Archivo etiqueta «Salud»
By Jay A. Levy, a professor of medicine and director of the UC San Francisco’s Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research and Daniel L. Peterson, a physician in private practice in Nevada who treats patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (LOS ANGELES TIMES, 30/09/11):
For more than 100 years, medical literature has contained reports of a debilitating illness that causes prolonged fatigue, memory loss, headaches, cognitive problems and issues with digestion and sleep. Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir and Thomas Eakins all suffered from what was then known as neurasthenia.
At that time, the recommended treatment for women was … Seguir leyendo
By Robert Jay Lifton, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the author of Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima and the forthcoming memoir Witness to an Extreme Century (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 16/04/11):
Nothing is more rapidly globalized than nuclear fear.
The partial meltdown of reactors in Fukushima, Japan, has created overwhelming fear in people living nearby, considerable fear in people living in the rest of Japan, and a certain amount of fear in people throughout Asia and even in Europe and the United States.
Nor can this fear be simply dismissed as hysteria. It can … Seguir leyendo
Par Annie Thébaud-Mony, sociologue, directrice de recherche honoraire à l’Inserm (LE MONDE, 21/03/11):
Le peuple japonais vit l’un des pires accidents industriels de l’histoire du capitalisme. A l’occasion du 20e anniversaire de Tchernobyl, Sveltana Alexievitch, auteur biélorusse d’un livre de témoignages des victimes de Tchernobyl, avait eu cette pensée prémonitoire : “Tchernobyl : notre passé ou notre avenir ?” (Le Monde, 25 avril 2006). Hélas, en ce 25e anniversaire de Tchernobyl, le cauchemar de Fukushima renoue, au Japon, avec cette expérience terrible de l’accident nucléaire.
Tant l’exploitant japonais Tepco et les autorités japonaises que leurs homologues français n’ont admis … Seguir leyendo
By Verna Yu, a freelance writer (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 04/12/10):
Banned books and milk powder: What do they have in common?
This: They are among the most prized commodities on the must-buy list for many of the millions of Chinese tourists who come to Hong Kong every year.
In this former British colony, books considered too politically sensitive for mainland China are widely available in bookshops. And since news emerged two years ago that many young children in China had died or fallen seriously ill after drinking local formula adulterated with the toxic chemical melamine, imported milk powder … Seguir leyendo
By Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey who is the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa and global health (THE WASHINGTON POST, 19/09/10):
An army of health activists and world leaders will gather at the United Nations this week to review the eight Millennium Development Goals agreed to at the start of the century and to recalibrate and recommit to more effectively achieve them by 2015. The overarching and noble goal is reducing global poverty. But the most compelling and achievable objectives — huge reductions in maternal and child mortality worldwide — will be … Seguir leyendo
By Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and author of Common Wealth. From 2002 to 2006, he was the director of the U.N. Millennium Project (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 17/09/10):
As 140 heads of state and government gather Monday at the United Nations for the Millennium Development Goals summit, they and the public will ask what has come out of this decade-long effort.
The answer will surprise them: A great deal has been achieved, with some of the most exciting breakthroughs occurring in Africa.
I recall how the Millennium Development Goals were initially … Seguir leyendo
By Ellen Johnson-Sirleafis, the president of Liberia (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 16/09/10):
Ten years ago, heads of state from across the world promised “to spare no effort to free their fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected.” The historic Millennium Declaration was duly adopted and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were established, with the aim of reversing the grinding poverty, hunger and disease affecting billions of people.
Ten years is a long time, and many millions will be looking to the … Seguir leyendo
By Hannah Richards, Christian Aid’s communications officer for Latin America and the Caribbean (THE GUARDIAN, 05/08/10):
Isabel is four years old. Her belly and ankles are swollen and she walks as if it hurts a little bit. Her family, who live in eastern Guatemala, have not had the means to feed her properly, so she is being treated for kwashiorkor – acute malnutrition.
Even though it is classified by the World Bank as a middle income country, the level of inequality in Guatemala is such that almost half its children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition. This is the … Seguir leyendo
By Philippe Douste-Blazy, a former French foreign minister and the UN under secretary general in charge of innovative financing for development (THE GUARDIAN, 05/08/10):
The global economic crisis has claimed many victims – unemployed workers, flooded homeowners and bankrupt pensioners – but nowhere have the repercussions been as devastating as in the developing world.
The setback to the fragile gains of recent years, particularly in Africa, threatens to return millions of people to the extreme poverty from which they had just managed to escape. In addition to the prospect of enormous human suffering, severe economic, political, and social pressures … Seguir leyendo
By Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991. He is a founding member of Green Cross International and is on its board (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 16/07/10):
The right of every human being to safe drinking water and basic sanitation should be recognized and realized.
The United Nations estimates that nearly 900 million people live without clean water and 2.6 billion without proper sanitation. Water, the basic ingredient of life, is among the world’s most prolific killers. At least 4,000 children die every day from water-related diseases. In fact, more lives … Seguir leyendo
By Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch (THE GUARDIAN, 23/06/10):
Pretend it didn’t happen. That’s apparently the strategy of the Chinese government, the World Health Organisation, and the International Olympic Committee toward China’s melamine milk contamination scandal during the Beijing Olympics.
An official ban on reporting of “all food safety issues” during the games stifled domestic media coverage of revelations that at least 20 dairy firms were spiking milk products with the chemical melamine. That cover-up contributed to the deaths of six children and illness among 300,000 others.
But there’s not a whisper of melamine … Seguir leyendo
Por Ricardo Cayuela Dalmau, profesor de Psicología del Trabajo, facultad de Psicología Blanquerna (LA VANGUARDIA, 25/04/10):
La creciente incidencia en el entorno laboral de la psicopatología conocida como burn-out (“quemado por el trabajo”) recomienda orientar su difusión, incidiendo en los aspectos de prevención. Mas allá del tratamiento individual, analizando el origen de un síndrome individual, pero que implica a dos componentes; al trabajador y a la organización. En consecuencia podremos establecer criterios compartidos de intervención para prevenir esta patología desde la doble vertiente de responsabilidad.
De entre las dos decenas de definiciones de burn-out existentes, la de Gil Monte … Seguir leyendo
By Leonard S. Rubenstein, a visiting scholar with the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, researched health reconstruction in areas of conflict as a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace last year. William Newbrander, a senior technical officer with Management Sciences for Health, is a senior adviser to the Ministry of Public Health of Afghanistan. His work with the Afghan ministry is funded by USAID through the Basic Support for Institutionalizing Child Survival (BASICS) project (THE WASHINGTON POST, 29/11/09):
Amid the news about U.S. failures in … Seguir leyendo
By Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister from 2005 to 2007, the chairman of Unitaid and a special adviser to the United Nations secretary general on innovative financing (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 24/09/09):
As leaders of the world’s largest economies gather today in Pittsburgh for the Group of 20 meeting, people in the world’s poorest countries will likely look on with a mix of hope and trepidation, wondering whether their needs will figure in the deliberations at all. The G-20 nations could help both the poor and the global economy by fully financing lagging efforts to fight poverty and … Seguir leyendo
By Dominic Lawson (THE TIMES, 09/08/09):
There are two reliable ways of telling if you have won an argument. The first is if your disputants switch from discussion of the facts to accusations about motives; the second, more obviously, is if they descend to mere abuse.
Alan Dangour, a nutritionist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, should therefore feel he has had an encouragingly uncomfortable week. He is the author of a peer-reviewed meta-study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that concluded, from 50 years of scientific evidence, that so-called “organic” food was no healthier than … Seguir leyendo