(Occasional series of scanned pre-1992 articles. This was first published 18 August 1982.)
A VERY nasty flu is sweeping Canberra.
Well, it really is three flus. One causes acute pain and discomfort in the gastric area, the second causes aches in the bones, and the third appears to be the tradi¬tional head and chest variety. Some sufferers had all three.
Employers reported higher absen¬teeism than usual. Most Canberrans get one or two colds in winter, but this flu puts people out for a week.
Sufferers complain of terrible pains all over the body. They would rather be well and at work than ill and in bed. The flu dominates their waking and sleeping; they can do nothing while their mind concen¬trates on the weakness and pain in their body. They ring up work and say they cannot attend, knowing that sickness benefits will appear in the pay packet on Thursday. They spend a few dollars on pain killers to give them relief, then curl up between an electric blanket and a continental quilt and wait. It might take a week or even two, but ultimately they emerge and resume healthy life.
Imagine having the flu all your life. Imagine never escaping the blocked nose, the heavy chest and the pains in the joints. Imagine hav¬ing no drugs to ease the pain, or having no drugs to ease the symp¬toms, let alone drugs to cure the disease.
Our Canberra flu is trivial, really. Most people in Africa carry up to four parasites all their lives. About a quarter of the world’s population is suffering from one of six tropical diseases: bilharzia, filariasis (river blindness), trypanosomiasis (sleep¬ing sickness), leishmaniasis, malaria and leprosy.
These diseases are caused by single-cell animals, worms and a bac¬terium. Nearly everyone in black Africa can expect to contract at least one during his or her life. Many will die from them. These parasitic dis¬eases gnaw into every aspect of life. Crops go unplanted or unreaped. Development is slowed. People suf¬fer. It is as if most of the people had something worse than Canberra’s flu most of the time. But there is no sick pay and no pain-relieving drugs.
The tragedy is that all six of these diseases could be very easily wiped out, or at least controlled. Malaria was almost beaten. In India in 1966 there were only 60,000 cases. By 1977 it had climbed to 30 million. In South-East Asia only 1 per cent of the population contracted malaria in 1975; by 1979 it had reached 20 per cent. And now in Africa one million children die each year of malaria. There are not enough insec¬ticides to kill the disease-carrying mosquitoes nor enough malaria pills. The World Health Organisation, the UN Development Bank and the World Bank have a joint campaign against these six diseases. It has a budget of $25 million a year —about the cost of the top half of a nuclear missile, or about the cost of one of the 10 PC3 Orion aircraft that Australia has on order. If that budget were tripled the diseases could not withstand the attack.
It does not cost much to make a huge impact in the fight against disease. The World Health Or¬ganisation’s right against smallpox must rate as humanity’s greatest bargain. With $90 million spent over 10 years WHO has virtually wiped smallpox from the face of the earth — that’s the price of two F111 aircraft.
Polio, diphtheria and tetanus rare¬ly claim lives in the developed world because immunisation is so cheap, but fewer than 10 per cent of people in the developing world are im¬munised and so five million children die each year of these_ diseases. Every child in the world could be immunised against all three diseases for the amount the United States spends in one day on defence.
Ironically, the disease that at¬tracts most government money is one that gets increasingly deadly as more money is spent on it — armaments. It is a mania that will attract the spending of $1,630,000,000,000 in the US in the next five years, accord¬ing to a visiting fellow at the ANU Strategic and Defence Studies Cen¬tre, Dr Frank Barnaby.
This disease threatens the extinc¬tion of the race as surely as the bubonic plague did in the 14th cen¬tury, but unlike the plague and the flu it won’t just go away.
People with the flu who have had the energy and interest to get this far can ponder on the following com¬parison: 400,000 defence research scientists, 27 million soldiers in uni¬form and 27 million civilian support staff consume about $650,000 mil¬lion a year. They have 50,000 nuclear warheads at their disposal with a total destructive power 1.6 million times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. Meanwhile, 570 million people lack proper food, 800 million are illiterate, 250 million children have no schools, 1,500 mil¬lion have little or no access to medi¬cal services, and about 5,000 people in Canberra have contracted the flu.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appears in The Canberra Times on 18 August 1982.