16791: Slavin: Newsweek on child mortality. Dr. Farmer mention. (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: PSlavin@unicefusa.org

Newsweek - September 22, 2003

   COVER STORY: GLOBAL VIEW; Pg. 78

   HEADLINE: Where Living Is Lethal

   By Geoffrey Cowley; With Karen Springen


   Around the world, millions of kids die needlessly each year. Can they be
helped?

To experience childhood as Americans knew it a century ago, you don't have
to travel very far. Just 700 miles from Miami, on Haiti's desolate Central
Plateau, obesity and food allergies and attention deficit disorder are
unheard of. In this part of the world, a healthy child is the one who
escapes death from tetanus or tuberculosis--someone like 14-year-old Noula.
When the boy's family carried him into Dr. Paul Farmer's frontier clinic in
the village of Cange two years ago, he had a raging fever and a ballooning
abscess on his back. Farmer's team saved his life by treating the TB and
other infections that were devouring his spine. But they couldn't restore
life to his legs--and they knew he wouldn't survive in his mountaintop
settlement without them. So Noula lives in the clinic now. He wheels around
behind the auxiliary nurses, coaxing moribund children to hang on, and he
seems to feel he's the luckiest guy alive. When I met him last March, he
had just been given a new wheelchair. His smile could have lit an office
building.