Population, Gender, and Disparity - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 72

various parts of Asia and can assure you that conditions
in most are grim.

mind that the majority of Chinese still live in rural
areas, earn little more than $US 2.00 a day , and have
no social safety nets other than their families.
On another occasion, I was on my way to
Laos from Thailand and I heard from an interna-
tional health-care volunteer that her small hospi-
tal in the northern tribal region had virtually no
supplies. I was going into the country by land and
knew that the border guards were instructed not
to let foreigners bring any goods in. I purchased
rubber gloves, bandages, Dettol (a disinfectant),
and syringes in Bangkok. The needles were easy
to get because they are distributed freely to drug
addicts in an effort to reduce the occurrence of
AIDS. Since you can only get one a day , I had to
visit several dispensaries. I packed the supplies in
my backpack under my camera equipment and
put a US$20 on the top (which is a lot of money
in Laos). Needless to say , I crossed the border
with ease; the US$20 disappeared and I was able
to deliver the goods to the hospital.

Personal Experiences
with Health Care in Asia

Once I went to a clinic in Simla (a popular Indian
tourist destination) because I had a bad cut on my
knee. The female doctor had completed medical
school in New Delhi where she was well trained.
However, she had very few supplies in her one-room
clinic. There were some tongue depressors, a jar of
cotton balls, a role of gauze, a large bottle of iodine
closed with a cork, and little else. Red, rubber hot-
water bottles were hanging on a wall. I have no idea
what these were used for. Thankfully , she was able
to tend to my knee.
Doctors may be poorly trained and are not
necessarily fully licensed physicians. They may be
little more than medical aides with a few weeks'
training. I met a young “doctor” in Xian, China,
who told me he was a cardiologist. When I in-
quired about his training, he said that he had
gone to “cardiology college” for four years after
finishing high school.
At Number Four People' s Hospital, a “nurse”
wanted to give me an injection because I had a
sinus infection. The room was filthy , and a “doctor”
squatted on the top of a dirty , rough, wooden
table where he smoked a hand-rolled cigarette.
There was a large, deep sink that was covered
with blood and who knows what other stains.
There was a grimy mop standing up in the corner
of the sink. The nurse rummaged around in a
drawer and came up with a big, rusty-looking
syringe that was unpackaged and clearly not ster-
ilized. The needle looked like something from the
Dark Ages—very long and so thick that I could
look up the hole at the end of it. She smiled
broadly and said: “I give you needle; I very good;
I practice on orange.” I said hsieh-hsieh (thank
you) and made a hasty exit.
China has recently built over 2,000 modern,
state-of-the-art hospitals, but these are situated in
large cities. Thus they could serve the local resi-
dents as well as country folk who came to town to
work or visit. However, it' s not working like that.
T Tests and treatments are costly , and medical insur-
ance no longer exists for most people. Keep in

ARE THERE TOO MANY PEOPLE ON EARTH?
Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of
Population in 1798. In it he forecast that population
growth would soon outstrip the world' s food supply .
Malthusian theory was touted into the 1990s and then
fell out of favor as demographers and others recognized
that overall fertility rates were falling in the context of
development and increasing affluence. Predictions are
that the global fertility rate will dip below the global re-
placement rate by 2020.
Neo-Malthusians claim that while fertility rates are
important, it is absolute numbers that count. They note
that another 2.4 billion people will be added to the global
population over the next 40 years. If, because of high fer-
tility rates in earlier generations, there is a bulge of
women of childbearing years, more children will be born
overall even though individual women are having fewer
births. Families will be smaller but there will be more of
them. At current rates, the global population will be over
9 billion in 2050.
T Today, , the critical issue related to population increase
is environmental damage. As development helps hundreds
of millions of people to escape grinding poverty , it also en-
trenches them more deeply in the capitalist economy . As
we saw in Chapter 2, modern consumption patterns are
devastating the global environment. At this point, a poor