A Monkey bite in Uganda: Global Health Care has gotten better

      Here are three anecdotes involving members of my sometimes-peripatetic family to illustrate the remarkable increase in medical knowledge around the world in the past three decades:

1.      In 1994 we spent a few months in Rostov, Russia’s fourth largest city, and one of my sons came down with a sore throat. The Russian doctor my wife took him to looked down his throat, with one of the bunch of tongue depressors that had been sharing a jar and, using only the faint illumination provided by the room’s one window, diagnosed tonsilitis and said the boy had to stay still and might be better off in a hospital. 

     Meanwhile, the nurse warned my wife that the boy would get “very, very sick” if he did not wear a scarf.

     More than one of our Russian friends had cautioned us to stay out of doctors’ offices, because such visits are “bound to make you sick.”

2.      In 2001, I found myself in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I was interested in access to the internet, which I think I realized was in its infancy and which was then available mostly through “internet cafés” (Remember them?), to only a tiny percentage of the world’s population.    

     The young Uzbek man who had been recommended to me as a guide and interpreter actually had an email address, which was, actually, @metallica.com. And he turned out to have been hired by the largest hospital in town to connect them to the internet.

     I was not prescient enough to realize it at the time, but the days of using scarfs to ward off illness were about to begin to end.

3.      My family has just returned from safaris in Kenya and Uganda. Three times along the way, we had to stop at hospitals: twice because of a stomach bug my wife had caught and once because a son received a minor bite from a monkey. One hospital was near Uganda’s capital, the other two were in smaller Kenyan cities.

     And each time we were impressed by the prompt, professional, up-to-date and wise care we received.

     The results of blood, urine and stool tests were available in about a half hour, as they might have been back in New York.

     We nervously checked doctors’ diagnoses against what we found on the internet or ran them, by email (the telephone connection was shaky), by our doctor back in Manhattan. In all cases the African doctors’ evaluations of the situations and suggested treatments checked out.

     A doctor in Entebbe explained that they regularly consult the World Health Organization and USAID. And, yes, he was aware that Trump and Musk have decimated USAID, but it was also clear that he would manage to find what he needs to remain current elsewhere if necessary.

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     Say what you will about cellphones and teenagers and conspiracy theories. But if the internet does nothing else but provide doctors around the world with accurate, intelligent and up-to-date medical understandings, it will have proven to be a significant step forward for humankind.