Word: barefooted
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Forget those images of barefoot hillbillies and turtleback Plymouths tearing around the hills. Moonshine, once a staple of rural Southern culture, is making a comeback--as a big-city public-health hazard. In a study of 581 emergency-room patients at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital, published in the September issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine, 9% admitted quaffing the stuff in the past five years. At a dollar a shot, moonshine may be enjoying new popularity because of economic hard times. It's also gaining appeal as a novelty drink--flavored with apples, peaches or other fruit to make...
Hebei province, China's breadbasket, is a long way from Douglas Trett's mechanized, 4,000-acre corn, cotton, nut and wheat farm, north of Fresno, Calif. "I just came back from a field where a man was working barefoot with oxen," Trett says in a tone of wonderment, as if he has just returned from another planet...
...Before economic reforms began to chip away at the communist system 20 years ago, medical treatment in the mainland?while often rudimentary?was widely available to its all citizens. China's famed "barefoot doctors," usually middle school graduates trained in first aid, hiked through hamlets offering prenatal examinations and setting broken limbs. The service, essentially free, helped to almost eradicate sexually transmitted diseases in China and nearly doubled the country's life expectancy from 35 to 65 between 1949 to the mid-1970s. But in the early 1980s, the mainland began shifting from communism to capitalism, and peasants...
...Nanzhao in Hebei. There, the local clinic contains a wooden desk, several threadbare chairs and a bookshelf lined with antibiotics, steroids and painkillers. In most countries, such potent medications can only be dispensed by qualified specialists, but for the clinic they represent a revenue stream to a former barefoot doctor with no medical degree. The sole way of covering expenses at a place like this is to "charge for medicine," says village chief Li Jinghua. So medical workers often prescribe them unnecessarily. According to UNICEF, 60% of China's health-care spending goes to drugs, compared with the worldwide average...
...desperately poor areas, the barefoot doctors of Chairman Mao's era might prove to be a more workable model. Gongdong township in Guangxi is a cluster of remote villages three hours' drive from the nearest paved road or flush toilet. Calcite in Gongdong's water causes kidney stones in residents and a lack of iodine in their diet makes goiters common. For the past six years, the French aid agency M?decins Sans Fronti?res (MSF) has trained the village doctors and midwives to treat minor injuries and illnesses with a basic stock of drugs, while referring serious cases to a township...