No Body has died
Partha Nag
Board Member | Non-Executive Director | Risk Management | Business Process Outsourcing | Legal Process Outsourcing
Excerpts from the New York Times article below
' As the world’s richest men slash American aid for the world’s poorest children, they insist that all is well. “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.”
That is not true. In South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, the efforts by Musk and President Trump are already leading children to die.
Peter Donde was a 10-year-old infected with H.I.V. from his mother during childbirth. But American aid kept Peter strong even as his parents died from AIDS. A program started by President George W. Bush called PEPFAR saved 26 million lives from AIDS, and one was Peter’s.
nder PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS orphans got their medicines.
Without the help of the community health worker, Peter was unable to get his medicines, so he became sick and died in late February, according to Moses Okeny Labani, a health outreach worker who helped manage care for Peter and 144 other vulnerable children.
“If U.S.A.I.D. would be here, Peter Donde would not have died,” Labani said.
Experts at the Center for Global Development who tried to calculate how many lives are at risk if American humanitarian assistance is frozen or slashed. While these estimates are inexact and depend on how much aid continues, they suggest that a cataclysm may be beginning around the developing world:
An estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid for H.I.V. prevention and treatment.
Achol Deng, an 8-year-old girl, was also infected with H.I.V. at birth and likewise remained alive because of American assistance. Then in January, Achol lost her ID card, and there was no longer a case worker to help get her a new card and medicines; she too became sick and died, said Labani.
Another household kept alive by American aid was that of Jennifer Inyaa, a 35-year-old single mom, and her 5-year-old son, Evan Anzoo, both of them H.I.V.-positive. Last month, after the aid shutdown, Inyaa became sick and died, and a week later Evan died as well, according to David Iraa Simon, a community health worker who assisted them.
Decisions by billionaires in Washington quickly cost the lives of a mother and her son.
Two women, Martha Juan, 25, and Viola Kiden, 28, a mother of three, have already died because they lived in a remote area of South Sudan and could not get antiretroviral drugs when U.S.A.I.D. shut down supply lines, according to Angelina Doki, a health volunteer who supported them.
Doki told me that her own supply of antiretrovirals is about to run out as well.
“I am going to develop the virus,” Doki said. “My viral load will go high. I will develop TB. I will have pneumonia.” She sighed deeply and added, “We are going to die.”
In South Africa, where more than seven million people are H.I.V.-positive, the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation estimates that ending PEPFAR would lead to more than 600,000 deaths over a decade in that country alone.
Some of you may be thinking: This is very sad, but why is it our job to keep kids alive in poor countries?
There are two answers to that. The first is that U.S.A.I.D. was established to advance our national interests as well as our values, and its demolition means that the United States loses soft power and China gains. Already, China has moved to replace the United States as the most visible supporter of Cambodia, and we’ll see the same elsewhere, particularly in Africa and the South Pacific.
Antiterrorism programs in Syria and West Africa are faltering and may lead to new attacks on Americans. Surveillance for early detection of avian flu and Ebola are weakened, and an epidemic of either disease could reach America and cost billions of dollars. Trump’s defunding of the polio eradication effort may lead, by one U.S.A.I.D. official’s estimate, to 200,000 cases of paralytic polio each year.
The same official warned that the aid stoppage could lead to nearly a one-third increase in tuberculosis cases. Some of those will reach the United States and lead to enormous expense — a single case of extensively drug-resistant TB can cost $500,000 to manage.
The second answer to that query reflects not a calculation of self-interest but the moral code we live by. In this century, we are all blessed with miraculous, almost biblical powers: We can heal the sick and save children’s lives, all inexpensively: America spends just 0.24 percent of gross national income on humanitarian aid. We properly honor a firefighter who saves a single child, but three cheers for us as taxpayers for rescuing millions of children around the world from AIDS, starvation and disease.
That is, until January.
Fatima Abdulai, 14, held her niece, Nadia, a severely malnourished 2-year-old, and said the household has been reduced to one meal a day of sorghum mush.
“Sometimes she cries from hunger,” Fatima said. “Then we give her water to drink.”
Civil war and famine in neighboring Sudan have sent refugees fleeing that country into South Sudan. Some are unaccompanied children, such as a 10-year-old girl who arrived recently on her own. The United States had supported a program to assist such children near the city of Renk and ensure they are not trafficked. That is one of the programs that has been canceled. '
There are many more such stories - and there will be millions more such stories.
Children dead, mothers dead and yet President Elon says empathy is the weakness of western civilisation and no one has died. He would not have cared much even if he acknowledged as such.
This is the world we live in now, before the stoppage of US Aid 15 million children died from hunger related causes each year, now even more will die due to more causes....
No one will go to jail for these criminal acts, no one will remember these kids who lost their lives due to no fault of their own other than being born in the wrong place and dependent on US Aid for survival.