Category Archives: publishing

by Joel | 1 June 2004 · 7:01 pm

Martha Gellhorn and D-Day at Rainy Day

It’s Martha Gellhorn week at Rainy Day, Eamonn Fitzgerald’s wonderful blog.

As the 60th anniversary of D-Day approaches, Rainy Day will be marking this pivotal historical event with a week of excerpts from the journalism of Martha Gellhorn, who stowed away on a hospital ship and sneaked ashore as a stretcher bearer during the landings at Normandy on 6 June 1944. Her eyewitness accounts of what happened on that long day are among the great feats of war reportage.

The week starts on 31 May with a profile of Martha Gellhorn, followed by excerpts of her writing, of which the following are tiny morsels.

Leaving for France

Pulling out of the harbour that night, we passed a Liberty ship going the same way. The ship was grey against the grey water and the grey sky, and standing on her decks, packed solidly together, khaki, silent and unmoving, were American troops. No one waved and no one called. The crowded grey ship and the empty white ship sailed slowly out of the harbour towards France.

Then we saw the coast of France

Then we stopped noticing the invasion, the ships, the ominous beach, because the first wounded had arrived. An LCT drew alongside our ship, pitching in the waves. A boy in a steel helmet shouted up to the crew at the aft rail, and a wooden box looking like a lidless coffin was lowered on a pulley, and with the greatest difficulty, bracing themselves against the movement of their boat, the men on the LCT laid a stretcher inside the box. The box was raised to our deck, and out of it was lifted someone who was closer to being a child than a man, dead-white and seemingly dying. The first wounded man to be brought to that ship for safety and care was a German prisoner.

On a deck lay a very young lieutenant

The man behind him was a 19-year-old Austrian. He had fought for a year in Russia and half a year in France; he had been home for six days during this time. I thought he would die when he first came on board, but he got better. In the early morning hours he asked whether wounded prisoners were exchanged; would he ever get home again? I told him that I did not know about these arrangements, but that he had nothing to fear. I was not trying to be kind, but only trying to be as decent as the nurses and doctors were. The Austrian said, ‘Yes, yes.’ Then he added, ‘So many men, all wounded, want to get home. Why have we ever fought one another?’ Perhaps because he came from a gentler race, his eyes filled up with tears. He was the only wounded prisoner on board who was grateful or polite, who said ‘Please’ or ‘Thank you’, or showed any normal human reaction.

They spoke of the snipers

Two men who thought they were being invited into an old woman’s house to eat dinner were actually being warned of snipers in the attic; they somehow caught on to this fact in time. They were all baffled by the French and surprised by how much food there was in Normandy, forgetting that Normandy is one of the great food-producing areas of France. They thought the girls in the villages were amazingly well dressed. Everything was confused and astounding: first, there were the deadly bleak beaches, and then the villages where they were greeted with flowers and cookies — and often by snipers and booby traps.

Rainy Day and Regions of Mind, two blogs rich in history, were the ones that most inspired me to start my own. One feature I particularly like about Rainy Day is the regular inclusion of excerpts from journals or diaries that present an articulate individual’s unique perspective on events.

Anti-Vaccination Fever

The January 2004 issue of Skeptical Inquirer ran a report by William John Hoyt, Jr., under the title “Anti-Vaccination Fever: The Shot Hurt Around the World”:

Sensationalist media, religious fanatics, and alternative medical practitioners fanned the fires created by questionable research to spawn worldwide epidemics of a disease that had almost been forgotten.

“A poignant television story of a victim of a rare reaction to a vaccine can render invisible the vast good brought about by this same vaccine.” — John Allen Paulos

When pertussis takes hold, the infected person makes horrid, whooping sounds as he inhales. When he gets a chance to inhale. Which isn’t often during the torturous “paroxysmal phase,” characterized by sudden attacks of repetitive, severe coughing. The disease’s Latin name, pertussis, translates as “intensive cough.” But whooping cough, the common name, does a far better job of describing the unique whooping sound the disease’s victim makes when, finally, he gets a chance to breathe….

You have probably imagined an adult victim while reading thus far. In fact, before an effective vaccine became available, pertussis had been a worldwide leading cause of infant deaths. Before the 1940s, it was a major cause of infant and child morbidity and mortality in the U.S. (CDC 2002). From 1890 to 1940, in New South Wales, whooping cough killed more children under five than diphtheria. It was second only to gastroenteritis as a cause of infant deaths (Hamilton 1979)….

Fear and Loathing on the Vaccine Trail

In 1906, researchers discovered that the Bordatela pertussis bacterium caused pertussis. Within twenty years of that discovery, the first whole-cell pertussis vaccine was developed (Research Defence Society 1999). After two decades of testing and refinement, many countries accepted varying versions of a whole-cell pertussis vaccine, established vaccination protocols, and began to vaccinate their citizens. Many of the vaccine manufacturers produced a combined diphtheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine.

For most countries, as vaccination coverage increased, both the frequency and severity of pertussis epidemics markedly declined. Ironically, this success actually may have been the vaccine’s undoing, as presaged in this pointed 1960 British Medical Journal commentary: “When immunization results in the virtual elimination of a disease it is inevitable that some will question the continued need for routine inoculation of all infants” (Editors 1960).

The first hint of a problem came from Sweden in 1960, less than ten years into its vaccination program. Sweden had previously seen pertussis incidence rates as high as nearly 300 per 100,000. By 1960, the incidence rates were merely a third of that and falling (Gangarosa et al. 1998). It was at this time that Justus Ström, an influential Swedish medical leader, questioned the continuing need for pertussis vaccines. In his British Medical Journal paper, he claimed pertussis was no longer a serious disease because of economic, social, and general medical progress. Furthermore, he cited thirty-six cases of neurological conditions that he attributed to the whole cell pertussis vaccine, calculating an alarming neurological complication rate of 1 in 6,000 (Ström 1960)….

Then in the United Kingdom, in 1974, Kulenkampff and his colleagues published a paper citing another thirty-six cases of neurological reactions that they attributed to the whole cell pertussis vaccine. The paper’s evidence was weak on several fronts acknowledged by the authors. They clearly stated they “do not know either the prevalence of natural infection or the frequency of inoculation encephalopathy (brain diseases resulting from vaccination) in the population we serve” (Kulenkampff et al. 1974). And they noted that “in as many as a third of our patients there were contraindications to inoculation with pertussis vaccine, in that there was a previous history of fits, or family history of seizures in a first-degree relative; reaction to previous inoculation; recent intercurrent infection; or presumed neurodevelopmental defect” (Kulenkampff et al. 1974).

Despite the authors’ appropriately cautious approach to their paper, the anti-vaccination advocates seized upon it, and the media ran with it. Soon after the paper’s publication, British television aired a program on the whooping cough vaccine. Focusing on the anecdotal evidence of terrible adverse reactions supposedly caused by the vaccine, it presented little of the clear good the vaccine had done historically.

The negative press and television coverage persisted for years….

Brief summaries and graphs then detail how pertussis infection rates spiked to epidemic levels in countries where panicked medical establishments abandoned or severely cut back on vaccination programs.

Returning to the Status Quo Ante Botchum

The epidemics shocked many of the nations that experienced them, although official and public responses have varied. Many countries introduced acellular pertussis vaccine as a “safer” alternative to the whole-cell vaccine. Some have also tried to control the problem by introducing more vaccination boosters to the protocol. But other countries, those whose vaccination programs were unaffected by anti-vaccination movements, haven’t experienced these epidemics at all. These countries include Portugal, Hungary, Norway, the former East Germany, Poland, and, until recently, the U.S.

Japan’s reaction to its epidemic was swiftest and strongest. By 1981, Japan resumed vaccination with an acellular pertussis vaccine and pertussis incidence rates returned to their pre-fiasco levels. The United Kingdom’s vaccine uptake rate began slowly climbing, and by the 1990s reached levels exceeding those prior to the hysteria. English and Welsh pertussis incidence rates declined accordingly.

Sweden, however, remains plagued with high pertussis rates. As recently as 1996, and despite continuing epidemics, Sweden had yet to resume vaccinations (Cherry 1996). Australia’s efforts to halt pertussis continue to be thwarted by a passive anti-vaccination movement. The 2001-2002 epidemic bears witness to that. The Russian Federation has also failed to regain control and today has one of the highest pertussis incidence rates in the developed world.

Distorted numbers, confusion of correlation with causation, and statistical innumeracy certainly played roles in this sad story. Sensationalist media campaigns fanned the glowing embers. But in each of the countries that experienced the raging fires of epidemics there were other forces at work. Most prominent in passive anti-vaccination movements were religious groups whose opposition was based on religious or moral grounds. Prominent in both passive and active anti-vaccination movements are followers and practitioners of homeopathy, chiropractic, and natural and alternative medicine (Gangarosa et al. 1998)….

When anti-vaccination alarm takes hold–characterized by sudden attacks of the media, mistaken researchers, fervent religious groups, and alternative medicine quacks–the infected society begins to make horrid, whoppingly bad decisions. There is, as yet, no Latin name for this peculiar social disease.

via Arts & Letters Daily

South Korea’s New Hybrid News Organization: OhmyNews!

Donata Communications has posted an article about a new type of media organization that apparently helped drive greater participation by normally apathetic younger voters (the “2030” generation, those in their 20s and 30s) during the recent elections in South Korea, the most “wired” society on earth. The article by Terry L. Heaton has a grandiose title–TV News in a Postmodern World: The Genius of OhmyNews–but is well worth a full read.

Whether it was genius, luck, timing or all three, OhmyNews! has become a very powerful media entity in South Korea, and the amazing thing is that its principal tool is a Website. OhmyTV is a very slick streaming online TV station, and their election night coverage would’ve stunned even the so-called “experts” at the network level in the U.S. The graphics and sound effects alone were enough to make any producer drool. OhmyNews! also publishes a Saturday print edition now, but its bread and butter is the Internet.

According to the UCLA Center for Communications Policy World Internet Report, there are two noticeable differences between U.S. and Korean Internet users. Seven in ten Korean users believe that most or all of the information on the Web is accurate or reliable. That’s compared to a little over half of Internet users in the U.S. Secondly, Internet users in Korea spend considerably more time online and less watching television than their U.S. counterparts.

Updates and bulletins can happen at any time, but OhmyNews! “publishes” its content three times a day, 9:30 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. It is, therefore, targeting a largely working audience. It also provides news via cell phones and other mobile devices.

Staff reporters (80% of whom began as citizen reporters) now number over 50 with almost 27,000 citizen journalists contributing. The American-educated Oh has a history of rejecting traditional journalism, having worked for alternative media outlets before founding OhmyNews!.

We do not regard objective reporting as a source of pride. OhmyNews does not regard straight news articles as the standard. Articles including both facts and opinions are acceptable when they are good.

And “good” is in the purview of his editors. It harkens back to the days before the elite “professionalism” took hold in the early 20th century, and it’s obviously resonating with the citizenry in South Korea.