RIFLE RANGE BOY

Vaxxed - From Cover-up to Catastrophe (2016) Vaxxed II - The People's Truth (2019) It must be difficult being educated in the 21st century. With the plethora of information at our fingertips, we are left not more well versed but on the contrary, more confused and unsure about almost everything. The more knowledge we seem to acquire, the more we seem to be wanting. The influence of visual media and the persuasive power of raw human emotions make us buy any story and rethink that perhaps conventional wisdom perhaps needs reassessment. For aeons, people succumbed to communicable diseases. Entire civilisations have disappeared in our not so distant past. The advanced Aztec and Mayan cultures were probably wiped out by the smallpox viruses brought in by looting Spanish sailors. Barring some viruses kept in laboratories for bio-weapons, we have managed to eradicate smallpox from our list of the leading causes of mortality. Vaccination used to be hailed as one of the fifty of mankin...

Credit: Pinterest Sarawak, 1950.  A tattooed Orang Ulu nurse and patient. Have you noticed how so often we are made to realise of our shortcomings? We thought the house was spick and span only to receive a metaphorical smack on the head when it is discovered that the stench was actually culminating the years sweeping the dirt under the carpet and the moisture it accumulated year in year out. Our colonial masters left us with a community level medical services network that we could be proud of. In the late 50s and all through the 70s, every gravid mother, parturient and neonate in a village was given personalised attention by the members of the medical team. They took great pleasure in caring for them from the cradle to the grave (when the time is ripe, of course). One of their greatest success stories is the immunisation programme that drastically brought down the incidence of common communicable diseases. Over time, we have become complacent. Lurking beneath the surface so...