Third World Diseases Creeping Back Into America
by John Lawrence
One of the places that Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, recently visited was Lowndes County Alabama. There there is an endemic crisis of hookworm, a disease that has been eliminated from most advanced industrialized countries, but not from Alabama. Loundes County is in the "black belt", a terminology that once referred to the black soil that forms a crescent through the state because it was so fertile. It was a great place to grow cotton in the slavery days, and many of the descendants are still there. Today the term is just as apt as a reference to them.
The Guardian reports:
Trump’s undermining of human rights, combined with the Republican threat to pare back welfare programs next year in order to pay for some of the tax cuts for the rich they are rushing through Congress, will hurt African Americans disproportionately.
Black people are 13% of the US population, but 23% of those officially in poverty and 39% of the homeless.
The racial element of America’s poverty crisis is seen nowhere more clearly than in the Deep South, where the open wounds of slavery continue to bleed.
It seems that in this Black Belt many families don't have access to adequate sanitation. Thousands of families live amid open sewers of the kind so common in the underdeveloped world, and, therefore, a disease of the developing world is thriving in the world’s richest country. Lowndes County is a majority black county that was the epicenter of the civil rights movement having been the setting of Martin Luther King’s Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in 1965. Despite its proud history, 70% of households in the area either “straight pipe” their waste directly onto open ground, or have defective septic tanks incapable of dealing with heavy rains.
The septic tanks back up into toilets and sinks when it rains, an unpleasant and unhealthy situation to say the least. Open sewage in Alabama. Homeless urinating and defecating on the streets of San Diego, LA and San Francisco. Hookworm, Hep A. Soon more once eradicated diseases will make their presence felt. Climate change wreaking havoc in Houston and Puerto Rico. It seems there is plenty of money for the war machine, but none for infrastructure, or health care. The health care system and infrastructure will have to wait because there is more killing to do in Third World countries while America becomes one of them itself.
