Scott McPherson's Web Presence

As you know all too well, I have not been blogging much on avian flu lately.  there are several reasons, the top three being the relative lack of news on the H5N1 front; the ability of my blogging colleagues to report on these in a timely and professional manner, rendering my posts on the same topics nothing more than redundant; and my focus on my "day job" as CIO for a Florida agency.

And let me assure you I am working on a very long and important series of flublogs. 

But occasionally things happen that just make me so mad, I have to speak out.  And so today, I am calling on the US Navy, the CDC and the WHO to get NAMRU-2 the Hell out of a clearly ungrateful Indonesia and get it to some place that welcomes it.  Like, ironically, Vietnam.  Or Australia, which would probably be easier to get samples to anyway. 

There is little doubt that Indonesia is politically sliding the way of pain-in-the-neck nations such as Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.  Now I know that the United States is a ripe target for ridicule.  We have done things around the world that the average American is not proud of.  But I am sick and tired of America being kicked in the groin by nations that we are trying to help.  From a health perspective, the nation doing most of the kicking these days is Indonesia. 

People have posted replies to my earlier blogs regarding Indonesia, asking me to be patient and to understand that if the US pulls out of any medical support for Indonesia, it will harm the Indonesian people.

Those pleas need to be vectored toward the real source of potential hardship:  The Indonesian government.  They are the ones harming their own people, and the United States cannot and should not be held responsible for what other nations deliberately do to their own people. 

Back to the title of the blog.  It is time to close the doors on NAMRU-2, and to relocate it somewhere else.  It is time to bring closure to this whole sad story.  Put NAMRU where it is appreciated, not condemned by some paranoid schizophrenic regime. 

Speaking of paranoid schizophrenic regimes: Last night, I watched the film The Last King of Scotland, and was mesmerized by the Oscar-winning performance of Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin.  Today, as I write this blog, I am haunted by that film.   How a charismatic person could lead a nation to ruin and mass death is so sad.  And we see several other nations and entire regions of the planet where government madness, fueled by anti-Western sentiment, is destabilizing this planet.  Supari and the Indonesian government overall would be wise to remember that the West wants to help, but its patience is not infinite, nor should it be.