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Putin Accuses Clinton of Instigating Russian Protests - NYTimes.com
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
MOSCOW — With opposition groups still furious over parliamentary elections that international observers said were marred by cheating, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putinon Thursday accused Secretary of StateHillary Rodham Clinton of instigating protests by baselessly criticizing the vote as “dishonest and unfair” and he warned thatRussia needed to protect against “interference” by foreign governments in its internal affairs.
Alexey Druzhinin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke in Moscow on Thursday.
“I looked at the first reaction of our U.S. partners,” Mr. Putin said in remarks to political allies. “The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that they were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers.”
“She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” Mr. Putin continued. “They heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.”
Mr. Putin’s assertions of foreign meddling and his vow to protect Russian “sovereignty” came after three days in which the Russian authorities have moved forcefully to tamp down on efforts to protest the elections, arresting hundreds of demonstrators and deploying legions of pro-Kremlin young people in Moscow to occupy public squares and to chant, beat drums and drown out the opposition.
The crackdown on the protests, as well as the arrest and jailing of some opposition leaders, has stoked further outrage and drawn international condemnation.
Another major opposition demonstration is being planned for Saturday in central Moscow, and while Mr. Putin said that lawful rallies should be permitted, his warnings about foreign interference suggested that the government would view the ongoing protests over the elections as a threat and would take further steps to contain them.
“We have to protect our sovereignty and it is necessary to think about improving the law and toughening responsibility for those who take orders from foreign states to influence internal political processes,” Mr. Putin said.
Speaking specifically about street demonstrations, he said, “If people act within the framework of the law, they should be entitled to express their opinion” but he added, “If someone breaks the law, the authorities and law enforcement agencies need to demand that the law be followed, using any legal means.”
Large contingents of riot police remain deployed in Moscow, as part of what officials had described as a period of heightened security around the elections.
The governing party, United Russia, which has nominated Mr. Putin for president, lost a surprising number of seats in Sunday’s elections. Opposition groups say those losses would have been even steeper were it not for the violations cited by election observers, including the brazen stuffing of ballot boxes at some polling stations.
Mrs. Clinton issued her first comments on the election on Monday, after a preliminary report was released by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The observers issued a scathing report in which they said their main concerns were deep structural problems, including no separation between the government and the political party.
Petros Efthymiou, a coordinator of the observer mission, cited “the interference of the state in all levels of political life, the lack of necessary conditions for a fair competition and no independence of the media.”
There were some predictions on Thursday that outrage over the election results would continue to grow.
“The protest mood is very widespread,” said Sergei A. Markov, a political analyst connected to the Kremlin and former member of Parliament with United Russia. “Especially in Moscow and Petersburg, people are broadly convinced that there was falsification.”
But Mr. Markov said that efforts to mobilize public would have to battle against deeply entrenched skepticism that street protests will amount to much. “In Russia, people are strongly convinced that if there are protests, then nothing good will come out of them.”
And Mr. Markov said he expected the government to treat the public like a whining child. “The authorities will attempt to conduct themselves with society as a parent would a child who is crying and demanding some kind of toy,” he said. “In this case, it is not correct to go out and buy the child a toy, but rather distract him with something else.”
Mr. Putin’s accusations of foreign meddling could provide that distraction.
Government officials had previously accused Golos, the only independent election monitoring group in Russia, of being financed partly by the United States and other Western countries, and of aiding foreign nations in meddling in Russia’s affairs.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Gorge Bush :- African leaders must boost AIDS programmes: AFP:
ADDIS ABABA — African leaders must ensure that programmes to fight HIV/AIDS on the ravaged continent are successfully carried out, former US president George W. Bush said Sunday.
Bush said at the opening ceremony of the International Conference on AIDS and STIs (ICASA) in Africa that funding from foreign donors such as the US President?s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) alone was not enough.
"PEPFAR also relies on African leaders to take responsibility for the success of programs," he said.
"The developing world must set priorities and there is no greater priority than saving a human life," he added.
PEPFAR has contributed $1.4 billion to HIV/AIDS programs in Ethiopia since it was launched by Bush in 2003.
Bush also encouraged the US to remain committed to saving lives in the developing world by promoting fighting disease. "Isolationism is always shortsighted," he said.
HIV/AIDS funding has diminished in recent years due to the global economic recession.
Last week, the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, the leading funding agency for the diseases, said it would not renew funding this year.
"It?s the wrong thing to do from my personal view, it will create a serious problem in terms of putting people on treatment," the executive director of the UN agency for AIDS Michel Sidibe told AFP.
An estimated 22.9 million people are infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, with the majority of cases in eastern and southern Africa, according to the UN.
The ICASA conference is being held in the Ethiopian capital until December 8 and is expected to attract some 10,000 delegates.
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WORLD HAND WASH DAY -Is your world awash with germs? | Society | The Guardian
Only one in 10 of us wash our hands after going to the toilet – yet as a society we have never found the idea of germs more disgusting. Why the confusion?
How many germs are on your toilet seat? You probably don't want to know.... Photograph: Greg Brown / Alamy/Alamy
Saturday 15 October marked the fourth annual Global Handwashing Day, and in schoolyards across the world, in Peru and Bangladesh, in Ghana and Pakistan, Egypt and Ethiopia, 200 million people, most of them children, gathered in a great act of communal handwashing: lines stretched across courtyards, tiny hands pressed beneath taps, a flurry of soap, water and lather.
Global Handwashing Day is a multi-organisational initiative, launched to convince us that the simple act of washing hands with soap can reduce the spread of often fatal diseases and acute respiratory infections. Its organisers estimate that hand-washing with soap could save more lives than any single vaccine or other form of medical intervention.
Encouraging people to wash their hands after using the toilet or before handling food might seem like stating the obvious. But the truth is quite disturbing: people lie – and lie quite spectacularly – about their personal hygiene.
A recent study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Queen Mary, University of London found that while 95% of us claim to wash our hands after going to the toilet, only 10-12% of us actually do so. And our soap-dodging has some unsettling repercussions: one in six UK mobile phones, for instance, is contaminated with faecal bacteria, which can survive for hours on hands and surfaces, transferring to everything we touch.
In a timely collision of events, the film Contagion, a Hollywood blockbuster about an incurable virus spread by a single touch, was released last weekend. "The average person touches their face three to five times every waking minute," Kate Winslet's character intones in the film's trailer. "In between, we're touching the door knobs, water fountains, and each other."
Contagion's story seems fitting in a world that is somehow simultaneously obsessed with germs yet strikingly nonchalant about hygiene. How is it that our society lives in fear of swine flu and bird flu, is so smitten with antibiotics, Cillit Bang and antibacterial chopping boards, yet the vast majority of us do not even bother to wash our hands after we have been to the bathroom?
You can tell a lot about a nation from its public toilets. In the UK we are increasingly following the lead of America, where for years public restrooms have been catering to a growing sense of germ phobia: plastic covers that scroll across toilet seats with the wave of a hand, automatic flushes, automatic soap dispensers, automatic taps, and state-of-the-art hand-driers. Many take their fear of public toilets even further: women making nests of toilet paper to cover the seat or choosing to "hover"rather than actually sit down; where an automatic flush is not available, some people use their foot to press the lever.
That the toilet door might well have more bacteria than the toilet seat is in many ways irrelevant, since this behaviour is motivated not by reality but by the perception of dirt. In truth, many shared bathrooms are cleaner than, say, the telephone on your office desk, your computer keyboard, the dishcloth by your kitchen sink, or your mattress at home, accumulating nightly a steady weight of dust and dead skin and mite detritus. In many ways this is wholly understandable; faecal bacteria spread easily, reproduce quickly and can lead directly to illness. And it is perfectly natural, perfectly logical, that we expect them to be congregating in greatest numbers somewhere around the toilet bowl: silent, invisible, potent.
"If you want to understand why people feel the way they do about contagion, you have to look at our evolutionary past," says Dr Val Curtis, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "We have an innate disgust towards germs, these tiny near-invisible things, in the same way that we have an innate fear that helps us keep away from large predators. So our behaviour, at a subconscious level, is driven by disease-avoidance."
Curtis lists the seven categories of disgust she and her colleagues have identified in human behaviour, ranging from our disgust at the threat of contagion, to the sight of wounds, bodily fluids, rotting foods, physical deformities and the moral disgust we direct towards those who violate our moral codes through cheating, lying or abuse. All of these are rooted in our desire to avoid contamination, she explains. "Disease and disgust weave themselves right through society."
The desire to keep clean is not confined to humans – Curtis points out that birds keep their nests clean, lobsters don't go into the nest of another lobster if it is ill, tapirs have latrines, chimps wipe their penises after sex, and primates groom. But the difference is that mankind has the ability to invent Domestos and antibacterial soap. If previous generations were not as clean as we are, it is only, Curtis argues, because they were unable to be. "There is a human propensity to want to avoid dirt, and now we have been able to build the world that we wanted. If cavemen could have had a white-tiled bathroom, they would."
But today we also have more stimuli to augment our fear of infection. Curtis points to the recent case of swine flu, an outbreak covered widely in the media, and how as a result handwashing at service stations doubled during the epidemic. The flu epidemic that has recently affected Australia, and is therefore destined to reach our shores this winter, will likely prompt a similar burst of public cleanliness.
Naturally, the manufacturers of cleaning products also capitalise on these fears, encouraging us to buy more products, and funding academic research into the best ways to defeat germs. The Hygiene Council, for instance, is funded by Reckitt Benckiser, the makers of Lysol, and even Global Handwashing Day, though a responsible initiativesupported by the Centers for Disease Control and Unicef, is also backed by Procter and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever. After all, if the essential message is to wash your hands with soap, someone has to provide the soap, right?
Occasionally, the science doesn't quite do what is hoped – a study in Pakistan, for instance, funded by a leading soap manufacturer disappointingly found that antibacterial soap was really no more effective at cleaning hands than normal soap. And for all mattress companies' talk of dust and mites and replacing your bedding, there is no hard evidence that dust mites spread illness.
Harsh chemicals may indeed have their own unwanted consequences –a study by University College London's Institute of Child Health concluded that strong soaps, beauty products and biological washing powders strip away the skin's protective outer layer, leaving people more likely to develop allergies.
And anyway, isn't a little bit of dirt good for us? Though Curtis is adamant that washing hands after going to the toilet or changing nappies is of paramount importance to stop the spread of dangerous bacteria, she also speaks of happily eating unwashed vegetables from her own garden. Some people believe there is weight in the "hygiene hypothesis"– the theory, first proposed more than 20 years ago by David P Strachan, professor of epidemiology at St George's in London, that limiting children's exposure to bacteria and parasites early on in life will lead to a greater likelihood of allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases when they are older. In fact a study by the Laboratory for Human Biology Research at Northwestern University found that children exposed to more animal faeces and suffering more cases of diarrhoea before the age of two had less incidence of inflammation in the body in later years.
"Ever since the development of germ theory in the 19th century, with Pasteur and Lister, there came the link between bacteria and disease," notes Kate Forde, curator of the Wellcome Collection's recent exhibition on the subject of dirt. "From then on, the body was the site of a battle between germs and disease, and I think that's something that's still very vivid in our cultural memory – even though the idea has become more nuanced and these days we're aware of things like "good bacteria", and even though some scientists believe that we are cleaning our environs too harshly and that this is leading to a rise in things like asthma, you still have all these ads on TV that talk of 'waging war on dirt and germs'."
"But it's a complex issue," she adds. "It was the anthropologist Mary Douglas who said: 'There is no such thing as absolute dirt. It exists in the eye of the beholder.'" Indeed Forde points out that in 19th-century London, "dirt" was potentially lucrative, and people sifted through the city's detritus, through dead cats, bones and broken pottery, seeking a way to make money – a practice immortalised by Charles Dickens in the character of Noddy Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, who earns his living scouring dust heaps.
"And in the 17th century the Delft scientist Antoine Van Leeuwenhoek, working before germ theory, would scrape the plaque from his teeth," Forde says. "He was so incredibly excited by this dirt, he was entranced by all these little creatures he was seeing down the microscope, and he saw them as proof of God's creative world."
While Curtis argues that our desire for cleanliness is a fundamental human instinct, a hardwired method to avoid disease, our disgust with the idea of dirt is something that seems to have grown rapidly in recent times. If you look at the ways in which our society has changed in the last century this is perhaps not too surprising. Over the past few decades, even as the global population has grown, we have seen an increased physical distancing from one another.
Viewed in another light, Contagion could be seen as a film about our increasingly atomised society as much as one about the spread of disease. "Don't talk to anyone, don't touch anyone, stay away from other people," says the film's trailer. But isn't that what we're doing anyway? A growing number of us now choose to live alone, to avoid our neighbours, to remain untethered to the area in which we live. Furthermore, in a world of email, text, video phones and social networking, our interaction with other people is increasingly virtual, and physical human contact grows ever more unfamiliar.
Arguably with this isolation comes a growing sense of disgust – a fear of contagion through contact with others, a squeamishness about all of the fluids and flakes of the human body. It's worth noting that in Contagion, Gwyneth Paltrow's character contracts the lethal virus while on a business trip to China, where she is cheating on her husband, before unwittingly bringing the virus back to the US. Her infidelity is an interesting element to the tale here, because it allies moral disgust with the spread of infection.
We seem increasingly to view infection as a threat that comes from outside ourselves, that is foreign and other, rather than a matter of personal responsibility. Curtis notes that the automated public bathrooms we see in airports are reflective of our fear of foreign bodies and infection from abroad. She also observes that some people may be so subconsciously repelled by the idea of contracting a foreign disease that they seek to minimise their time and contact with surfaces in the public bathroom by skipping hand-washing altogether.
In her studies of service-station toilets, Curtis found one of the most effective ways to persuade people to wash their hands has been to put up signs by the sinks that read: "Is the person next to you washing their hands?" In these studies, people felt shamed into washing their hands themselves.
Perhaps it is time we began to direct more of that shame towards ourselves. Our disgust with the very idea of dirt and of waste has meant that we are no longer dealing with it responsibly. Forde speaks of becoming intrigued by the idea of landfills – "how far away from us they are, so they have this invisibility" – and tells of the American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles who has taken it upon herself to shake hands with every sanitation worker in New York. "The point of that is trying to remind people that they are connected to waste, that we create waste, even every time we so much as breathe out, so we ought to have a more honest, realistic approach to it."
Similarly, Curtis admits that last week's mobile-phone study was specifically publicised in a way to "gross people out – because disgust is the best way to get people to wash their hands". In recent times our disgust has been focused elsewhere, on foreign infections, on the strangers in public bathrooms, but now it is high time we reconnect with our own dirtiness, that we grow just a little bit disgusted with ourselves. Because, as Curtis notes: "The thing you have to remember is that thedangerous bugs are inside you."
Monday, October 10, 2011
Jerry Large | A passion for family medicine | Seattle Times Newspaper
A passion for family medicine
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Seattle Times staff columnist
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People should never forget that real health depends how well you take care of yourself...(October 9, 2011, by TimothyStaggs) Read moreRead all 2 comments >Post a comment >
When Rich Kovar was about to graduate from medical school, the dean called him in with a question.
"Rich, you're such a good student, and smart," the dean said, "why do you want to be a family doctor?"
Family doctors are generally not the stars of the medical universe. I only know about Kovar because he has been named the 2012 Physician of the Year by one of the country's largest medical organizations, the American Academy of Family Physicians.
When I showed up at his small office in Capitol Hill, Kovar said he was humbled and embarrassed by the attention, but determined to use it as a platform to champion the role of family physicians and community clinics in health care.
The dean's question says a lot about health care in the United States. Sometimes the focus of health care is on diseases, or money, or prestige, but there are some, Kovar, among them, who believe it works best when it is about people.
He graduated from George Washington University Medical School in 1980, stuck to his plan, became a family doctor. He worked on five continents in the midst of war and famine, and now is part of the medical safety net as a physician and medical director of the Country Doctor Community Health Centers, which operates two clinics, Country Doctor and Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center.
In his other professional role, as a clinical professor of family medicine at the University of Washington, he urges his students to follow their hearts.
I suspect some of their hearts may lead them to specialties. That's great, but they shouldn't make that choice because they've been pushed away from general practice by concerns about income or status.
Kovar said he doesn't feel deprived because he doesn't earn a specialist's fees. He said his salary puts him around the 95th percentile of earnings for Americans. He could go for 98th, but why? "If I won the lottery, there is nothing more I would do."
He doesn't feel stressed out by long hours. "I eat dinner at home," he said. He has time for his wife and two children, who are in high school now, and time for sports and other activities.
And he's definitely not bored by the routine. He enjoys getting to know patients over time, and dealing with the full spectrum of their health care.
More importantly for the discussion the country is having about health care, he believes community clinics are the solution to many of our problems, that they are cost-effective, efficient, humane and holistic care providers.
His clinics have not had a low birth weight delivery in two years, which means mothers are getting good prenatal care. It also means saving money that would be spent on expensive hospital procedures if something went wrong in a birth.
Community health centers can't turn anyone away because of money, and as of this year 67 percent of the Country Doctor centers' patients lack health insurance. It was about 54 percent last year.
Kovar said he's seeing more and more middle-class people who've lost health coverage and now turn to clinics for care, but as the need grows, budgets erode.
Clients pay what they can, which is just over half the clinic's budget. The governor pulled state funding, he said. King County hasn't increased its contribution (less than 1 percent of the clinics' $11 million budget) in seven years and federal money is iffy. If clinics don't survive, he asks, where are people who can't afford for-profit care providers going to go?
Kovar's passion about health care for everyone is rooted in the discussions around the dinner table when he was growing up in New Jersey.
His father was a hardworking dentist. His Uncle Sidney, a pediatrician, continued working in his community even as it became poorer. His Uncle Lou was also a doctor. "There was never a family dinner that he didn't take a call and go help someone."
Some form of health care is nearly genetic in his family. His brother is a doctor and his sister a veterinarian.
Kovar got his undergraduate degree in American Indian studies, but one of his courses turned him toward medicine and social-justice issues. It was a health class in which he learned about the terrible consequences faced by Native Americans who lacked health care.
Since becoming a doctor he has practiced on reservations, in refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, in Sudan, Ethiopia, Iraq and several other countries.
While trying to save people during a famine in Ethiopia he met an Irish nurse, who he later married. Having children keeps him close to home now, but just as committed to helping people who have few resources.
"I get to be a community doctor in the community I live in," because, he said, "I did what my heart told me to do."
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