Where surgery is lacking
On a screen in the cavernous hall at the Harvard Club of Boston were images of two patients, one with a hernia and the second with breast cancer, conditions routinely treated with surgery in the United States. Only these patients were not in this country. They were in the developing world, where access to surgery is a rarity. Instead of neat scars from conditions treated early, the images showed a hernia so distended that it was as large as a football, and a cancer left untreated until it consumed a breast. For decades, the focus of medical professionals fighting to improve health in the developing world has been on defeating infectious disease. In more recent times, the focus has shifted toward chronic illnesses, such as heart disease and diabetes, which until recently were thought of as problems limited to industrialized nations. Public health professionals and surgeons gathered on Friday (Nov. 5) to begin...