Doctoring the World with WHO

The following is a passage taken from Doctors of the World (1958) by Murray Morgan. The book was written as a graded reader for students to study English with, and 65 health and epidemic related words are put in bold in the book and glossed in the back. As a graded reader, or a "ladder" step reader of 5 steps, this book supposedly has a base vocabulary of 2,000 words and builds on the vocab learned in the previous level, I think the first level. Well, I might add that as a language teacher, I think the vocabulary selected is not your everyday common words and the sentence structure would be a real treat (yikes!) for someone struggling with English, especially Asian languages that use the radically different sentence structure of S-O-V while English uses S-V-O. Imagine the word order being complex anyway, without the many embedded clauses within clauses. Here's an example of the complexity, and notice that the first paragraph is constructed with only two sentences:

Twenty years ago the United Nations (UN) created the World Health Organization (WHO) to give to all peoples the highest possible standard of health. In a world with a population of something like 3,500,000,000 people, about two-thirds of whom are struggling with conditions that make sickness and lack of proper food the normal state of life, this is a huge task indeed - especially for an organization with fewer than three thousand full-time workers and with only $50,000,000 to spend in a year.

Of all the United Nations' activities those of the World Health Organization are probably the least known in the United States and Western Europe, but the best known in the young countries of Africa and Asia, as well as the republics of Latin America.

Sanitation

In its world-wide battle against disease, WHO works closely with other UN groups such as the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the International Labor Office (ILO), and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

BREAKDOWN OF CHAPTERS AND CONTENT

Murray Morgan, the author, is not a doctor but as I understand it a reporter who travels from WHO sites to WHO site to document some of the "hot spots" where WHO is desperately trying to eradicate disease in various parts of the world. His reader has 11 chapters and I will ever so briefly outline what each is about:

Ch. 1 - The Race Against Resistance: Mexico Against Malaria
225,000,000 a year suffer attacks of malaria a year, and some 2,000,000 die from it. By the time of this writing, malaria had been eliminated in 13 countries which included the US, but in other places the mosquito, the carrier, is building up resistance and so WHO went on a hyped up mission to eradicate it by heavy usage of DDT on the walls of every one's houses in Mexico.

Ch. 2 - Kwashiorkor, the Hidden Killer of Children: Central America
Kwashiorkor with symptoms of emaciated arms and legs and distended bellies, hair that changes to have pink-yellow tones and skin to develop yellow-white spots is a child killer. The disease is one of malnutrition and is most common in children after they have been weaned from their mother's protein-rich milk and put on a diet for children, that of heavy starch. And in many countries like in Central America, sick children need special care, that is corn starch soup, not realizing that it is the excessive starch and lack of protein that is causing the imbalance.

Ch. 3 - The Bat Man: Costa Rica, Trinidad and Mexico
In an outbreak of rabies in Costa Rice, the best rabies-specialist Dr. Aurelio Malaga-Alba was sent. He made an eradication program for all wild dogs to be killed, all domestic dogs to be vaccinated, and as the rabies epidemic spread northward he caused rabies to be controlled in the wild spaces outside the cities. In short, he set up 41 poisoning stations and in an area of 1.5 million acres, 18,000 wolves were killed, drastically decimating the population but also decimating the carriers of the rabies virus.

Ch. 4 - Nurses Afoot and on Horseback: El Salvador
Adelia Eggstein, one of the nurses on foot who traveled to isolated places to vaccinate, treat, give powdered milk and feeding schedules to mothers, as well as care for patients in remote mountainous places in El Salvador was a phenomenal trooper. Though Adelia originally from Minnesota but having lived for many years in China until the cultural revolution was a well-educated nurse, there were many other female nurses who many of them had only as many as three years of education besides some nurse training for administering care in the mountains.

Ch. 5 - The Case of the Silent Monkeys: Colombia, Panama and Central America
The monkeys in the forest turned out to be dying of yellow fever, and the fever which had not been heard of for many years was wildly spreading again. Yellow fever is a killer and it spread northward with everyone holding their breath for "Would it stop at the Panama Canal like last time?" The answer was a clear no as it was transported further northward, as it was suspected, by migratory birds.

Ch. 6 - The Andean Mission: Peru and Bolivia
The creation of technical education programs to help the younger generation be more educated to meet the needs for improving agriculture and repairing machinery. The author picked up on the problem that in this early stage of educating the youth that sanitary education centers were lacking, case in point, when he asked about digging a latrine for the shabby elementary school next to the new tech school, the answer came back to not waste time or effort on the old but to place all effort on the new.

Ch. 7 - They Hunt the Smallest Game
Otis and Calista Causey were two researchers who would trek into the worst stretches of jungle to find and identify viruses, old and new alike. Of all the researchers who were employed by WHO to search out world viruses, Otis and Calista had by far found more than all the other research teams altogether. Otis insists that it's not skill from 18 years of acquiring research skill but rather that he and his wife have their success from the large amount of viruses present in the Amazon jungles of Brazil.

Ch. 8 - The Race with the Snails: Brazil
Snail fever (nowadays more commonly referred to a liver flukes) is a rampant disease of flukes which burrow into the liver and feed on the blood within the body. They do not reproduce in the human body, however, but the eggs are passed out through the feces which then contaminates water where snails are and the embryo eggs find a host in the snails until they can pass back into the water where they can be ingested or simply burrow through the skin of humans to develop until they can reproduce again. The flukes remain in the human forever causing loss of energy, weakness, liver hardening and after a long period of time, death. WHO was frantically trying massive poisoning methods at the time of this writing, but liver flukes are still a huge problem in the Amazon, so obviously the battle still rages.

Ch. 9 - Miracle in the Jungle: Nigeria against Yaws
Yaws is a disease for country people who live in a hot, wet climate. It is a disease caused by poor sanitation and affects the body with a skin sore or sores, much like leprosy. In past centuries, it was treated unsuccessfully with mercury, but other successful treatments have been to set up sanitation stations with good food, cleanliness, pure air and water, e.g. like bathing in sea water, and the yaws clear up after 6-12 months. The recent wonder drug Penicillin, however, clears up yaws within days, a month at the most. In Nigeria 1955, 40,000,000 people had been examined and 10,000,000 had been treated for yaws with penicillin.

Ch. 10 - Leprosy - One Million Victims: Nigeria and the Upper Volta
Out of a population of 18,000,000 in the northern states, 593,000 were suffering from leprosy and 125,000 lepers were receiving treatments at 462 clinics. Some clinics are permanent because people and their families by association are ostracized from healthy society; some clinics are weekly as in those areas the people are more open to lepers who own or work land and come on the weekly visit to the leper clinics for their weekly pills of Dapsone (DDS), a medicine related to sulfa.

Ch. 11 - The Big Picture: Geneva
Dr. J. H. Hale, a science professor at the University of Malaga in Singapore, noticed in 1957 that a large number of people were being treated for influenza. He took throat samples to learn which of the three types it could be - the three types of influenza A, B and C and each has many sub-categories. This particular strain of influenza was traced back to Hong Kong and was a new strain of influenza A, and therefore, a strain which no one was known to have any antibodies to. As this book was concluded, WHO was monitoring its spread to all continents of the world and making predictions about its behavior, the first time that WHO had had the technology to do either.

Teacher's Training and Child Abuse

Torey Hayden, special education teacher and author, wrote her own experience in one of her special ed classes in which 8 of the "worst" children were placed. The 8 had a medley of problems but there was just no where else to put them. They included Peter (8) with a deteriorating neurological condition; scarred Tyler (8) a girl who had tried to kill herself twice and once by trying to swallow some acid which ate away part of her esophagus; big strapping Max (6) with infantile autism; fat Freddie (7) at 94 pounds was said to be either retarded, autistics or condition unknown; Sarah (7), a victim of physical and sexual abuse who chose to be mute; petite, angelic Susanna (6) who had childhood schizophrenia and hallucinated, rocked herself or wept; William (9), a boy haunted by fears and rituals to waylay them; Guillermo (9), an angry blind boy from a migrant community. Torey wondered what she had gotten herself into to get such a mish-mash of "unwanted" children, that is, children who did not in any way fit in other special ed programs so they were dumped into her class.

And then after Christmas vacation, another child was added to her medley, a child who no one wanted and was scheduled to go to a state hospital, but as there were no beds available, her classroom was the only one where the child could be placed. The child was a horror! The child, 6, had a couple of months previously kidnapped another child, age 3 and about the same size, tied the child to a tree and proceeded to burn him.

Sheila, the unwanted child, arrived, She was feral, uncommunicative, unresponsive, and had angry watchful eyes. She already had a history of destroying other classrooms. Her fears seemed insurmountable, but love and understanding oh so gradually won her over. Her veneer cracked ever so slightly when in trapped fear she pee-ed on herself. The shame and horror of such an act and the teacher's response that it was just an accident was what got her to talk, to the effect of "You're not gonna tell my pa. He'd beat me for somethin' like that. I didn't mean to ..." And it became obvious that she was a child of abuse. Torey already knew from records that her mother had abandoned the girl at the age of 4 along a highway, and later Sheila revealed that she had just been shoved out of the car and left by her mother who took only the younger brother Jimmy with her. An abandoned child, seriously damaged, and one who was abused by the remaining parent.

I highly recommend this book. It needs to be on the reading list of every single teacher, psychiatrist, psychologist, child care worker and social worker. Torey Hayden, as a trained special ed teacher, made mistakes in trying to reach Sheila, she admitted those mistakes, but the premise in her classroom was to make and keep good communication with all her children. With Sheila this rule of communication was tested and revised as Sheila had a tested IQ of 182 and knew angles and loopholes in logic and behavior that Torey had never encountered. One Child is really a must-read!

Interesting notes on One Child

One Child did not start out as a book, but it was a personal story to record for herself her extraordinary time with Sheila. It was only after the story was completed that she considered publishing it.

One Child is Torey's first book and it was the first thing she ever submitted for publication.  The story itself was written very quickly - only eight days from start to finish. And it took only 42 days from the time she started writing One Child until she signed a contract with G.P. Putnam's Sons to publish it.

One Child is currently in 28 languages and has been adapted in several diverse forms, including a one-act opera, a Japanese puppet play and a TV movie.
 
The book was written 2-3 decades ago, and to find out what happened to Sheila and the other 8 children from that medley classroom, a person can read here. However, I recommend reading the book first and not spoiling the fun of discovery.