12th July 2004
What, I asked myself, would De Valera have had to say about it? Ireland has certainly changed. There is a new statue on our road. I think it is of Queen Maeve, but a naked Queen Maeve with endless legs and pubic hair, and what big breasts! She has an eagle or raven or other old bird on one shoulder and a salmon dangling over the other. And she is holding aloft the severed head of a bull and carrying a spear in her other hand. Where will it all end I ask myself. (No answer yet.)
Another example of how we have changed is that the Irish Presidency of the European Union focused on HIV/AIDS, which is mainly sexually transmitted, as the issue of most importance for the six months of our presidency. Several international conferences have been held, the last on microbicides at the end of June. Great credit must be given to the Department of Foreign Affairs and especially Development Co-operation Ireland for bringing this serious problem to the fore. When one looks at the mess in many oil producing countries at present, causing oil prices to rise, hearing that HIV/AIDS is a bigger economic worry puts the devastating effects of this disease in perspective.
Microbicides are being developed and tested by many small companies. There are many types, vaginal rings rather like old fashioned pessaries, creams, foams and sprays. The large pharmaceutical companies are not involved because these products will be used by poor women. The cultural acceptability of microbiocides is being investigated and also the ethics of trials. It sounds as though microbicides would have to be used with condoms and the difficulties of distribution of these and ensuring their use are well known.
It was very sad to hear that young married girls in Sub Saharan Africa are more likely to be HIV positive than unmarried girls of the same age who are in sexual relationships. This is because the first group are more likely to be married to older men and condoms are not used regularly in married relationships whereas the mate of the unmarried girl will be younger and the couple are likely to use condoms. Virtue is not its own reward in this case.
Vaccines were up for discussion, too. Again the practicality and ethics of these trials and the acceptability of vaccines to the population on which they are to be tested are fraught. Vaccines have been so successful in preventing the development of so many serious diseases but, as we know from the dramas with MMR in recent years, they can very easily be blamed for causing worse problems that they prevent.
Talking of what vaccines can prevent, I wish some of those who deny their children vaccination could have met the Post Polio Support Group who came before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children recently. Rarely has a case been better presented. We have about 700 sufferers of the late effects of polio, aged from 37 to their late eighties. Most got polio before they were five years old, generally in the forties or fifties. Their lives have been such a struggle, some because of their disabilities, being in employment below their level of training.
All they ask are medical cards and the recognition of the condition as a long term neurological illness. Seeing that their number is diminishing every year it seems amazing they cannot be given the little they ask. They did look too for special clinics with the expertise to deal with their problems. This, we all argued, was impossible in view of the dreadful shortage of neurologists in the country not to mind the impasse between the Department of Health and Children and podiatrists.
I can remember a bad polio epidemic in Cork where I lived as a child. There were many deaths and I have a vivid recollection of a big, strong, local farmer reduced to a skeletal person who was capable of nothing but sitting propped up outside his house, his young wife run ragged from dealing with the dairy herd which was their main form of support.
A young friend of mine has two children and neither child has had any form of vaccination. She takes these children to India with her to visit a Guru there. Remembering the Cork outbreak and thinking of how polio can cause life long devastation as so well explained by the Post Polio group I do hope she never has to regret her anti-vaccination stance, polio not being totally eradicated from India, I believe. New vaccines are desperately sought yet old and tried ones are shunned. It's a funny old world.
But giving injections can be life threatening for the injectors I discovered recently. Over four years ago about 20 people were charged with deliberately infecting nearly 400 children with HIV at Benghazi Paediatric Hospital in Libya. Without a doubt the children are infected and forty five have died but no one has put forward any valid reason as to why even semi-sane people would do this dreadful act. After protracted trials, with evidence from distinguished HIV experts dismissed, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor have been found guilty and sentenced to death. They can appeal but even with Libya's re-entry into the civilised world one can but fear for their fate.
Senator Mary Henry, MD
