A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.
It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.
Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.
Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.
The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.
It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.
The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.
When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.
Depois da enésima foto de Alessandra Negrini mostrando a bunda aos cinquenta e tantos anos, a gente para de pensar como ela está bem de corpo e começa a pensar em como ela está mal da cabeça.
Twitter proibido no Brasil
Autoridade estrangeira importante faz comunicado aqui (Biden anunciou que saiu da eleição aqui)
Jornalista brasileiro não pode acessar
Então um correspondente tem que acessar e traficar o conteúdo pra jornalista brasileiro
Feels like North Korea.
O portal da transparência do guardião constitucional do país, o STF, está fora do ar há quatro dias
Por quê?
A Folha descobriu que foram gastos 100 mil em segurança para ministro ir a evento de lobby na Europa
Há 70 anos, num 5 de março de 1953, morria Josef Stalin.
E eu preparei essa thread contando por que ele foi um dos piores seres vivos de todos os tempos:
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Espero que para os brasileiros que de fato pensam no país e no futuro dos seus filhos, mas discordam totalmente do PT e de suas lideranças, tenha ficado claro, com os fatos divulgados ontem, que o voto em Lula no segundo turno das eleições de 2022 era absolutamente necessário.
Era a única forma de evitarmos um golpe que aconteceria com grande chance de sucesso em 2026. O resultado da reeleição de Bolsonaro seria um Supremo totalmente aparelhado, as Forças Armadas devidamente submetidas às suas vontades, onde a realidade seguiria sendo distorcida pela desinformação e a espionagem de adversários políticos chegaria a níveis ainda piores.
Muito provavelmente, começaríamos o ano de 2027 em um regime de exceção sob o comando de Bolsonaro.
É preciso agora punir com rigor todos os envolvidos, civis e militares, aprender com tudo que aconteceu, mas virar essa página e iniciar a construção - sem populismo, sem revanchismo, com disposição, com visão de longo prazo e lideranças coerentes - do Brasil que queremos.
Estamos atrasados.
Direitos Humanos inclui a dignidade das mulheres. De todas elas. Absurda e indigna essa presença num evento no evento do Ministério que carrega missão tão nobre.
The Western civilization approach to the issue of women is based on two factors: seeking profit and pleasure. Islam’s outlook with regard to the issue of women is exactly the opposite; it is concerned with protecting human dignity.