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© Center for a Public Anthropology,
Robert Borofsky (2001)
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2. Little girl with anthrax:  This little girl makes me think of idiotic public policy. She has cutaneous anthrax, which she got the old-fashioned way: proximity to affected livestock, probably goats (since her family is too poor to have cows). But I don’t think of idiotic Haitian public health policy, but rather the fact that the U.S. government is now pouring billions of dollars into paranoid "bio-warfare preparedness" projects, some of them through universities, when in fact we’re not really sure that anthrax is all it’s cracked up to be as a weapon. As a weapon against the poor, however, it’s quite effective: a young man in this girl’s home village died the day after this photo was taken by my friend Mark Mosely. He had not sought medical care, we were told, because he couldn’t afford the $4 it would have cost for transportation to the clinic.

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