televisual feasting: Rx For Survival

[anotheranon]

I've been watching this miniseries/documentary for the past couple of nights. It's 6 hours of tv (PBS so no commercials) and quite serious, but if it's running on your local PBS station I highly recommend it (I'm sure it will repeat).

Those who know me know that I contract to part of the National Institutes of Health, not in any medical or scientific way, but I do read the stuff that crosses my desk and the people I technically support are doing some Very Cool Things. I genuinely find epidemiology and public health interesting, even if I have only a layperson's understanding of the issues.

One of the best (if morbid) things about the series is that it shows what these terrible diseases look like - polio, smallpox, river blindness, West Nile etc. in Technicolor on screen. The reason I say "best" is because living in the developed world we're fairly isolated from disease and death and because many of the Big Bads have been eradicated here it's easy to develop this idea that they weren't really that bad. A description of smallpox (pustules, fever, dizziness) sounds like nothing worse than a bad case of chicken pox until you see pictures of it. Polio - we think of FDR, who had the best medical care of his time, not a baby in Africa who will never walk.

Maybe that's "anti-vaccines" is a trend - people really don't see or remember just how bad things were :(

Anyway - if it's on in your neck of the woods, see it. All of it isn't morbid, I promise - some of it is quite hopeful, especially BRAC, which teaches poor women how to provide health care for their communities.

Comments

[wendyzski.livejournal.com]

I was able to catch parts of it - I think it should be required viewing for some of the more rabidly anti-vaccine folks. Yes it is true that vaccines can cause side effects, but the risk of not vaccinating is two-fold. Sure YOU may not get the illness, but you are helping create conditions for a possible outbreak. I liked the phrase they used about "social responsibility" - that getting vaccinated is a responsibility to your society.

Now, I'm not sure about vaccines for stuff like chicken pox - I'm not sure the risks balance the benefits for this one.

But definitely an interesting program and worth watching, even for non-geeks. The BRAC program was definitely neat to learn about.

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

It's also worth knowing that wild animals can carry some of these diseases - just because you're not going to run into other people to infect you doesn't mean you might not run into something else.

The anti-vaccine people featured in the first episode really galled me with their arrogance and ignorance, and I hope they DO watch this show they appeared in. "Look, that's what polio LOOKS like. Do you want your kid to go through that?"

[wendyzski.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Also, that is what concerns me about the "polio eradication" efforts going on. No doubt that they are a good thing, but I don't believe they will untimately be successful because unlike smallpox, polio can live in the soil. So it will prove difficult if not impossible to eradicate completely.

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

(!) I didn't know polio could survive outside the human (or other living creature) body - yes, that does make eradication more of a problem.

If you're interested in this sort of thing (I remember your posts about participating in emergency preparedness scenarios, so I'm guessing you are), I gotta recommend aetiology. It's written by a doctor in infectious diseases and she does a good job of writing about disease so laypeople can understand it.