Gadgets for the poor and sick

How much can technological advances be expected to narrow the gap between the richer and poorer countries of the world, including the health gap in terms of life expectancy, morbidity, mortality, and the rest of the merry gang of indicators?

I guess I tend to be a bit skeptical about high-tech gadgets lifting people and communities out of situations of disease, oppression and squalor. For example: Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is awash with cellphones. Unfortunately, that is not all it is awash with, and having a cellphone in itself is not much help when you struggle with a dodgy food supply, a cholera outbreak or an electricity grid gone AWOL.

So when Huffington Post asked me to comment on a TED talk about an innovative way of controlling malaria in Africa by zapping mosquitos with lasers ... my diminished enthusiasm was hard to hide. I hope I am proved wrong: maybe the lasers will rid Africa of the vectors of disease that cause so much mayhem. Who in their right mind wouldn't want that? But I have the feeling that technological inventions flourish in social, political and economic circumstances that are already in relatively good shape, while in the less favorable ones, they just add to the decor.

Coffee, malaria and bioethics

Quite an interesting reversal. Increasingly, when it comes to new drug development, the developing world acts as 'tasters' for the richer countries of the north, taking on the burdens of being research subjects and hoping against hope that they or their community can share in the benefits, though often the resultant drugs are for conditions that are not very prevalent in their own communities anyway.

So it is quite surprising to learn that safety and efficacy trials of new malaria vaccines will be conducted in ... Seattle. This rainy city is usually associated with grunge music, coffee and computer geeks, but it is apparently also home of a significant number of people willing to knowingly get bitten by malaria-carrying mosquitos. True, they will only be exposed to malaria strains that can be effectively treated with existing drugs, and the researchers will have fancy diagnostic tools to detect malaria infection among study participants right away. Still, it is awfully sporting (and even noble) of research volunteers in Seattle to participate in research on a disease that does not affect their community at all -- either that or they are in desperate need of quick cash for the Starbucks. Funny: when research is done in developing countries largely for the benefit of the developed world, we are liable to call it exploitation. When the reverse happens, it's called altruism. It is only against (senseless) global inequality that this makes sense.