A couple of decades ago...


...I was listening to All Things Considered on OPB before Bob Geldorf organized a bunch of rock concerts that eliminated hunger in Africa, and in the course of the barrage of statistics and anecdotes about how even flies were endangered by the incredible drought and famine because they could not get enough liquid from the dry eyes of starving infants, I heard this figure: six African children were dying of starvation or thirst every minute. It was the kind of statistic that sails by most of the time, but I did some quick math, and that worked out to slightly more than half as many African corpses for the next 12 month period as Jews exterminated during the Holocaust.

I'm sure glad that Bob Geldorf solved that problem or we wouldn't have enough Africans left today for me to come across a similar statistic in The Oregonadian (if it matters to Oregasmian, you'll find it in The Oregoanadian) a few days ago. The subhead read: AIDS deaths in Africa reach 8,000 a day. Unfortunately, I didn't keep the copy of the paper, and when I searched OregonLive.com, I couldn't find the article either. So I went to Yahoo News, a typical source of truth in the NOMF, and searched for AIDS Death Africa and came up empty again, except for this curious ad at the both of the results page:

I'm not sure what the best price would be for acquiring a sufficient supply of aids death africa, and I'm not sure I would trust Smarter.com to find it for me.

The original focus of this post was, once again, to do some math, based on losing 8,000 people a day to anything. That works out to 56,000 a week, 240,000 a month, 720,000 a quarter, or 2,920,000 a year. Where's Bob Geldorf when we need him?

Posted: Sun - May 27, 2007 at 10:38 AM          
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