In reading an article on celebrities and plastic surgery by Clive James on the BBC site yesterday I came across the name of an unfamiliar disease that mainly affects children and adolescents, causing facial disfigurement. Underlying factors for the disease are malnutrition and poor sanitation, and it often occurs subsequent to other infectious diseases such as measles or tuberculosis. The mortality rate is extremely high. Given that the WHO apparently estimates an incidence of about half a million victims per year, a not insubstantial figure, I'm surprised I'd never heard of it before.
'Noma'.
Maybe because the effects are so horrible that World Vision-style adverts on prime time TV would induce people to switch off before they can be asked to donate?
It strikes me as being such a preventable disease- it was once prevalent in Europe, and was apparently endemic in some Nazi concentration camps in WWII.
I wonder what would happen if the sort of people who are conned into believing they can obtain a surgical cure for their 'imperfections' were first given the opportunity to read about the effects this disease has on the lives of the kids who survive it; how the work of plastic surgeons whose jobs don't subsist solely on the waterfall of cash pouring from the western cult of personal dissatisfaction can enact real and entirely necessary changes in the lives of these children.
Photo from Les Enfants du Noma.
1 comment:
An imperfect face is an outrage - whereas poverty is just a pity.
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