Doctors and junk food without borders
Been off the blogmobile for a couple weeks due to travel, mostly to the US-Mexico border. I’ll be writing more on that soon. Meanwhile, here are some interesting links.
International bridge, El Paso, TX
First, wonderful work from Feroze Sidhwa, a 25-year-old student at the University of Texas medical school in San Antonio. The US papers this month are full of worry about possible trauma to our kids from learning of 16-year-old TV star Jamie Lynn Spears’ celebrity pregnancy. Sidhwa educates us about real pediatric horror: posttraumatic stress disorder in Palestinian children from violence and militarized apartheid, as well as malnutrition due to the same conditions. The piece, “Food Security and Mental Health in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” was published in a recent print edition of CounterPunch, which very few people get to read. I asked for permission to store it here so Internet browsers can find it. Give a look (click here) and be grateful we have healers in training like Dr. Sidhwa.
And another Counterpunch item about an MD: the case of Catherine Wilkerson, an Ann Arbor doctor who was arrested and charged for trying to help a protester after police injured him, threatening his life. Wilkerson was tried earlier this month – and acquitted. The whole thing is zeitgeisty and ominous. Read about it here.
Finally, Richard Baron sent me an amazing photo essay from the book Hungry Planet, by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio — of families around the world posed next to the groceries they consume in one week. Everyone from Italians surrounded by lots of homemade bread, to Americans with way too much Domino’s and Doritos, to middle-class Mexicans drowning in Coca Cola, to Sudanese refugees in Chad huddled one or two forlorn bags of grain. The picture posted here is of the Melander family, in Germany. For more, click this.