Poor public health seems to be a legacy of centuries of over-populationand poverty. Loud hawking and spitting is an awful national habit. In our hotel, one of only two four stars in Guiyang (there are no five stars) well-dressed men spit into the pebble-lined cigarette extinguishers next to the elevators. The condition of public toilets is best left to your worst imagination. If H5N1 mutates into a deadly pandemic virus, this country is one of the prime sites for it. With over 2 billion people, the density is ideal for person o person transmission. The BBC TV news had the Asian head of the WHO say that the estimates of how many people will die from a pandemic if it happens is between 5 million and 150 million, depending on how prepared the world was to respond quickly. Scary.
Yokelin drew my attention to the fact that almost every child below the age of three that we see is a boy. The Chinese obsession with having a son, coupled with the one-child policy, easy access to ultrasound and abortion, is the best explanation. The university students I have met told me that there is already a huge social problem with the gender imbalance in their cohort group. A fewdays ago in Chongqing airport we saw for the first time two openly gay men. They caught the same plane as us. One had lipstick and walked with a womanly gait, and the other was his partner. I askedone of my hosts whether the Party was worried about this, and the answer was that the Party could not care less. Hmm, I guess this is one solution to the bad shortage of women here! Oh, how did we find out that one- or two-year olds are mainly boys? Simple. These kids wear special pants that do not cover their bottoms! This makes it easy for them to go to the loo, I suppose, but it begs the question of what happens when they have "accidents".
I have 4 days on my own before the next technical meetings, which is good as I need to read a few papers and think about a number of algorithms I have been exploring. Yokelin and I fell victim to common cold, and we feared the worst. Thankfully it was a short episode -- the massive vit C doses may have helped.
Yokelin drew my attention to the fact that almost every child below the age of three that we see is a boy. The Chinese obsession with having a son, coupled with the one-child policy, easy access to ultrasound and abortion, is the best explanation. The university students I have met told me that there is already a huge social problem with the gender imbalance in their cohort group. A fewdays ago in Chongqing airport we saw for the first time two openly gay men. They caught the same plane as us. One had lipstick and walked with a womanly gait, and the other was his partner. I askedone of my hosts whether the Party was worried about this, and the answer was that the Party could not care less. Hmm, I guess this is one solution to the bad shortage of women here! Oh, how did we find out that one- or two-year olds are mainly boys? Simple. These kids wear special pants that do not cover their bottoms! This makes it easy for them to go to the loo, I suppose, but it begs the question of what happens when they have "accidents".
I have 4 days on my own before the next technical meetings, which is good as I need to read a few papers and think about a number of algorithms I have been exploring. Yokelin and I fell victim to common cold, and we feared the worst. Thankfully it was a short episode -- the massive vit C doses may have helped.
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