"There’s a lot of fear in this country,” said Calvin White, a UBC alumnus who spent a year counselling TB patients in Uzbekistan for Doctors Without Borders, when explaining the title of his recent book, Letters from the Land of Fear.
This week, Calvin White is presenting tales from his emotionally impacting experiences in Uzbekistan from his book at Vancouver Public Library branches across Vancouver.
Nowhere is the impact of irresponsible land use as apparent as in the disappearance of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. In the span of a single generation, a Soviet irrigation scheme to boost cotton drained the world’s fourth largest lake to 10 per cent of its original size. Industrial agriculture in the area relied on toxic pesticides, leaving contaminated sediment exposed to be spread by the region’s periodic dust storms. The change turned a thriving region into a setting for “ruin porn,” with corroding ships scattered in the middle of the desert.
For residents of the former oasis, adding to the obliteration of their industry resulted in a sharp decline in the health of the region’s population. The effects of chronic exposure to toxins manifest themselves in acute respiratory conditions, developmental problems and, most lethally, a multidrug-resistant strain of TB (MDR-TB).
However, the only successful treatment for MDR-TB is not easy, requiring a daily regiment of over 20 pills and injections with a complex of side effects.
“When you’re faced with having to take such a cocktail of medication six days a week for two years straight, you have to have a tremendous amount of belief in yourself,” he said.
The debilitating effects of the treatment prove overwhelming for many who try to continue work, school or contributing to family life — resulting in a high dropout rate. This threatens the situation even further, allowing the untreated bacteria to become even more resistant to drugs. This is where White’s role as a counsellor for MSF was crucial to enable the treatment to work for the affected individuals.
“You can provide the drug response, but it doesn’t make sure that the patients will be able to sustain the treatment, which is why there is an epidemic," he said.
Not overly optimistic about the treatment, White said, “The only way it will be stopped is if they can develop new drugs that don’t have those side effects.”
However, with pharmaceutical research driven primarily by money and fear, TB scores low on the priorities of the big companies and the need for counselling and medical support will persist.
White found cultural barriers in his counselling to be a non-issue, regardless of age and gender. What he saw were people with the exact same issues and vulnerabilities as those he counselled back home.
“Editor’s note: Some quotes from the original article have been removed at present at the request of the source because of their potentially harmful nature."