Abraham Verghese

 Otfura Bamie

It is here that a book by Abraham Varghese ‘My Own Country’ (1994) stabs close at heart and it’s considered important,. The book deals on the urban dynamic of Johnson City Tennessee which experienced no protection from were spreading like fire. But unlike the cases of ignorance and partisan politics of casting a weight blanket on the Gay communities in Tennessee, the story ran by Itano on the problems of burying the head, also indicated that it affected a casualty rate among pregnant women that was nowhere seem before. The contagious theory of the use of blood was not discourses, and seemed to miss out in her book, yet set against a more balance theory that there was little or no stories of anemia among these women and children, lives the story to something much sinister, that it might be questioned whether the blood industries of the outbreak of X Factors for Hemophiliacs were to be measured as a component of the spread in the earlier years of these African States, and if not, could then suggest that the issue of blood contamination played a different role elsewhere where for similar reason it played out differently in the names of Vaccines produced and tried on these women in the 80’s and 90’s without their full consent. Reading from the Verghese book, (1994), we discover the strange reasons why there is a failure in tying some of the loose ends of the study of the Virus. He mentions for instance that “…pneumocystis had a long history before AIDS made it a household word. Epidemics of Pneumocystis swept through Europe in the 1940’s. They occurred primarily in premature infants in orphanages, in the setting of overcrowding and malnutrition.”  The author discussing this statement made overt connection between the depletion of one’s defense system and the activity of some external agent repeating some of the earliest claims that not all immune deficiencies are caused by Pneumocystis, that Europe after the wars discovered itself confounded by the cases of ‘immune compromising conditions’ and one of such was this virus and the other was also Leukemia which required long list of blood donors. The author goes on to raise the question on the nature of the Virus and why as late at the 1990’s its pathology still eluded the most accomplished medical scientist. He asked “how are we to view this organism? As an invader from outside? Or an as opportunist from within?,” and he attempted to answer the question by referencing a case of infecting a rat with pneumocystis  pneumonia, that ‘all you to do is give the rat cortisone, - a potent suppressor of immune system – and the rat then spontaneously develops pneumocystis infection.’ That in comparison to the injections on the rate with Staphylococci, the rat is able to mount immune response. His conclusion and the conclusion of his colleague named ‘Betty’ from the Rat experiment is that “…Pneumocystis is present in low numbers in the lung at all times….The constant vigilance of the immune system keeps it in check. Immune suppression by steroids…AIDS results in unchecked multiplication of this organism.”