in our society, especially as a South Asian American female. When I ecstatically announced the FDAs approval to my mother and declared the need to get all the girls in our extended family here vaccinated, I was met with a, "Isn't HPV sexually contracted? Why would we need to vaccinate then?" I didn't really know how to respond to her. Social stigma of sexuality in our community as a form of birth control and cancer prevention will only take us so far.

Last week Toronto played host to the 16th International AIDS conference, a biennial summit that brings together HIV professionals, philanthropists, politicians, artists, writers and victims from all walks of life. It was a week of solidarity, hope and action through future thought for the 30, 000 participants representing the close to 40 million living with the infection/disease today and those 25 million who have died as a result of it. The theme for AIDS 06 was “Time to Deliver”, they should have added a “Now” at the end of that…

Two news items relating to the twin weapons of prevention and cure require mention here while at least two G-8 governments require a duo of tight slaps.

First up, courtesy of a great post on Pass the Roti (Thanks, Ennis!) we have details of a Bangladeshi group ‘Durjoy Nari Shangha’ having to close down sex-worker aid and education centers in Dhaka in order to keep in accord with US funding conditions:

The sex workers collective — its name translates roughly as “organization of women who are hard to repress” — had 20 drop-in centers before December, offering sex and literacy education as well as moral support, toilets and a place to wash and rest for up to 5,000 women. It closed them after signing what aid groups call the “prostitution loyalty oath” that requires groups receiving USAID funding to have a policy opposing prostitution and sex trafficking. The group now has just four centers, geared to children and children’s rights. Bagum said that before the centers closed, the group sold 73,000 condoms a month. That has fallen to 30,000, even though health experts agree that condoms are the best way of stopping the spread of AIDS.[Link]

That precious, happy little girl you see above is Nirali. She has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (Thanks, bean). According to the following,

Despite overall improvements in outcome, the prognosis for patients…is poor. Their estimated event-free survival (EFS) is only about 30%. [link]

her life is very much at stake, so the way I titled this post isn’t sensational or an exaggeration of any kind. After losing an Uncle to Leukemia two years ago and having an even closer family member go to the hospital this week because of the looming possibility of cancer, Nirali’s story makes me want to weep.

She needs a bone marrow transplant.

She needs that transplant from someone who is brown.

There aren’t anywhere near enough desis in the National Marrow Program database.

We have no excuse for this.

I am terrified of needles, I’ve said this many times. I avoid flu shots, because I find them so traumatic, but even I sacked up and then felt like the biggest baby for being afraid of the “typing” process which put me in the database of potential donors. Apparently, they’ve even taken care of THAT obstacle; now you can just get your cheek swabbed and that is enough.

Look here for a desi-centric list of opportunities to join the database, nationwide. Go. Give a tiny part of your physical self. And then pray, if you are inclined to do so, that we follow-up this post with some joyful news.

Time Magazine’s Asia edition has a cover article this week that details the life and travels of Marco Polo in the context of today’s emerging economies in China and India:

If history has taught us anything, it’s that Eastern and Western perceptions of one another are thoroughly unstable, an uneasy blend of fascination, fear and greed that lends itself to exaggeration. That all started with Polo (1254-1324), who left a detailed, and still controversial, account of his journeys and the years he spent in the service of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. Polo’s Description of the World is the world’s first best-selling travelogue. He set off to the Orient from his native Venice with his father and uncle in 1271. For them it was a return journey; they had already been to what is now Beijing, where the Great Khan had given them a letter to the Pope, and asked them to return with learned men who could teach his people about Christianity. The route, as described by Marco Polo, took them through the Caucasus, Persia, Afghanistan, over the Pamirs and along the Silk Road to Cathay, as he called China. Hardship and danger were balanced by wonder, especially once he arrived at Kublai’s court, where he claimed to have become a court favorite who was sent off on diplomatic missions. He dictated his book, years later, long after his return to Italy, while in jail in Genoa in 1298. Some of the descriptions—from the miracle oil that cures skin trouble in the Caucasus to the giant griffin birds who pick up elephants and drop them into the Arabian Sea—earned him a reputation even in his day as a fairytale spinner rather than a credible witness. [Link]

Also in the issue is an article on western Big Pharma’s attempts to patent knowledge that Indians have been actively using for millenia:

It started with turmeric. An essential ingredient of most Indian curries, the spice was paid tribute by Marco Polo; he compared it favorably to saffron, and noted its importance in traditional medicines. Indeed, Indian doctors have long reached for the knobby yellow root to treat a variety of ailments from skin disease to stomachache and infection. So when two U.S.-based researchers were awarded a patent in 1995 on turmeric’s special wound-healing properties, a collective howl of outrage arose from the subcontinent. “Housewives have been using turmeric for centuries,” says V.K. Gupta, director of India’s National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources in New Delhi. “It’s outrageous that someone would try and patent it.” The patent was eventually revoked, after a decade-long battle in which the Indian government and private sector spent millions of dollars in legal and research fees to prove that turmeric’s qualities were well documented in ancient medical textbooks. Gupta scrolls through a list of some 5,000 applications currently pending approval by U.S. and European patent offices, jabbing a finger at the most egregious examples of what he considers to be outright theft. He estimates that at least half of those scientific “discoveries” are established remedies in India’s ancient plant-based medical system, called Ayurveda. To Gupta, each application is a jewel plundered from India’s vast trove of medicinal knowledge. “If this isn’t piracy, I don’t know what is,” he says. [Link]

It’s hot outside. So hot, these days, you want to curl up next to a fan with a cup full of ice water and allow your brain to regress to an almost womb-like state of slushee-induced, heat-transcending peace. The local papers here in Philly have had nothing very exciting to say about the curent heat wave, but the BBC has an amusing article on the rest of the British media’s penchant for “climate porn” (the BBC, of course, only participates in the phenomenon by discussing how everyone else participates in it). Still, “climate porn”: you might want to rethink how much time you spend at work checking the weather.

Speaking of returning to the womb, or something close to it, did you hear about the new, designer desi-themed baby food?

HappyBaby, which sells colorful cubes of frozen vegetable and fruit purées through FreshDirect and Gourmet Garage, flavors puréed peas with fresh mint, and potatoes and red lentils with coriander and cinnamon in their savory dahl, an Indian staple.

“This is how my parents fed me,” said Shazi Visram, co-founder of HappyBaby, which began on Mother’s Day and is expanding its line this month. “Why shouldn’t babies, of all people, get to eat delicious things?”(link)

No more vanilla, canned Gerber for today’s stylish babies. At HappyBabyFood, you get organic Baby Dhal. It comes in frozen, baby-sized cubes, and is sold at health food places in the New York City area. (Because it’s frozen, they can avoid having to put in preservatives.)

Not everyone is thrilled with the masalafication trend:

But some parents remain skeptical. “Moms ask me, ‘Can babies really have that?’ ” said Anni Daulter, co-founder of Bohemian Baby, which delivers meals like Vegetable Korma, made with coconut milk, for 12-month-olds, and purées of fruits like pomegranates and figs for infants. “And I say, of course! What do you think they feed babies in India?” (link)

Wait, you mean they feed babies in India something other than American baby food?

For more frozen organic baby food porn, click on this image, from New York Magazine. And a bit more on HappyBaby Food co-founder Shazi Visram, who has an MBA from Columbia and has worked in real estate in Brooklyn, can be found here.

There’s quite a controversy brewing (thanks, Scott Carney) over the pesticide content in Indian soft drinks. The vast majority of these are owned by the multinational Coke and Pepsi companies, and are of course manufactured and bottled locally in India using all local ingredients.

The controversy actually began three years ago, with a report from the Centre for Science and the Environment that alleged high concentrations of pesticides in soda samples. The government at the time attacked the findings aggressively, and questioned the credibility of the scientists who conducted it. But as a result of the study, strict standards for pesticide content were put in place for the water that is used in soft drinks, though standards for the sugar and other ingredients that go into the soda still haven’t been finalized.

Now the CSE has done another study, and published the findings in its magazine, Down to Earth. The actual numbers, and notes on methodology, are available on this PDF. (I haven’t found a more formal, “science journal” style article indicating the methodology of the study in detail anywhere.) The CSE says it is testing the soft drinks using methodology developed by the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

There are stories floating around of farmers using Coke and Pepsi drinks as low-budget pesticides, which would be a rather grim confirmation of this finding if substantiated. Of course, it’s unlikely that the amount of pesticide in these drinks is actually killing any bugs (the study finds pesticides in the drinks in the range of 11 parts per billion); it might well be the citric acid or the phosphoric acid (on the other hand, wouldn’t bugs be attracted to the sugar?). As a commentor on Scott Carney’s blog points out, it’s not clear whether this is a widespread practice, or a bit of an ‘urban legend’.

On March 16th of this year, Abhi wrote about a first-in-man trial in the UK which went horribly awry for six volunteers who experienced heart, kidney and liver failure after they were given an experimental drug made by German firm TeGenero, called TGN 1412:

It is an anti-inflammatory agent makers hoped would become a lucrative treatment for rheumatism, leukaemia and multiple sclerosis.[link]

When we first posted about this nightmarish story, Doctors said they were “in the dark” and that they did not know exactly how these human guinea pigs would be affected. Unfortunately, now it seems we have an answer—and it is tragic:

Victims of the disastrous “Elephant Man” drugs trial have been told they face contracting cancer and other fatal diseases as a result of being poisoned in the bungled tests. [link]

Nav Modi, 24, whose bloated face and swollen chest led to the nickname “Elephant Man”, said he did not know how long he would live.[link]

“It’s a really bizarre feeling when you discover you might be dead in a couple of years or even in a couple of months,” he said. “I feel like I’ve given away my life for £2,000.”[link]

It seems that not only were the volunteers (quite predictably) assured before participating in the trial that they would not suffer any life-threatening illnesses, they were told that after it was obvious that the test results were disastrous, too.

Four months later he still suffers from occasional lapses of memory, severe headaches, back pain and diarrhoea. (Modi) and the others had been led to believe that while their symptoms might persist for a while, their long-term future was not at risk.[link

Wrong. So very wrong.

One of the six victims was told last week he is already showing “definite early signs” of lymphatic cancer.

He and three others have also been warned that they are “highly likely” to develop incurable auto-immune diseases.[link]

The Washington Post today detailed the tragic history of Plan B (a.k.a. the morning after pill). It is crystal clear that right wing idealogy has been winning out over science for far too long. From Wikipedia:

Emergency contraception (EC) (also known as Emergency Birth Control (EBC), the morning-after pill, or postcoital contraception) refers to measures, that if taken after sex, may prevent a pregnancy.

Forms of EC include:

* Emergency contraceptive pill —referred to simply as “emergency contraception,” “ECPs,” or “ECs”, or “morning-after pill” —are hormones that act both to prevent ovulation or fertilisation, or perhaps the subsequent implantation of a fertilised egg (zygote). ECPs are not to be confused with chemical abortion methods that act after implantation has occurred.
* Intrauterine devices (IUDs) - usually used as a primary contraception method, but sometimes used as emergency contraception.

As opposed to regular methods of contraception, ECs are considered for use in occasional cases only, for example in the event of contraceptive failure. Since they act before implantation, they are considered medically and legally to be forms of contraception. However, some who are anti-abortion define pregnancy as beginning with fertilisation, so they consider EC to be a form of abortion. These claims remain controversial; see Controversy section for more detail. [Link]

The key thing to understand here is that idealogically driven elements in this country, working with the Bush Administration, have tried to equate the use of the morning after pill with abortion. When the public is misled in this way many feel they too should work against allowing over-the-counter sales of such a pill. This analogy is simply untrue. The morning after pill is a form of contraception. It works to prevent conception in the first place in cases ranging from rape and insest to when a condom breaks. It was back in 2004 that an independent FDA review board made up of scientists and health professionals recommended that the pill be sold over-the-counter:

”By overruling a recommendation by an independent F.D.A. review board, the White House is putting its own political interests ahead of sound medical policies that have broad support,” said Phil Singer, a spokesman for Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign. ”This White House is more interested in appealing to its electoral base than it is in protecting women’s health.”… [Link]

Because I can safely be described as a masochist, I am always on the lookout for masochistic stories with a desi angle. This one comes to us as a tip from former SM heartthrob Apul. It seems that there is a race that takes place in New York called the The 3100 Mile Race. Allow me to explain:

The Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team is proud to offer the Ninth Annual Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race. In this grand test of endurance and survival, a small group of athletes attempt to negotiate 5649 laps of a .5488 of a mile course (883 meters) in the time-span of 51 days- an amazing challenge. This is the longest certified footrace in the world; runners must average 60.7 miles per day to finish within the 51-day limit. The serious athlete must have tremendous courage, physical stamina, concentration and the capacity to endure fatigue, boredom and minor injuries. The predecessor of this very race was the 2700 Mile Race (held in 1996), in which five intrepid runners finished the distance well within the 47-day time limit. In 1997, Sri Chinmoy, race founder, upped the distance to 3100 miles. Two runners finished the inaugural 3100 Mile race in less than 51 days, showing that athletes indeed believed in self-transcendence. Last year nine finished 3100 miles out of 12 starters… [Link]

There are two things that I find particularly interesting about this race. The first is that the founder, Sri Chinmoy, doesn’t appear to have the classic runner’s build. See for yourself:

He looks like he is about to fall asleep

Second, I found the “route” to be sort of mundane. Imagine circling the same city block repeatedly for 3100 miles! After some inquiries in dawned on me that this would also be a great route if you were a pedophile. What am I implying? Nothing. It was just an observation.

PBS’ Frontline Roughcut series lives up to its name with its latest on-line film. You might remember that I have linked to their on-line film series before. The latest one tracks the human kidney trafficing business in a slum near Chennai nicknamed “Kidney-vakkam.” The 10 minute film is titled, A Pound of Flesh: Selling kidneys to survive.

Traveling between Bangalore, India’s thriving technology center, and the slums to the south, Grant spoke to government officials, doctors, kidney brokers and donors to try to find out why so many people are still getting paid to give up their kidneys even though a law was passed 12 years ago to heavily regulate the practice. When Grant arrived in the slums of Chennai, about eight hours south by train from Bangalore, someone offered to sell her their kidney on the spot. “I was stunned,” she says.

A New York Times Magazine article recently asked the question, “Why not let people sell their organs?” From an economic point of view, the article explains, demand for kidneys is far outrunning supply around the world. If people could legally sell, economists argue, more people with kidney disease might be saved, and the poor people willing to sell would have a chance to get badly needed funds.

As Grant reveals, the problem is especially acute in India, where demand for kidney transplants is increasing along with the country’s growing numbers of diabetics, a health problem that has been directly linked to India’s recent prosperity and rise in obesity. Those who can afford medical care are much more likely to receive a new organ, often because inside India’s impoverished slums, many are desperate enough to sell a kidney for as little as a few hundred dollars. [Link]

The film points out that as Indians increasingly adopt a western diet they are becoming more susceptible to kidney disease, thus increasing the demand for illegally sold kidneys.

Above all, Grant’s story shows a vicious cycle among India’s poorest — particularly among women, the family members traditionally expected to sell their kidneys. Holding out her original donor card, one woman tells Grant that she has been waiting 17 years for the rest of the money promised her. [Link]

As the film explains, the quickest way to close down this practice is to limit kidney donations to between blood relatives, but nobody seems incentivized to do this.

Time Magazine (hat tip: Julie) this week has a story about a couple who got married in a Hindu ceremony recently in upstate New York, Carrie and Sujeet. But this isn’t your ordinary cross-cultural wedding — both Carrie and Sujeet have Down Syndrome. Carrie and Sujeet are the first generation of DS individuals to be healthy and functional enough to consider marrying. They’ve benefited from full social assimilation, new therapies, and close medical attention that mitigates the health complications of DS:

This generation of young adults with DS has shattered old ideas about what is possible for people who carry an extra 21st chromosome in their cells—the cause of DS—and what opportunities society owes them. They came of age in an era of early-intervention programs to spur physical and mental development—Desai began one at 7 weeks. Once in school, they were included in regular classrooms when possible and were offered tutoring and special classes when needed. Both bride and groom are high school graduates. Just as critical, this generation has benefited from medical care addressing the heart and gastrointestinal defects, eye problems, thyroid issues, obesity and other health woes that, for reasons that are poorly understood, often tag along with mental retardation as part of Down syndrome. The result: their average expected life span has doubled, from 25 in 1983 to 56 today.(link)

Carrie and Sujeet met, started dating, and he popped the question publicly after performing at a music recital. I think the whole thing is pretty wonderful. Check out Sujeet’s home page, which has video footage of him proposing and pictures. And Carrie has a website too. Also, Wikipedia on Down Syndrome for more on the science of the genetic condition.

Disclaimer: Some good lovin’ from time to time is also required.

Because I am blessed and in good health, I only require my fish oil supplement and my multivitamin to get me through each day. I am definitely one of the lucky ones though. For those living with AIDS it is not nearly so easy. The most effective way to slow down the ravages of AIDS has been via a triple cocktail of drugs such as Sustiva, Viread, and Emtriva.

The triple-cocktail treatment for HIV involves taking three different drugs to combat the infection. These medications are two nucleoside analog drugs, such as AZT and 3TC, and a protease inhibitor, such as Crixivan. The drugs drastically reduce the concentration of viri in the bloodstream to undetectable levels by affecting enzymes in the virus itself. The drugs do not completely eliminate every virus in the body and probably never will. It is not certain whether patients taking the drugs may still be able to transmit HIV to other people. In addition, the drugs are not a vaccine which can be prevent a person from being infected with HIV.

The total cost of the medication may be as much as $12,000 a year, although some health insurance companies cover the drugs.[Link]

Some positive news announced late today for those suffering from AIDS:

The first once-a-day AIDS pill that combines three current medicines won U.S. approval on Wednesday, offering patients a more convenient alternative to current multiple drug cocktails.

Atripla, which contains Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s drug Sustiva and Gilead Inc.’s medicines Viread and Emtriva, is the latest step in making it easier for AIDS patients to keep the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV in check — a process that once included dozens of daily pills.

“It’s one thing to have medicine available, but it will only be effective when people can indeed take it as they are supposed to,” U.S. Food and Drug Administration Deputy Commissioner Murray Lumpkin told reporters. [Link]

Perhaps Uncle “all things desi are good for your health” was right. Turmeric may prevent Alzheimer’s. Mangosteens may combat bird flu. Ice in your soda may be bad for you. And now it turns out that pomegranate juice may reduce the risk of heart disease and even fight off prostate cancer.

Seeds of life?

Although Persephone’s consumption of pomegranate may have consigned her to the land of the dead, it looks like the fruit may have the opposite effect on us:

Scientists in Israel have shown that drinking a daily glass of the fruit’s juice can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Pomegranate juice contains the highest antioxidant capacity compared to other juices, red wine and green tea,” said Professor Michael Aviram, who led the team. [Link]

Drinking a daily eight ounce glass of pomegranate juice can significantly slow the progress of prostate cancer, a study suggests. Researchers say the effect may be so large that it may help older men outlive the disease. Pomegranates contain a cocktail of chemicals which minimise cell damage, and potentially kill off cancer cells. [Link]

No word on whether cooking with anardana has a similar effect. Of course, you know where the best anardana in the world comes from, don’t you?

Pomegranate seeds are sometimes used as a spice, known as anardana … The seeds of the wild pomegranate daru from the Himalayas is considered the highest quality source for this spice. [Link]

With statistics being released last month of India’s HIV rate of 5.7 million total infections the following news makes me want to yelp with joy. Yelp!

India plans to provide free anti-retroviral drugs to combat HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — to around 100,000 people by early next year, a top health official said, as this nation struggles with the largest number of AIDS infections in the world. [Link]

Armed with a budget of about $200 million U.S., availiability of free ARV drugs is going to expand from 52 clinics supplying 35, 000 people to a whole 100 clinics:

“By August, we will be able to reach anti-retroviral therapy drugs to around 85,000 people infected with the virus,” Rao told journalists. “But by early 2007, we will have drugs made available to 100,000 people with HIV.”

According to Sujatha Rao (Director General, National AIDS Control Organization), treatment is going to supplement a newly strengthened AIDS awareness campaign:

Among the new initiatives is a program to reach out to pregnant mothers so that mother-to-child transmission of AIDS can be controlled. So far, only 4,500 pregnant mothers had been given doses of nevrapine — a drug that prevents the transmission of the virus from an HIV-infected mother to a newborn infant.

Today’s business news had me thinking of two things: Andrew Carnegie and whether there are any significant brown philanthropists.

Carnegie was a self-made man who went from rags to riches, creating a steel empire which made him the wealthiest hombre alive. Three men in today’s paper might be seen as present day Carnegies — Laxmi Mittal, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet — the three richest men around. Laxmi Mittal is the most literal aspirant to the title since Arcelor-Mittal will soon be the largest steel company in the world. However, the other two capture what is to me Carnegie’s best attribute, his philanthropy.

Just as Carnegie gave away 90% of his fortune [he built a university, several thousand libraries around the world, and did various other good works], Warren Buffet announced that he will be giving away 85% of his wealth with most of it going to more than double the endowment of the Gates Foundation, now the largest charitable foundation in history.

Are rich brown people simply more selfish than rich white ones?Compare Buffet and Gates to Mittal, the next richest man in the world. Mittal is famous for his personal spending. He owns the world’s most expensive house, which he purchased for $128 million. He recently spent more than $55 million dollars on his daughter’s wedding. But his charitable giving rarely (never?) makes the news, and is not in the same league as either his personal consumption or the donations of his “peers”.

The question is, why not? Mittal competes on every level with his white counterparts except that of his charitable giving. Is this a desi thing? Are brown philanthropists as generous as white ones? Who are the major brown philanthropists anyway?

When I want to feel good about charitable giving in South Asia, I look to ordinary people, not the super rich. Despite religious and cultural taboos against organ donation, there is one town in India where tens of thousands of people have pledged to donate their eyes when they pass away. And it’s not just talk, the people of Neemuch in Madhya Pradesh have already given sight to 3,000 others across India.

This large scale kindness to strangers started out in a more modest and typically desi way, with a gift of a cornea within a family:

Neemuch’s reputation as the town of eye donors began some three decades back when a venerable local politician Shyammukh Garg pledged his eyes before passing away at the age of 55. Mr Garg had pledged his eyes for a simple reason: his grandson had lost his vision after his birth, and he was keen that the little boy should try regaining his sight with his grandfather’s corneas… his grandson … received his grandfather’s eyes and got his vision back.

Inspired by Mr Garg, all his family members donated their eyes. [Link]

Where this story becomes unusual is that this tradition went beyond the family, and prevailed over superstition to become a local tradition:

The Garg family persuaded a local club to push a campaign for eye donation - newspapers, billboards, door-to-door visits - were used to extol its virtues.

It was not an easy mission. There were religious taboos to counter, including one that held that an eye donor is born blind in his next birth. The club members were also attacked by family members when they turned up at homes where somebody had died with a plea to donate the deceased person’s eyes.

But people soon began converting to the good cause - so much so that even the police began allowing removal of eyes before post mortems were conducted on people who had died unnatural deaths. [Link]

I self-identify as a gym rat. My body begins to feel ill and lethargic if I go even a week without working out. I have been working out at a gym regularly for the last eleven years. I consider going to the gym an almost spiritual duty. I believe in a personal philosophy that you must keep your body in the best shape you possibly can at all times so that it will be clean and ready if called into service for a greater cause (whatever that might be). I know that might seem silly to a lot of people but I really mean it. It isn’t about vanity. I actually eat four servings of fruits a day also, because being in shape isn’t just about going to the gym but about taking care of your health in general.

When I am at the gym I do not socialize. I only know the first names of one or two people at my gym. I always workout alone, I wear headphones, and 80% of the time I am there I don’t even make eye-contact with anyone. The gym is my “me” time. It is where I meditate on the things bothering me as well as on the things I am happy about. I toss around ideas for blog posts and also consider whether I should ban that one commenter who has been bugging me for months. It is my hour and a half of refuge from the storm outside.

An article published this week at Slate.com has got me reconsidering everything. Far from living a good example, maybe I, and those of you like me, are just a bunch of freaks in the making:

There have been three major terror attacks in the West over the past five years—9/11, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and the 7/7 suicide attacks on the London Underground. For all the talk of a radical Islamist conspiracy to topple Western civilization, there are many differences between the men who executed these attacks. The ringleaders of 9/11 were middle-class students; the organizers of the Madrid bombings were mainly immigrants from North Africa; the 7/7 bombers were British citizens, well-liked and respected in their local communities. And interpretations of Islam also varied wildly from one terror cell to another. Mohamed Atta embraced a mystical (and pretty much made-up) version of Islam. For the Madrid attackers, Islam was a kind of comfort blanket. The men behind 7/7 were into community-based Islam, which emphasized being good and resisting a life of decadence.

The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though—their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires? Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims’ relationships with others—whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves. Perhaps it was there, among the weightlifting and rowing machines, that these Western-based terror cells really set their course. [Link]

I just wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that AIDS “turns” 25 this week. India now has the largest number of infected people and is still trending downhill:

Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases were reported, there is no sign of a halt to the pandemic which is likely to spread to every corner of the globe, the head of the United Nations’ AIDS agency said.

Peter Piot was speaking as UNAIDS released a report which declared that the world’s response to the disease, that has infected about 65 million people and killed 25 million, has been nowhere near adequate. Five years after a special U.N. session pledged its commitment to halt the AIDS pandemic, only a few countries have met the targets laid down…

India has the largest number of people living with the virus. With 5.7 million infections, it has overtaken South Africa’s total of 5.5 million. But, the epidemic is still at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of the world’s HIV-infected children live. [Link]

The first reported case in India came nearly 5 years after the first reported case in the U.S.

The first case of HIV infection in India was diagnosed among commercial sex workers in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in 1986. Soon after, a number of screening centres were established throughout the country. Initially the focus was on screening foreigners, especially foreign students. Gradually, the focus moved on to screening blood banks. By early 1987, efforts were made up to set up a national network of HIV screening centres in major urban areas. [Link]

The statistics are grim:

The UN Population Division projects that India’s adult HIV prevalence will peak at 1.9% in 2019. The UN estimates there were 2.7 million AIDS deaths in India between 1980 and 2000. During 2000-15, the UN has projected 12.3 million AIDS deaths and 49.5 million deaths during 2015-50.

A 2002 report by the CIA’s National Intelligence Council predicted 20 million to 25 million AIDS cases in India by 2010, more than any other country in the world. [Link]

So you guys tell me. We know what some of the problems are. What more can be done to stop this boulder from rolling?

Everyone knows the ‘brain drain,’ I presume — the flight of educated professionals from the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to the west. A number of the immigrants were doctors, who were in desperately short supply at a time when the U.S. population was spiking. My own family was part of that event, which admittedly must have hurt the progress of health care in India itself (though I don’t know if this has ever been formally studied).

And while there now are, perhaps, too many doctors in the U.S., there aren’t enough nurses. According to one statistic in today’s New York Times, there were 118,000 nursing vacancies in U.S. hospitals last month, and the deficit could reach as high as 800,000 in the next decade. Now the U.S. Senate’s immigration bill contains a clause that will remove the immigration cap entirely for qualified nurses from India, the Philippines, and China.

The lack of qualified U.S. nurses is due mainly to the lack of places to train them; nursing schools turn away scores of applicants since there simply aren’t enough Professors of Nursing around. But despite the severe shortage, the American Nurses Association is opposed to the current measure, which it calls “outsourcing.”

The repercussions on the health care systems of the affected countries could be severe, even if there is some overall benefit to the local economy:

The flight of nurses from the Philippines, a former American colony, has provided a huge boost to a weak economy, through remittances. Some government agencies there have encouraged the export of nurses, who send home billions of dollars each year to their families.

A nurse in the Philippines would earn a starting salary of less than $2,000 a year compared with at least $36,000 a year in the United States, said Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, a medical professor at the University of the Philippines who led the country’s National Institutes of Health.

He said the flight of nurses had had a corrosive effect on health care. Most Filipinos died without medical attention in 2003, just as they had three decades earlier. (link)

For the Philippines, there’s already a care drain. The same may be in store for India if this bill passes and goes through the House, as seems likely.

Incidentally, there is already a recruiting company, called RNIndia, that specializes in bringing Indian nurses to U.S. hospitals. And Abhi talked about another side of this issue here.

I recently picked up Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science in a bookstore in Philly. I thought I already had a favorite Indian doctor-writer in Abraham Verghese, but Gawande gives Verghese a run for his money in this excellent, thought-provoking book.

After two years of market research, Hindustan Latex Limited (HLL) is ready for a commercial launch of the female condom in India. It will be distributed under the brand name ‘Confidom’. The condom is manufactured in the U.K. by the Chicago-based Female Health Company (FHC). In addition, the FHC announced this week that it has received an order from the National AIDS Control Organization of the Government of India for over 500, 000 condoms. [Link, in PDF]

Research conducted by HLL last year indicated an interest in the product from commercial sex workers as well as from college girls [Link]. While HLL is eying the moolah in upper middle class spheres the Indian government is giving them a helping hand by working with NGOs to reach sex workers:

Positioned as a high-end lifestyle product targeted at the segment of women aged between 18 to 35 years, the product has been priced at Rs. 250 for a pack of two. It expects to sell five lakh units in the first year. Meanwhile, the government has already ordered about five lakh pieces to be distributed free through NGOs or at a subsidized price of Rs. 5 to sex workers. [Link]

Female condoms are unique because they give women simultaneous control over STD prevention and contraceptive technology. Their influence on HIV prevention programs dealing with sex workers, such as Kolkata’s Sonagachi Project, could be huge. While promoting HIV awareness in the Sonagachi brothels, public health scientist Smarajit Rana found some very basic obstacles preventing the use of male condoms:

It transpired that if a prostitute insisted on condom use, her customer just went to someone else. Unlike AIDS, starvation posed an immediate threat, and the program seemed doomed. “Counseling, educating—it just doesn’t work,” Jana states. “Higher up in the social hierarchy, people are able to act on the information given to them. Not so in the lower levels.” [Link]

Confidoms could drastically reduce such difficulties faced by sex workers but at Rs. 5 a pop I wonder how accessible this method really is to them. HLL is looking at negotiating a deal with the FHC that would allow them to manufacture the condoms domestically, which would lower the price, but no word of a definite agreement as yet.

Google Trends reveals the most sexually repressed (and Internet-literate) nations in the world by showing who spends the most time searching for the word ‘sex’ (via Andrew Sullivan).

The #1 city: Delhi. The #1 country: Pakistan.

Three of the top six cities are in India: Delhi, Chennai and Bombay.

The top U.S. city: Salt Lake City. Then Chicago.

The top language: Arabic. Was it really a surprise?

Also check out who searches for the word ‘pornography’ and the word ‘desi.’

One of the ultimate ironies of the traditional Indian gender roles is that, although they strive to keep chastity on every cherubic mind, they accomplish quite the opposite… every interaction is viewed through the filter of gender… it’s a perversion that the platonic part of our lives is defined by the sexual. If chastity were the objective, repression is clearly not the answer. [Link]

Related posts: Everyone’s having sex except you, No sex please, we’re Indian, Bad Indian Boy, There is no place to hide it in India

America’s most celebrated practitioner of ayurveda has fallen afoul of his employer again. Ricky Williams, running back for the Miami Dolphins, has been suspended for a year following a violation of the NFL’s drug policy. To many fans this is a same-old-story: Williams only recently returned from a previous supension, and the court of sports talk radio has found him guilty of self-indulgence, narcissism, and letting down the team.

What’s different this time, however, is that the suspension is not for marijuana (“according to a source” — the league won’t give details). Williams was a known pothead at the University of Texas, with the New Orleans Saints (where he alienated teammates and press with his reclusive behavior, before getting treatment for social anxiety disorder), and during his first stint with the Dolphins. It didn’t stop him from barreling through D-lines, and for a moment in Miami he looked on track to become one of the sport’s greats.

But the weed habit finally got him kicked out, and during his year off he hung out in Australia, India, and eventually studied at the California College of Ayurveda in (yes) Grass Valley. Ricky returned to the league not just clean but cleansed – vegetarian, versed in yoga and ayurveda, wearing only white, and apparently pot-free. (He was in India studying yoga when the offending test results came in.)

So if it wasn’t pot, what was it? The buzz is that an ayurvedic herbal supplement may have gotten him busted this time. In 2004 Abhi blogged that these supplements may not be all that pure. Perhaps Ricky should have chosen this supplier:

In the basement of our North Dakota headquarters we employ a small but elite team or researchers designated the “SMU.” Their sole job is to predict “the next big thing,” and they are rarely wrong. You see, our marketing department has indicated that based on focus group feedback, readers that visit our site will flock to other blogs the minute we fall behind on what’s happening in the world around us. They will leave us the minute we aren’t ahead of the curve on “what’s cool.” Therefore, whenever the SMU staff starts “rattling their cages,” they know they will have my full attention. I predict that the next big thing (and you are hearing it on our blog first) is…Camel Milk:

While slightly saltier than cow’s milk, camel milk is highly nutritious. Designed after all for animals that live in some of the roughest environments, it is three times as rich in Vitamin C as cow’s milk.

In Russia, Kazakhstan and India doctors often prescribe it to convalescing patients. Aside from Vitamin C, it is known to be rich in iron, unsaturated fatty acids and B vitamins.

Tapping the market for camel milk, however, involves resolving a series of humps in production, manufacturing and marketing. One problem lies in the milk itself, which has so far not proved to be compatible with the UHT (Ultra High Temperature) treatment needed to make it long lasting.

But the main challenge stems from the fact that the producers involved are, overwhelmingly, nomads.

Another problem, according to the FAO, is the nature of the animal itself. Camels can reputedly be pretty stubborn. And unlike cows, which store all their milk in their udders, camels keep theirs further up their bodies. [Link]

Now I know that some of you might not like milk of any kind. Some people just don’t. My mom for example never drinks milk. But what about chocolate? Everybody likes chocolate…

An easier sell would appear to be the low-fat, camel milk chocolate, which A Vienna-based chocolatier, Johann Georg Hochleitner intends to launch a low-fat, camel milk chocolate this autumn. With funding from the Abu Dhabi royal family, his company plans to make the chocolate in Austria from powdered camel milk produced at Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, then ship 50 tons back to the Gulf each month. [Link]

In the realm of health policy, the low birth weight of babies is used as a primary measure in infant health as well as welfare in economic research.

Low birthweight affects about one in every 13 babies born each year in the United States. It is a factor in 65 percent of infant deaths. [link]

[R]esearch has found that [low birth weight] infants tend to have lower educational attainment, poorer self-reported health status, and reduced employment and earnings as adults, relative to their normal weight counterparts…[B]irth weight has been used to evaluate the effectiveness of social policy. Research on the benefits of largescale social programs—including welfare and health insurance for the poor—typically use birth weight as the primary indicator of infant welfare. [link]

I would like to point out at this moment that I was a healthy 9 pound baby when I was born, well above low birth weight levels, thank you very much. Unfortunately when the time comes for me to have a baby, as a ‘U.S.-born Asian Indian woman’, I run a high risk of having a low birth weight infant, according to recent research coming out of Stanford.

U.S.-born Asian-Indian women are more likely than their Mexican-American peers to deliver low birth weight infants, despite having fewer risk factors, say researchers at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and Stanford’s School of Medicine. The finding confirms previous research that showed a similar pattern in more recent immigrants, and suggests that physicians should consider their patients’ ethnic backgrounds when planning their care…They found that Asian-Indian women were more than twice as likely to have low birth weight infants as were white women. These infants weigh 2,500 grams (about 5.5 pounds) or less at birth, either because they grew poorly in the womb or were born prematurely.[link]

These results are important in the realm of South Asian American health policy and are significant, at least should be significant, as to how prenatal care for desi women are implemented. As a desi woman, it is important to be informed of this issue and as a policy maker, it has inherent long term effect in our community.

“You might ask, ‘What’s so bad about being small?’” said Madan, who points out that the growth curves used for this and other similar studies are based on white infants. “Is this just normal for Asian Indians? But we’re concerned because we know that abnormally small babies run a higher risk of fetal distress and often require more intensive medical care and longer hospital stays after birth.”

In addition, unusually small babies are known to be at higher risk for a variety of medical problems in adulthood, including diabetes, hypertension and an increased risk of heart disease - conditions that some studies have reported to be higher in Asian Indians. [link]

April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month. To promote this important issue Lifetime Channel has descended upon Washington DC for “Stop Violence Against Women Week” going on now (April 3rd-7th) with a list of events worthy of Capitol Hill. This past summer, Lifetime dedicated a week around issues of human trafficking and they are interestingly using their media access to promote issues affecting women. I think this is great. It is rare that a television channel will make that kind of a commitment to their viewers. Violence against women is not just important to Lifetime viewers, but is an important issue in the upcoming midterm election as well:

According to a new “Lifetime Women’s Pulse Poll,” conducted for the network by Roper Poll, when women and men vote in the mid-term elections this fall, expected issues such as homeland security, jobs and the economy and the war in Iraq will be very important, but an issue that receives far less attention — preventing violence against women and girls — will be just as, if not more, important to them.[link]

As we all have read, violence against women can often hit closer to home than can ever be expected. It takes a powerful woman to live through the experience and an even more powerful woman to be able to share their personal story. In addition to the personal experiences, the statistics out there on violence against women are alarming:

• One in three women worldwide will be beaten, raped, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.[link]
• One in four girls will be sexually assaulted before the age of 18.[link]
• An estimated 1 million women are stalked each year in the US, with about 1/4 of them reporting missing an average of 11 days of work as a result of the stalking.[link]
• Researchers Anita Raj and Jay Silverman discovered that more than 40% of the 160 South Asian women living in Greater Boston they surveyed indicated that they were victims of intimate partner violence, and only 50% of women who experienced intimate partner violence were aware of services available to help. [link]

What is unfortunate to see is the taboo in the South Asian American community when there is violence against our women. But the important thing is, you are not alone. There is a national network of South Asian women’s organizations out there to support our survivors of the trauma of sexual assault.

Sakhi, based in New York City and a partnering organization to the Lifetime campaign, provides language specific culturally sensitive services to South Asian women because..

• Abused immigrant women may hesitate to reach out to police, shelters, courts, and mainstream violence agencies due to barriers of language, financial constraints, and fear of deportation;
• Women that reach out to Sakhi may be abused not only by their husbands, but also by in-laws and other family members; and,
• Survivors may face the cultural stigma and shame of divorce in the community, and be told that it is their “duty” to keep the family and marriage intact, despite abuse. [link]

But New York City isn’t the only place with with access to these South Asian specific organizations, there is a national network of organizations listed here, and for our Canadian sisters here, here, and here. In Chicago, there’s Apn Ghar which has served over 5400 clients since 2000. SAHELI Boston is working on a newly launched Men’s Initative, to bring men into the dialogue. Maitri in the San Jose area has volunteers that speak Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Marwari, Oriya, Punjabi, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. ASHA in the DC area has recently intitated a partnership to find employment for survivors of domestic abuse. There are a lot of resources out there specifically towards our community, and almost all of these organizations have a toll-free hotline, multi-lingual support, assistance to find shelter, and referral to social, legal and mental health services.

Via our newsline we see that Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature has a paper out which indicates that dentistry may be one of the world’s oldest professions. The paper, which has an Italian as the lead author, is titled Early Neolithic Tradition of Dentistry (paid subscription required). Now when we are old uncles/aunties we can brag to our children that South Asians invented denistry also.

Proving prehistoric man’s ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates back 9,000 years.

Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday’s journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.

That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought — and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia.

This was no mere tooth tinkering. The drilled teeth found in the graveyard were hard-to-reach molars. And in at least one instance, the ancient dentist managed to drill a hole in the inside back end of a tooth, boring out toward the front of the mouth. [Link]

My whole life I had looked down on people with multiple cavities because I had never had one. I usually snubbed these “enamelly challenged” because I saw them as being weak and unable to resist candy. I got my just desserts though. Last year I got my first (and I swear it will be my last) cavity. By the time the doctor was done she had pulled two of my innocent teeth just to get to the offending tooth which she then reconstructed with a crown. My wisdom teeth surgery was even worse (warning: NSDL). Apparently they were like upside down. I can’t even begin to imagine how people were able to withstand the pain in the Neolithic.

The site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan lies along the principal route connecting Afghanistan to the Indus valley. After intermittent occupations by hunter-gatherers, Mehrgarh’s subsistence economy shifted to the cultivation of barley and wheat, cotton domestication and cattle breeding. Diachronic archaeological evidence records an increasingly rich cultural life, with technological sophistication based on diverse raw materials. Excavation of the Neolithic cemetery known as MR3 yielded more than 300 graves created over a 1,500-year time span…

Whatever the purpose, tooth drilling on individuals buried at MR3 continued for about 1,500 years, indicating that dental manipulation was a persistent custom. After 6,500 yr BP, the practice must have ceased, as there is no evidence of tooth drilling from the subsequent MR2 Chalcolithic cemetery, despite the continuation of poor dental health. [Link]

Teeth are the greatest find in any paleontological/archeological expedition. Measuring istope ratios can even tell you what the people ate. I keep two of my old teeth on my desk at home. This is just in case my body is lost during some adventure and someone wants to learn about my lifestyle when I was still alive.

This NYT story about single women attempting artificial insemination explains what happens when a 38-year-old, blond, female advertising exec starts browsing sperm donor profiles. Yup, one of them turns out to be desi:

She loves dandy lions

As I sat across her desk, she pulled up the donors’ descriptions on her computer. One was Indian: “He’s got black straight hair,” she told me, “brown eyes, he’s six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that’s perfect. You don’t have to get in fights about food.” The Indian donor’s complexion was described as “medium/dark,” and he had proven fertility. He had a master’s degree in business. He was bilingual, Hindu, single and liked traveling and music. His family-health history looked good. [Link]

I can see their first meeting now. He comes out of the kitchen in a salwar kameez with a dupatta over his head, tea tray in hand, eyes downcast and shy. She ticks ‘wheatish complexion’ on her clipboard and says, ‘Beta, please walk around the room’ to make sure he’s not lame. She opens his mouth and checks his molars, hocks and withers.

Sure, everything looks good on paper now, but what happens 18 years down the road? They need to put out a public health warning:

This story shouldn’t surprise anyone though. With the conservative public morés of traditional desi culture, hundreds of millions of desi men happily spill surplus gametes outside the regular channels. But this chap was the only one enterprising enough to get paid for it.

Is he desi? Oh, indubitably.

How to dispose of a dead body is carefully prescribed by religion. Burial is popular in the U.S., but a new book called Body Brokers makes clear that unregulated burials shunt body parts into a ghoulish trade. In a morbid sense, it’s a triumph of capitalism:

Every year human corpses meant for anatomy classes, burial, or cremation find their way into the hands of a shadowy group of entrepreneurs who profit by buying and selling human remains. While the government has controls on organs and tissue meant for transplantation, these “body brokers” capitalize on the myriad other uses for dead bodies that receive no federal oversight whatsoever: commercial seminars to introduce new medical gadgetry; medical research studies and training courses; and U.S. Army land-mine explosion tests. A single corpse used for these purposes can generate up to $10,000. [Link]

The corpses — including those donated for medical research and those left unclaimed at morgues — “are cut up into parts, not unlike chickens, and distributed through a complex network of suppliers, brokers and buyers,” Cheney writes…

… she takes a tour of a factory where crushed human bone is turned into precision-tooled orthopedic tools… their loved ones are destined for, among other things, testing of anti-mine protective armor… she tells the grim story of how mishandled bodily tissue killed a young man who underwent a routine orthopedic operation using bone from a cadaver. The killer? Deadly bacteria from the bone’s donor, a young man who shot himself and went undiscovered for almost a day. [Link]

Many Hindus and Buddhists practice cremation due to hygiene and beliefs about detachment and reincarnation. However, Christian and Muslim theologians have long opposed the practice, Christians because of a belief in literal resurrection:

Many people thought cremation was at best irreligious and at worst barbaric. The strongest opponents came from the Catholic Church which banned cremation for its members in 1886, and did not finally remove the ban until the 1960s. [Link]

In an Instruction issued in 1926, the Holy Office [of the Vatican] referred to cremation as “a barbaric custom … a practice repugnant to the natural sense of reverence due to the dead.” [Link]

TGN1412 is the current designation given to a trial drug that is being tested in the UK as a treatment for leukemia. The first human trial resulted in some horrific results earlier today. First the background though:

Another human trial gone horribly wrong

Two men were in critical condition Wednesday in a London hospital and four others were seriously ill after taking a new drug in a trial supervised by a Waltham, Mass.-based company.

British regulators ordered the immediate suspension of tests of the drug, developed to treat autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and leukemia.

“Two patients remain critical and four patients are serious but showing some signs of improvement,” Ganesh Suntharalingam, clinical director of intensive care at Northwick Park Hospital, said in a statement. “The drug, which is untested and therefore unused by doctors, has caused an inflammatory response which affects some organs of the body…” [Link]

Here is how things took a turn into science fiction territory and became plain scary for the volunteers:

The girlfriend of a man fighting for life after taking part in a pharmaceuticals trial has said the drugs he was given have left him looking “like the Elephant Man”.

“His chest is puffed out. He is already a big kind of guy but his face is out here, like Elephant Man, it’s completely puffed.

She added: “They haven’t got a cure. This is not leukaemia. This is a drug they have never tested on humans before so they don’t know what they are dealing with. It’s completely messed up their vital organs…” [Link]

A couple of the hospitalized volunteers appear to have been of South Asian origin.

One of the scenarios that pessimists foresee for the new century involves a rapid spread of disease due to population growth, habitat erosion, migration, travel and trade. Already this year, the avian flu H5N1 has reached Europe and Africa; its jump-in-progress to human beings has got the Cassandras clucking. Between this, killer mudslides and embryonic civil wars, 2006 is already proving a fine year for catastrophists — and it’s not even two months old.

In the desi-heavy islands of the Indian Ocean, another odd little disease is on the move. Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne infection that produces high fever, rashes, and intense joint pain. It has no known cure, only symptomatic treatment. It was not thought to kill, but since an epidemic broke out a year ago in the French territory of Reunion, it has caused at least 77 deaths.

In Reunion, “chik” has hit 115,000 people out of a total population of 750,000, and the French media are calling the government to task for its passive response to a crisis in an overseas territory/colony. For those who read French, today’s portfolio of stories in Liberation is edifying.

“I’ve never seen people in such pain,” says Dr. Jean-Luc Yvin, chief of internal medicine … [T]he symptoms of “chik,” as it’s now called, have evolved. “In the first phase last March, we were dealing with simple, typical symptoms: fever, joint pain and rashes. Then the epidemic slowed in May, and we were still getting sporadic, typical cases,” Yvin says. Since the end of 2005, when the epidemic flared up, the symptoms have grown richer. The specialist lists them: skin disorders, mouth sores, digestive ulcers… Joint symptoms seem more severe, with full-fledged arthritis in the hands and feet. And complications never previously described in the literature have appeared: encephalitis, myocardia, hepatitis… [my translation]

In nearby Mauritius, chikungunya has made fewer inroads but anxiety is high. There are 1,700 suspected cases so far this year. According to the Mauritius press, political leaders are responding in classic fashion to the threat to public health and to the nation’s large tourism industry:

Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam denounced foreign press ‘propaganda’ about the virus during a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the [Labour Party]. For his part, Pravind Jugnauth, leader of the [opposition] MSM, was critical of the government, particularly the initiatives of the health ministry in this period of Shiva Maharatree. [my translation]

The Seychelles, Comoros, and Madagascar have all been touched by chik and South Africa, an air gateway to the region, is keeping a close watch. There are also direct flights between Mauritius and Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai.

I’m really busy today but I still want to put a topic out there that is worth discussing. This means that I’m going to have to resort to some lazy blogging. Please forgive my complacence. Every blogger knows that a good picture is worth a thousand words and can bail you out from time to time:

A good poster for vegetarianism

A veterinarian doctor puts chickens into a pit for burial at Navapur, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Monday, Feb. 20, 2006. Farmers burned their dead chickens and health officials went door-to-door Monday in western India for signs of people infected with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus as a massive poultry slaughtering operation entered its second day. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)… [Link]

The slaughter seems pretty bad already and may get a lot worse:

The bird flu is taking grip of the world slowly and steadily. Because of massive population density in India and to some extent china/South East Asia, these countries may plunge into a deep deflationery depression cycle. According to some experts, in India, people and poultry live close to each other. In the country side most families keep poultry for eggs. With a serious break out of bird flue, India can lose 18% of its population within the first year. If the outbreak is not controlled, 38% of the population can be affected.

According to media reports, a poultry farmer has died of suspected bird flu in western India, where the country’s first outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu virus has been confirmed. [Link]

One stereotypical but reliable way to distinguish a FOB from an ABCD is their attitude towards ice. Whereas an ABCD will load their drinks cup up with ice before filling it, a FOB will (usually) leave their cup entirely devoid of crushed frozen water.

Mmmmm … bacteria!

Or is it? A 7th grader in Tampa Florida decided to compare the bacteria in the ice at a fastfood restaurant to the bacteria in its toilets. Her findings:

Roberts set out to test her hypothesis, selecting five fast food restaurants, within a ten-mile radius of the University of South Florida. Roberts says at each restaurant she flushed the toilet once, the[n] used sterile gloves to gather samples. Roberts also collected ice from soda fountains inside the five fast food restaurants. She also asked for cups of ice at the same restaurant’s drive thru windows.

Jasmine Roberts: “I found that 70-percent of the time, the ice from the fast food restaurant’s contain more bacteria than the fast food restaurant’s toilet water…” [Link]

Note that the ice is not necessarily more unsanitary than the toilet water because bacteria is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, bacteria in yogurt is good for you. Most types of bacteria are benign and the ice in question probably has high levels of harmless bacteria in it. Toilet water may have lower levels of aggregate bacteria (because they are regularly disinfected) but still higher levels of unhealthy bacteria, so you don’t want to start emulating your dog just yet.

In short, her study is far from an argument that fast food ice is unhealthy. Still, I suspect that the ice at a fast food restaurant probably is kinda gross (via Boing Boing).

Related Posts: How to befriend a vegetarian

First they tell us turmeric in food is good for your health. Now they tell us speaking more than one language protects against senility. By the time they tell us oversized, gold-rimmed aviator glasses are better than Viagra, we’ll all have turned into our fathers:

… Researchers are finding that bilingualism — be it in French, Greek, Portuguese or Hindi — has lifelong benefits.

“Does bilingualism protect you from cognitive decline? Every study we’ve done suggests that it does,” Prof. Bialystok said… while both groups started showing cognitive decline by age 60, the rate of slowing for bilinguals was much slower…

Brain-imaging research released this week shows that the physical inability to silence mental noise is key in making the elderly prone to distraction and poor multitaskers… the elderly lose the ability to power up brain regions, such as the frontal lobe, needed to focus on a task, and to turn down activity in inner brain regions that are most active when a person is in idle or default mode.

In contrast, the brain images of people between ages 20 and 30 displayed a far more dramatic see-saw effect activating and de-activating regions as they shifted out of idle to task. The study found this pattern begins to dull in middle age and actually results in cognitive deficits beyond age 60. [Link]

Researchers say the only thing better than Dad is Gamer Dad, so fire up a Ramayana game and start swinging that priapic mace:

A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable. [Link]

In 2000, a video game based on the Ramayana legend won Thailand’s national game software competition… The prize-winning game portrays several wars between King Rama and Ravana… Rama and Laksman must successfully manoeuvre through four rounds of fight in order to rescue Sita.

The Thai threesome turned to the epic Ramakien, as the Thai version is called, for its unmatched fighting scenes and more than fifty interesting human and semi-human characters… [Link]

Related posts: My Thais, Haldi may help prevent Alzheimer’s

Shiladitya Sengupta was on the subway in Boston when he saw someone selling balloons that contained smaller balloons inside them. If you've seen one of those things, you'll know what a hideous racket they can make when some young swine with a sharp object gets close to them. But instead of exhibiting the normal adult human reflex of covering up both ears in anticipation, Shiladitya dug into his roots and exhibited the normal desi reflex: He started thinking about work.

Sengupta, luckily for us, was a postdoctoral associate at one of the biology labs at MIT, and was part of a team that was working on a treatment for cancer. The double balloon thing eventually led his team to develop something called nanocell cancer treatment.

The January edition of India New England carries a profile of Sengupta, who was one of the five desis on TR35 - the list of top young technology innovators last year.

Sengupta, an assistant professor for Harvard Medical School and MIT, came to the United States in 2001 after receiving his doctorate in pharmacology from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is originally from New Delhi, India, and he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Sengupta now lives in Waltham, Mass., with his wife, Shivani, who also teaches at MIT.

What Sengupta developed for cancer treatment stems from the idea of a balloon within a balloon. One balloon carries a drug to shut down the blood supply, and the second, smaller balloon carries a drug to kill the cancer. [Link]

Back in 2003, NY Newsday published an article by reporter Dennis Duggan titled, The Growing Legion of Wounded. A reprint of the article can be found on this website. Here is an excerpt:

October 8, 2003

When a rocket propelled grenade struck his checkpoint in Northern Iraq on June 1, Sgt. Wasim Khan of Richmond Hill became part of an unheralded and growing legion of wounded.

When Khan, 27, of the Army’s 1st Armored Division, was struck by shrapnel, he was sent to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for five days before being transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington…

What makes Khan’s American soldier story even more compelling is that he is a Pakistani who dutifully practices his Muslim faith.

Khan has spent the last four months in Ward 57 at Walter Reed, where the maimed lie in limbo waiting for prostheses…

Khan told me over the phone Tuesday that he hopes to get a medical leave in the next few weeks. Departure from the ward is the dream of most of the soldiers who endure pain and humiliation as their wounds are swabbed, poked and scraped. Painkillers are often useless, and sometimes the doctors and nurses break into tears along with the patient who cries out in pain. [Link]

Sgt. Khan’s name re-surfaced in the press once again just last week. Guess where?

“Our men and women in uniform are making sacrifices,” said President George W. Bush during his State of the Union address Jan. 31, and listening intently from the balcony with First Lady Laura Bush was wounded-in-action Soldier Sgt. Wasim Khan.

Khan, a native of Gilgat, Pakistan, is a patient at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Khan was wounded in Iraq while serving with the 1st Armored Division. He was a special guest at the State of the Union, nominated to attend by the secretary of the Army.

“I got to meet both President Bush and Mrs. Bush after the Address,” said Khan. “They thanked me for my service and for coming and I told them it was an honor and a privilege to see them…” “It was wonderful to see how the American people support us, and keep up that support,” he said. “I hope they keep doing what they think is right for the country and right for the world. We have a lot of work ahead of us…” [Link]

Chennai these days is littered with hoardings.The large ones have all been taken up by advertisements for saree stores and cell phones, and so the quirky ads have been relegated to occupying the small amount of space on top of bus shelters. Once such advertisement that is all over the city is for a brand of cooking oil, featuring a rather healthy looking film actress suggesting mysteriously that for a healthy life, people should practise oil-pulling. I was consumed by questions. Pulling oil? From where? Is it fun?

Unable to bear the anxiety, I asked my dad what in the world oil-pulling was and he handed me a magazine that featured a six page advertisement on the benefits of oil-pulling therapy. That’s right, therapy. And it is not fun.

The advertisement was not really an advertisement. It was a study on the benefits of oil-pulling commissioned by the oil manufacturer and conducted by a doctor who was featured on the front page of the spread. The results of the study can be summarized thus:

A group of people were asked to take a couple of teaspoons of pure, unadulterated sesame oil, and pour into into their respective mouths. After this, they were asked to swirl the oil in their mouths for a period of fifteen to twenty minutes. Care had to be taken to suck the oil through their teeth.

Eww. The ad continues.

My title may be a bit inflammatory, but deservedly so I thing. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about India’s Lost Girls. The discussion that followed about the practice in India of gender selection through abortion, was quite interesting and evoked many strong opinions. It now seems that this practice has long since spread like a disease from the old world to the new. The Observer reports on its own investigation [link via Pickled Politics]:

… abortion of female foetuses has long been a part of life in Britain and The Observer has uncovered evidence that pregnant British Asian women, some in effect barred by the NHS after numerous abortions, are now coming to India for gender-defining ultrasounds and, if they are expecting girls, terminations…

…Ritu, 27, is fidgeting impatiently with her scarf. This mother of two children from Leicester has come to India while her husband, an engineer, has stayed with his family. With her is a cousin she barely knows. Ritu is just over 14 weeks pregnant. ‘I’m here because we were already coming on holiday to see relatives,’ she says quietly, motioning her cousin away. ‘I had an ultrasound here a few days ago. It cost about £20 and we found out I was having a girl. My mother-in-law suggested we aborted the baby because the family wants a boy, but insisted we do it in Delhi. I’ve had an abortion in the UK and she is worried the NHS won’t let it happen again; anyway, it is cheaper here - only £100 - and the doctors are excellent.’

Ritu says two of her aunts in Britain have had five abortions between them in their quest for a boy. Both were eventually refused ultrasound tests in Leicester and had them privately.

‘There are clinics in Leicester that won’t identify the sex of babies to Asian women. They have a policy, they say, so more British Asians are coming to India when they are pregnant to make sure everything goes to plan.

A newly-invented wristwatch draws blood from the wearer four times a day and tests it for malarial parasites. It’s designed for South African miners, but it could also be useful in South Asia, where malaria is rampant.

Gervan Lubbe has developed the watch which obtains blood samples with a microscopic needle that automatically penetrates the skin twice during the day and twice at nightThe watch takes blood samples with a microscopic needle that penetrates the skin four times a day. An alarm sounds if the parasite count is above 50, before the first symptoms appear… at that point an antidote in the form of tablets should be consumed and, within 48 hours, all traces of malaria are eliminated from the body. Malaria is the single biggest killer on the African continent, claiming close to three million lives a year. [Link]

“If you wait until you get symptoms and a malaria diagnosis, you can be in bed for six months and have to take huge quantities of quinine, which can be dangerous…”[Link]

It even has a remote data feed:

With the wristwatch, each miner will walk through a scanner, similar to a metal detector, and the watch’s radio frequency will transmit the wearer’s information to a central computer.

And, just like cleaning out the filter on a clothes dryer, you have to do something with all the blood. Anne Rice should be all over this:

… the watch’s alarm rings every 35 days to remove the small metal sieve and wash the old blood away. [Link]

India still suffers ~2 million malarial infections a year:

According to the World Health Organization, every year in India an estimated 2 million cases of malaria occur, with 1,000 deaths; and 95% of the population live in malaria-risk areas. [Link]

A new study published in the medical journal The Lancet (subscription required) exposes the staggering numbers involved in India’s greatest shame. The BBC reports:

More than 10m female births may have been lost to abortion and sex selection in the past 20 years, according to research in The Lancet medical journal.

Researchers in India and Canada said prenatal selection and selective abortion was causing the loss of 500,000 girls a year.

Their research was based on a national survey of 1.1m households in 1998.

The researchers said the “girl deficit” was more common among educated women but did not vary according to religion.

In most countries, women slightly outnumber men, but separate research for the year 2001 showed that for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls. [Link]

The one result of the study which really makes me lose hope for the future is that a more educated woman is even MORE likely to pursue sex selection by abortion (although this could be due to pressure from their equally more educated spouse). Also, there is an even larger spike in people selecting the sex of their babies through abortion if there has already been a daughter born into a family.

In cases where the preceding child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys in the next birth was 759 to 1,000.

This fell even further when the two preceding children were both girls. Then the ratio for the third child born was just 719 girls to 1,000 boys.

However, for a child following the birth of a male child, the gender ratio was roughly equal.

Basically this means that for a female fetus to see the light of day she has to hope that she has an older brother waiting on the other side for her.

Dr [Shirish] Sheth says: “Female infanticide of the past is refined and honed to a fine skill in this modern guise. It is ushered in earlier, more in urban areas and by the more educated … A careful demographic analysis of actual and expected sex ratios shows that about 100 million girls are missing from the world - they are dead…” [Link]

The annual South Asian Student Alliance (SASA) conference begins next weekend. I think that SM bloggers and quite a few of our readers have made it pretty clear what little respect we have left for SASA, which seems to have lost its way (see previous posts 1,2). If you are a student who has not yet arrived at the conclusion that we have, and you have decided to attend next weekend, then I have a critical mission for you. I believe that there exists a way in which you can make the trip to New York worth it. The SASA conference will once again hold a Bone Marrow Drive. Make sure that you take the time to give just a few drops of your blood.

Thursday Jan 12th: 1:00pm - 10:00pm
Friday Jan 13th: 10:00am - 10:00pm

Ballroom Floor
At The New Yorker Hotel
481 8th Avenue at 34th Street
New York City

Take a look at these faces…they are just like you and me! Look at the fellow South Asians and ask why can’t we save them and help many more, who are likely to be in same situation in the future. It does not matter if you are from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh; it does not matter if you are Hindu, Moslem, Christian or Jain. What matters is, that we all share the same genetic pool, and we save each others life!

You can probably show up for the drive even if you aren’t there for the conference. Need more motivation? Help Save Ashish:

Ashish has undergone a great deal of suffering since first admitted at Texas Children’s hospital on September 26, 2005. He has been in and out of the hospital, first admitted at Texas Children’s hospital on September 26, 2005. requiring transfusions, fighting infections, undergoing bone marrow biopsy’s and surgeries. He has to check his blood levels every week and needs transfusions regularly. In spite of the pain he has gone through he has an incredible inner strength that is portrayed in his beaming smile and good nature. While we pray for a miracle his only medical hope for survival is a bone marrow transplant.

Wired says a real-life Constant Gardener scenario has just begun playing out in India. New rules against generic knockoffs of Western drugs have emboldened pharmaceutical companies to use India’s poor as cheap drug testing guinea pigs (via Slashdot):

… multinational corporations are riding high on the trend toward globalization by taking advantage of India’s educated work force and deep poverty to turn South Asia into the world’s largest clinical-testing petri dish… trials account for more than 40 percent of drug-development costs. The study also found that performing the studies in India can bring the price down by about 60 percent…

… in March, everything changed when India submitted to pressure from the World Trade Organization to stop the practice and implement rules that prohibit local companies from creating generic versions of patented drugs…. the number of studies conducted by multinational drug companies has sharply increased since March. [Link]

There are attractions other than low cost:

“Doctors are easier to recruit for trials because they don’t have to go through the same ethics procedures as their Western colleagues,” Ecks said. “And patients ask fewer questions about what is going on… ” Companies are attracted to India not only because of the huge patient pool and skilled workers, but also because many potential study volunteers are “treatment naïve,” meaning they have not been exposed to the wide array of biomedical drugs that most Western patients have… [Link]

Ethical shenanigans aren’t restricted to just Western pharmas:

In 2004, two India-based pharmaceutical companies, Shantha Biotech in Hyderabad and Biocon in Bangalore, came under scrutiny for conducting illegal clinical trials that led to eight deaths. Shantha Biotech failed to obtain proper consent from patients while testing a drug meant to treat heart attacks. Biocon tested a genetically modified form of insulin without the proper approval from the Drug Controller General of India or the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee. [Link]

The saddest thing is that if the drugs work, the testers are unlikely to even have access to the drugs:

Since many pharmaceutical companies are developing the drugs for markets in industrialized nations, it is unlikely that India’s poor will have access to most of the new medicine. [Link]

The comedy Barbershop relied on the fact that black-owned barbershops are male watering holes, informal congregations based on gossip and habit. Now New Delhi is hoping the smell of shaving cream and menthol will not only bring in the shearlings, but also help fight AIDS. Barbers have begun handing out prophylactics and pamphlets (thanks, Saurav):

Eighty-five barbers in [Delhi’s] congested southern district of Lajpat Nagar are currently involved in a programme to promote safe sex and spread the message of prevention against HIV/AIDS to their customers…

“… sometimes when I feel awkward, I point them to the posters in the shop. I have also trained others in my shop…”

… sometimes customers say they are aware of the importance of safe sex but find condoms “too expensive”. “But when I told them that they can collect condoms from various government hospitals and my shop free of cost, they readily agreed to use them. Now they even ask for them on their own…”

Eleven thousand packets of condoms have been distributed by the 85 barbers in the past six months in Lajpat Nagar alone. [Link]

Call me crazy, but I don’t like mixing straight razors with the family jewels. Eventually I saw the appeal of it. When you come in, they take a little off the top. When you leave, they give you something to put back on. I’ll never look at a barber pole the same way again.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

— Balwinder Shaikh’s Pir in Amrit

Mama Beeb reports that India is putting together an ayurpedia to fight inappropriate patents in developed countries (via Slashdot): Claim: 80% of U.S. patents on medicinal plants by 2000 were of Indian origin

In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts… One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is wading through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a medicine derived from the mango fruit…. putting together a 30-million-page electronic encyclopædia of India’s traditional medical knowledge…

Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth encyclopaedia project… reckons that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin… … in most of the developed nations like United States, “prior existing knowledge” is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database…

Mogambo is displeased

The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country’s traditional medicine in five languages - English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish - in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them. The electronic encyclopædia, which will be made available next year, will contain information on the traditional medicines, including exhaustive references, photographs of the plants and scans from the original texts…

… ayurvedic texts are in Sanskrit and Hindi, unani texts are in Arabic and Persian and siddha material is in Tamil language… there are some 54 authoritative ‘text books’ on ayurveda alone, some thousands of years old… [Link]

As I posted earlier, some fitness instructors have been Christianizing yoga out of fear that its Hindu origins open you up to demonic possession. It’s the same kind of assimilation which annoys theologians about Hinduism:

When Cathy Chadwick instructed her three yoga students to move into warrior position… she read aloud the prayer of St. Theresa of Avila. “Good Christian warriors,” Chadwick softly said as the women lunged into the position…

Chadwick is one of a growing number of people who practice Christian yoga, incorporating Biblical passages, prayers and Christian reflections. Occasionally, teachers rename yoga postures to reflect Christian teachings or, as Chadwick did with warrior position, include religious metaphors… [Link]

Good Christian warriors, assume the position! Apparently Catholics in yoga haven’t gotten the memo:

In a 1989 letter, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who is now Pope Benedict XVI, said practices like yoga and meditation could “degenerate into a cult of the body…” [Link]

Never mind that meditation is designed to do the exact opposite. Trying to keep up with the times, the Vatican issued the memo over IM. Here’s an actual, unedited transcript:

c^th0l1k: omg y0gA rOxX0Rz LOL
V^tic^n_1: newayz h0 dAt sHiZz b3 d3m0nIc ROTFL

The NYT reported recently that HinJews are now jumping in. Well, technically, they’re shuffling in while complaining about the weather

A similar movement is taking place in Judaism, with teachers merging teachings or texts into yoga classes… Stephen A. Rapp, a Boston yoga teacher, developed Aleph-Bet yoga, a series of postures meant to represent Hebrew letters… Rapp expresses the Hebrew letter ‘bet’ in the posture Dandasana, where one sits on the ground with legs and arms straight out in front. [Link]

Yesterday, Manmohan Singh went to the podium and incongruously began to croon a Salt-N-Pepa single from 15 years ago. He said:

Well, not really. His words were his own, spoken not sung, but they had the same import and were no less surprising than a Karoke act would have been. What he said was:

“Leading a healthy and safe sexual life is a commitment we must all make … This is particularly important given our traditional inhibitions about discussing such matters within our families and among our colleagues, quite apart from doing so in public. This, quite obviously, has to change if we are to create awareness in the war against HIV and Aids.” [Link]

In other words: Let’s talk about S-E-X. This from a 73 year old man who has been married for almost half a century. This is a clarion call from the top, as blunt as we can expect from a policy wonk in a sky blue paag.

According to official figures, India has the second highest number of HIV+ people in the world, and the CIA has forecast that there could be up to 20 million HIV positive Indians within 5 years. Addressing this challenge will not be easy. Ignorance is widespread:

Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said … that despite over 80 per cent of the people being aware of the epidemic, most in the country continues to deny its existence, he said. [Link]

In New Delhi, 30 students completed a 6,800-km (4,200-km) walk across India to warn people against AIDS. “Villagers who have heard about AIDS thought we may be HIV-positive and did not want to stand near us or talk to us because they felt they would get infected,” said 20-year-old Vicky Gill, who is HIV-negative. [Link]

And many are extremely touchy about the subject:

Last month, a popular south Indian actress was pelted with sandals, tomatoes and rotten eggs and hauled before a court for telling Indian men not to expect their brides to be virgins. [Link]

I meant to post this yesterday and now invoke my ethnic background to excuse my tardiness.

While my laptop’s already suffering from too much spyware to withstand finding a cure for HIV, I did want to note World AIDS Day in some way. Via Anupam Chander, I see that HIV+ women in Golaghat, Assam joined a rally “to acknowledge they are living with AIDS and should not be shunned.” From what I can tell, India is doing surprisingly well, particularly compared to some African nations, in admitting its HIV crisis. When I last visited in 2003, there were bilboards with giant pictures of condoms, which is something I’ve never seen even in Houston or Dallas, where conservatism appear to be greater than in Bombay and Hyderabad. Though the government is unwilling to say just how big the population of HIV+ Indians is — as a NYT editorial puts it, “India is providing numbers no one believes” — it has not gone through the lengthy period of denial that the U.S. government did in the 1980s, which allowed HIV to threaten to become epidemic among margnialized groups.

The problem now is getting treatment to sufferers, and unlike the issue of accepting the existence of the disease (though that certainly is far from complete, and contributes to the difficulty of accessing treatment), seems likely to get worse, not better. The WTO is supposed to be giving developing nations more time to comply with patent rules, but Indian already reformed its laws last year. This has had the benefit of drawing large pharmaceutical companies who previously feared that their investments would be unprotected. On the downside, however, are millions of Indians who cannot afford the cost of a patented drug and whose salvation previously had been the cheap generics that local drug makers had pirated.

In 1998, Nidha Mubdi, a student at St. John’s University in New York, discovered during a routine checkup that she had leukemia. After much searching through SAMAR, a donor named Himesh Kapadia stepped forward:

The bone marrow donation saved her life, but Mubdi’s kidneys began failing because of chemotherapy, and she’s been on dialysis for the last five years. But earlier this month, Derek Ivery, a friend from Queens College, gave her one of his kidneys, a much more serious operation:

Mubdi’s family members were tested to see if they could donate a kidney, but no one came up as a match. [Link]

Ivery, of Queens, decided to step forward after Mubdi put out a call for a donor on the Internet. They had met when when they were student advisers at Queens College… Mubdi’s grateful father, Shelley Mubdi, a Bangladeshi immigrant who is president of Medina Masjid, a Manhattan mosque, called Ivery, a “courageous man…”

Ivery, 26, and Mubdi, 25, were resting comfortably at New York Presbyterian/Columbia Hospital last night after the nine-hour operation. [Link]

Over the tip line we got word from runyolarun about an organization up in Toronto that is promoting itself with a new set of agency posters:

"The Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention is a community-based, non-profit, charitable organization committed to providing health promotion, support, education and advocacy in a non-discriminatory manner for those who identify as South Asian living with and affected by HIV/AIDS."

ASAAP is a Toronto based AIDS service organization. It was founded in 1989 as a result of the voluntary efforts of members of Khush (a social group for South Asian gays and lesbians that has since closed down), in a community response to a request for support for a South Asian couple infected with HIV/AIDS who died in isolation, unable to access services in their own language. Our catchment area is greater Toronto and all the surrounding suburbs/towns. Our services include preventative education, support to South Asians infected with and affected by HIV/AIDS, outreach, and advocacy. Services are available in Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, and Bengali. You may need to call ahead to arrange assistance in South Asian languages.

Seems like they do great work. I realize that I am about to possibly get myself labeled as a prude with the following comments (which I assure you is not true), but I'm just not that into their new posters. In my opinion AIDS education has always been difficult because too many people continue to associate AIDS with homosexuality or otherwise "deviant" behavior. In truth, as we all know, AIDS can affect anyone, and an important part in trying to educate people about the disease should be to reach out to populations who think they are above risk. With that in mind I feel like these posters are a bit too racy. I can't help but feel that many people will think, "Oh, I'm not like the people in those posters (even the one of the straight couple). This doesn't concern me." To be specific, the first poster, which seems to be that of an orgy, has several buzz words on it which include "Slip n' Slide," and the poster of the Lesbian couple includes the single word, "fist." Are orgies popular in South Asian communities in Canada (if so I am leaving Jesusland tomorrow)? Also was it necessary to use a clichéd Come/Cum pun on the poster of the straight couple? Am I just getting old? Do most of you like these posters?

A new study shows that meditation lets you close popup ads faster (via Boing Boing):

The test involves staring at an LCD screen and pressing a button as soon as an image pops up. Typically, people take 200 to 300 milliseconds to respond… meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.

“Every single subject showed improvement… Why it improves performance, we do not know.” The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice. [Link]

Not to mention bigger head muscle:

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

“You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,” she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing”. [Link]

The Great Bongmeister chronicles the sexual revolution on Indian cable TV with the fondness of a grandfather sharing his stash of classic Playboys:

Sushma Swaraj, Minister of Virtue

The cable revolution of the early 90s came as a blessing from heaven (or hell) for the raging hormones of my generation who were henceforth liberated from the oppressive censorship of state-owned television… ladies with Sachin Tendulkar shoulders and Ramesh Krishnan waistlines heaved and thrusted away. As a result, Silk Smitha, Nylon Nalini and the other goddesses of the wet sari pantheon became part of our nightly vocabulary… [Link]

Alas, the uprising was choked nightly by a minister inappositely named Swaraj:

In the north rose a fell presence, an evil Eye that never slept… minister Sushma Swaraj.. launched a war against flesh tones on the airwaves! Soon she was passing one dictat after another—Star Movies censored all their sugar and spice, Sun TV followed suit… [Link]

One frustrated victim of fowlstrangulum interruptus commented:

Uff, Sushma Swaraj… how we cursed her… [Link]

But the sexing up of daily media soon made blue channels and pr0n sites irrelevant:

People stopped going to websites for their porn—instead they started making them themselves armed with… camera phones and webcams. School kids in respectable institutions were shooting their own sex videos and marketing them through auction sites… Who would go to Desibaba [a porn site] to watch digitally morphed pictures when people like Tanushree Dutta were going topless in songs in reality…

Indians were being sexed up too fast and Desibaba was now a relic of a more innocent bygone era… I would like to believe that Desibaba is still alive—spread out over thousands of hard drives where pictures and stories from it have been downloaded over the years… there is a little bit of Desibaba in each of us—in the memories we carry. [Link]

Related posts: Delhi sex clip portends sexual revolution?, Baazee.com CEO arrested over sex clip