Well, yes, great, but in the last line of this report are the causes of the disproportionate rates of oral cancer in the DTES - no dental service being one. Yes, a free clinic will pull a tooth if you are in pain, but not give you a free cleaning. So where is the money and other resources for that? The DTES malaise is stuck at the band-aid stage, throw dollars at the results of a problem, and prevention of the problem itself seems to be beyond anyone's vision. See housing, addictions, mental health, poverty, nutrition (on welfare...huh), well being, isolation, and the same tired unimaginative approach continues.
Vancouver Sun
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
VANCOUVER - The BC Cancer Agency is launching a free mobile screening program in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where one out of 150 residents is thought to suffer from oral cancer, compared with a provincial rate of one in 10,000.
"We're taking a proactive approach and screening for oral cancer in populations of people more likely to get this cancer," said Health Minister George Abbott.
"The chances of survival are greatly increased if the cancer is detected early."
Dr. Catherine Poh, an outreach program leader with the agency's oral cancer prevention program, said a more intensive, closer-to-home approach for care is necessary to ensure people seek screening and treatment.
"One in 10,000 British Columbians is diagnosed with oral cancer annually, but the incidence rate is alarmingly higher for residents of the Downtown Eastside, where one in 150 suffers from oral cancer," Poh said.
"There is an urgent need to reach out to this community with strategies that will help prevent and identify disease at early stages when it is easier to treat."
"Our goal is to make access to screening easy," said Dr. Miriam Rosin, director of the program.
The increased risk for oral cancer among the downtown residents is thought to be due to heavy tobacco and alcohol use, compromised immune function, poor nutrition and poor oral hygiene, and limited access to dental care.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008
Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Shelter plan is unfair to hard-pressed area
Beverley Bowes
Times Colonist
Friday, June 20, 2008
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest postal code, is the result of flawed policy and poor decision-making. Today, a Victoria neighbourhood is headed down the same slippery slope.
Practical, rather than moral, grounds were the order of the day in the early 1980s when prostitution was chased out of Vancouver's middle-class West End and Mount Pleasant districts into the Downtown Eastside. The same situation occurred in 2003 in Victoria when sex-trade workers were pushed out of the downtown core and into Rock Bay and Burnside Gorge. Along with The Stroll came the drug dealers and higher crime rates.
The neighbourhood managed to absorb the influx because it is a strong and diversified community. The area comprises light industrial, middle- to lower-income single-family dwellings and condos, transient accommodation offered by single-room-occupancy motels, pockets of executive condo developments, office buildings, subsidized housing complexes, residential drug and alcohol treatment facilities, housing for the hardest-to-house and housing for federal prison parolees.
This community is now teetering on the edge of an abyss, at the bottom of which lies a hell similar to the Downtown Eastside.
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A work in progress - Stephen
An Hour or So With a Mexican Scribe
From The Washington Post
Is this the way ahead?
Seemingly backwards?
The wonderful Schumacher used the phrase 'intermediate technology' to refine the distinction between tools which put the power into the producers of the tools and home made tools which perhaps don't offer the mechanical advantage necessary.
In the villages of old, imagined societies, not everyone did everything. You had a fletcher - putting the flights on arrows, a blacksmith - shoeing horses, a baker - baking the bread.
A local person was skilled and revered for their skill. That skill was passed down through families. It grew upon a natural aptitude as well as something in the blood.
So no one failed. The large boned blacksmith wasn't forced to use his large fingers to be clumsy with delicate feathers.
In today's societies we are somehow made addicted to self-sufficiency.
I recall an incident about 20 years ago when the sister of a friend of mine wanted her bicycle serviced and asked me to do this for her. I remember being very angry at her refusal to learn from me how to do it herself. I had become obsessed with the self-reliant, we must all do everything approach and this incident exposed my unease with it.
So the story of Mexican scribes using electric typewriters to compose bills, love letters or contracts seems refreshing.
In westernized Vancouver, obsessed with formal learning, of course this would combat the idea of an educated population.As Daniel Quinn points out in 'My Ishmael' and Ivan Illich says everywhere, a child knows everything they need by about 12 years old. The last six years just turn them into insatiable consumers. Consumers of goods and of 'training'.
*** *** ***
So the poor people who did not write would be sent to school in shame and pity.
Equality would be cited; you have to be equal Equally dependant on capitalist baubles and trinkets.
The electric typewriter scribes would be sent for 'upgrading', in shame and pity, to become obsessed with computers and be current or modern and keeping up with the times.
But why should everyone be able, read lonely and independent, enough to know how to do everything that the educational and capitalist society wants?
Could it be that capitalism needs everyone to do everything to sell more of everything?
The photographer used to be called in to take photographs, now everyone has to have a digital camera.
So instead of one camera per say 1000 people there are 500.
A true graphic designer or illustrator used to be a talented person who had a gift.
Now everyone with a computer and a silly amonut of money to buy Photoshop thinks they are talented instead of just tooled.
Every house in a street has its own lawnmower, electric drill and other assorted owned tools used so infrequently that sharing could reduce dependency by perhaps 100 to 1/
So the illiterate would swap their illiteracy for dependence on typewriter and computers.
The social interaction with the scribes would be gone.
The scribes would have no work.
But everyone would have imbibed the expectation to purchase expected tools and be so called self-sufficient.
Progress.
