An Equation for "Why move to Africa?"

I wanted to give you an introduction to our medical mission vision.  A mentor once advised me to formulate an equation to measure my values, and thus give me a litmus test for decision making for our future.  This is it, the impact of our work is equal to need times patient care to the exponents of education and research.

 

 The first variable is that impact is proportional to need.  And this is a snapshot of the world in terms of mortality.  It compares mortality rates among adults by cause and region.  Your eyes are drawn to this bottom row, where the overall mortality for Africa more than doubles the rate of high-income countries, and the cause-specific mortality encompassed in these grey bars: HIV/AIDS and other infectious/parasitic diseases causes more death than all of the combined mortality in the high-income countries.  This is why I am an infectious disease doctor moving to Africa.

And here in the blog, I get to dive a little deeper into global health statistics.  And I think that these statistics have an important message.  I promise only one new acronym from the alphabet soup of the World Health Organization statistics set: Disability Adjusted Life Years.   It is the accepted way of quantifying years of life lost due to early mortality and years of healthy life lost due to disability, and gives a more holistic view than total mortality rates.  Because though more people in the world may die from ischemic heart disease, more disability and early death are actually due to lower respiratory infection, diarrheal disease and surprisingly to me: depression.

And these people, suffering and dying from these preventable and treatable diseases cannot be reduced to numbers on a bar graph.  I can see their faces, with their hollow sunken eyes, overcome and hopeless by the wasting disease of HIV/AIDS.  I can hear their labored breathing as they struggle to get enough air through their lungs, thick with tuberculosis and bacterial pneumonia.  And I can see the children, their unnaturally swollen potbellies from malnutrition.  These are real people, who Christ lived and died for.