I was reading Time magazine this morning, when I came across this startling statistic:
"33.2 Years of life expectancy for women in Swaziland, where the HIV infection rate is nearly 40% and life spans are the lowest on earth"
Thirty-three. That's how old I am now. If I lived in Swaziland, chances are good I'd be dead or dying, as would most of my peers. That's pretty crazy.
Speaking of horrible living conditions, I read the following on Kim's blog, then saw it on another online Autism group. It's long, but well worth reading. Autism is a huge, and growing, issue worldwide that needs to be faced. This really struck me:
We were in North Korea where their solution is to send children with autism upon the first symptoms to a remote institution where their life expectancy is less than 2 years. Most starve.
Even in 2nd world countries with strong economies -- lots of Starbucks -- conditions can be horribly bad - I have been in Autism institutions where these children are literally warehoused in shocking conditions.
You are permanently changed from the experience of walking through an institution and seeing 3,000 children with autism - some tethered to their beds lying in fecal matter as a result of chronic diarrhea and untreated medical problems.
Yep, reading that makes my own struggles to help Hutton with biomedical treatments for Autism seem no less important, but far more reachable. My hope is that the money going to Autism research will actually go that: real research with real solutions for a real problem.
3 comments:
Hi - thanks for spreading this post around. Autism will become like AIDS - only the very wealthy will be able to afford treatment and millions of kids will be thrown away to die, unable to fend for themselves in vile institutions or simply left alone to die. It makes me want to tear my hair out. Really. It's overwhelming for me to think about.
It is unimaginable to think that a parent could just throw away a child due to autism.
What a horrible, wretched truth that these conditions exist anywhere. I'm speechless (watch out, my husband has said that would be a sign of the apocolypse!)
I really is hard to comprehend, and so sad. I mean, it's one thing to be dealing with autism here in the US, where we have some resources and information to help our kids, though I admit it takes lots of time and money, and even with those (and no one I know has enough of either!) it's so hard to get what we need, especially information. In countries where living conditions are horrible to begin with, it's a given they are not able to give kids with Autism the biomedical care they need. It's quite frustrating that certain foundations (which shall remain nameless because Hubby works for a company started by the founder of one of these biggies) are doing their best to make sure second and third world countries have access to VACCINES - but guess what? That's going to lead to more Autism. Just a hunch I have.
If I were still a sane person, I would consider adopting kids with Autism from second and third world countries, but I know that even though I have some of the money and information necessary to help these kids, I don't have the patience or energy! Well, maybe that's the little sane part of me talking. Maybe Angelina Jolie wants to start her own "Adopt the Autistic Kids of Second and Third World Countries" foundation. Sounds like a great charity, doesn't it?
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