THAT INDIAN BOY WHO GOT AIDS FROM A PINEAPPLE

If you use WhatsApp, then you are no stranger to the kinds of messages that come to you from people you know as well as appear in groups you belong to that notify you at the beginning that they have been forwarded as received and then enjoin you at the end to please share…so that God will bless you, or so that misfortune will avoid you, or so that you will save a soul…or something more or less ludicrous.

Well, there is this group I belong to, and a few days ago, someone posted this message:

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(Public Interest)

Dear All, It's in India, Karnataka, Bangalore, a 10-year old boy, had eaten pineapple about 15 days back, and fell sick, from the day he had eaten. Later when he had his health check done, doctors diagnosed that he had AIDS!!!

His parents couldn't believe it. Then the

entire family underwent a medical checkup. None of them suffered from AIDS. So the doctors checked again with the boy if he had eaten out. The boy said 'Yes'. He did that evening. He ate pineapple.

Immediately a group from the hospital went to the pineapple vendor to check. They found the pineapple seller had a cut on his finger while cutting the pineapple; his blood had spread into the fruit.

When they had his blood checked, the guy was suffering from AIDS which he himself was NOT aware.

Unfortunately the boy is now infected and is now suffering from it.

Please take care while u eat on the road side (particularly Water Melon, Pineapple and Pawpaw (cut to size and packed in Nylon)) and pls fwd this mail to your dear ones

Please do take care.

Please Forward This Mail To All The Persons You Know As Your Message may save someone's life today💞

Dr Sushant Jadhav,

CMO, Civil Hospital

Mumbai

This message 📮 is from a group of

Doctors in India:

(forwarded in public interest)

***

According to this message, purportedly from a doctor, a boy ate a pineapple that he got, maybe bought, from a pineapple vendor, and then he fell sick from the very day he ate the pineapple. 15 days or so later, doctors conducted a health check for him and found he had AIDS. AIDS o, not HIV, but AIDS. Ehen.

Then the doctors who found that he had AIDS checked to see whether he had any family members who had AIDS too, and when they couldn’t find any family member with AIDS, they now started doing a dietary recall. They wanted to know what he had eaten and where. As an investigation for AIDS. They were in India o, yet they were not interested in whether he had been raped…they were interested in what he had eaten 15 days ago.

Then the 10-year old remembered that 15 days ago he ate a pineapple that he got from a pineapple vendor. Fantastic 10-year old. He remembers a lot from 15 days ago.

This pineapple vendor had AIDS, and somehow spread his AIDS into the pineapple which eventually infected the boy and got him sick that very same day, only to be diagnosed 15 or so days later.

Story story.

Now for a few facts.

AIDS is the name given to the assemblage of diseases that follow an uncontrolled infection with the HIV virus. The HIV virus infection itself is a slow infection that takes months to years to manifest into clinical symptoms. And in many cases, someone who has just been infected with HIV will not test positive for HIV till about 4 weeks (28 whole days o) after infection. Usual time it takes for HIV to be detected by standard testing after infection is 4 – 12 weeks (that is, 1 – 3 months).

HIV infection may be passed from pregnant mother to unborn child, from a newly infected, lactating mother to her suckling child, from a man or woman to his or her sexual partners, through sharing of sharps – whether by choice or inadvertently or even accidentally – through blood transfusions, and through direct exchange of blood and other bodily fluids..

It is not common for HIV to be transmitted from one person to another through a pineapple – even if the pineapple has some of the blood from the cut finger of an infected person. Even if the person comes from India.

Avoiding pineapples and watermelons will not take you any further from HIV infection than your current lifestyle already is.

Let us be careful what we reshare on social media. The above story is an example of the dangerously inaccurate things we see and repost on social media.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against a pineapple hawker or a poor, innocent pineapple.

THEY LOOKED ON AS SHE DIED … BECAUSE SHE WAS NOT THEIRS

Pupils were fixed, dilated, and unresponsive to light, pulse and cardiac activity were absent,…we certified this unknown adult female to be clinically dead at 2243 hours on December 09, 2016.

With those short sentences, and a few others to the same effect, I effectively completed my short summary of my acquaintance with the girl who had been brought to the Clinic, lifeless, a hapless victim of an accident that happened on the road but could not really be called a road traffic accident.

***

The road was not a busy road. It was the road outside her own house. She had been sitting on a kerb facing the driveway in front of her house, and backing the road. She had been sitting there, several feet away from the Clinic, and sharing an evening gossip with a friend. She had plans for that evening. As the sun fell in the sky, her spirits must have risen in anticipation. For that evening was the evening of her long anticipated first date – and that was the gossip she had been sharing with a friend.

On the road behind her, a man had just gotten behind the wheel of the car he drove for his boss. After eight months being on the streets hunting for a job, any job, he had finally secured one as a driver just the previous day. This evening, he had brought his boss here to this quiet hamlet; his boss usually came here for an evening drink before going home to his family. But the driver didn’t know that. Today was his first day at work as a driver. His first day at work in eight months. He was finally going to get paid in 29 days. Get paid so his two children could finally get dinner in his own house rather than pretend to be visiting with the landlord’s children at dinner time.

He was thinking about the 29 days between the day and his payday as he got into the car to turn it around to face the exit. He saw the two ladies seated on the kerb. They sat with their backs to him, oblivious of his world, his suddenly happy world into which the sun unexpectedly shone the previous day at 4pm when someone called his phone number, told him he had been selected for one of the jobs he had interviewed for, and asked him when he would like to start. The ladies on the kerb did not matter. What mattered was that his children were finally going to get something to eat. What mattered was that he was a man again. He could finally plan on getting his wife that phone he had always wanted her to have. That mattered. The two ladies seated on the kerb, with their backs to him as he tried to maneuver the car into position, did not matter.

Till they did.

The shoe on his right foot somehow got trapped on the throttle as he tried to apply the brakes inches from the gutter that separated the front of his SUV from the kerb on which the ladies sat. And from that point, life went south. Again.

As he tried in vain to readjust his foot in order to disentangle the shoe, he effectively floored the throttle. The engine roared and the tires squealed as the car shot forward, flew over the small gutter, and swept off one of the girls even as the right side of the car knocked the other girl into the gutter.

Horror-struck, and frantically pushing at every control his hands and legs could reach, the driver saw the girl the car had picked up fly off the bonnet of the car and get impaled on the sharp end of a stick which was jutting out of the ground and a few feet into the air.

Finally, the car stopped.

As he stepped out and ran to the girl who was lying in a rapidly expanding pool of blood, the driver could make out the small group of onlookers which was quickly swelling into a crowd. Hope that help was coming swelled in his heart.

But help was not coming. They said the girl was a Calabar girl. She was a known food vendor in that community. The man was clearly a Kogi man. The scars on his face told his ethnicity more eloquently than words ever could. Neither was Yoruba. And so, when some of the boys who had gathered stepped forward to try to help, their mothers and other women screamed at them in their native Yoruba to stay back – that the girl was Omo Ibo and the man was a ne’er-do-well drunkard. They were to stay back and watch. They were to be onlookers.

The man was going berserk. He ran from her head to her feet and back. He carried her off the pole on which she was impaled and the new gush of blood told him he had just made a mistake. He dropped her and shouted again and again for someone in the crowd of onlookers to step forward and help him.

But they were a crowd of onlookers. They looked on. He was not Yoruba. She sef was Calabar. So they waited for God to come down and help them. And while waiting, they looked on. 

The driver ran to the one in the gutter. She apparently was not very hurt. She was sitting up and looking around for her companion. He ran back to the one he had hit. The blood kept pouring. He glanced at the onlookers again. They were doing their job of looking on. With due diligence. A few were loudly praying to God for the miracle of life, while they waited for God to come down from His throne on high to give help to the bleeding woman, the crying man.

One man stepped forward and as the driver turned to face him, a flicker of hope warmed the chill of his heart. Perhaps help was at hand. That flicker went with the wind as he saw the man go to his now mangled vehicle and set about deflating all four tires. That was not help. That was hate. That was not the answer to the cries from his breaking heart. There was no answer to the cries from his breaking heart.

He turned back to the bleeding girl. Kneeling at her side, taking her left hand in both his hands, he cried like a baby, his gasps of grief in time with her gradually increasing gasps for air.

Finally, someone decided that not being Yoruba wasn’t a compelling enough reason to stand idly by as another human died. He stepped forward and got the driver to get a hold of himself. And the two of them carried the girl, whose evening had started so brightly, to the Clinic where I was to examine her and thereafter to write those dark lines that made her fate official.

***

I examined her companion thereafter. She was the lucky one, emerging almost unscathed. She it was who eventually told me of the crowd’s reaction. It was from her account I learnt that my chances of getting help when I am in trouble depend very heavily on two factors: what part of the country I come from and what part of the country I happen to be in when I need help.

#SaneLunacies - ECCLESIASTICAL COURTS, VICTORIOUS MISERABLES, AND THE NIGERIAN RECESSION

Chai.

People who do not agree on whether there are three persons in one God, whether abortion is right under any circumstances, women ordination, and all other uniquely Christian controversies are now hammering out a process of setting up "Ecclesiastical courts" across Nigeria...where "lawyers" and "judges" alike will be looking to litigants and defendants for guidance on what to believe and for how long to believe what before debelieving what was believed and believing what had previously been disbelieved.

In another news story coming from this same country, a minister sends his women out to a world tourney; they go out there, they humble the continent, they return with the world at their feet. The minister now says he cannot pay the victorious women because he hadn't expected them to win.

My reading: he sent them to the championship to lose. For him, it is bad news that they won. Every goal they scored on their way to victory was another nail in the coffin of his expectations. They were too poor to win. Why couldn't they just receive sense for once, cut their football boots according to their leather, and lose gallantly? Why win when they could lose? Isn't it always cheaper to lose? Is that really so hard to get?

Ecclesiastical courts. Victorious miserables.

This is not caused by recession. This caused the recession.

THOUGHTS ON THE INDICTMENT OF THE NIGERIAN ARMY FOR THE ZARIA MASSACRE

By Pius Adesanmi

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Not content with opening fire on members of the Shi'a Muslim group they said blocked the route of General Buratai their boss - yes, I saw that video and I still do not see anything that tear gas could not have solved in the circumstance - the Nigerian Army did a follow-up with an early-morning raid on the civilian enclave of the group. By the time they were done, at least 347 innocent civilians including women and children had been wasted in their sleep.

The gruesomeness of this 21st-century crime against humanity was perhaps only equalled by the inhuman gruesomeness of the public acclamation which greeted the act. It was as if Buratai and his goons had entranced the very civilians whose humanity they violated on a massive national scale. It was worse than mass hypnosis. National hysteria married national orgy in lionizing Buratai as hero.

The Army did not even have to lift a finger to justify or rationalize the sorrow, tears, and blood they visited on innocent civilians in their sleep in Zaria. Psychologically-damaged civilians did an excellent job of brutalizing and victimizing fellow civilians who had been murdered. How dare they stand in the way of an Army General? Nonsense! Some claimed that Buratai even tried. Others claimed that Buratai even exercised restraint. Ok, if you say that killing those who blocked his path was justified, what about the follow-up massacre? Nothing doing. Nigerians wanted a hero in Buratai and 347 innocent lives was not too much a foundation to lay for the hero-making edifice!

I felt so alone - especially on Facebook. I felt so alone with two other outcasts - Ike DanfoDriver Mbachu and Obinna Aligwekwe. These two Igbo gentlemen and I screamed and screamed and screamed. We felt like we were the only ones mourning the Hausa-Fulani dead in an ocean of voices lionizing Buratai. We called for Buratai's head. We suffered vilification. For the three of us, it was the first time we suffered dismissal as "wailers" by career Buharists. I mentioned the ethnicity of these two great Nigerian patriots because when they subsequently raised their voices against the same Army for mopping up innocent Igbo civilian protesters in the east, some of the idiots who justified the massacre in Zaria labelled them tribalists for speaking up against the massacre of their own Igbo kinsmen!

Now a panel has indicted the Army for the Zaria massacre. Specifically, the panel indicted Major General Adeniyi Oyebade, the General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Army's Ist Division. He it was who authorized the operation which led to the massacre of the 347 civilians. This is a good start but I'm afraid it does not go far enough. General Buratai also bears responsibility. Luckily for him, he is an astute saver and has enough financial muscle to hire the best lawyers should this case grind slowly through years all the way to the Hague as I expect and hope it will.

President Buhari has been self-destructing especially on the integrity front lately by somehow deceiving himself that silence is the first instrument of statecraft. I expect him to greet this with silence as he has done so many other issues. I expect him not to act on Buratai. I expect him not to even talk to us. After all, the insufferably arrogant Femi Adesina has finally told us, the school pupils he often scolds, that we have no right to expect our elected President to talk to us regularly.

Beyond the Army and our self-destructing President, this episode is an occasion for sober reflection. This episode is an occasion for national self teaching. If you were one of the hordes who joined the Buratai lionization bandwagon, don't worry. Don't be too harsh on yourself. We suffered more than three decades of military brutalization (I almost wrote buratailization) in this country. We have only had democracy since 1999. It will take more than two decades for you to gain the civic instinct to automatically recoil at the presence of military uniforms in civilian spaces.

You just need to keep working at it. Every time you wake up in the morning, tell yourself that military uniforms have no place in civilian spaces. Tell yourself that soldiers have no powers of arrest. Only the police have such powers. Tell yourself that soldiers are in violation of the rules whenever you see them frog jumping civilians in Ojuelegba or Oshodi. Work on yourself to stop clapping and hailing when they beat and mow down fellow civilians.

We need to collectively construct a national psyche which is hostile to the very idea of soldiers in our civic and civilian spaces of agency. They are not supposed to be there, let alone beat and shoot you there.

Also, it is good that the Zaria massacre has been investigated by a panel set up by Kaduna. It should be clear that the Federal government will set up no panel to investigate the civilian massacres during IPOB protests in the east. Consequently, do they have governors in the southeast? Are these governors efulefus? If they are not efulefus, who are they expecting will come and set up a panel to investigate the murder of their own civilians? Pius Adesanmi? Shior. You should at least come together to do it at the symbolic level.

The same applies to Gabriel Ortom and all the state Governors whose people have been murdered by herdsmen. If you set up panels to at least symbolically defy the President's shameful silence on these critical fronts, the findings of such panels may be actionable in the future. An administration hostile to silence may pick them up and act. You owe it to that future to at least do your basic home work today.

WHO IS A FANATIC?

The one who slaughters people in the name of Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah, El?

Yes!

The one who holds that his own brand of religion is the only one worth the name and that other religions and persuasions are either inferior or outright evil?

Yes!

The one who believes that all homosexuals and bisexuals and transsexuals and all-kinds-of-sexuals belong to hell and should be helped to get to hell quickly by any murder means available?

Yes!

The one who believes that he owes his God a duty to fight the latter's battles for Him and to destroy others in the process?

Yes!

The one who believes that his interpretation of truth is the only interpretation there is and that everything else is just another shade of falsehood?

Yes!

The one who is intolerant of dissenting opinion?

Yes!

The one who believes that Arsenal must win their match or we will not hia word?

Yes!

There is a fanatic in every man. Alas, there is no man in any fanatic. Just different types of little boys.