human rights
revere | June 22, 2008The hardest and most dangerous agricultural work in the United States is not done by people who are citizens. It is done by immigrants. Some don't have proper documents but many do. Documents don't protect workers from dying. And agricultural workers die of heat stroke at 20 times the rate of other workers:
In mid-July 2005, a male Hispanic worker with an H-2A work visa (i.e., a temporary, nonimmigrant foreign worker hired under contract to perform farm work) aged 56 years was hand-harvesting ripe tobacco leaves on a North Carolina farm. He had arrived from Mexico 4 days earlier and was on…
scientificactivist | June 1, 2008After a rapid media outcry, the US and Israel have come together to reinstate the Fulbright Scholarships initially revoked from several students from Gaza due to Israel-imposed travel restrictions. From The New York Times:
JERUSALEM -- The American State Department has reinstated seven Fulbright grants offered to Palestinians in Gaza for advanced study in the United States, reversing a decision to withdraw the scholarships because of Israel's ban on Palestinians' leaving Gaza for study abroad.
The American Consulate in Jerusalem sent e-mail messages on Sunday night to all seven telling them…
scientificactivist | May 31, 2008Something very unfortunate happened this week. The US had to revoke eight Fulbright Scholarships for students from Gaza to study in the US due to Israeli-imposed travel restrictions. From CNN:
The U.S. government has taken Fulbright scholarships away from eight students in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, citing Israeli travel restrictions imposed on the Hamas-ruled zone, a U.S. official said Friday.
The scholarships, which bring international students to the United States to study at American universities, will be given to students in the West Bank, said Stacey Barrios, a spokeswoman for…
scientificactivist | May 28, 2008Oh, the things we do in the name of "the global war on terror." And, not just in the US. Here's an example from the UK. From The Guardian:
A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university informed police about al-Qaida-related material he downloaded has spoken of the "psychological torture" he endured in custody.
Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials…
scientificactivist | April 30, 2008Earlier this week, I wrote about the Chinese ship carrying arms bound for Zimbabwe that was turned away thanks primarily to the actions of the South African dockworkers' union. A news story from the Mail & Guardian today gives a pretty good indication of just how those weapons might have been used if they had made it to their intended destination:
Zimbabwe's army is supplying militants with weapons to intimidate voters to ensure that Robert Mugabe wins a possible run-off in the presidential election, Human Rights Watch said.
In a statement released late on Tuesday, it said military…
scientificactivist | March 17, 2008As demonstrating and rioting against the heavy-handed Chinese occupation of Tibet increased in intensity this weekend, it's not surprising that China cracked down using one of its favorite tools: internet censorship. As of sometime Saturday, the Chinese government had already blocked YouTube in response to protest/riot footage on the site, and recent reports indicate that Google News has also been blocked. The government's crackdown has already caused the loss of about 80 lives, and it's doing its best to prevent footage of the crisis from reaching the rest of China (through internet…
revere | March 11, 2008I'm an advocate of using computer models to help us think about what might or could happen during various pandemic flu scenarios, but it is a technique with drawbacks. For one, it can suggest that some things might be possible that are either very difficult to do or aren't feasible. This happened in 2005 when some models were published in Science and Nature that suggested a pandemic could be nipped in the bud before it started. Most people thought that what was required was unrealistic but it put WHO in a bind. They had to marshal their resources to show they were willing to try or go down…
revere | March 10, 2008I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you occupy a country you also assume responsibility for its public health. That's both international law and it's the right thing to do. In Iraq we haven't done that. So while I am about to say it once more, after I've said it I have something else to say, too, something that underscores my point in triplicate.
But first the main point:.
It is the kind of news that everybody had been dreading. An outbreak of cholera in Iraq, which started in two Northern provinces, has already reached Baghdad and has become Iraq's biggest cholera outbreak in…
revere | February 11, 2008In the 1960s, as the US biomedical research establishment was starting to rev its engines, bioethicists called attention to a dark side to research, the abuse of human beings as subjects of research studies. The poster child for this was the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," a study to see what happens to people when you don't treat them for a treatable disease. Like many such things, it started off with reasonable intentions. At its outset syphilis treatments were toxic with many adverse side effects. It wasn't obvious patients wouldn't be better off, on average,…
revere | February 4, 2008Most Americans think the Afghanistan mistake was the Right Thing to Do. While we are on record (here and here) as of another opinion, the conventional view is that getting rid of the Taliban was Good (they were Bad, which is true) and anyway it was payback for 9/11 (even though the Afghans didn't actually commit 9/11, only were the geographic location of the planner -- thanks to US aid when bin Laden was fighting the Soviets. Now Pakistan is where the 9/11 leaders live (not to mention that the actual perpetrators, who mostly came from Saudi). You fill in the rest. Still, few agree with us.…
revere | November 2, 2007Medical education in the US is four grueling years on top of four years of undergraduate college education. The spectrum of topics is hugely wide and the depth of coverage hugely uneven. Some things are covered in ridiculous detail and others with breathtaking superficiality. And some things hardly at all:
Medical students are woefully uninformed about military medical ethics and a physician's responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, a situation that could be a problem if they're ever drafted, according to an article by Harvard Medical School researchers.
The researchers surveyed…
revere | October 8, 2007The US invasion of Iraq has not managed to spread Democracy in the region but it is successfully spreading Cholera:
The number of cholera cases in Iran is on the rise after the outbreak of an epidemic in neighbouring Iraq, an Iranian health official was quoted as saying on Saturday.
"The last count shows 43 people have contracted cholera in Kordestan province," Mohsen Zahrai, who is in charge of water and food-borne diseases, told ISNA news agency.
He said those affected had been commuting across the border with Iraq and warned Iranian citizens to postpone pilgrimages to Iraq until the…
revere | September 3, 2007Labor Day, 2007. Arlo Guthrie and Emmy Lou Harris singing a song written by Arlo's father, Woody Guthrie.
On January 29, 1948 a plane, carrying 28 Mexican workers crashed in Los Gatos Canyon near Fresno, California, killing all aboard:
The crash resulted in the deaths of four Americans and 28 illegal immigrant farm workers who were being deported from California back to Mexico.
Guthrie was reportedly struck by the fact that radio and newspaper coverage of the event did not give the victims' names, but referred to them merely as "deportees." He responded with a poem, assigning symbolic names…
revere | July 30, 2007I don't know what to say about this, except it appears at this point to implicate theuse of slave labor in the construction of the US Embassy in Baghdad, aided, abetted and with the knowledge of the US State Department (hat tip Boingboing) . You decide:
The US State Department is denying the claims of occupational health and safety violations while at the same time saying they can't control how foreign laborers are treated:
"At this time our reach does not extend to third-country hiring practices," said William Moser, the deputy assistant secretary for acquisitions. (Washington Post via…
revere | July 24, 2007At 3:50 am EDST I received the welcome news, via Declan Butler, that the Tripoli 6 were free and on the tarmac in Sofia, Bulgaria. All are Bulgarian citizens and were released by the Libyan prison authorities as part of an extradition arrangement. Their life sentences were immediately pardoned by Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov. Our six medical colleague had been accused of deliberately infecting over 400 children in a hospital in Benghazi, Libya and sentenced to death. They have been imprisoned for 8 years, through two trials and numerous appeals. Genetic analysis of the infecting…
revere | July 18, 2007Yesterday the Libyan Supreme Council commuted the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-Bulgarian doctor to life in prison. The Tripoli 6 have become a cause celebre in the scientific and diplomatic communities when Libyan courts, after holding them in prison for eight years, refused to hear solid scientific evidence exonerating them from a charge they deliberately infected over 400 children in the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi. in 1998 (for more background, see here). Poor hospital hygiene is the presumed source of the tragic infections which so far have claimed the…
revere | July 17, 2007The case of the Tripoli 6 -- five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor now a Bulgarian citizen (for background see here) -- is in its final throes. It is not pretty. After a day's delay, word has come the Supreme Council has commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, but with extradition to Bulgaria. We await details and no one with experience in this sad case will breathe easy until the six are on Bulgarian soil.
However this case comes out, scientists and science journalists played a very significant role in its evolution. Nature magazine, now the world's most prestigious and…
revere | July 11, 2007The final act in the drama of five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor imprisoned for seven years and sentenced to death by firing squad in Libya after being accused of deliberately infecting over 400 chidren with HIV in a children's hospital in Bengazi (see posts here) is now being played out in the Libyan capital of Tripoli:
Libya's Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld death sentences on six foreign medics for infecting Libyan children with HIV, a ruling that paves the way for moves by Muammar Gaddafi's government to win their freedom.
Experts said the ruling completed the role of the…
revere | June 20, 2007As Declan Butler reports on his blog, the Tripoli 6 case is reaching its final phase. To summarize briefly, The Tripoli 6 are five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who have been imprisoned in Libya for 7 years and then condemned to death by firing squad on charges they deliberately infected some four hundred or more children with HIV in the hospital in Bengazi. Scientific work later demonstrated they could not have been the source of the infection. You can find previous posts we did on this here. On December 19 a new trial, called as a result of an appeal to the Libyan Supreme…
revere | April 10, 2007Soon, maybe as soon as the end of the month, the Libyan Supreme Court will hear the appeal of the five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor, the "Tripoli 6" (here, here, here, here, here and here). As it approaches there is intense activity from the international scientific community. On March 23, ten major medical associations wrote to Colonel Qadhafi:
We the undersigned leading health professional associations in the United States are writing to urge you in the strongest terms to immediately release and exonerate the five Bulgarian nurses--Valya Cherveny, Snezhanka Dimitrova, Nasya…