> I am right now watching a program on PBS about current world medical > crises and solutions, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
World medical crises sponsored by Gates? Like Gilead-Rummy's flu? ;-} > The program also showed the example of a Johns Hopkins opthalmalogist > who, in the process of trying to alleviate night blindness among children in > poor countries, not only found a very cheap cure (vitamin A), but also > found that giving the vitamin A would not just stop the night blindness but > also save hundreds of thousands from dying of other diseases. The doctor > encountered rejection from the medical establishment because his > discovery was "too good to be true". Finally he did more tests and > the resistence apparently has faded, but now the problem is how to get the > poor children to the cheap vitamin A, in these countries. > > Obviously, all this ties in with the -- so it seems, very laudable -- > efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve the health > of the world's poor. The problem with Gates' "philantropy" is that it is a hypocritical pretext to fund the pharma and genetic tinkering industry, which in turn buys his software. I wouldn't be surprised if the vitamin A story above was carefully picked to push "Golden Rice", a PR operation of the GM industry. (genetically vit.A-"enriched" rice which would be a much more expensive and impractical way to supply poor people with enough vit.A than simple vitamin pills) > On the other hand, I would *also* like to see Bill Gates experiment with > improving work life for middle class persons in the first world by > transforming Microsoft into an industrial democracy, where the fact that > the co-product of all labor is the conditions of labor of the laborer would > be self-reflectively thematized into the conditions of the workers' labor. Actually, Gates' 3rd-world operations are quite consistent with his software business practices... Chris _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
