Mega-Slums & Disease, How They Are the Hotbed of the Next Pandemic

[KakistocracyHater]

http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2009_summer/16_davis.html

...."Mike Davis, a recipient of the MacArthur "genius" award, is author of The Planet of Slums. The following is adapted from an interview with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels.

The global pandemics we see today tend to originate and spread from impoverished slums that push humans into close proximity with animals and food sources, thus providing an incubator for viruses that would otherwise die out or go dormant. Pandemics are thus closely linked to the emergence of "hot zones" in what I call "the planet of slums."....

I think of Tent-City in Sacramento, & how authorities were NOT providing porta-potties. This IS a big deal, & our "fearless leaders" don't seem smart enough to put a check on this.

I'll add more...."Slums as contiguous swaths of settlement are largest in.."(no condom).." Latin America —the largest being on the southeastern edges of Mexico City."...

Frivolous reproduction, this is what Christian Evengelicals want, this is what the endzone of a no birth control nation finds itself caught in, a nightmare it does not truly want.

[NYC_SKP]

1. Of course it's exponentially worse on other contintents than in Sacramento...

But, Mega-Slums might be coming to your town soon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Dharavi:

Poignantly this place stands for the destiny of those people living in slums like Dharavi. The pipe that can be seen here carries drinking water to the central part of Mumbai whereas most of the residents of slums have no access to clean drinking water. For them it often means a very long walk.

~~~

[Warpy]

2. Abortion is now legal in Mexico City

and it's likely to be legalized in the rest of the country once the furor dies down and the priests and bishops find something else to howl about.

[KakistocracyHater]

3. about time. Do you know about the world's youngest mother?

http://www.oddee.com/item_90966.aspx Can you guess her age?
http://youngest_mother.tripod.com/ 5 years, maybe 4ish. I am somewhat relieved that abortion is 'ok' now. I hope they shift over to condom-use & hiv-prevention too.

I am not looking exclusively at Sacramento, I used that example to demonstrate how close to home people in the U.S. can be to a 'slum', whether mega or micro. There are mentions of various slums, in Mexico City, in Mumbai)India), in Africa, in Asia southeast.

There usualy is no water, no plumbing-this is crucial to avoid disease, it's why Iraq has cholera & other Victorian diseases. I say that because I've been to a cematery & have seen many cause-of-death inscribed on the tomb. So these various crowded places give politicians many reasons to build apartments, or at least install some waste pipes/plumbing.

[Warpy]

5. There are colonias here in NM

that are as bad as anything I've seen in Mexico: derelict campers, junked trailers and shacks of found materials, no water, no sanitation, no electricity, no services of any type. The people in them are the real fringe, damaged ex military, garden variety drunks, and whole families of immigrants (legal and illegal) who are working marginal jobs and living on the edge.

These are the people who bus tables, empty trashcans, mop retail floors after hours. They're invisible to all the people who smugly claim that poor people choose poverty.

Nothing makes my blood boil hotter than hearing that smug, ignorant, privileged statement.

[AdHocSolver]

4. Those who think that poverty in other countries doesn't affect them, should read this snippet.

(snip)
..........
In Kinshasa, Congo, the only way people have been able to survive the collapse of the state and the economy is by bringing agriculture into the city. There are chickens and other animals roaming everywhere. These kinds of conditions transform the whole ecology of disease, speeding up transmission among animals and enabling the leap to humans. They create linkages and causal chains that weren't there before.

One example: Urbanization in West Africa has increased demand for protein in diets. At the same time, European companies have driven West African fishermen out of their traditional fishing zones, which provided most of their protein. Without fish for protein, people turned to the bush meat trade in the big logging countries such as Gabon. That demand for bush meat, for example from monkeys or chimps, has broken down all the biological species barriers for disease. People are eating wild mammals that carry exotic diseases like the Ebola virus or HIV.

Recent studies have shown that what HIV required to obtain the critical mass to become a world pandemic was Kinshasa—a hot breeding ground. People out in the bush had been getting HIV from chimpanzees for a long time, but it quickly died out before it could be widely transmitted.

Through today's connections of migration, travel and transport, diseases incubate in such hot conditions, then go global.
..........