Mourning Statistics: the consequences of Trump’s policies on global health

I TELL THE story many a time when I am faced with choices of having to mourn. Mourning is a collective action of expressing pain. It can be amongst people or about an individual. The effect of mourning is that it takes on total immersion of the body and soul. The body gets exhausted as all its parts cave in to give recognition to the one whom, in breathing flesh, cannot be communed with. Collectively, it arouses moments of collapse and fainting in very spectacular form.

- PALI LEHOHLA

To say that US President Donald Trump’s signing of executive orders has brought about global mourning is to put it mildly. Economically, the demise of livelihoods is not on the horizon, but in households, driving generational harm in terms of deaths deprived of immediate medication.

Economically, the demise of livelihoods is not on the horizon but in households, driving generational harm. In institutions that delivered services to peoples, only narcissistic beings cannot be moved by the scale of disaster at those levels where people depended on the health services the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) delivered.

The sudden closure has been, “You are Fired,’ reflecting the man himself in his heyday’s reality Apprentice show. His skills of firing workers, is not only being aimed at Americans, but for the globe.

In 1998, we worked on a painstaking process of knowing who was fired by God from earth, not only that they were fired, but about how they departed. This was the beginning of ensuring that the cause of death statistics is systematically captured so that, by knowing what killed the dead, the living can be saved.

By 1999, this effort was put into practice. The advantage of having a medical doctor who was also a minister of health made this process easier.

The joint effort from Statistics South Africa (StatssA) and Department of Health, therefore, paid off and we could get the Department of Home Affairs to adapt its forms to capture cause of death better, allowing notification of births and deaths by institution of occurrence, which is predominantly in centres of health-care and not at home affairs. Therefore, locating the innovation at point of occurrence was no brainer.