Science Guardian

Avian Flu: Is the Government Ready for an Epidemic?

Virus Poses Risk of Massive Casualties Around the World

Sep. 15, 2005 – It could kill a billion people worldwide, make ghost towns out of parts of major cities, and there is not enough medicine to fight it. It is called the avian flu.

This week, at the United Nations Summit in New York, both the head of the U.N. World Health Organization and President Bush warned of the virus’ deadly potential.

“We must also remain on the offensive against new threats to public health, such as the Avian influenza,” Bush said in his speech to world leaders. “If left unchallenged, the virus could become the first pandemic of the 21st century.”

According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Bush’s call to remain on the offensive has come too late.

“If we had a significant worldwide epidemic of this particular avian flu, the H5N1 virus, and it hit the United States and the world, because it would be everywhere at once, I think we would see outcomes that would be virtually impossible to imagine,” he warns.

Already, officials in London are quietly looking for extra morgue space to house the victims of the H5N1 virus, a never-before-seen strain of flu. Scientists say this virus could pose a far greater threat than smallpox, AIDS, or anthrax.

“Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects,” says Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow on global health policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That makes it the most lethal flu we know of that has ever been on planet Earth affecting human beings.”

No Natural Immunity

The Council on Foreign Relations devoted its most recent issue of the prestigious journal, “Foreign Affairs,” to what it called the coming global epidemic, a pandemic.

“Each year different flus come, but your immune system says, ‘Ah, I’ve seen that guy before. No problem. Crank out some antibodies, and I might not feel great for a couple of days, but I’ll recover,’” Garrett says. “Now what’s scaring us is that this constellation of H number 5 and N number 1, to our knowledge, has never in history been in our species. So absolutely nobody watching this has any natural immunity to this form of flu.”

Like most flu viruses, this form started in wild birds — such as geese, ducks, and swans — in Asia.

“They die of a pneumonia, just like people,” says William Karesh, the lead veterinarian for the Wildlife Conservation Society. “When you open them up, you do a post-mortem exam. Their lungs are just full of fluid and full of blood.”

Karesh has been tracking this flu strain for the last several years as it has gained strength spreading from wild birds to chickens to humans.

“We start at a market somewhere in Guangdong Province in China,” explains Karesh. “And it’s packed with cages, and you’ll have chickens, and you’ll have ducks. You might have some other animals — cats, dogs, turtles, snakes — and they’re all stacked in cages, and they’re all spreading their germs to each other.”

In response, Asian governments have killed millions of chickens in futile attempts to stop the flu’s spread to humans.

“The tipping point, the place where it becomes something of an immediate concern, is where that virus changes, we call it mutates, to something that is able to go from human to human,” says Redlener, the National Center for Disaster Preparedness director.

Echoes of the ‘Spanish Flu’ Epidemic

Scientists in Asia and around the world are now working around the clock as they wait for that tipping point.

“Unlike the normal human flu, where the virus is predominantly in the upper respiratory tract so you get a runny nose, sore throat, the H5N1 virus seems to go directly deep into the lungs so it goes down into the lung tissue and causes severe pneumonia,” says Dr. Malik Peiris, the scientist who first discovered the so-called SARS virus, which killed 700 people and drew worldwide attention.

To date, there have been 57 confirmed human deaths, and another suspected one last week in Indonesia. Scientists say the humans have only been infected by birds. However, they add every infected person represents one step closer to the tipping point.

“Once that virus is capable of not needing the birds to infect humans, then we have the beginnings of what can turn out to be this worldwide epidemic problem that the experts call ‘pandemics,’” Redlener says.

That is exactly what happened in 1918 when the global epidemic called the Spanish flu struck.

“The Spanish flu was killing people in two or three days once they got sick,” Bill Karesh of the Wildlife Conservation Society says.

“In 1918, my now-quite elderly uncle was a young boy, living in Baltimore, Maryland,” says Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations. “And the flu came through, and his family insisted that he could not go outside for any reason until the whole epidemic was over. He spent afternoons looking out the window and counting the hearses going up and down the neighborhood and trying to guess which of his schoolmates had died.”

Disaster Would Require Massive Quarantines

Unlike the avian flu, the Spanish flu spread long before the international air travel routes of today. At that time, there were no non-stop flights from flu ground zero to the United States. But not anymore.

Karesh believes the avian flu could travel from China to Japan to New York to San Fransisco within the first week.

“It’s on people’s hands. You shake hands. You touch a doorknob that somebody recently touched,” Garrett says, referring to how the flu is spread.

Redlener, who is stationed at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, has been working with New York City officials to get ready for the deadly epidemic.

“The city would look like a science fiction movie,” according to him. “It’s extremely possible we’d have to quarantine hospitals. We’d have to quarantine sections of the city.”

“I could imagine that you could look at Grand Central Station and not see much of anybody wandering around at all,” Garrett agrees. “People would be afraid to take the subways, because who wants to be in an enclosed air space with a whole lot of strangers, never knowing which ones are carrying the flu?”

As for the hospitals, there would be scenes like the ones this past month in the stadiums of New Orleans and Houston after Hurricane Katrina.

“There wouldn’t be equipment and personnel to staff them adequately that you could really call them a hospital,” Garrett predicts. “You might more or less call them warehouses for the ailing.”

And, as happened in New Orleans, there would be no place for the dead.

“If you look at the expected number of deaths that could occur in cities across the United States, we are wholly unprepared to process those bodies in a dignified and respectful way,” asserts Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “We will run out of caskets literally within days.”

The prospects have become so bleak that in planning meetings held in New York City, veteran emergency responders have walked away.

“They just don’t know how we’re going to get through,” says Osterholm of those responders. “If we have a repeat of the 1918 life experience, I can’t imagine anything to be closer to a living hell that that experience of 12 to 24 months of pandemic influenza.”

If the flu does strike, victims at first would not know if it is the kind of easily treated flu that comes every year or the killer flu, known as H5N1.

The man in charge of making sure Americans are prepared in the event of a killer flu epidemic is the secretary of Health and Human Services.

“We would do all we could to quarantine,” says Secretary Michael Leavitt. “It’s not a happy thought. It’s something that keeps the president of the United States awake. It keeps me awake.”

The preparedness plan calls for Leavitt to run operations out of a crisis room in Washington.

When pressed as to how ready the country actually is, Leavitt replied, “Not as prepared as we need to be. We’re better prepared than we were yesterday; we’ll be better prepared tomorrow than we are today.”

The draft report of the federal government’s emergency plan, obtained and examined by ABC News’ “Primetime,” predicts as many as 200,000 Americans will die within a few months. This is considered a conservative estimate.

“The first thing is everybody in America’s going to say, ‘Where’s the vaccine?’ And they’re going to find out that it’s really darned hard to make a vaccine. It takes a really long time,” said Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In fact, the draft report says it will not be until six months after the first outbreak that any vaccine will be available, and then only in a limited supply.

“I imagine that not a lot of poor people will get vaccinated,” Garrett says. “If you think about New Orleans, this is a similar situation.”

‘Inadequate’ Stockpile of Medicine

While there is no vaccine to stop the flu, there is one medicine to treat it. Called Tamiflu, it is made by the Roche pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. Roche has been selling Tamiflu for years.

Only recently, however, did scientists learn of its potential to work against the killer flu, H5N1. That has since created a huge demand and a critical shortage.

“All of the wealthiest countries in the world are trying to purchase stockpiles of Tamiflu,” says Garrett. “Our current stockpile is around 2.5 million courses of treatment.”

According to Leavitt, that is a long way from the country’s ideal stockpile. “Our objective is to have 20 million doses of Tamiflu or enough for 20 million people,” he says.

He later admitted that only 2 million are currently on hand, but asserted that no other country is in a better position.

Officials in Australia, however, have 3.5 million courses of treatment, and in Great Britain, officials say they have ordered enough to cover a quarter of their population.

“I think at the moment, with 2.5 million doses, you are pretty vulnerable,” warns Professor John Oxford of the Royal London Hospital.

“The lack of advanced planning up until the moment in the United States, in the sense of not having a huge stockpile I think your citizens deserve, has surprised me and has dismayed me,” he admits.

Faced with worldwide demand, the Roche company, which produces Tamiflu, has organized a first-come, first-serve waiting list. The United States is nowhere near the top.

“The way we are approaching the discussions with governments is that we are operating on a first-come, first-serve basis,” says Dr. David Reddy, head of the pandemic task force at Roche.

“Do we wish we had ordered it sooner and more of it? I suspect one could say yes,” admits Leavitt. “Are we moving rapidly to assure that we have it? The answer is also yes.”

When asked why the United States did not place their orders for Tamiflu sooner, Leavitt replied, “I can’t answer that. I don’t know the answer to that.”

Even leading Republicans in Congress say the Bush Administration has not handled the planning for a possible flu epidemic well.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., says the current Tamiflu stockpile of 2 million could spell disaster.

“That’s totally inadequate. Totally inadequate today,” says Frist, who is a physician by training. “The Tamiflu is what people would go after. It’s what you’re going to ask for, I’m going to ask for, immediately.”

Leavitt says deciding who gets the 2.5 million doses of Tamiflu currently on hand in the United States is part of the federal government’s response plan. However, he also admits that thought has motivated the government to move rapidly in securing more doses of the medicine.

“It isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but if it happened the day after that, we would not be in as good as a position as we will be in six months,” he says.

However, in the end, even the country’s top health officials concede that a killer flu epidemic this winter would make the scenes of Katrina pale in comparison.

“You know, I was down in New Orleans in that crowded airport now a couple weeks ago,” Frist says. “And this could be not just equal to that, but many multiple times that. Hundreds of people laid out, all dying, because there was no therapy. And a lot of people don’t realize for this avian flu virus, there will be very little effective therapy available early on.”

ABC News’ Rhonda Schwartz, Michael Bicks, Samantha Chapman, Maddy Sauer, Simon Surowicz, Jill Rackmill, Steve Baker, Monica DelaRosa, and Jennifer Needleman contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

The New York Times

September 6, 2005

TELEVISION REVIEW; Through Shakespeare, Lessons of Life And Devotion

By ANITA GATES

In a fifth-grade classroom in a poor and dangerous part of Los Angeles, Hobart Boulevard Elementary School pupils (mostly Latino and Asian) are doing ”Hamlet.” They are so good at it that at one point Sir Ian McKellen, who has played Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago, Richard II and Richard III, drops in to watch, to do a little recitation of his own and to praise them.

”The best thing about the Hobart Shakespeareans is that they know what they’re saying,” Sir Ian tells them, adding that this cannot be said of every adult who has ever appeared in a Shakespearean play.

In Mel Stuart’s fine and passionate documentary ”The Hobart Shakespeareans,” which has its premiere tonight on the PBS series ”P.O.V.,” several things are clear. The 49-year-old teacher, Rafe Esquith, is a genius and saint. The American education system would do well to imitate him. These children’s lives have been changed by their year with this man. And it is not all about Elizabethan drama.

Mr. Esquith’s pupils play guitar. They name the six states that border Idaho. They discuss whether Huckleberry Finn would be doing the right thing to turn in his friend Jim, a runaway slave. They visit the Lincoln Memorial on a class trip.

Their classroom world operates like the real one: with money. In this case the currency is play money, in which they are paid salaries. It costs more to sit at the front of the class than in the back. Not doing your homework brings a $50 fine. At Christmas, Mr. Esquith gives them real Barnes & Noble gift certificates.

But it is the yearlong study of a single Shakespearean play that symbolizes Mr. Esquith’s methods and his success. It is thrilling to hear Brenda De Leon read a speech of Ophelia’s beautifully, to watch Lidia Medina express Gertrude’s pain and to see Alan Avila, who was considered a problem student by a previous teacher, tackle the title role of the melancholy Danish prince. At the outset, Mr. Esquith explains what ”Hamlet” is about: death. ”They’re throwing skulls all over the graveyard,” he says.

During Christmas vacation, the children in the play come in every day to work on it. Mr. Esquith tells the camera that this is teaching them discipline, teamwork and sacrifice. He is a man fond of mottoes: ”Be nice and work hard.” ”There are no shortcuts.” As Hamlet says: ”Words. Words. Words.”

But words have impact. This is clearest, on a class visit to the campus of U.C.L.A., Mr. Esquith’s alma mater, when he tells the children: ”This is the life you’re working for. You can do this.” He has Ivy League pennants on his classroom wall, gifts from former students who have gone on to those schools, to prove it.

P.O.V.

The Hobart Shakespeareans

PBS, tonight at 10, check local listings.

Directed and produced by Mel Stuart; Alex Rotaru, co-producer, editor and cinematographer; Tamara Blaich, Chad Baron, associate producers; additional photography by Damani Baker, Chad Baron, Jerry Henry and Mel Stuart.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy

September 6, 2005

latimes.com : Education

Shakespeare, to expand their globe

# A Koreatown teacher sets high goals for his fifth graders. The results are chronicled in a PBS documentary.

By Merrill Balassone, Times Staff Writer

The bell shrills at Hobart Elementary in the heart of Koreatown, signaling the end of the school day. The campus quickly empties, but no one budges in fifth-grade teacher Rafe Esquith’s classroom. Instead, more children file in; some perch on filing cabinets bordering the room and some former students, still enjoying summer vacation before the start of middle school, pack into the back.

Today is an important day for this group, the Hobart Shakespeareans, and a hush falls, punctuated only by excited whispers. The cast list is being announced for this year’s Shakespeare production, “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

The children, ages 9 to 11, know there are months of work ahead of them. Esquith has asked them to sacrifice video games and television. These children, many from immigrant families who don’t speak English at home, will memorize and perform the unabridged work. But they are inspired by the students from years past, who have traveled the country to perform and attended top-notch universities, and whose fans include actors Ian McKellen and Michael York. Many alumni, some still children themselves, return to help the new actors memorize their parts and master the rhythm of the lines.

The young troupe is the subject of a PBS documentary, “The Hobart Shakespeareans,” directed by Mel Stuart that premieres on “P.O.V.” at 9:30 p.m. Friday on KCET in the Los Angeles area. The hourlong film chronicles the group’s year of rehearsals as they prepared for their performance of “Hamlet” in 2003.

Esquith’s students suffer from poverty and struggle against the influences of gangs and drugs, which result in a culture of low expectations. To compete with students from more privileged schools, his classes work twice as hard. His rallying cry, echoed in a banner at the front of the classroom: “There are no shortcuts.”

Nearly all his students arrive at 7 a.m. — an hour before school starts — for extra math work and spend their recess and lunch breaks learning guitar. After school is Shakespeare rehearsal, and on Saturdays and vacations, students practice grammar and math, while alumni can get SAT tutoring and help with college applications. The students read higher-level literature, such as “Lord of the Flies,” “Huckleberry Finn” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”

“I ask these children to defy the culture of their neighborhood,” Esquith said. “I want my kids to know that they’re just as good and just as American as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington or Dr. Martin Luther King. My worst fear is that they will become ordinary.”

Brenda De Leon, 12, who starred in the production of “Hamlet” as Ophelia, said her experience as a Hobart Shakespearean broadened her horizons and taught her to set higher standards for herself.

“In other classes, they don’t expect much — if you got average grades they would be happy with you,” said Brenda, who now hopes to attend an Ivy League school and become an AIDS specialist. “I was very shy and wouldn’t participate in class. In Rafe’s class, there was lots of work and lots of sacrifice, and I learned I had to be excellent all the time.”

As a Shakespearean, Brenda also took trips: one to perform in front of 1,000 people in Hawaii, where she also swam with dolphins; a trip to Ashland, Ore., for its annual Shakespeare Festival; Washington, D.C., for a tour of American monuments; and South Dakota to learn about Native American heritage.

“Before, I felt that Koreatown was the whole world,” Brenda said. “Then I saw that there were better communities and neighborhoods. There weren’t always gangs.”

Esquith said the trips are an opportunity to teach the children real-life skills, such as how to manage a budget, plan meals and even tip the maids.

“When we travel, we won’t stay in Motel 6 — that’s not what we’re working for,” he said. “I’m tired of walking into a hotel and seeing that the only Latinos there are the workers. I want my Latino students to be running these hotels someday.”

As a young teacher, Esquith worked four jobs, including graveyard shifts, to raise the money for trips and to purchase books and musical instruments for his students. Still, he would arrive at Hobart at 6:30 each morning wearing his signature uniform: a crisp button-down shirt, sweater vest and tie, with white Adidas sneakers.

His schedule eventually took him past the brink of physical exhaustion, but even that didn’t slow him down. He once climbed out of a hospital window after a severe asthma attack so he wouldn’t miss a trip with his students. It took pleading from his wife, Barbara, a registered nurse, to make him realize the toll on his health.

“I had to grow up a little bit,” Esquith said. “If you’re all passion and no brains, you’re not effective. You’re no good to anyone if you drop dead.”

In 1992, an alumnus from Esquith’s first year of teaching, by then in his third year of Yale Law School, came to his rescue. He set up a nonprofit organization called the Hobart Shakespearean Foundation that now brings in about $200,000 a year in donations.

The documentary shows snippets of the troupe’s “Hamlet” performance, which is interspersed with rock songs and performed in Esquith’s classroom with stage lights and bleachers set up for the audience, which included British actor York.

“I cannot watch Mel’s documentary without being moved to tears,” York said. “There’s such a bad rap about education, immigration and all these ills, but here’s someone who has a solution and the dedication to carry it out. Rafe says his big fear is that the kids will be ordinary, but you have the sense that none of them are.”

York said he was particularly moved by a scene in which the students read an excerpt from “Huckleberry Finn” dealing with Huck deciding whether to turn in his friend Jim, an escaped slave, to the authorities. The children take turns reading, their sobs choking the words as they are overcome with emotion.

“I was truly amazed, and I’m not just talking about the Shakespeare,” York said. “It’s all the other things that go along with it — the extraordinary civility of the children.”

The motto “Be Nice, Work Hard” is another tenet the Shakespeareans must live by. On a recent afternoon during recess, the classroom is full of students who are learning to play guitar. The walls are covered with pennants from the nation’s top universities — Yale, Stanford, Harvard. Under the pennants are placards inscribed with the names of the students who now go there, with the date they graduated from Esquith’s class.

While Esquith has won honors, such as the National Medal of Arts from President Bush (which he keeps locked away in a cabinet for safekeeping) and the National Teacher of the Year Award (which he accepted wearing a tuxedo with his white tennis shoes), his peers have not always been kind. He has received hate letters from fellow teachers who feel their efforts have been overlooked in light of Esquith’s national attention, and he gets his fair share of cold shoulders on campus.

His classroom too has come under fire — vandalized and burglarized by gang members. And his students say they are picked on for being in the Shakespeare productions, ostracized as “snobs” by former teachers and fellow students alike. For Esquith, it’s not about making an easy path for his students but about opening doors for them to work hard and create better lives for themselves.

“I’m just this really ordinary guy that stuck with it,” Esquith said. “My job is done when they’re ready for their lives.”

A lesson in teaching

By Steven G. Kellman

09/01/2005

In The Hobart Shakespeareans, one instructor proves again that children rise to meet expectations

To find an early advocate of dumbing down the curriculum, look to Shakespeare’s Desdemona. “Those that do teach young babes/ Do it with gentle means and easy tasks,” she tells Iago. However, though Rafe Esquith reveres Shakespeare, the tasks he sets the young babes in his classroom are far from easy. Esquith teaches fifth grade at Hobart Elementary, a large public school serving a neighborhood in central Los Angeles so tough that the building sometimes has to be locked down to protect the children from violence outside. Most of his students are either Latino or Asian, and none speaks English as a first language. Yet Esquith inspires his 10-year-old charges to mount a production of Hamlet that astonishes Ian McKellen. “You understand every single word,” the master actor tells the young performers, in awe of an accomplishment that eludes most college students, and even their professors. “Once they’re in a culture of excellence, they do fine,” says Esquith about the correlation between expectation and achievement.

Fifth-grade teacher Rafe Esquith uses Shakespeare to teach vocabulary, fencing, ethics, and more. His unorthodox, award-winning dedication to a Los Angeles public school is documented in P.O.V.’s Hobart Shakespeareans.

The Hobart Shakespeareans focuses on preparations for the staging of a Shakespeare play that concludes the school year for each successive cohort under Esquith’s tutelage. It is a grander example of San Antonio’s “Shakespeare in the Barrio” program. But the film, which is scheduled for broadcast on KLRN-TV Tuesday, September 6, at 10 p.m., as part of the PBS P.O.V. series, is not confined to Elizabethan drama. Esquith also teaches math, geography, history, music, and baseball, as well as discipline, civility, and compassion. “We do Shakespeare because I personally love him,” he explains. But Hamlet becomes a pretext for the study of vocabulary, fencing, ethics, and much else.

“Be nice. Work hard.” If a secular institution must have commandments carved in granite, those two rules that govern the world according to Rafe would do just fine. The children enrolled in Esquith’s class are not there because of any special tracking. They happen to live in the impoverished district and are fortunate enough to be assigned a teacher so dedicated to his profession and pupils that he voluntarily comes to school six days a week. Esquith even holds sessions during vacations, and, until wealthy patrons began making donations, paid for group trips with his own funds. He expands the boundaries of the California classroom by taking his students to Washington, Gettysburg, Williamsburg, and Mount Rushmore. In a society that honored teachers as much as politicians, the pedagogical paragon of Hobart Elementary would be immortalized on the face of a South Dakota cliff.

The Hobart Shakespeareans

Dir. Mel Stuart

Some dissent.

Mercedes Santoyo, his principal, hints at the envy that Esquith’s international attention has aroused in fellow teachers. But director Mel Stuart (best known for the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) offers no elaboration. Sixth-grade teachers must consider Esquith a hard act to follow. Except for a glimpse of him lecturing in Houston, we are shown no interaction between Esquith and others except his adoring students and his devoted wife, Barbara. Nor do former students testify to his influence during a career spanning two decades. Ignoring the neighborhood, the camera remains riveted on Esquith at work. While reading about Huckleberry Finn’s moral dilemmas, several students are moved to tears. Learning about the reading list – including Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and A Catcher in the Rye – that these fifth-graders master, a viewer is moved to wonder why Johnny can’t read in twelfth-grade classes elsewhere. Like Jaime Escalante, who – portrayed by Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver – taught calculus and self-esteem to disadvantaged youngsters in East L.A., Rafe Esquith is an inspiration to us all, and an admonition to all those Texas leaders who lack and limit education. •

©San Antonio Current 2005

The Atticus Finch of Hobart Elementary

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted September 6, 2005.

In a stunning new documentary, a fifth-grade teacher at one of the nation’s largest inner-city schools inspires his students to lead extraordinary lives, despite language barriers and poverty.

Documentaries today may be giving us what we hunger for. The film March of the Penguins, which reveals the birds’ harsh and glorious Antarctic mating season, has become the second highest grossing documentary in history, behind only Fahrenheit 9/11. Another documentary, Mad Hot Ballroom, takes us inside a ballroom dancing competition for New York City’s fifth graders. A third film, The Hobart Shakespeareans (premiering on PBS Tuesday, Sept. 6), made by filmmaker Mel Stuart, follows Rafe Esquith’s fifth-grade class in inner-city Los Angeles as they learn to perform a full-text Hamlet by the end of their school year.

Whether it’s penguins or fifth graders, all these documentaries are about goodness, dedication and purpose, as well as respect and treating others well. There’s something joyful and painfully touching when we see the life force in action with purpose.

Rafe Esquith leads his fifth graders through an uncompromising curriculum of English, mathematics, geography and literature. His classroom mottos are “Be nice. Work hard,” and “There are no shortcuts.” Every student performs in a full-length Shakespeare play. Despite language barriers and poverty, many of these Hobart Shakespeareans move on to attend outstanding colleges.

Esquith, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended the city’s public schools, has taught fifth grade at Hobart Boulevard Elementary for over 20 years. “I don’t want my students to be ordinary,” he says. “I want them to be extraordinary because I know that they are. If a 10-year-old, who doesn’t speak English at home, can step in front of you and do a scene from Shakespeare, then there is nothing that he cannot accomplish.”

TERRENCE MCNALLY: Rafe, what led you to teaching and to Hobart Elementary?

RAFE ESQUITH: I became a teacher because my father taught me that a life without service is a wasted life. I found I had a knack for teaching, I taught at a middle-class school for two years. Great kids, but they didn’t need me. I was challenged by a principal to come to Hobart School, where there are 2,400 children, and I realized that we were a perfect match. These were kids who want a way out, and after many years of teaching, I figured out a way to help them get out.

Mel, what led you to this documentary?

MEL STUART: Luck. That’s a very important part of being a filmmaker. You have to be lucky. I was read in the paper that Rafe had won an award for teaching inner-city schoolchildren, nine and 10 years old, a curriculum that included performing Shakespeare. I’m a Shakespeare nut, have been since I was 13 and saw Henry V with Olivier. So I called Rafe and asked him, “What play are you doing next year?” and he said, “Hamlet.” I said, “Perfect, that’s the one I want to do.”

I was initially attracted to the film because of the Hamlet hook, but when I watched it, I saw so much more. What did you know before you decided to do it, and what surprised you?

MEL STUART: I went there planning to do Hamlet, but it turned out, they were playing baseball to learn to be American citizens, they were simulating a money economy in the classroom, they were reading the most incredible books. Rafe was guiding them through the great books of our literature.

Fifth-graders.

MEL STUART: Fifth-graders reading Catcher in the Rye and Malcolm X, or Huckleberry Finn. You see the effect it has on these kids. I only wish that my own children could have gone to Rafe’s class. I made the film because I want the whole nation to know what Rafe can do with children that don’t have the background and the money that other children in this country have.

Rafe, in the film and in your book you mention a turning point, when you realized that you were a pretty good teacher and you were a teacher kids liked, but that you weren’t making the difference you needed to make.

RAFE ESQUITH: You’re too kind. The truth is, I was failing, because the real measure of a teacher is not that the kids like him or that they do well at the tests at the end of the year. The real measure is where are these children five years from now, 10 years from now? What am I giving to these children that they’ll be using for the rest of their lives?

One night when I was really ready to give it up, my wife Barbara said, “Rafe you ought to re-read To Kill a Mockingbird.” In Atticus Finch, I found the model I was looking for. Early in that book his children ask, “Are we gonna win?” Finch says no. But he doesn’t run from the courtroom, he goes in and fights the fight anyway, because he believes strongly in Tom Robinson’s innocence and he’s going to speak the truth.

My classroom is that courtroom. I feel all the time that I’m a very ordinary human being, but what separates good teachers from other teachers is good teachers don’t give up. I tell the children not to give up. That means I can’t give up either.

Late in the documentary, you say, “I’ve won these awards, I’ve written this book, I’ve got this documentary, I could make more money doing something else, and I’ve been here 20 years now … But for 20 years I’ve been telling them this is important. For me to walk away would make me a hypocrite.”

RAFE ESQUITH: Well, we always say, “No child left behind.” I see a lot of teachers now who win an award or two, and they write their book and they get their website, and then they leave. Talk about no child left behind, they leave them all behind! I can’t do that.

What are some of the things you’ve come up with over the years? It’s looks like a totally unique world inside your classroom.

RAFE ESQUITH: You’re right, we’ve created a different culture — a culture that’s different from the neighborhood in which these kids live, a culture different from society. We do it through character development. We have the children develop a code of behavior. Right now I’m not in the classroom, but I’ll come back in an hour after I’m done talking to you, and the kids will be behaving perfectly because they don’t behave for me. A lot of children try to please adults. I don’t want them to please me, I’m a very small part of the story.

The real heroes in this film are the children who have the courage to walk the path that I’ve laid out for them. That means a push for excellence. Our society doesn’t value excellence, and I don’t think excellence is a switch you can throw on at 3 p.m.: Hey, now it’s Shakespeare time, now we’re gonna be excellent! I want them to have a code of excellence in the way they approach their mathematics and their literature and the way they write and the way they speak in front of people, and the way they play baseball and travel on the road. It’s not a dog-and-pony show, it’s a way of life in Room 56.

If I were a young teacher at your school, and I said, “My God, I walked through the neighborhood to get here this morning, I’m looking at what’s around here, I’m looking at the way kids were out in the parking lot, how can I possibly do what you do?” How do you transform them? Why do your kids buy in?

RAFE ESQUITH: First of all, lesson one, you are the role model, and you have to be the person you want the children to be. I want my kids to work hard, so I’ve got to be the hardest worker they’ve ever seen. It’s not a question of preaching. I’m at that school at 6 in the morning, and right away, the kids go, “My God, this guy is really gonna work hard, so I have to work hard.” I don’t raise my voice to these kids, I don’t humiliate these children. I’m a tough teacher, but if I want them to be nice to each other, I better be the nicest guy they ever met. So rule number one, be the person you want the children to be.

Mel, I’ve heard you say that this is one of your favorite two or three projects of your career. That’s saying a lot. Why?

MEL STUART: Number one, it is the most cinéma vérité film I’ve ever made. Nothing was re-enacted. Everything was the only take. Rafe has that incredible quality which he’s shy to admit, he can talk and walk at the same time. In our business it’s very rare to find somebody who can go about doing what he’s doing and still talk to you. He’s doing his business, and the kids don’t care and the class goes on, and you have a tremendous sense of reality. I never had to ask Rafe a question twice, the right answer always came out of his mouth. It’s a very rare art, and Rafe has it. There were no re-takes.

How did you choose to shoot it with Rafe occasionally speaking directly to camera?

MEL STUART: No, he doesn’t talk to camera. He talks to me, and that’s a very important difference. I don’t want him to talk to the camera, because first of all, it’s a very hard thing to look at a camera and be yourself. Most of the time Rafe’s walking this way and that around the classroom, and he has a thought and just hits me with it. If he hit the camera with it, it would look false. It’s just the thoughts coming out of his head, but always on the nose.

And we mustn’t forget how important all the children are in this. There was a moment when I was interviewing the little boy who plays Hamlet, and I ask him, “What did you think of Huckleberry Finn? What kind of experience was that for you?” And he said, “Well, I thought the characters were interesting. They held a mirror up to nature.” A 10-year-old Mexican kid just used that as a phrase. It blew me away! That was just a wonderful moment for me.

A point you make even more in your book than in the documentary, Rafe, is the value of reading above all else. In teaching to change their lives, reading is something you find enormously important.

RAFE ESQUITH: We have a Wall of Fame in my classroom. We have all the former students up who are in college now. I tell the children, there are a lot of different kinds of kids up there. There are jocks and there are artists and there are wild kids and there are shy kids. But the one thing they all have in common is they all read for pleasure and they all read well.

One of the things that’s wrong with the schools today is that in throwing basal readers at the children, and getting them to take all their tests and everything — has anybody ever asked the children how they feel about the reading program? The kids hate it. They despise the reading program. The companies will say, “Oh, but test scores are going up.” Their goals have to do with fluency and speed. My goals have to do with pleasure and passion. There’s a scene in the film when the kids are reading Huck Finn, and they’re absolutely in tears as Huck has to decide between heaven and hell, whether or not he’s going to turn Jim in ….

That is very powerful. Ten-year-olds together in a school classroom coming to a point in the book, and they cannot control their emotions.

RAFE ESQUITH: That’s what reading is supposed to be. We just finished Tom Sawyer and kids were hysterically laughing as Tom hoodwinks his friends into whitewashing the fence. My class’s reading scores are so high because my kids love to read. They read all the time. And it’s not because I’m such a good teacher, but I put great books in front of them. We forget Mark Twain’s a great product. Children read him in the 1800s.

Most kids won’t get these books until years later, if at all. And these are not just fifth graders. Most of them are either Asian or Latino, and in their homes English is not the first language.

RAFE ESQUITH: There’s a key to that also. When they get thrown Steinbeck or Twain in the eighth or ninth grade, and are told, go home and read this, many children are going to home environments where it’s just not conducive for reading. That’s why we read these books together in the class. When people say to me, gosh Rafe, this takes a long time, I say well so what? I’m not in a hurry. When I say there are no shortcuts, that’s for teachers too. We can’t look for these simplistic solutions to complicated problems.

You titled your book There are No Shortcuts. You have it spelled out on a banner in the front of your classroom. Where did that phrase come from and what does it mean to you, to your kids, and to the larger American society?

RAFE ESQUITH: I’m a learner and I once took kids to the Hollywood Bowl to see the great cellist Lynn Harrell play, and Lynn loved my class so much he pulled his kids out of private school in Beverly Hills and put them at Hobart.

There’s an endorsement!

RAFE ESQUITH: It was pretty funny to have these two white kids at Hobart. One of them wound up at Vassar and one of them wound up at Princeton, and they’re still in touch with me all the time.

We went backstage to visit Lynn and a young cellist looked up at Lynn Harrell, who’s 6 foot 5, and the little kid said, “You know, I play the cello, Mr. Harrell, but it doesn’t sound like that, how do you do it?” And Lynn just looked down and said, “Well, there are no shortcuts.” I was in about my fifth or sixth year of teaching, and I said, “Boy, that encapsulates everything I’m trying to get across to these children.”

It’s almost like a small tribe who share a certain set of iconic rules.

RAFE ESQUITH: Being in Los Angeles and loving basketball, I always used to tell the children, there’s nothing magic about Magic Johnson. This talented man worked for hundreds of thousands of hours in lonely gyms when there weren’t people cheering him on to create that magic. There are no shortcuts.

You openly tell the children you want a better life for them than the one their school, their neighborhoods or even their families offer. On field trips you put them up at hotels and feed them at restaurants. “There’s a scene in the bus on the way back from Washington, when you address them about how they feel about going back to their normal lives. What’s your thinking behind all this? Do you get flak for it?

RAFE ESQUITH: I don’t get flak for it; as a matter of fact I’ve got 60 kids showing up at 6:30 in the morning.

I meant from other teachers or politically correct folk.

RAFE ESQUITH: Sure, I teach with 125 teachers. Most of them are incredibly nice to me, and eight or 10 believe I’m the anti-Christ. And that’s OK. The best teacher who ever lived was Socrates and they killed him.

Exactly.

RAFE ESQUITH: So if they’re not shooting at me sometimes I’m probably not doing anything right. I do want a better life for these kids and surely, to live in a neighborhood where you hear gunfire at night is not the best thing to envision in your future. There are other children in America who don’t have to go to bed with that. I’m just trying to level the playing field.

“The Hobart Shakespeareans” premieres on PBS Tuesday, Sept. 6. Check your local listings for times.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org), where he interviews people he believes can help create ‘a world that just might work.’

« AlterNet Home

Friday, September 9, 2005

Search for AIDS vaccine at risk due to lack of interest and funding: Lewis

Canadian Press

September 8, 2005

MONTREAL (CP) – The pursuit of a vaccination against AIDS is dying due to lack of funds and global commitment, according to the Canadian who is the United Nations point man on the fight against the deadly disease in Africa.

In a Tuesday evening speech to scientific researchers who are chasing a vaccine for AIDS, Stephen Lewis said the quest for a vaccine received $640 million US in funding in 2004, about half of the amount that should be dedicated to the research.

The UN Secretary General’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa pointed to recent high-level meetings on AIDS prevention where scant mention was made of the search for a vaccine.

“Your pursuit is in jeopardy,” Lewis said in prepared remarks to researchers at the AIDS Vaccine International Conference.

“Your collective voices must be heard on the funding dimensions of a vaccine. It can’t be left solely to activists. You’re the influential professionals. You should give no quarter. The world depends on it.”

Lewis was speaking at a conference organized by the Canadian Network for Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics – a network of researchers working on clinical trials for a vaccine for AIDS and SARS. The federal government last summer pulled $34 million in funding towards the clinical trials.

Seven vaccines developed by the Canadian researchers were ready for clinical trials next year, according to the organization.

Lewis said he can’t explain the lack of enthusiasm for the research in Canada and other developed nations.

“I don’t think the world yet realizes the carnage that is to come,” Lewis said. “I don’t think the world yet realizes the full, incomparable horror of AIDS, and its inexorable spread around the planet.”

Lewis urged the scientists to emerge from their laboratories to become champions for the cause.

“The world desperately needs your voices,” he said.

© The Canadian Press 2005

The New York Times

September 8, 2005

Glaxo to Acquire Canadian Vaccine Maker for $1.4 Billion

By ANDREW POLLACK

Hoping to become a major supplier of flu shots to the United States, GlaxoSmithKline said yesterday that it would pay $1.4 billion to acquire ID Biomedical, a Canadian vaccine maker.

The deal comes a week after Novartis offered $4.5 billion for the 58 percent of Chiron it does not already own, which would put Novartis in the vaccine business. So far, Chiron has rejected that offer as too low.

The takeover activity could reflect a change of perception among pharmaceutical companies, many of which have long regarded vaccines as an unattractive business.

“You’re seeing the big pharma companies recognizing the value of the vaccine business,” Anthony F. Holler, chief executive of ID Biomedical, said in an interview.

The flu vaccine business in particular seems to have become more attractive as shortages have lifted prices and concern has grown about a possible pandemic stemming from bird flu.

Last year the United States experienced a severe shortage of flu shots when Chiron’s factory in Liverpool, England, was shut down because of sanitary problems. Since Chiron was one of only two major suppliers, the shutdown deprived the United States of about half the expected supply of 100 million doses.

The supply outlook for this winter is still somewhat uncertain and will depend on how many doses Chiron can deliver.

In response to the shortage and federal efforts to recruit new suppliers, both GlaxoSmithKline and ID Biomedical had already been moving to enter the American market.

Glaxo, which already sells flu vaccine in dozens of countries, won United States approval last week but will sell only about eight million doses in this country this year because of capacity constraints at its factory in Dresden, Germany. Some of Glaxo’s vaccine was used on an emergency basis in this country last year.

ID Biomedical has been aiming for United States approval next year.

David Stout, president of pharmaceutical operations at Glaxo, said the acquisition “gives us immediate access to some capacity, state-of-the-art facilities, and product that is close to approval in the U.S.” He said owning the ID Biomedical factory would also allow Glaxo to produce bird flu vaccine, if necessary, for a possible pandemic.

Glaxo’s takeover of ID Biomedical would reduce the number of potential vaccine suppliers by one. The deal, however, and the possible acquisition of Chiron by Novartis, would put the American supply into the hands of financially stronger companies. The leading supplier of flu shots to the United States is Sanofi-Aventis.

Glaxo has said it planned to more than double the capacity at its German factory to 80 million doses by 2008. ID Biomedical, which now sells about 8 million doses a year to the Canadian government, is expanding capacity to about 70 million doses by 2007, with much of that output destined for the United States.

In an all-cash deal Glaxo has agreed to pay 35 Canadian dollars a share, or about $29.50. ID shares rose $3.46, to $29.46 yesterday.

The agreement does not preclude another company from making a higher offer, but Glaxo would have the right to match such an offer.

Biotech Monthly, an investment newsletter, said ID, which is based in Vancouver, was getting far less, relative to sales, than Novartis offered for Chiron. But Geoffrey C. Porges, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, disagreed, saying the relatively higher price offered for ID would pressure Novartis to raise its offer for Chiron.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The New York Times

September 9, 2005

Billions for Vaccines for the Poor to Be Raised in Bond Markets

By CELIA W. DUGGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 – Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Sweden will announce an agreement on Friday to raise almost $4 billion on the bond markets for an enormously expanded use of vaccines across the developing world. The World Health Organization estimates this undertaking will save the lives of five million children over the next decade.

Commitments from some of the participating nations have been secured only in recent days.

The new funds would roughly double the resources of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, an umbrella group of countries, international organizations, vaccine industry representatives and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Over the past five years, the alliance has financed the immunization of 78 million children and prevented more than a million child deaths, the health organization estimates.

The alliance’s board has already approved ambitious programs for 2006 to expand measles coverage in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as to help eradicate polio worldwide and increase the use of maternal and neonatal tetanus vaccines. These plans can go forward now that the new financing has been secured.

“We hope this pilot will demonstrate the feasibility and the power of this financing mechanism, and we look to gain more support from more countries,” said Paul Kissack, a spokesman for the British treasury.

The United States has declined to join the vaccine plan. Bush administration officials could not be reached for comment Thursday night, but said earlier this year that the long-term commitment to raise money through the bond market is not consistent with the annual appropriations process in Congress. The United States provides $60 million to $70 million a year to the alliance.

“We hope if this process is successful that the United States will reconsider its position,” said Dr. Julian Lob-Levyt, the vaccine alliance’s executive secretary.

British officials have said they hope the new resources will help the world reach the goal adopted unanimously five years ago at the United Nations to reduce child deaths by two-thirds by 2015. More than 170 government leaders will gather in New York next week to assess progress in meeting the antipoverty objectives they set in 2000.

The pact marks the first time rich nations have used pledges of increased aid to back government bonds as a means of financing a major development program. This so-called international finance facility is the brainchild of Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer.

Under the plan, income from the sale of the bonds would be provided to the global vaccine alliance to pay for vaccinations over a period of 10 years. The five participating nations would pay off the bonds over 20 years. The two largest donors are Britain, which has pledged to cover 35 percent of the cost, and France, which is covering a quarter.

The money will be used to purchase vaccines and bicycles to transport them, as well as to rehabilitate health clinics and pay health workers to do the immunizing in remote areas. Leaders of the alliance hope the vaccine plan will strengthen basic health services in poor countries, not just immunization efforts.

The New York Times

September 8, 2005

Virus Ravaging India’s Poor Stirs Call for Counterattack

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

LUCKNOW, India, Sept. 7 – Government ministers descended on this storied North Indian state capital on Wednesday to kick off an ambitious rural health initiative. The city’s roads were freshly tarred, and banners hung along the main boulevard to welcome its chief guest: former President Bill Clinton.

But across town in a government hospital ward with paint peeling off its walls lay small children clinging to life. One, in her father’s arms, could barely swallow spoonfuls of milk. Another had been unconscious for 10 days. A third could not breathe on his own.

All were victims of the viral disease known as Japanese encephalitis, which causes high fever, aches, eventual coma and often death. It has struck this region with a particular fury this year, shining a harsh light on India’s inability to halt an entirely preventable disease that has killed or stunted some of its most vulnerable citizens for the last quarter-century – the young rural poor.

The director general of the state government’s health department said Wednesday that since July 1 the death toll had reached nearly 500, and those were only cases reported to government hospitals across the state. Reuters on Wednesday gave a figure of 600.

More than 1,500 suspected cases of Japanese encephalitis have been reported so far, according to the state.

And while the number of suspected cases is considerably higher than in past years – five times as high as the counts in the last few years at the King George Medical University hospital here, for instance – critics said that the rise should be no surprise to government health officials and that the misery inflicted could have been significantly reduced.

This year, only 200,000 of the 7 million children who needed to be immunized in high-risk areas of Uttar Pradesh were vaccinated, and other ways of preventing its spread – keeping pigs, which harbor the virus, at a safe distance from people, and spraying against mosquitoes, which ferry it to humans – were apparently inadequately pursued.

“There is gross apathy of the government,” said T. N. Dhole, a professor of microbiology at the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences here, fresh from a tour of some of the most badly affected district hospitals. “You could have reduced mortality if you had done a little homework before.”

Even as the rural health initiative begins, the United Nations released its annual human development report on Wednesday, showing unsettling rates of infant mortality in this country.

For every 1,000 Indian children, 63 die, according to the report, a rate worse than neighboring and far poorer Bangladesh. Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous province, is one of the four Indian states with the worst rates of infant mortality.

Over all, India spends less than 1 percent of its gross domestic product on public health; the government has pledged to increase that share.

The encephalitis virus grows in wading birds as well as pigs; children are often the mosquitoes’ main victims.

Approved vaccines are in short supply worldwide, though another vaccine, derived from the cells of hamster kidneys, is widely available but yet to be approved by the World Health Organization. India says it plans to conduct clinical test trials of that vaccine, but that will not happen in time to help the children who need it now.

In Uttar Pradesh, the central government health minister, Dr. Ambubani Ramadoss, said in an interview here on Wednesday that he would encourage state health officials to mount a more aggressive spraying operation. State health officials have said health department staff members and vehicles, which could have been deployed to spray high-risk areas and monitor Japanese encephalitis, were deployed for local election duty in July and August – the crucial mosquito-breeding months.

Pigs are reared primarily by the caste groups, mostly poor and landless, who make up an important source of votes for the state’s ruling party. “Some political problems,” is how the state’s director general of health and medicine, O. P. Singh, put it. “They will try to separate next year.”

He was cheerful about the challenge. Next year, he said, the government would procure additional vaccines. “We will get vaccinations,” he said. “We will do it.”

In Gorakhpur, the eastern Uttar Pradesh epicenter of the epidemic, not a single corner of the three encephalitis wards in the local government hospital was free of misery and stink. Children were hooked up to nasal feeding tubes and oxygen tanks, and distraught parents camped out on the floor. In most beds, two children had been squeezed in. Additional beds spilled out into the hallways. Medical personnel have poured in from outlying areas to help.

On Wednesday alone, 30 new patients were wheeled in.

Dr. Ramadoss said it was primarily the state government’s responsibility to stop the epidemic. Then he corrected himself. “It’s a collective responsibility but implementation is for the state,” he said. “The state government has to be more proactive.”

Dr. Ramadoss pointed out that India was now a destination for medical tourism, its private clinics drawing foreigners seeking medical treatment.

By the time children arrived at the hospital at King George Medical University, they were either unconscious or suffering from seizures, or had lost some of their motor skills. Parents said they had watched their children deteriorate as they went from village doctor to local hospital to here.

As a rule, rural hospitals in this country are in short supply of oxygen, medicine and qualified staff.

“If you caught a child early on and gave him supportive treatment, yes, you would save some children,” said Rashmi Kumar, a pediatrician at the hospital. Of the six children who were in one of the encephalitis wards, she found it hard to say how many would survive.

The one ray of hope was Brijesh, 6, who had stood on his own and, holding his father’s fingers, walked a few steps along the hospital floor.

He was running a fever of 102 when he was admitted a week ago. He had had two seizures that very day. Before the fever gripped him, his father, Matadin, said, he would sprint across the village at the sound of a television set. Today he could barely whisper into his father’s ears. “Let’s go home,” he said.

Soon enough, Brijesh will be able walk like a normal little boy. But, the doctors say, his cognitive abilities might never fully rebound.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Gorakhpur for this article.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company