The World's best kept secret? (More WHA66 article postings...)

http://csdablog.com/2013/05/24/the-worlds-best-kept-secret/

WHA66: The Mysterious Case of the Missing Mainstream Media
Rebecca Megson

My headline could have read “Dr Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) says ‘NO! I don’t talk to the media.’”

A bit of a mouthful admittedly, though that was her response when approached by colleague and fellow journalist Xun Lu at the Sixty-Sixth World Health Assembly (WHA66) held in Geneva in May. Was the response of the Director General perhaps indicative of the WHOs attitude towards the press I wondered?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) holds an annual assembly in which delegations from the 194 member states attend to discuss and define the global health agenda. Health ministers, foreign affairs and finance ministers congregate in one spot to discuss global health care. Their discussions impact the global health market believed to be worth more than 5.5 Trillion USD.

Above all, their discussions impact you and me.

As we have seen in recent years diseases do not recognise state borders. Pandemics are a reality. Our ability to respond and protect ourselves is under threat as antibiotic and other first line drugs become increasingly redundant.
So, given the size and clout of the participants, the dollar value of the market and the very real life-and-death impact on all of us, where are all the mainstream journalists at the WHA66?

Attending as part of a new initiative Who’s there? Yes (WTY) on the role of journalism and public health as public goods led by the UK-based World Health Communication Associates (WHCA) and Switzerland-based CSDconsulting, newly graduated journalism student Lindsay Gill (@SciCommOok) and I querried the press locally and virtually via twitter on the subject.

Jason Anthony Tetro (@JATetro) Huffington Post writer said “some member states don’t want to have the public arena there lest it becomes a circus #scicomm”.

The Guardian Development Professionals Network (@GdnGlobalDevPro) said there were a couple of reasons why they didn’t attend, including having not been pitched to attend by the WHO.

Jennifer Yang (@jyangstar), Global Heath correspondent for the Toronto Star, felt that the WHA66 was a lot about process, which makes the subject harder to digest and to dig out the really newsworthy stories. That said her position as Global Health correspondent is one of a handful of new global beats the Toronto Star has set up in an effort to garner readership beyond Toronto, capitalising on the reach the internet provides. For the Toronto Star global health issues are clearly important enough to salary a reporter – a significant indicator in economically challenging times.
Google ‘66th World Health Assembly news’ and you’ll find an article by China news, a copy and paste of the WHO press release by Reuters and potentially some Africa news and Lancet references.

The World Health Assembly then really is one of the world’s best-kept secrets.

References
WHO proposed budget 2014/2015

http://www.who.int/about/resources_planning/A66_7-en.pdf

WHO estimates on the global health market in USD

http://apps.who.int/nha/database/ResourcesPage.aspx

(WHO Global Health Expenditure Atlas)
World GDP graph from World Bank

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries?display=graph

Ms. Megson was part of a workshop called Who’s there? Yes (WTY) on the role of journalism and public health as public goods organised on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly (WHA), May 2013 in Geneva, Switzerland.

World Health Communication Associates - WHO's Sixty-Sixth World Health Assembly

A friend of mine just prompted me to post the articles I wrote back in May when I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Sixty-Sixth World Health Assembly in Geneva.....


http://csdablog.com/2013/05/26/poetry-in-times-of-tuberculosis/

Tuberculosis: from poetry to present day UK
Rebecca Megson

Mention tuberculosis (TB) today in the UK and images of Romantic poets coughing themselves into an early but poignant death are conjured. In the modern world TB is believed to be a problem that belongs, if anywhere, ‘over there’, in developing countries.

However, London is now recognised as the ‘TB Capital of Western Europe’ with nearly 9,000 new cases per year.
In recognition of this, an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) was set up in 2007 to examine the issue of TB in the UK. Yet, according to Dr Mario Raviglione, Director of the Global TB programme at WHO, despite the APPG’s best efforts, the issue continues to lack the necessary funding and focus.

The APPG recently released their latest report and recommendations in which they called for the implementation of a national strategy and increased UK commitment to the Global Fund.

Talk at the Sixty-Sixth World Health Assembly has centred on the emergence of new Multi Drug-Resistant strains of TB (MDR-TB), which is resistant to front line drug treatment, requiring more complex, lengthy and therefore expensive therapy.

Whilst 60 per cent of cases of MDR-TB are located ‘over there’ – in the Russian Federation, China, Philippines, India, Pakistan and South Africa – instances of the disease have doubled in the UK in the last decade. Without intervention the trend is set to continue upward.

Andrew George MP, APPG chair, said, “While the majority of developed countries (notably the US) have achieved sustained reductions in the number of cases, TB rates continue to rise here.”

In the WHO series of reports on TB published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases (March), whilst most cases of MDR-TB were found in patients born outside of the UK, resistance in London to one of the key front line TB drugs was found to be highest in UK born patients.

Attributed to the outbreak of TB in London that has continued over a decade, it points to the potentially lethal implications of not tackling TB head on and immediately.

TB is one of the biggest infectious disease killers worldwide. It is on a par with HIV/AIDS with around 1.4 million people are killed each year, compared to 1.7 million deaths from HIV/AIDS.

References
UK All Party Parliamentary Group report on TB – Drug Resistant Tuberculosis: Old disease: New Threat – led by Andrew George MP

http://www.appg-tb.org.uk/images/reports/Report%20on%20TB%2011.04.2013%20-MTA.pdf

Drug-resistant tuberculosis: time for visionary political leadership in The Lancet Infectious Diseases 24th March 2013

And what is the situation in India? Read on…

http://www.newslaundry.com/2013/05/tuberculosis-still-a-scourge/

Megson and Ranganathan were participants in a workshop on the role of journalism and public health on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, May 2013

I am Kloot - New Album Review

I was late to the I am Kloot party, I’ll admit. A very dear friend of mine, whose musical ear leads me to believe that in a former life/parallel universe her career is significantly more musically led, thrust I am Kloot’s – Sky at Night at me back in 2010 with a simple ‘listen to this, you’ll love it.'

She was of course right, though I dallied for a while, loaded it up into my iTunes and then forgot about it till the smart lyrics and haunting orchestral tunes caught me unawares, initially mere shuffle background fodder, crying out for more attention. Which the album duly got and has retained.

The new I am Kloot – Let it All In, released on a dreary cold Monday in January is, like its immediate predecessor, produced by Craig Potter and Guy Garvey of Elbow fame. It has already received accolades of album of the week by the Times, the Telegraph and the Times Culture magazine. It hit the top ten album charts on the last Sunday in January. It is heralded as destined for great things, securing the band’s continued (albeit modest) commercial success after 12 years and 6 albums of effort and energy. I wonder, is there anything more to say?

Well, yes, of course there is. The album opens with the expected catchy poetic lyrics in Bullet, from the command ‘don’t open that drawer there, that’s where I keep my ghastly truth’ to the statement that ‘you treat your body like a cheap hotel, somewhere you can stay but never stop’. The movement is bluesy and I’m instantly intrigued, nodding along, agreeing with John Bramwell (guitars/vocals) that this is a story I want to hear. It feels familiar but it feels like something I already know I like. I’m not disappointed as we move into the next track Let em All In….Again, the hook is the lyrics, the easy lazy way of phrasing life as in ’I can’t hear the words for the sound of the information/I haven’t got a job or a hobby or an occupation’.

However the music really comes to life around Mouth on Me. The chorus is catchy, the cymbals (though I understand Bramwell doesn’t like too much focus on the music over and above the words…) break like waves on a shore of bouncy 60s groove moving neatly into my favourite song on the album – Shoeless – which is when things really (forgive the pun) take off. Shoeless, Even the Stars and Masquerade form a central trio around which nostalgic, cine-camera/polaroid snaps are formed. From the sunshiny romance of being in love with the shoeless girl in her favourite dress to the folksy summer field of Masquerade I am Kloot provide choruses that are filled with hopefulness and a sense of the meaning behind the moment. These are the images seen in the peripheral vision, a glimpse almost missed unless we pay heed to the instruction ‘Don’t let the clouds clutter up your skies/Let the TVs turn off their weary eyes, for who are we, you and I?’. Even the Stars opens with a question ‘Did you crack the sky….Did you cross the bridgeless gulf of chatter/Did you say just one thing that mattered’ a catechism on having perspective, after all even the stars die, but even so Bramwell, having seen it sparkle and shatter, affirms jubilantly that he has ‘half a mind/To crush the bridgeless gulf of chatter/To say just one thing that matters’. A rallying cry of juxtaposed words aiming to reach beyond the pretty-but-gritty indie pop-chorus.

The whole album has a reflective, nostalgic feel about it, of looking over a life and giving a nod of approval to a way of living; acknowledging choices made about love, the pub and fame that could’ve come off differently - but perhaps only if lived by a less cool group of people.

It’s good, of course it is. It was always going to be challenging to usurp the acer that was the Mercury prize nominated Sky at Night and it’s close enough to that album in sound and feel to not disappoint. What I am disappointed by though is that the only date (at this moment in time) in the I am Kloot European tour that is sold out is the Bristol Trinity gig on 23rd February. Yes, go on those of you who have tickets, go ahead and mock the rest of us…In the meantime I’m going to call my very dear friend and find out what she thinks of Let it All In…

http://www.intuition-online.co.uk/archive.php?category=3&edition=58

Making New Old Friends

Meeting Feargus Woods Dunlop, Artistic Director of Bath based theatre production company New Old Friends, is an energising experience that leaves you feeling that you really have just made a new old friend.

Fearg’s huge welcoming smile and easy, sunshiny attitude quickly set the tone for the interview.  The passion that he and Company Manager Heather Westwell have for making entertaining theatre that can rival a night out at the cinema or the pub is inevitably infectious and I find myself wishing I’d been around to see previous shows that the duo have been involved in as producers and performers. 

Ensuring I don’t miss the next chance to see them at work I surreptitiously grab the phone to quickly programme in 31^st January to see the preview of Silly Songs of Shakespeare at the Rondo Theatre, Bath, before it takes off on it’s 23 date national tour.

New Old Friends have been around for about 5 years and was originally the theatrical love child of Fearg and friend/co-founder Josh Golga.  Though Josh has since left for pastures filmic and otherwhere for the time being, New Old Friends continue to bound forward, the biggest and most significant leap of recent times being Heather joining as Company Manager.  I settle down, notebook and chewed pen in hand to find out more from Mr Fearg…

So tell me what makes you and Heather a dream team?

We had a meeting recently where our double act of energetically stupid man and slightly disapproving sensible lady was praised as a good bit of branding. But to be honest it’s not that far from the truth. I’ve got a tendency to be a bit “Oh it’ll be alright.” Whereas Heather is fantastic at making sure that ‘alright’ isn’t enough. We want our shows to be great.

And how long have you two been actoring for?

I’m tempted to say forever - Heather used to put on shows for her neighbours with her sister aged about 5! But it’s been an exclusively performance-based career for about 5 years, which we’re hugely grateful for.

Do you and Heather write all the material?

Yes, we write the vast majority of our work at home over a brew/stew. Although occasionally I take the laptop and find a nice spot somewhere to sit and pretend to write whilst secretly hoping someone asks me what I’m doing so I can tell them I’m a playwright! But with Silly Songs, our cast are fabulous and have contributed a few songs themselves which has been an unexpected but very welcome bonus.

Okay, what is the Silly Songs of Shakespeare show and tour and how did that come about?

Theatre Royal Bath’s Shakespeare Unplugged commissioned us to create a show that took a sideways looks at Shakespeare. We wrote a bunch of daft songs, performed them in a silly way, and were picked up by producer/tour-booker extraordinaire Mark Makin of makin projects, and the rest is history.   Since Shakespeare Unplugged we’ve made the show 50% bigger (and obviously 50% funnier!).  I love Shakespeare but I think the weight of the significance of the bard can make it feel as though it’s just for geeks.  Our show is all about our audience being serenaded by the beautiful beehived Sonnettes with our ‘synopsongs’ and having a thoroughly and satisfyingly silly time.

It’s a tough economic landscape at the moment and creative industries tend to get hit first/hardest when belt tightening happens – what’s your survival strategy?

Our strategy can only really be to keep producing work that is worth people spending their money on. It bothers us greatly when we go to see shows charging premium prices that aren’t premium quality because that hurts theatre as a whole. Right now venues are even more scared of unknown quantities so we’re very proud, honoured and grateful to get this tour now.

Where do you reckon the company will be in another 5 years time?

If we continue to move along the path we’re on, hopefully in five years we’ll be settled into a regular routine of writing, building and touring one or two shows a year. Which would be awesome.

What’s next up for New Old Friends in the way of exciting projects?

Well one of the fruits of Heather’s labours has been securing the rights to Anthony Horowitz’s The Falcon’s Malteser. It is a brilliantly funny book that spoofs the film-noir Raymond Chandler private detective genre and we’re so excited to get to work on it. Anthony Horowitz is a league or two above us (he’s currently scripting Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s new movie…) so it was thrilling to meet him and talk about our ideas for staging his book. He’s been great and he’s really behind the project. We’re currently looking to get co-producers on board, so watch this space.

SILLY SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE TOURS NATIONALLY FROM 7^th Feb.

A SPECIAL SOUTH WEST PREVIEW IS ON AT BATH’S RONDO THEATRE
Thursday 31^st Jan, 8pm.
Tickets £12/£10 from 01225 463362 or www.bathboxoffice.co.uk/rondo

Bat For Lashes - The Haunted Man

Album Review I wrote back in November for Intuition-Online and forgot to post here for posterity!

More to come in the upcoming issue....

The mythological difficult third album has indeed been a challenge for Natasha Khann who says during its dark gestation she, "felt like I was never going to be able to write a song again". Stuck in her flat in Brighton, she felt lonely, lost and panicked about having writers block. She sought ways to distract herself, trying to invest her energy in non-musical endeavours though even this approach seemed frustrated for a while until a friend suggested she did unpaid gardening work at idyllic Bloomsbury-set country retreat in Charleston, East Sussex. Amongst the dahlias and the grounding of earth work, seedling inspiration stirred once more for Natasha.

It is fitting then that the album bursts into bloom with the opening track Lilies, a familiar Two Suns-esque Bat for Lashes sound; psychedelic, transcendental and ethereal climbing vocals breaking into a warm, rounded chorus of drums. It’s all graves and prayers and scented lilies but the relief that breaks through in the penultimate verse ‘Thank God I’m alive’, feels jubilant. Exactly the chorus you might expect from a talented singer/song writer who has returned from staring down the barrel of writers block, having seriously confronted the possibility of a life without music.

There are more blooming flowers and abundant gardens saving Natasha in Horses of the Sun and more lyrical affirmations of being alive. The catchy, victorious chorus, ‘You and me we’re wanted on the run, busting out the heavens like the horses of the sun’, does pretty much what it says on the tin, acting like a burst of hot musical sunshine breaking through clouds.

A more pop-friendly sound can be found in All Your Gold, the next single from the album released 29th October; an upbeat, edgy tune about never falling in love with Mr Nice, “Cos you’re a good man, I keep telling myself to just let go…someone from the past, I let him take all my gold, and hurt me so bad, and now for you I have nothing left”. Similarly the success of the song-writing collaboration with Justin Parker (who previously worked with Lana del Rey) produced the popular piano ballad Laura, the first single from the album.

It’s not all positive affirmations about life and flowers though. There are darker, more brooding songs on the album such as Deep Sea Diver. An earthy heartbeat thud underpins the song, lightened by icy rain drops of a piano thaw. Winter Fields begins haunting and melancholic, capturing a childish thrill and fright of freedom found in a changed snowy landscape, when the known becomes unfamiliar and special.

Overall Haunted Man is an album about place and journey, going on the latter and gaining a deeper sense of the former. The album is confident and energetic and bodes well for the live performance of Bat for Lashes on 2nd November at Anson Rooms in Bristol, which I am increasingly excited about going to see….watch this space for a future review of the gig.

http://www.intuition-online.co.uk/article.php?id=2741

Teenage Kiks All Thru the Night

Ella is 14.  She has beautiful thick dark brown hair, perfect raw material for an indie-girl block fringe adorned with flowered festival crowns.  Ella is however one of those teenagers who is angular, unable to tease her hair into sultry style or find clothes that compliment her still-more-child-than-adult figure.

"I've never even had a boyfriend," she tells me.

"What, not ever?" I ask in some disbelief.

"Nah, I say I had one on holiday and that one is best left on holiday, but it's not true."

She pauses thoughtfully for a moment.  

"Maybe next year, when I save up and get some straightners and stuff.  I know I'm not really very pretty." She goes on with a list of things she needs and wants to change about herself and I gently chip in and tell her she is pretty, actually.  She nods in a noncommittal way. 

I want to say it should be about more than just whether she has big breasts or straight hair or ladles of makeup but before I have time to consider how to shape these thoughts into a sentence I realise we're now talking about sex and how she's the only virgin amongst her group of friends.  

"How do you feel about that?" I ask.

"Dunno." She shrugs. "Think I'd probably run a mile if the sex thing came up to be honest." She giggles and we both fall about laughing, saying  "Oooh, no! Put it away!" gesturing to an invisible make-believe boyfriend and covering our eyes.

Ella tells me one of her friends might be pregnant but she doesn't know for sure yet. Apparently her friend had an abortion a couple of months ago but this time she wants to keep the baby if she is pregnant. Her boyfriend of two years is not keen.  Another friend in the group has had five or six abortions.

"Gosh, what a major thing to have to go through," say I.  Ella shrugs again and is pragmatic in her response, "Gemma says it's a real pain in the bum having to go to the doctors to get it signed off."

Ella goes on to tell me about a girl she doesn't like, who has a boyfriend and is known to have sex with other boys.  

"She's a real slut" she says.

In the conversation that follows it isn't just the having sex with many boys, or the cheating on her boyfriend that add up to the term slut.  The sense that the girl is arrogant plays a key part of it.  And that her family has gone bankrupt.  Basically she's a bit of a stuck up bitch and doesn't have the 'right' to be.

The class 'slut' has had one or two one-night stands.  I ask Ella what she thinks of one night stands.  To my (well-hidden) surprise she becomes quite animated.

"I'd LOVE a one-night stand," she exclaims, "it's one of my life long ambitions to have a one-night stand."

"How come?" 

"Well, it's an adventure isn't it? I mean waking up in the morning and not really knowing who's next to you.  And there could be like 7 or 8 guys in the bathroom, waiting to gangbang you, or you could get slaughtered, you just don't know!"

"You know, it could just be a night of mediocre sex and then waking up in the morning and having to get rid of the guy as quickly as possible?"  I say.  She giggles and agrees and goes on to show me Omegle.com.

Omegle, for the uninitiated, is an online 'chat roulette' system, that allows you to talk to 'randomers' on a one-to-one basis.  You can text chat or video chat and disconnect any time you like.  You have to be over 13 to use it but must have the permission of a guardian or parent if under the age of 18.  We're on her phone and before I know it we're chatting to someone.  The first question is 'asl' - Age, Sex, Location.  Ella confidently types in '40, f, usa'.  We get differing responses to that, some disconnecting immediately.  We chat to nearly 10 randomers, never for more than a minute or two. We're always asked sex and age and we're usually asked if we have kiks or skype.  Ella does have kiks as it turns out and takes me to the ap on her phone to show me some of the conversations she's had with boys.

Pretty much immediately they are offering pictures of their cocks in exchange for pictures of her tits.  Immediately.  Ella, amusingly, if rather bizarrely, tends to send them pictures of Ed Sheeran.  Clearly none of these guys are particularly clued up on the teen music scene (which makes me question their asl...) as none of them seem to recognise who he is.  All of them are shocked and quite outraged when they receive her picture, exclaiming 'You're a dude?!' or having a go at her for making a fool out of them.  Ella laughs and is just clicking back into Omegle to give some apparent 17 year old male her kiks name when her mum comes in.

Ella sweeps off, telling her mum that we've been looking at Omegle, though her mum looks frankly blank.  I wonder if 'knowing' your kid is on omegle qualifies as getting permission from a parent or a guardian. 

I've been pretty cool throughout the conversation but I am shocked at how dark Ella's fantasies are.  On the flip side fantasies are a way in which we play out and control our fears, making them (and ourselves) safe.  In some senses Ella is using the sort of chat room technology that we hear so many scare stories about in order to arm herself with information about the opposite sex but interestingly she is categorically not playing to 'their' rules.  

The Unsequelled Breath

Tonight I want to write and the words won't come.  These words have come of course.  Tonight it is easier to write about not being able to write than it is to say my mother died a year ago today.  It is easier to wipe the print from the screen, than to say I have feared this day, to explain how I have felt that after today an irrevocably closed door has slammed shut, separating me from her.  It is easier not to say that I have been scared that after today I will have truly lost her.  It is too hard to say what that might mean.  I am not maudlin.  My life is full of such beauty and good things.  But I want to mark this day, this year, this anniversary.  And whilst the words won't come I watch the clock in the corner of my screen tick past minutes and I feel the urgency of publishing whilst it is still July 1st.

She died in a hospice.  She died quickly and quietly having slipped into a sleep 40 hours earlier from which she never regained consciousness.  She went into that sleep without us having the ability to hold any Hollywood-style goodbye conversation.  She slept believing she would wake, go home and live for a few more months.

What is there to say? Do the words not come because there is nothing to say?  Death is incomprehensible up close and in person.  Once ended it is demanded of us that we summarise the life that was, wrap it up in words that save us from the too close consideration of our mortality or the reality of never touching that person again.  

My mother was an extreminist.  She defied convention.  It does not surprise me therefore that she defies my wordsmithing this evening.  And despite her defiance, because of it perhaps, I make my mark - unsatisfactory as it may be - on the page, and leave my remembrances to toss and turn into the dark dreams of the night ahead.