April 18, 2011

World Hemophilia Day


Today is World Hemophilia Day, celebrated all over the world where there are established hemophilia organizations. There will be some excellent photos and public awareness campaigns, which will hopefully help these organizations get recognized from their governments.

It’s also a time for companies to make grants of money and factor as gestures of solidarity, which is great for established organizations.

There are an estimated 400,000 with hemophilia in the world. Up to 75% of them have little or no treatment. Many of them are even in countries where there are hemophilia organizations. But here is an interesting thing: If we could observe the earth from a far, and light up the countries where there are no hemophilia organizations, you’d be amazed to see that most of them are in sub-Sahara Africa and the Caribbean. This means no patient registry, no education and no factor.

It will be a glorious World Hemophilia Day some day in the future when we are able to bring so many other countries into our global community and share our success, our resources and our compassion with them. For now, we can be glad for those we have helped and who are celebrating.

To learn more, visit www.wfh.org and www.saveonelife.net.


Great Book I Just Read
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

I thought to reread this 1942 book from high school days today on Palm Sunday. What a joy! This small book is packed with thought-provoking commentary on religion, good and evil, Christianity, and being a human, amusingly packaged as a series of letters from a senior devil to his disciple. Lewis was one of the foremost authors on Christianity of his day, and is widely known for the Chronicles of Narnia series. But this book is truly one of his masterpieces. Easily read in a few hours, it will haunt you for years. Screwtape writes to his nephew, “dear” Wormwood, guiding him as the minion attempts to seduce a human to the dark side and away from Christianity. It is at once deep, amusing, satirical, insightful and embarrassing—you may see yourself at times in the hapless and struggling human. Far from the silly horror-movie antics Hollywood uses to portray devils, Lewis skillfully points out that devils can merely distract us from “the Enemy” God to win humans over to their side. There are many excellent thoughts and phrases, worth debating and pondering. What would Lewis write today with all our texting, computers, Netflix and video games? Four stars.

ADVERTISEMENT
HemaBlog Archives
Categories