Kathy Kelly ,an American woman about my age, has packed about two dozen lives into her life when I have barely managed to have one.
She should have a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bravely confound the reality of the continuing weaponization of medicine in the case of Iraq.
Yeah, I know : you totally believed the Tooth Fairy when it swore that the UN specifically exempted medicine from its near-total embargo of goods in and out of Iraq.
Which is why, no doubt, an excess of a half million kids in that country died premature deaths - just from the sheer joy at hearing that news.
A country with a good record at rapidly improving child mortality rates suddenly nosedived the other way : and let us not forget the echo effect upon Iraq children of future generations whose parents were under-fed during their crucial early growth years under the sanctions.
For famine is the gift that goes on giving.
Food and pure water are always the best medicine.
But when they are in short supply, drugs and medical machinery needs to step in.
When, however, these also are either in very short supply or in the case of medical machinery , broken down from lack of parts - even a nominally less severe famine, in terms of calories, kills far too many by indirect means.
Food, pure drinking water chemicals, winter clothing and home heating fuel, non-damaged shelters : all are forms of natural medicines, as effective or even more so than antibiotics in keeping kids alive.
Weaponize them and you kill all ultimately --- but the poor, the weak, the elderly and the youngest and nursing mothers - they usually die first.
Government leaders and combat soldiers get their rations and clothing allowance right up to the last.
And let us not forget governments reacting to embargoes by rationing their remaining scarce chemicals and fuel and steel to go to tanks and explosives and aviation fuel instead of to tractors pulling steel plows for food.
All governments respond to embargoes by cutting their weakest citizens off first, and keeping the elite and the military going to the bitter end.
Always have ; always will.
And that bitter end is almost always the destruction of that armed forces and government - not the death of all the state's weakest citizens.
Killing the weakest is immoral - and since it is so ineffective in ending any war, doubly immoral because it is both bloody and bloody inefficient.....
Showing posts with label weaponization of medicine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weaponization of medicine. Show all posts
Friday, June 28, 2013
Thursday, June 27, 2013
WWII's Opium Wars : Britain's efforts to weaponize life-saving penicillin
The shabby ways in which the Churchill Conservatives, coupled loosely with Republican friends in the American OSRD, conspired to weaponize life-saving wartime penicillin should not surprise anyone with any historical knowledge.
Britain was a past-master at using life-strangling blockades of someone else's civilian population to substitute for the possible combat deaths of the officer sons of the British elite.
Napoleon had been defeated by just such a blockade policy and the Opium Wars against China had shown just how effective covert drug warfare can be in de-stabilizing a nation's populace.
(A lesson hardly lost on the OSRD's successors in the CIA et al.)
But Churchill and Britain were playing with fire when they attempted to severely limit the production of penicillin and restrict its use to only those frontline Allied sick combatants deemed recoverable for further combat.
Because in the 1940s we did not have the arsenal of about 100 viable antibiotics that we have today.
We had only a half dozen members of the Sulfa drug family and they were all rapidly failing --- due to overuse bringing on rapid bacterial resistance.
Wars bring on sudden pandemics - like WWI's horrific Spanish Flu.
One wonders what would the world response had been to Sir Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of British politics) if tens of millions of people had needlessly died, before penicillin production was brought up to speed ?
The world was very lucky indeed that Henry Dawson was not so callous as Churchill and the Allied scientific establishment on the turning a precious lifesaver into a weapon of war...
Britain was a past-master at using life-strangling blockades of someone else's civilian population to substitute for the possible combat deaths of the officer sons of the British elite.
Napoleon had been defeated by just such a blockade policy and the Opium Wars against China had shown just how effective covert drug warfare can be in de-stabilizing a nation's populace.
(A lesson hardly lost on the OSRD's successors in the CIA et al.)
But Churchill and Britain were playing with fire when they attempted to severely limit the production of penicillin and restrict its use to only those frontline Allied sick combatants deemed recoverable for further combat.
Because in the 1940s we did not have the arsenal of about 100 viable antibiotics that we have today.
We had only a half dozen members of the Sulfa drug family and they were all rapidly failing --- due to overuse bringing on rapid bacterial resistance.
Wars bring on sudden pandemics - like WWI's horrific Spanish Flu.
One wonders what would the world response had been to Sir Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of British politics) if tens of millions of people had needlessly died, before penicillin production was brought up to speed ?
The world was very lucky indeed that Henry Dawson was not so callous as Churchill and the Allied scientific establishment on the turning a precious lifesaver into a weapon of war...
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