Today is the 50th birthday of medical doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer — born in North Adams, Massachusetts (1959) — the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tracy Kidder's (books by this author) recent book: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (2003). He specializes in infectious diseases, and sets up hospitals and community health centers to provide free health care to the world's poor.
He got started 26 years ago by treating patients in Haiti when still a student. There, he gave HIV-positive pregnant women antiretroviral drugs so that HIV would not be transmitted to their unborn babies. He also set up community-based treatment programs in Peru for virulent tuberculosis; the TB strain was once considered a death sentence, but his treatment method cured 80 percent of infected patients. He set up a program for treating the sick in Russian prisons, and other programs in Lesotho and Malawi. Paul Farmer now resides much of the year in Rwanda, where he and the organization he co-founded, Partners in Health, are working with the Rwandan government and the Clinton Foundation to set up an ambitious national health program.
Paul Farmer has written more than 100 scholarly publications; among his books are AIDS and Accusation (1992), Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (1998), and Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2003), in which he wrote, "In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity."
On November 1 -- six days later -- I found a copy of the book on the sidewalk in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, amidst a pile of garbage. If you know me well enough, you know I picked up that book. The synchronicity was too much to bypass, and I am eager to start reading it, as soon as I find some way to disinfect it.
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On the Bus Mall - the Decemberists
Rock over Portland, rock on Port-au-Prince
Maxwell House - good to the last drop
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