There are no Celebrities in Angola

on a serious note, yesterday's new york times front page offered a sobering look at the cholera epidemic in Angola...a Southwestern coastal African nation.

Cholera, as you probably know, is a bacterial illness contracted through contact with feces. In its worst form, the disease causes watery diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps--followed by rapid loss of body fluids, dehydration and shock. Without treatment, people infected with Cholera can die within hours. Says the Times:

Only one in six Luandan households is lucky enough to have running water, and for many of them, it comes from a community standpipe, according to Development Workshop, a nonprofit group in Angola.

These community standpipes are usually linked directly into the Bengo River, the primary water source in the country. The river is highly polluted--its banks strewn with garbage and human waste. Water distributors pick up millions of gallons of polluted water from this river, claim to have it "sanitized" and sell it at 12 cents a gallon--a small fortune to people in the slums of the country. Of course, in some situations...it's not sanitized...and the epidemic spreads.

Children stripped to their underwear dance through sewage-clogged creeks and slide down garbage dumps on sleds made of sheet metal into excrement-fouled puddles.

Much of the city has no drainage system; in heavy rains, the filthy water rises hip-high in some of the poorest dwellings.

According to the WHO, As of 6 June 2006, Angola has reported a total of 43 076 cases and 1642 deaths (overall case-fatality rate (CFR) 3.8%). In the last 24 hours, 280 new cases including 8 deaths have been reported. Fourteen out of 18 provinces are affected.

Doctors Without Borders officials say the government response to the outbreak has been woefully slow and underfinanced. A crisis committee began work only two and a half months after the epidemic began, and the government has set aside a mere $5 million in emergency money to fight the disease.

Here's the thing, though. Angola is not the poverty-stricken African country we all think of when we think of those obscure land masses "somewhere in Africa." According to the Times:

Angola is in the midst of a gusher in oil revenue, its hotels crammed with oil executives and its harbor filled with tankers carrying away the 1.4 million barrels of crude pumped here each day. The economy grew by 18 percent last year. The government racked up a budget surplus of more than $2 billion.

This year it is expected to take in $16.8 billion in revenue, well over twice the $7.5 billion it received in 2004. Next year, revenue is expected to rise by a third again, almost all because of oil.

Economists say the government simply has more money than it can spend.

I have an idea of how they can spend it...The cost of a single dose of cholera vaccine? 31 cents. With 16.8 billion dollars in revenue, they could purchase 51,612,903 doses of vaccine...enough to vaccinate the entire population of Angola 5 times over.

Unfortunately, in spite of all this, Angola suffers the same fate of most of Africa--no Brangelina babies (Namibia) or George Clooney led rallies (Sudan). Instead, these millions of impoverished people suffer disease quietly, forgotten by the rest of the world. Take a moment, and consider how you might be able to make a difference.

Fix your jones for not letting the world ignore injustice @ doctors without borders ...or simply pass this story on.

Posted by sarah t. at 9:40 AM