Samples of Patricia Leidl's published work
Introduction: Humanity at the crossroads Since their discovery, antibiotics have completely transformed humanity’s approach to infectious disease. Scourges that once struck terror into the hearts of millions—plague, whooping cough, cholera and scarlet fever—have been, or are on the verge of, being controlled. Improvements [...]
Section one: why vaccines? “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Thus carolled Benjamin Franklin, legendary American man of letters, epigrammatic homilies, and founding father of contemporary electronics. Although Franklin lived in a time when [...]
Introduction: unsafe injections - a global problem Chan Tha is 12 years old. Every day she helps support her family by scavenging for used syringes in mountains of refuse that make up the city’s dump. She is small for her age and, like so many children who make their living digging through the stinking heaps of flyblown garbage, her [...]
“One day, not so long ago, a woman showed up at the clinic showing signs of a complicated late-stage pregnancy. I asked her husband to let her come to the hospital for 10 days to deliver safely and get support, or she would die. The man told me that he did not have money for 10 days [...]
Silent spring: the tragedy of India's never-born girls Ranu killed her first two children by strangling them hours after their birth. Both were girls. Married at the age of 18 in the northern, drought-prone Indian state of Rajasthan, Ranu has [...]
Introduction “They went after my daughter, and I knew they would rape her. But she resisted and said she would rather die than have relations with them. They cut off her left breast and put it in her hand. They said, 'are you still resisting us?' She said she would rather die than be with them. [...]
Ivette Badilla was a ‘naïve little girl’ who enjoyed a lively game of ball with her friends after climbing into cars with strangers and exchanging oral sex for money. The second youngest of a poor family living in San Jose’s most squalid and dangerous neighborhood, ‘father’ was [...]
TAJIKISTAN — Amina met her husband for the first time on her wedding night. A screen separated the newlyweds, and Amina recalled trembling with fear and anticipation over meeting, for the very first time, the man who would be her husband and the father of her children. He lifted her veil and then did something completely unexpected: he reached over and wrapped both of his big hands around the 14-year-old’s throat so tightly that Amina could feel herself go lightheaded and then begin to pass out. “This is to show you who is boss,” he hissed while her new mother and father-in-law smiled on approvingly. Her first sexual encounter was a nightmare of repeated assaults. “I knew then,” as she told her maternal aunt afterwards, “that from that point onward, I would be better off dead.”
Used syringes, garbage and clothing litter the floor of Sarah’s 10 by 10 ft room. Pockmarks, scabs and the scars from years of hard living mar the features of the still-pretty 26-year-old French Canadian. A long, sad-eyed man she introduces as her “room-mate” unfolds his gaunt frame [...]
The dust hangs heavy over Kandahar. Eight years into the NATO invasion and locals maintain that not much has changed here. Drugs, guns and militancy still flow freely through this semi-autonomous “tribal” belt of desert, dust and sandstone that span the troubled borderlands with neighbouring Pakistan. Its inhabitants—nearly one million strong—are mainly Pashtun with a smattering of Baloch, Brahui, Tajik and Hazara. Today, the capital city of the same name is what some describe as the ‘wild east’, a jihadist Hole-in-the-Wall of 110,000 residents, some of whom, Coalition forces maintain, participate in development projects by day and insurgency by night. A sprawling town of concrete and mud punctuated by the occasional mall and RPG-pocked government building, it is also home to a proliferation of hulking bunker-like mansions distinguished as much by bad taste as the battle-hardened guards that bristle every time anyone strays too close. Concertina wire and kitsch: The transnational aesthetic of those who would enrich themselves with ill-gotten gains.
Amina* is 40-years-old but looks like 60. Her husband died some years ago from overwork and age. Like so many Afghan women, Amina was married at 14 to a far older man. Today she lives with her ten children in a decrepit house on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, the dusty capital of Helmand Province. Less than a year ago she had nothing to eat and was desperately ill with kidney and stomach disease. Her children wept with hunger and most of the tiny income she earned from embroidery, washing and other menial work went to pay her landlord. Amina does not know her last name because, like 90 per cent of Afghanistan’s women, she could neither read nor write.
As more sickening details emerge in the Arab media—including mobile phone videos etc.—of what actually happened to CBS reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square February 13 the rhetoric on the left/right divide shows no signs of abating. Some bay that it was ‘pro-Mubarak’ thugs who sexually assaulted (mounting evidence points to gang rape) and almost killed the 39-year-old mother of two, while others point the finger at ‘pro-liberation’ hooligans, Muslim fanatics or ‘liberal’ revellers. Such distinctions however, have nothing whatsoever to do with the reason why Logan was attacked and in fact obscures the real issue. The simple fact is that the gang of men who attacked Logan did so because they wanted to and could. Not only was she blonde and western (Logan was born in South Africa) but she was an independent, seasoned reporter at the top of her game in a country where females are still regarded as third-class citizens. Once separated from her team (some Arab sources claimed a burly bearded man pulled her away by her hair) she was a lone woman in an ocean of men.
By Valerie M Hudson and Patricia Leidl | Published by World Politics Review The massive, exhilarating protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen mark a sea change for the better in the Arab world. But the implications of the uprisings for women in these countries have not yet been fully analyzed. All of the countries currently experiencing upheaval have made significant progress for women -- progress that could be swept away very easily, as it was in Iran in 1979, never to be regained.
Pervasive stunting hampers poverty alleviation efforts
By Patricia Leidl and Didier Habimana
Jeanette is five years old but unnaturally tiny for her age. A year ago she could not stand, play with other children, eat solids or talk. The thin monotonous wail that convulsed her scrawny frame drove her mother, Esperance, to distraction. “I desperately feared that she might die”, says the 45-year-old. “Her hair colour changed. It turned orange.”
Universal Birth Registration in Pakistan
By Patricia Leidl | Published by World Vision
It is an overcast day and stagnant ponds of greasy water pockmark the fields that surround Matta, a nondescript village located in Kasur, Pakistan, a bleakly impoverished district huddled against the teeming Indian subcontinent to the south. In the compound where Safina Sarfaz, her husband and three daughters live, goats bleat angrily while scrawny chickens scratch amid piles of refuse.
