Interesting and all too common story of shoddy medical service in Sri Lanka. I don’t mean shoddy medicine, I mean shoddy service. In SL we have free health care, but your choices are to wait and be messed about or go and get actual medical care at a private hospital. The problem with that is that private hospitals are insanely expensive, like a hundred dollars a day for saline and monitoring. And even then they don’t always offer decent service.

I wrote a post about adult film theatres that has somehow turned into a debate about obesity. As in, are Americans fatter than Sri Lankans. The answer is, of course America are fatter. This is not because Sri Lankans are better people, it’s really just for lack of opportunity. As I was reading in a recent UN Food Ag Org report, one third of the food in the world is wasted or lost. In the west the waste it at the consumer level, here we lose it at the production level.

Sri Lanka has free public health care but a lot of people don’t use it. I have dealt with public health care only briefly. My girlfriend once went and spent about 6 hours over two days just to see a doctor for the kid. I think it’s the time issue that makes people avoid it, I dunno. Luckily I’ve avoided the hospital except for a brief bout with dengue/viral fever, and that under company health care. Recently, however, I checked the girlfriend’s kid into Lanka Hospitals for observation and it was really expensive. I wonder how the system sustains.

Since the western world started cracking down on cigarettes, the cigarette companies have started pushing their wares in the developing world. According to the WHO, ” Tobacco kills more than AIDS, legal drugs, illegal drugs, road accidents, murder, and suicide combined.” For this reason it is regulated, as it should be. Actually, for these reasons it should be illegal, but that’s another story. The story now is that, since western governments are cracking down, the companies are moving east. Smoking already kills more people in developing countries, and yet tobacco companies have relatively free reign here. Sri Lanka is a bit ahead on regulation, but in places like China and Indonesia, smoking is regulated little or not much at all. This has catastrophic consequence like the smoking toddler in the video above.

Above is a remarkable video showing how well current AIDS medication works. Now, effectively, AIDS is a chronic but not lethal disease. Especially if you have money. My favorite blogger Andrew Sullivan has HIV and blogs like a hundred times a day. A recent article in the Guardian, however, raises the question of priorities. There is only so much health budget. The world spends billions on AIDS research, yet much less on easily curable diseases like sleeping sickness or bilharzia. People often die or are ruined of diseases like this simply for lack of money or knowledge. It’s hard to say. AIDS does affect millions of people and, more dangerously, can spread like wildfire. For those reasons I think the money probably is well spent. Health policy should, however, serve less glamourous causes equally well.

I got this in the mail. Apparently midnightdivas, known for selling lingerie online, has imported a product that enables ladies to pee standing up. I can’t tell is this is for liberated women or professional drunks. It’s basically a funnel which, well, to quote: “Just lower your panties and put GoGirl against your body, forming a seal… You won’t be like a man, you’ll just pee like one.” I do admit that peeing standing up is one of the greatest things about being a man, besides physical security and higher income, but I’m not sure that a plastic pink prosthesis is the best way to even the score. My main question is what do you do with it after you’re done? It’s supposedly reusable.

Ah, the mosquito. Bane of my existence. Like Twilight, they both drink blood and annoy. Only female mosquitos bite, and they are basically molesting us, using our blood to trigger their ovaries. Grossly, they need something called a blood meal in order to produce eggs. Males, by contrast, sip flowers and stuff and then buzz around in big orgy parties for the females to fly into and mate. The female mosquito can take in three times her weight in blood, as you may have noticed from slapping them and getting a handful of your own blood. The horrid creatures sense body heat, breathing and sweat, making it difficult to get away. More dangerously, mosquitoes also spread dengue, malaria and killer blood diseases which hit places like Sri Lanka basically every time it rains. I hate the mosquito, but it was still interesting to read this Slate article on their story. Unlike some others that recommend mosquito genocide, this one recommends a modified co-existence. I think I still prefer killing them all.

There’s an article in Nature saying that were mosquitoes to disappear, they would not be missed. Ecologically that is. There are, or course, significant caveats, but some scientists seem to think that the mosquitoes positive ecological niche would be quickly filled. Mosquitoes are rather horrid creatures that carry horrid diseases like malaria, dengue and chikunguniya. Less people would die were they genocided and African nations in particular would even significantly improve their GDP (due to reduced health costs and great productivity). The danger is that eliminating mosquitoes would mess up the circle of life, but at least a few scientists seem to say the disruption wouldn’t be so bad.

Life is not easy for a local girl. For one thing, harassment is the norm. If you walk down the street, you will be sexually harassed. I know exactly zero girls who have not been flashed or masturbated at. Barring that general level of disrespect, we’ve appropriated both the Puritan and depraved elements of western culture with precious little in between. Girls are either at home forever or out clubbing at 14. There is, of course, a space in between, but it is largely an imagined community which takes a certain amount of delusion to sustain. There’s a lot of carnage on either side. I honestly don’t know anything about good girls so I will restrict this discussion to the ‘bad’.

This girl was walking around the boat with a file folder in front of her head. I wondered why. Then I realized she was trying to keep out of the sun. There’s still a stigma on darkness in the subcontinent, now bolstered by Shah Rukh Khan and John Abraham hawking Fair And Handsome (or Fair And Lovely). That plus the invariable comments from aunties about kalu vela (you got dark). I do use sunscreen, this sun is vicious, but I think the fairness cream is going a bit far. There’s a Last Mango In Paris song that covers the phenomenon well, I think(Download MP3). Beyond that, I know a few girls who avoid going out at all during the day, which I find estrange. Being dark is not such a bad thing, it’s actually kinda hot. Literally I guess.