'Optimism is okay: Let's all hope for the best. But that's not preparing,' says one professor of medicine at Harvard. 'Maybe a little cloud of pessimism would spur us to prepare better for a public-health catastrophe.'
A worker with Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and Population checks the temperature of a Haitian man coming from the Dominican Republic on March 5.A worker with Haiti's Ministry of Public Health and Population checks the temperature of a Haitian man coming from the Dominican Republic on March 5.Dr. Paul Farmer, professor of medicine at Harvard University, has spent three decades helping poor countries fight devastating diseases – from tuberculosis to cholera to Ebola to Zika.
How many people show up with shortness of breath and a fever and a cough or even low oxygen in the blood. How do we get this staffed up? We need to take care of people once they're sick. And in affluent economies, doctors don't have to go to the hospital and say, is there going to be electricity today, or will the oxygen concentrators work?They take the air around us, remove nitrogen and concentrate oxygen so that it's therapeutic for those with pneumonia, for example.
And one thing we haven't discussed is money. In rich countries, there is money to address a pandemic. How do poor countries manage?
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