Drugs Banned, Many of World’s Poor Suffer in Pain

Cancer and AIDS are just two problems that go severely untreated in Sierra Leone, where prescription drugs are in short supply.

People in countries like Sierra Leone are trying “alternative remedies” whereby they commit suicide to find release from the pain. The blessing of vaccines for diseases like malaria have only given many people in the third world time enough to suffer even worse diseases like cancer – diseases that do not offer a quick death.

Waterloo, Sierra Leone — Although the rainy season was coming on fast, Zainabu Sesay was in no shape to help her husband. Ditches had to be dug to protect their cassava and peanuts, and their mud hut’s palm roof was sliding off.

But Mrs. Sesay was sick. She had breast cancer in a form that Western doctors rarely see anymore — the tumor had burst through her skin, looking like a putrid head of cauliflower weeping small amounts of blood at its edges.

“It bone! It booonnnne lie de fi-yuh!” she said of the pain — it burns like fire — in Krio, the blended language spoken in this country where British colonizers resettled freed slaves.

No one had directly told her yet, but there was no hope — the cancer was also in her lymph glands and ribs.

Posted by mercenary
I've been a media student, an English Literature undergrad, a radio host and a few other things to pass the time. I've been properly around the third world, as well as a bit of the first. At the end of all this, I've found that there's more to learn than...

RELATED ITEMS

• Nigeria files criminal charges against Pfizer
  Posted by antiguanoctane on Friday, July 27th 2007
• Nigeria fights tobacco and drugs giants in court
  Posted by Watson on Wednesday, July 4th 2007