Despite your preoccupation with exams and other pressing matters, I’m sure you’ve heard about the terrible natural disasters in Myanmar and Sichuan Province in China.  We’ve heard from a former Wesleyan student from Myanmar, Wunna Kyaw (now studying engineering at USC), who has been in touch with friends doing relief work in the Irawaddy delta area near the capital, the area hardest hit by the cyclone.  He is asking for contributions to enable his friends to buy relief supplies.  As you’re probably also aware, getting supplies (including most importantly clean water and medicines), to the hundreds of thousands of survivors, has been exceedingly difficult.  As residents of the country, Wunna’s friends are having better success than most in getting the supplies to those who need it most.  We have also heard of another organization through a Wes alum, Hanna Ingber Win ‘03, whose husband’s family live in Yangon:  www.uscampaignforburma.org   — that seems to be successfully deilvering relief supplies. 

We are also looking at the Red Cross of China to make contributions to the earthquake relief effort:  http://202.108.59.10/english/index.htm

If you would like to contribute to these organizations directly, please use the weblinks above.  If you would like to contribute through Wesleyan, you may deposit your contribution in the donation bowls in the Usdan University Center Wednesday and Thursday. Look for the signs. We will divide the contributions between Myanmar and China.

Thank you for your attention — and good luck on your exams!

Best,

Alice Hadler
Associate Dean for International Student Affairs 

Daniel Hiroyuki Teraguchi
Dean for Dviersity and Student Engagement

From Scientific American…

If you use cocaine and need a reason to quit—or one to avoid starting in the first place—think conservation. The national parks of Guatemala and other countries have become the preferred haven of drug traffickers who usurp protected areas and burn the forest to serve their own purposes and the demands of their customers, according to Roan McNab, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) country director for Guatemala.

“They systematically destroy and sabotage forests so they can put in landing fields,” McNab said at the WCS State of the Wild conference on April 15. The landing fields enable them to move drugs—particularly cocaine—north by plane to feed American habits.

Similar misuse of parklands has plagued Colombia since at least the 1990s, and the Sierra de la Macarena National Park there is home to some 13,000 hectares (32,100 acres) of coca plantations, according to field data compiled by the illegal-drug monitoring U.N. body the Sistema Integrado de Monitoreo de Cultivos Ilicitos. As a result, officials have targeted the park for herbicide spraying from airplanes. Of course, this indiscriminately kills both coca and forest vegetation as well as poses a risk to the area’s frogs and other amphibians.

In Guatemala, drug traffickers clear a new landing strip on average once every six months to avoid being caught. read full article…

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) offers up a two minute podcast about the preparing for the implication of health issues due to global climate change.

CDC Global Climate Change Podcast – April 2008.

But why consider organ donation in the first place? This is what the Mayo Clinic says:

Being an organ donor can make a big difference, and not just to one person. By donating your organs after you die, you can save or improve as many as 50 lives. And many families who have lost a loved one who became an organ donor say that knowing their loved one helped save other lives helps them cope with their loss.

It’s especially important to consider becoming an organ donor if you belong to an ethnic minority. Minorities including African-Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and Hispanics are more likely than whites to have certain chronic conditions that affect the kidney, heart, lung, pancreas and liver. Certain blood types are more prevalent in ethnic minority populations. Because matching blood type is necessary for transplants, the need for minority donor organs is especially high.

Perspective by Tadataka Yamada, M.D.

The recent failure of another potential vaccine against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) underscores the enormous challenges of tackling diseases whose heaviest burden falls on the developing world. A quarter of a century after the first report of AIDS, our knowledge about how an HIV vaccine might work is still distressingly limited. It seems clear that neither current dogma nor traditional thinking is likely to get us to the next step. Truly creative ideas will be required. I must confess to having learned the hard way that embracing new thinking, as difficult as it may be, is crucial for the advancement of science and medicine.

As a gastroenterologist, I was one of the many who believed as gospel truth that peptic ulcers were caused by gastric acid. When two scientists from Australia came along and argued that it was actually a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, that produced ulcers, those of us in the “Acid Mafia” rejected their claims out of hand. But Robin Warren and Barry Marshall persisted. Marshall even drank a solution of H. pylori, became ill, took antibiotics, recovered, and wrote a paper about it, just to get others in the field to pay attention. You know the ending to this story — these scientists were proved right and went on to win a Nobel Prize in 2005.

New ideas should not have to battle so hard for oxygen. Unfortunately, they must often do so. Even if we recognize the need to embrace new thinking — because one never knows when a totally radical idea can help us tackle a problem from a completely different angle — it takes humility to let go of old concepts and familiar methods. We have seemed to lack such humility in the field of global health, where the projects related to diseases, such as HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, that get the most funding tend to reflect consensus views, avoid controversy, and have a high probability of success, if “success” is defined as the production of a meaningful but limited increase in knowledge. As a result, we gamble that a relatively small number of ideas will solve the world’s greatest global health challenges. That’s not a bet we can afford to continue making for much longer.

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