Let the paranoiacs die

If shame had a face
I think it would kind of look like mine
If it had a home would it be my eyes?
--Lifehouse

Earlier this year over twenty people in Sarawak died within weeks from an ancient and deadly disease. The epidemic, swift and horrific as it was, raised little outcry among Malaysians because the people were Penans and the disease was measles. The Penan are one of the last few nomadic tribes left in Malaysia (because the government is trying to assimilate all the other bumis into the Malay Muslim culture, ha) and anyway true autochthones like the Peninsular Orang Aslis and Sabah/Sarawakian tribes are largely ignored by city people on the Peninsula...who cares about all those savages running around in the jungle, right?

What I'm totally disgusted by is that they died of measles. Is this getting through to you? In the twenty-first century, in a nation that's supposed to be pretty darn good as developing countries go. They died of fucking measles. Where is the outrage?

My first remembered encounter with vaccines was in Standard One. They lined us up and marched us to the school hall where we each received a shot in the arm and a drop of sweet liquid on our tongues. No permission requests sent to parents, no questions asked. Everybody got the stuff. I was proud of myself because I only cried a little, but prouder still because my little six-year-old brain, already running in a biology-geek track at that time, was sure that I was the only kid in the class who knew what that precious liquid was - oral polio vaccine. (One of my favourite books at the time, for whatever twisted morbid reason, was David Werner's Where There Is No Doctor, a manual for rural healthcare workers.)

See, at the time, my father's secretary was a middle-aged Indian with a moustache we called Mr. Roberts (the secretary, not his moustache). Mr. Roberts limped with one foot on tiptoe and twisted inward at a strange ankle. It was explained to us that this was because he had had polio so one leg was shorter than the other. Also, my father is deaf in one ear because of the streptomycin used to treat the tuberculosis he had as a small child. So I didn't complain when five years later they lined us up for BCG jabs. (Although I did complain about how long it took the vaccine lesion to heal.) And much later, when I was in college, an elderly microbiology professor delivered the memorable line "The polio virus - not a friend of mine." He limps and has one eye that droops.

So all in all, vaccination is a wonderful thing. Free vaccination offered to all schoolchildren, too, is a pretty good thing in societies where many parents are too poor to shell out hundreds of dollars for their children's shots - i.e., most places on Earth. If you're an impoverished woman who got a free MMR shot at fifteen, ten years later when you're pregnant you won't have to worry about giving birth to a rubella-deformed baby. Unfortunately, it seems that some people don't think so.

Try doing a Google search for 'vaccinosis' and you'll come up with twenty hysterical sites about how vaccinating your kids with DTP or your dog against rabies (since dogs are the new kids) is practically child abuse before you hit a single sensible one. Rich people in America who refuse to vaccinate their kids because they think it's a conspiracy by the medical profession and pharm industry and it'll make them autistic are no better than imams in Nigeria who think it's a conspiracy to sterilize Muslims. In fact, they're even bigger morons than those barefoot imams. They live in a society where information is freely and easily accessible, and what more, they're living in a society and lifestyle that is based on the same technologies they vilify. Let the paranoiacs die then. Let them go and live in a society where almost no one is vaccinated and the ancient scourges run rampant.

Too add insult to injury, the relatively backward Penan would hide in the jungles whenever medical teams are dispatched into their area out of fear of being vaccinated.

I do not, however, put the Penans in this category, even though they ran away from the opportunity to be vaccinated. Imagine you've lived in the forest all your life as a hunter-gatherer. All the medicines you've every known have been plant or animal products. All the outsiders you've ever known have been poachers or loggers after your land. Then suddenly a team of strangers shows up offering to stick needles into you and your family members for no clearly explained reason. What sane person wouldn't run? It is a failure of outreach and education on the part of the people responsible for giving the vaccinations. Not so for the supposedly well-educated and well-off upper-middle-class US citizens who have internet access and pamphlets all over the pediatrician's office.

I think the term that economists have for people like that is 'free riders' (see Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone). Their unvaccinated kids aren't getting sick from whooping cough and mumps not because vaccines are unneccesary - they're protected by the herd immunity effect of all their friends who have had their jabs.

And you think of those people in the hills of Borneo...dying of a disease they could have so easily been saved from with a little more outreach, a little more education, a little more inactivated virus suspension...I could cry.

Links to stories about the measles outbreak:

• 14 Penan mati, Menteri tidak tahu-menahu
• Four more Penan children die
• Parliamentary proceedings: why there's no clinic in Penan areas.

These two aren't about the measles outbreak but might suggest one reason why the state govt isn't interested in helping the Penans that much.

• Penans stage protest against logging companies
• Special report: LOGGING IN EAST MALAYSIA

(Ir)responsible parties:

• Ministry of Health

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One last thought: in the prophecies of Ezekiel and their echo in the apocalypse of John it says that through the city of God there runs a river, on whose banks grow trees whose leaves serve for the healing of the nations. Christians believe that on some level, the kingdom of heaven is already here - that we are the citizens of the city of God. Why aren't there more Christians in biomedical research? Where are those beautiful trees? "Take care of my sheep...whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me."