Kimberly Mega Feb 6th 2008 Food Scarcity 5:25 pm
There is a research team working in Uganda to discover whether food insecurity, or the persistent difficulty in finding enough food to eat, undermines the effectiveness of an HIV treatment. The study is being done by the University of California and the Mbarara University of Science and Technology. The patients will be followed for two years to monitor how food insecurity will affect their drug regimens, illness and death rates. They have found that most families scrape each meal together and are never far from starvation. And with HIV patients the drugs only make them hungrier faster. Each patient is being researched about how much food they consume, what they eat, whether they grow their food, and if the side effects of the HIV medicine are worse on an empty stomach. Most of the patients in the study grow their own food or trade with their neighbors. Their bulk of their diet consists of matoke(mashed green plantains), posho(maize flour), and beans. Chicken and fish, which are readily available in the US are hardly ever served. They are “luxuries” and most families can only afford them once a year. These patients face a tough choice in determining where their cash crop goes. If they feed it all to their children they can’t sell it and if they don’t sell it they cant pay for their monthly trip to the clinic. And when at the clinic they lose a whole day of work they could spend on their children’s diet. From this study they have found that packaging food with HIV drugs or reimbursing patients for travel to the HIV clinics can improve health and save lives. It would extremely benefit the patients in this study and other HIV afflicted persons in the Africa. Near the end of this article one of the researchers posed the question: what is the point of researching this?. At first I was shocked to hear that but when I read on I understood what he had meant. He was wondering why aren't we helping the people that obviously need it. And I completely agree with him. Why do we need to even question whether giving them food will benefit them and their families. Everyone needs help once in while and some depend on aid to survive. The reason is international donors need data and documentation for proof that an intervention will actually work. They need to feel confident that their money will reduce misery and benefit the society. In my opinion you don't need to coordinate a study to see misery in other parts of the world. All you need to do is turn on the television to pick out who needs help, where , and why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/health/25case.html
2 comments:
I couldn't agree with you more, Kim! I mean, it's definitely a no brainer. To me, that's like someone saying "Oh, look. There's a child who can barely stay above water. He's waving his hands and yelling 'I'm drowning.' Let me do my research to find out if he really needs help." Some people just don't realize how priviledged they are. A lot of us as Americans can get sick and choose to use our shopping money for medicine, or our money that we were putting into our savings account on medicine. But anytime you're faced with the dilemma of food or medicine? Come on! Of course these people need help!
It's really sad that people need proof that people are starving, it's completely obvious. What makes me really disturbed is that by the time this two year study is finished it may be too late for some who could have benefited from the program.
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