Sophie Cousins

Tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing more than a million people a year and infecting many millions more, even though treatment in the form of antibiotics has existed for seventy years. TB predominantly affects the poor in the Global South. As Paul Farmer wrote in Infections and Inequalities (1999), ‘the “forgotten plague” was forgotten in large part because it ceased to bother the wealthy.’

‘We die! You make money!’ was one of the slogans that HIV activists chanted at the New York Stock Exchange in 1997 in protest at pharmaceutical companies whose high drug prices had barred millions of people with the virus from accessing life-saving medicines.

In a rare moment of internet connectivity – only possible by satellite – doctors at Ayder Referral Hospital in Mekelle, the capital of Tigray, made contact using Telegram and Signal. ‘The situation is terrible: no vaccines for children, no oxygen for critically ill patients, no chemotherapy for cancer patients,’ one doctor told me.

International Women’s Day on 8 March is an annual event, recognised by the UN since the mid-1970s, that celebrates women’s achievements and raises awareness of gender inequality. If you search for IWD online, the top hit is internationalwomensday.com, a website that promises to celebrate women, provides guidance and resources to support IWD events, and offers a way to donate to female-focused charities. It’s unclear who runs the site, which does not appear to have any direct links to the UN. It lists thirty or so corporate ‘supporters’, including Northrop Grumman, one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers and military technology providers, and Lockheed Martin, the American aerospace, arms, defence, information security and technology company.

The first recorded polio epidemic was in Sweden in the 1880s, though inscriptions in Egypt suggest the disease dates back to ancient times. In 1916 the virus devastated New York and swathes of the north-eastern United States, killing six thousand people, mostly children, and leaving thousands more paralysed. Unlike other deadly epidemic diseases, such as tuberculosis, polio appeared to have no correlation to poverty. ‘Once the terror stalks, mere wealth cannot buy immunity,’ as the Ladies Home Journal put it in 1935. ‘The well-fed babies of the boulevards are no safer than gamins from the gutter from the mysterious universality of the crippling midget, once it’s on the rampage.’