I keep meaning to respond to Michael Meadon’s critique of my position on global warming, but the real world keeps intervening. I’m busy writing about currency intervention, after a fortnight in which I simply had to tackle the topical and thorny subjects of Zimbabwean immigrants (give them citizenship, I wrote), as well as the National Health Initiative and the water crisis (about which I warned in 2008). Mr Meadon, I have not forgotten your post.

Hi all. It’s been over a year, and I keep getting asked when (or if) I’ll ever get around to blogging again. The answer is: I’m not blogging, but I am writing. This gives me little reason to blog and some good reasons not to.

Most Thursdays (and occasionally at other times) you can find a column on technology or telecommunications at ITWeb. Every Tuesday, my column on politics, economics and (anti-)environmentalism is published at the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Branko Brkic’s dearly departed Maverick magazine: The Daily Maverick. I also still write a monthly column for Brainstorm magazine, where the then-editor Brkic first convinced me to write opinion, and where current editor Samantha Perry continues to tolerate my invariably overdue mutterings.

Here’s what I’ve been up to since I stopped blogging, written while The Daily Maverick was still in pre-launch beta testing: Going cold turkey.

Since its launch, I’ve taken up one of my favourite cudgels: Too late to cool it? This week I penned a piece on the temerity of leftwingers who claim to oppose fascism: The irony of the left. I have many ideas lined up to fuel future arguments, so keep an eye on The Daily Maverick. Moreover, it is home to an eclectic group of brilliant reporters, photographers, analysts, commentators and columnists who offer some of the finest reading matter available on the South African internet. It is a pleasure and an honour to be published alongside them.

Elsewhere, this rant on power plugs for Brainstorm magazine elicited some vigorous nodding from readers, many of whom, unsurprisingly, share my pain.

Though a promising challenger has recently appeared (here’s to you, Duncan McLeod), ITWeb has for 15 years been the backbone and daily staple of the South African tech and telecoms scene. Among my recent ITWeb columns are an opinion about which commenters appeared to miss the point somewhat: Sure, fund the SABC with tax, an argument about who might be producing primary reporting in the future: Reviving the leisured classes, and a story about a man, The chief incompetence officer, which may yet have repercussions.

Discussion of or comments on my columns are best posted on the publishers’ respective sites, not only because they buy my bread and beer, but also because I’m more likely to read and respond there. I’ll post alerts of new articles and columns over here, however, so the many friends (and enemies) I’ve made here can follow me wherever I write. Speaking of following, I’m @IvoVegter.

Of course, the archives remain intact, and contain some 218 041 words in 520 posts, with 1 331 comments. Some of the topics I tackled, or responses I promised (but never wrote) will no doubt surface again on ITWeb, in Brainstorm or on The Daily Maverick.

Thank you all for reading and, most importantly, arguing with me. You’ve been a whetstone for my blade: sharpening my arguments, but innocent of how rashly I wield them. You rock — dangerous communists included.

Follow the logic here:

The government will table draft legislation intended to regulate the private health sector, including private hospitals, within two months, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Wednesday.

“It is clear that we cannot sustain unregulated private health care service delivery in this country and at the same time regulate the medical schemes industry,” she told the National Assembly.

“We must therefore regulate the providers and the industry as a whole.”

Of course, once the industry as a whole is regulated, they’ll find that they cannot regulate the health industry and sustain unregulated medical supplies, cleaning services, labour, construction, equipment manufacturing or import… in fact, they cannot sustain unregulated anything.

All aboard? Next stop, central planning. Funeral services will be held in the dining car once a day and twice on Sundays.

Perhaps the government officials and Eskom directors can use some of their bonus money to buy a bunch of flowers and a card that says “We said we’re sorry, you know!” for the Diza family:

A man died at Mankweng Hospital because the operating theatres at Polokwane Provincial Hospital were undergoing load shedding and doctors there couldn’t operate on him.

This was claimed by sources within the hospital this week.

A nurse at the Mokopane Hospital’s casualty ward, Hilda Kgonyane, said Stephen Diza, 22, was stabbed in the abdomen and brought to the hospital at 3am on Sunday morning.

He arrived at Polokwane Hospital casualty ward at about 9am as Mokopane was not equipped for the operation.

Polokwane doctors found 40cm of his intestines protruding from the wound. They rushed Diza to the theatre – only to find that the theatre had no electricity as the hospital had been hit by load shedding.

According to a reliable source at the hospital, the hospital’s generator had kicked in but the chief electrician had then diverted power from the theatre to the other wards.

“The generator’s capacity is not enough to supply the entire hospital with electricity.”

He said doctors tried to get hold of the electrician from 9am to 11am – and did not succeed.

“Because of the patient’s critical condition, he went into cardiac arrest and doctors kept resuscitating him.

“Doctors asked for a helicopter to take Diza to another hospital, but the manager in charge said it was too expensive. They then asked him if they could operate in the casualty ward, but he said it was ‘inappropriate and risky’,” he said.

Doctors then called the provincial Emergency Medical Services (EMS) at 1pm to transport Diza toMankweng Hospital.

“EMS didn’t respond to the calls. Netcare 911 was called and Diza was taken to Mankweng Hospital. He died as doctors started operating on him,” said the source.

Had there been electricity Diza could have been saved within an hour, the source said.

Perhaps Thabo Mbeki or Buyelwa Sonjica can make another speech, asking us to please refrain from stabbing each other until new generation capacity comes online.

The medicine-registration leaflet of herbal remedies provide unexpected amusement. Outside politics, one wonders, can less be said in more formal-sounding words?

I’m one of those people who enjoy bitters. Not just rock shandy, not just sweet Jägermeister. Not just the light aromatic aperitif-style stuff, but heavy stomach bitters, as an after-dinner or night-cap digestif. The stronger, the better. There’s nothing quite like sipping a small glass of Fernet-Branca, Unicum or Underberg along with a tall glass of ice water.

Jurgen Gothe, an upstanding member of the Canadian cognoscenti, writes a fine paean to all things bitter, in All hail Fernet-Branca, the foulest liqueur on Earth. Hail, indeed.

So it was with some pleasure that I discovered, in my local pharmacy, a concoction known as Schweden-Bitter, made by PharmaNatura, “the natural medicine company”. Despite its relatively low price (compared to, say, Fernet-Branca), it compares pretty well to digestif bitters you’d find in the better bars or liquor stores around town. It’s less smooth and rounded, perhaps, but look, this is supposed to be medicine. Forget castor oil. This is the stuff I’d feed to moaning brats complaining about mysterious stomach pains to get off the homework hook.

Still, Schweden-Bitter isn’t a scheduled drug, or anything. So it was with some surprise that I discovered a package insert, just as the law requires of real medicine. Apparently, it is classified in the pharmacopoeia as “A. 34 Other”. Seeking somewhat greater clarity, I turned to the pharmacological action, which is described thus:

This preparation is designed to correct imbalances within the unhealthy body and so enables the organism itself to overcome the disease condition. The constituents in their indicated form work accordingly.

Okiedokey, then. Glad we cleared that up. A friend, who’ll remain nameless, said: “You see, that makes perfect sense to me.” But then, I’ve long ago given up arguing with them about what does and doesn’t make sense.

There’s more. After all, this is a very official and quite formal medicine registration notice, as required by Act 101/1965.

Side-effects and special precautions:

None known.

Known symptoms of overdosage and particulars of its treatment:

None.

Now I’m no doctor, and I have no clue what any of the 20 curiously-named herbs from which this “ethanolic extract” is distilled might do to a person, in great quantities. And to be fair to the makers, it is not recommended to exceed the maximum dosage of a teaspoonful four times a day.

But I do know what a concoction that contains 40% alcohol per volume could do, and I can guarantee you, this piece of paper isn’t going to get me off the hook if I have a few tots of this good stuff and get behind the wheel. I’m also fairly convinced alcohol has symptoms of overdosage (though I am, of course, entirely innocent of the particulars of its treatment).

Now, let’s assume a tot of this stuff to be equivalent to a standard drink, which is about right, given the alcohol content. Based on the information on alcohol overdose kindly published by John Brick, Ph.D., M.A., F.A.P.A., of the Rutgers University Centre for Alcohol Studies (when I grow up, that’s where I want to work), consuming a bottle (500ml) of this stuff in four hours has a 50% chance of killing a 90kg man.

I’d think death is a fairly significant symptom of overdosage, though I can see why they’d omit the particulars of its treatment.

Now, for that tot I just photographed. Your health!

In 2005, according to this news report, “8.8 million people became infected with tuberculosis and 1.6 million died of it. It takes months of careful antibiotic treatment to clear the infection.”

This sort of death toll is why projects like the Copenhagen Consensus, which is due for an update in 2008, cite disease control as a better way to spend a given amount of public money than many others (such as fighting global warming). It cites HIV/AIDS and malaria, though not TB, in particular.

The problem many countries — in particular developing countries like my own — face is that TB treatment is hard to enforce. Although South Africa has had some success with a buddy system to monitor drug treatment, the fact is that among poor communities, rigorous adherence to long-term drug treatments is a problem (and not only in the case of TB). Non-completion of courses of antibiotic medication leads to mutations that create drug-resistant super-strains. These affect not only the country of origin, but the rest of the world.

So, having sketched the bad news, the article cited at the top contains the good news:

Researchers have decoded the gene map of a strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis and said on Tuesday their work has identified mutations that may help develop better treatments.

They also sequenced the genome of another dangerous strain called multidrug-resistant TB, as well as run-of-the-mill tuberculosis bugs, and found a few mutations may explain how the mutant strains evade antibiotics.

“By looking at the genomes of different strains, we can learn how the tuberculosis microbe outwits current drugs and how new drugs might be designed,” said Megan Murray of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Of course, one needs to be careful with statistics such as the number of infections and deaths cited above. It turns out, for example, that statistics on HIV/AIDS have been grossly overestimated. As the Washington Post reports from Johannesburg, South Africa:

The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.

AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.

The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV — estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising — now will be reported as 33 million.

The main reason isn’t an actual decline in the underlying numbers: “U.N. officials say the revisions stemmed mainly from better measurements rather than fundamental shifts in the epidemic.”

Why is this a problem? Well, as James Taranto trenchantly notes in his Best of the Web Today column, the Washington Post piece is quite explicit about it:

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.”

… Among the reasons for the overestimate is methodology; U.N. officials traditionally based their national HIV estimates on infection rates among pregnant women receiving prenatal care. As a group, such women were younger, more urban, wealthier and likely to be more sexually active than populations as a whole, according to recent studies.

The United Nations’ AIDS agency, known as UNAIDS and led by Belgian scientist Peter Piot since its founding in 1995, has been a major advocate for increasing spending to combat the epidemic. Over the past decade, global spending on AIDS has grown by a factor of 30, reaching as much as $10 billion a year.

But in its role in tracking the spread of the epidemic and recommending strategies to combat it, UNAIDS has drawn criticism in recent years from Epstein and others who have accused it of being politicized and not scientifically rigorous.

… Piot often wrote personal prefaces to those reports warning of the dangers of inaction, saying in 2006 that “the pandemic and its toll are outstripping the worst predictions.”

All of this lends support to the arguments by Taranto, Don Surber, Noel Sheppard and others, that UN claims about future dangers and funding priorities are flawed, corrupt, or both.

Large government or inter-governmental spending sprees are no match for scientific and technical progress that tackles real problems, rather than hyping up politically-correct bogeymen. Scientists outwit high powered mutants¹, whereas the bureaucrats create them.

But guess who’s going to get stick when a pharmaceutical company uses the excellent work of the scientists whom Eli and Edith Broad so generously fund, to make life-saving drugs for sale in Africa?

1. with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson [↩]

The Carpe Diem blog has an interesting table confirming an argument Greg Mankiw recently made in an op-ed in the New York Times.

It is standard rhetorical fare on the left (and among foreigners who just love to find reasons to snipe at the US) to argue that private healthcare is worse than universal, socialised medicine, and the fact that raw life expectancy numbers in the US are lower than in more socialist countries proves this. Turns out the causes of lower raw life expectancy in the US are unrelated to the quality or accessibility of private healthcare, after all. If you account for the effects of premature death resulting from non-health-related fatal injuries, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development does with its standardised life expectancy measure, the US comes out on top. Go figure.

(Via Greg Mankiw’s blog.)

For an economics piece (and in the New York Times, to boot), this is a beautifully succinct, clear article. Written by Harvard professor of economics, Greg Mankiw, it addresses three of the most frequently cited canards about the US healthcare system and its implications for the notion that free markets and prosperity are two sides of a very valuable coin.

It argues that the following statements, even when superficially correct, do not mean what they appear to mean:

1. The United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canada, which has national health insurance.
2. Some 47 million Americans do not have health insurance.
3. Health costs are eating up an ever increasing share of American incomes.

The article is an object lesson in interpreting statistics, and as Mankiw writes, “As we look at reform plans, we should be careful not to be fooled by statistics into thinking that the problems we face are worse than they really are.”

Be afraid, be very afraid. If you’ve been eating pork sausages, ham, polony or bacon, you’re going to die.

Okay, you’re going to die anyway, but a new study says you should rather die without eating smoked, processed, cured, salted, or preserved meat. Or any red meat whatsoever. To make it easier to remember, simply add this to the list of things you shouldn’t consume much, if any, of: alcohol, tobacco, white bread, toasted brown bread, milk, butter and margarine (or margarine and butter, depending on who you consult), salt, pepper, anything that makes food taste better or last longer, fried food, potatoes, tomatoes, cheese, canned food, carbonated soft drinks, sweetened anything, spicy food, chocolate, coffee, tea… In fact, just assume you can’t eat something, unless otherwise specified by government, or an agency of the medical or parma pharmaceutical industries.

According to details published in the LA Times, for example,

Once an individual reaches the 18-ounce [~500g] weekly limit for red meat, every additional 1.7 ounces [~50g] consumed a day increases cancer risk by 15%, the report said. Every 1.7 ounces of processed meat consumed a day increases cancer risk by 21%, it added.

So if you eat a kilo of red or processed meat a week, your cancer risk is at least 150%, possibly 210%. Be terrified.

On the ham and bacon issue, it would seems the Jews and Muslims, who listened to God, got it right. To the Christians, Peter explained that in a dream he was presented with a great feast on a picnic blanket (think Wal-Mart, Tesco, Spar), “wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air.” When he refused to eat it because it was “common or unclean”, God told him, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”

The grammar is tortured, but the meaning is clear. Peter might have appeared to be a sandal-shod communist on acid, but he clearly was a PR for the global corporate retail oligopoly, trying to make a good little consumer out of you.

You thought you could get away with eating carrots and nuts? Wrong. The European Union has just set the safe limit of beta-carotene and selenium intake to the equivalent of two carrots and two brazil nuts, according to an article published by a group that claims to tell you what doctors don’t, and is devoted to pushing pills.

Which makes it clear that this whole food health scare thing is a propaganda effort by Big Pharma. Its profit margins on dietary “supplements” (read: “substitutes”) are around 40%, according to the most recent market study by the US Food and Drug Administration. The study is eight years old, so who knows how big it is these days? I’ll bet the FDA is in cahoots with the Big Pharma pill pushers, which is why it stopped publishing research on the subject. Perhaps maybe the pill pushers just threatened to stop paying tax, which would put half of the civil service out of work.

The pill pusher’s poison plot is hoping to make us realise that food is bad for you, and the only way to live is to consume only vitamin pills. Of course, they need the EU and other governments to publish laws that limit the permitted quantities of active ingredients, to keep the costs down and profits up.

On the other hand, I’m a heretic and an apostate. I reckon living increases your risk of death to near 100%, so you might as well eat steak and drink beer. Besides, if I die under suspicious circumstances, it’s not like officials will investigate the pill pushers or government agents. They’ll just blame it on my lifestyle.

Lifestyle. There’s another bad thing. Causes death too, you know.

Here’s what happens when the government runs the healthcare system. If this is what it’s like in a rich country like the UK, imagine what we’ll get when the government succeeds in insuring everyone, for identical benefits, at identical prices. Doctors won’t compete for patients, and as with any price controls, both supply and quality will dry up.

We’re already seeing it with pharmacies. How many in your area have gone out of business because they cannot afford to stock expensive drugs, or cannot compete while markups are capped — in rand terms, not even in percentage terms — the way the government insists?

Better stock up on pliers and superglue. Before hardware stores get the government treatment too.

Temba Nolutshungu, a director of the Free Market Foundation, has written an interesting piece that examines the role and influence of non-governmental organisations in African policy formulation around major development issues. The link will not work forever, so the full text follows.

Statist NGOs wreak havoc in Africa
Temba Nolutshungu

Ever since the 19th century territorial scramble for Africa, Africans have become used to Western intervention in their affairs. Decolonisation and independence was supposed to mark the end of this, and to a large extent, Africans govern their countries in a sovereign way. But long after the pith helmets and starched uniforms of the colonisers have left Africa, a new breed of colonialist is emerging. These are the statist NGO campaigners who hope to save Africa from everything from GM food to globalisation.

These NGOs consist of ‘consumer’ and humanitarian groups and ‘development’ charities. They are united in the belief that modern industrial civilisation, profit and competition are unethical. In their view, people, particularly those in developing countries, would be better served by the existence of strong, comprehensive regulations and state intervention that put ‘equity’ and the redistribution of wealth ahead of the economic dynamism that has made the West and eastern countries like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea wealthy.

Read the rest of this entry »

As per my previous post, the Mail & Guardian Online has invited me to blog for their new opinion section, called Thought Leader. This is my second post:

Thabo Mbeki is quite right

The elevation of axed deputy minister of health Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge to heroine status is a little farcical. The president has every right to relieve members of the executive of their duties, for any reason, or indeed for no reason whatsoever.

It is true that she has been publicly hostile towards both the Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and President Thabo Mbeki in the past. If that isn’t enough, Mbeki certainly has the right to fire her if the member in question disregarded protocol or acted against direct instructions, one of which is almost certainly true. Besides which, flying to Spain accompanied by her son, on business class, at a cost of seven RDP houses, is among those profligacies that the opposition and the media have consistently — and most aptly — criticised before.

So why not be consistent and welcome Mbeki’s prompt action? After all, Madlala-Routledge is a member of the Communist Party, so she hardly deserves loyalty from the classical liberals in the Democratic Alliance. Mbeki was quite right to fire her, and setting her up as some kind of saint smacks of shortsighted partisanship.

You can read the rest of it here.