TIE ME ANIMALS DOWN, SPORT
Beware of the gonzo nature-television presenter

By Andrew Marshall

Sept. 4 is the fifth anniversary of the death of Steve Irwin, the Australian wildlife presenter fatally speared by a stingray’s barb while filming on the Great Barrier Reef. His death was a shock, but its manner surprised nobody. There was no dangerous animal Irwin wouldn’t provoke and manhandle for TV.

Five years on, the pet-and-pester approach he pioneered has become the standard way for nature programs to produce cheap dramatic footage — reality TV with claws. Turn on any channel and you’ll see Irwin lookalikes hassling animals. They declaim their love of nature, while unwittingly recording our dysfunctional relationship with it, teaching our children to both fear and subjugate creatures already pushed to the brink of extinction.

Irwin’s boyhood inspiration was the British broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough. Often whispering so as not to disturb his subjects, Attenborough reverentially reveals the wonders of the natural world and our place in it. He doesn’t set out to demonstrate his mastery over animals.

Today’s presenters are different. Animal Planet’s slogan is “Surprisingly Human.” It should be “Depressingly Human,” since it chronicles our species’ conflict with almost every other. A South African herpetologist called Donald Schultz, who fronts Wild Recon, is a self-styled adrenaline junkie on a pseudo-scientific mission. He collects snake venom and other animal fluids “that could yield life-altering scientific discoveries.” In Sri Lanka, he draws blood from a tranquilized young rogue elephant “so that researchers can study his hormones.”

But what discoveries those unnamed researchers make — or what qualifies a snake expert to draw blood from the world’s largest land mammal — is never explained. What we learn is this: animals are vicious, so humans are justified in using any means to subdue them. Schultz describes the drugged and terrified elephant as “five tons of aggression.”

This message is driven home by more recent shows, such as Man-Eating Super Snake (“No one is safe in South Florida”) and Nature’s Deadliest (“Size doesn’t matter to the world’s most dangerous creatures”). I’ve given up on finding a show that teaches us how to live in harmony with animals. Instead, we invade their habitats and, when they defend themselves, we brand them violent.

This is the apparent strategy of Animal Planet’s Into the Pride. A pride of lions known for “aggression toward people” must learn to grow accustomed to ecotourists at a Namibian reserve — or else. “If they don’t calm down,” we’re told, “they will be destroyed.” Calm down? They’re wild animals. They’re calm enough when you leave them alone. But try telling that to the show’s frat-boy host, a Canadian animal trainer called Dave Salmoni. He approaches on an all-terrain vehicle and sets about acclimatizing the lions to humans — by repeatedly aggravating them. “Right now, they’re problem cats,” Salmoni explains, “because of their perception of what humans are.” In this case, a whooping doofus on a quad bike.

Even National Geographic (“Inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888″) can’t leave animals be. An episode of its Monster Fish shows American biologist Zeb Hogan wrestling giant South American arapaima into a man-made pond where anglers pay to catch them. This is conservation?

All this poses a dilemma for parents. Where do children form an appreciation of nature? My father took me to zoos, which I loved. But today even the best zoos discomfit many parents, this one included. So children must turn to TV, where they find the bloody dramatized attacks of Discovery Channel’s recent Shark Week, or a show like Swamp Brothers, in which Florida reptile trader Robbie Keszey restrains wild animals under the guise of (he says) teaching people to respect “their rights to this place we call earth.” My son won’t be watching him.

Is there a connection between TV’s obsession with subjugating animals and our capacity to destroy them and their habitats? Possibly. We demonized sharks and were soon slaughtering millions for their fins every year. Through nature TV, we’re now demonizing all wild creatures to make us feel better about precipitating their extinction. “People come first,” says Schultz as he pursues that elephant, and for once he’s right. On this planet, only rogue humans are allowed to roam free.

By Orlando de Guzman & Andrew Marshall

If you don’t like hospitals—and who apart from health professionals does?—then you’ll hate Dhaka Hospital during one of the Bangladesh capital’s regular cholera epidemics.

Last October, when we filmed Dhaka’s Cholera Wars for Al Jazeera, the emergency ward was seething with men, women and children, many of them severely dehydrated and fighting for life. Patients moaned as nurses connected them with intravenous needles to bags of saline. Hospital orderlies pushed away trolleys piled with buckets of diarrhoea and vomit.

And all the while more patients arrived, by wheelchair or stretcher, or half-carried by fretful relatives, until they spilled out into makeshift wards set up in the parking lot.

It looked like pandemonium, but it wasn’t. The Cholera Hospital, as locals call it, is efficient and deceptively high-tech. (Look closely, and you’ll see that medical staff track each patient with handheld computers.) And it is unrivaled at treating large numbers of patients with potentially fatal diarrhoeal diseases such as cholera. “If you arrive alive at our hospital,” its director Mark Pietroni told us, “then you leave alive.”

We quickly realized that what we were filming was not a hospital, but a factory of miracles. Its staff save thousands of lives.

Dhaka has two cholera outbreaks each year: roughly, one before and one after the monsoon. Left untreated, cholera can kill in hours and it spreads quickly, which is why it so terrifies people. “You can start being ill at ten the morning and be dead by two in the afternoon,” says Pietroni. But treat it promptly, and even the sickest patients make a full recovery. Patients who were stretchered into Dhaka Hospital were walking out—albeit gingerly—within 24 hours.

Dhaka Hospital is part of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), a world leader in its field. One morning, while filming around the centre’s sprawling compound, a grey-bearded figure shambled past. “That’s Richard Cash,” explained a staff member in a reverential undertone. “He should have a Nobel prize.”

Now 70 years old, Cash pioneered the use of oral rehydration solution (ORS), a simple mixture of salt, sugar and water, to treat cholera and other diarrhoeal diseases. ORS is thought to have saved more than 50 million lives.

Today, ORS is the primary weapon in Dhaka Hospital’s fight against cholera. Treatment is free, but that doesn’t mean only the poorest go there. So do affluent Bangladeshis, who know the hospital’s no-frills appearance belies a standard of care offered almost nowhere else. We often saw sick children cradled by mothers in fine sarees and gold jewellery.

While we were filming in Bangladesh, another cholera epidemic was raging in Haiti, which had been devastated by a powerful earthquake in January 2010. By late October, the Caribbean country had reported about 3,800 cases and 280 deaths, a mortality rate of more than 7%. During the same period, Dhaka Hospital probably treated at least half that number of cholera patients, and we didn’t hear of a single death.

We left Bangladesh with a new appreciation for the staff of Dhaka Hospital and the ICDDR,B—and for the people of the world’s most densely populated large country. The poverty of Bangladeshis, and the disasters they endure, are well-documented. We hope that Dhaka’s Cholera Wars also shows their courage and resilience in the face of an age-old disease.

Watch Dhaka’s Cholera Wars on Al Jazeera

MEET COLONEL FISH SAUCE
By Orlando de Guzman & Andrew Marshall

We nicknamed him, rather cruelly, “Colonel Fish Sauce,” after the pungent staple ingredient in Thai cooking. The Royal Thai Army had invited us to film its drug rehabilitation program at a vast military base outside Bangkok, and the colonel’s bizarre advice to young drug users seemed to embody all that was wrong about the place.

“Eat lots of fish sauce,” he urged the men, who sat on the ground next to the colonel’s well-shined boots. “It replaces calcium and makes you sweat. The drugs come out with your sweat.”

Get caught on a minor drugs charge in Thailand, and you will likely be detained at a military-style boot camp like this, run by the armed forces or police. The one we visited for Al Jazeera’s “101 East” program is fairly typical. There, guarded by officers from an artillery regiment, a hundred or so men underwent the army’s version of rehab: four months of dawn-to-dusk military exercises.

They are not alone. Every year, hundreds of thousands of drug offenders end up at boot camps across Asia. Some camps are brutal: detainees at facilities in China, Vietnam and Cambodia have been subjected to torture and forced labor, reports Human Rights Watch. All are ineffectual: relapse rates hover between 60% and 95%, reports the World Health Organization. So why do most Asian governments still favor them?

One charitable answer: out of sheer panic. Asia is awash with a highly addictive drug called methamphetamine. The pill form is often known by its Thai name yaba (“crazy medicine”), while the purer, crystalline form is called ice, shabu, or speed. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it is now the “first choice drug” in China, Japan, Taiwan, and much of Southeast Asia.

Every year, police in these countries seize millions of yaba pills and hundreds of kilos of ice. But this still represents only a tiny fraction of what Asia produces and consumes. With law-enforcement agencies proving incapable of shutting off the supply, then reducing demand is paramount. But the repressive rehab policies favored by most Asian governments have barely dented it.

Methamphetamine can be eaten, smoked, snorted, or injected. Euphoric highs—the drug boosts energy, self-esteem and sexual pleasure—are often followed by crashing lows. Withdrawal symptoms can include fatigue, anxiety, paranoia, insomnia, loss of appetite, and depression.

Addiction is hard to treat. There is no methadone-like substitution drug. (Fish sauce is no help.) Heavy users can take months or even years to recover. Dependence is best treated with psychosocial and other behavioral therapies, which require time, money, and expertise.

It is cheaper and easier to incarcerate men at army camps and march them up and down for four months, often much longer. If high relapse rates don’t bother Asian governments much, it’s because boot camps aren’t really designed to rehabilitate users. They are designed to punish users, and thereby demonstrate that a government is tough on drugs.

Asians are sick of the havoc that methamphetamine is wreaking on families and communities. They desperately want solutions, and politicians are always happy to promise quick fixes. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, for example, absurdly insists that its 10 member countries will be “drug free” by 2015. Good luck. In 2009, more than 135,000 people were arrested on drug-related charges in Thailand alone.

Detention centers were partly designed to decriminalize users and keep them out of Asian prisons already overcrowded with drug offenders. Sure, most boot camp detainees don’t get criminal records. But they are stigmatized, cut off from their families and jobs, and eventually released back into drug-saturated societies with no real-life training to help them stay clean.

One surprising exception to this is Malaysia. Surprising, because this Muslim-majority nation isn’t exactly famous for its progressive policies. (Recently, one state sent dozens of schoolboys to a boot camp to address their “effeminate tendencies.”) The Global Commission on Drug Policy recently urged world leaders “to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately”: that repressive strategies don’t work. Zuraidah Mohamed, who last year took charge of Malaysia’s National Anti-Drugs Agency (NADA), has done exactly that.

“We’ve been in this compulsory [drug rehab] business for 28 years,” she told us. “The result is not encouraging at all. Something had to be done.” That something is what NADA calls Cure & Care Clinics. Drug users report to these clinics voluntarily and are treated as patients with a chronic, relapsing disease. At a clinic outside Kuala Lumpur, we filmed a group therapy session in which Malaysian men and women sat in a circle with counselors and discussed what triggered them to relapse into drug use. The difference between this spirited session and the one run by Colonel Fish Sauce couldn’t have been more striking.

NADA now runs seven Cure & Care Clinics and plans to open another 10 by 2013. Skeptics note that Malaysia still has 20 compulsory rehab centers, where conditions can be appalling—inmates rioted and set fire to one in Johor state just last week. But NADA’s change of direction remains a laudable exception in a region where the trend is still toward increasing compulsory rehab. Methamphetamine is Asia’s favorite high, but repressive and counterproductive drug policies are proving just as hard a habit to kick.

Watch Asia’s Speed Trap on Al Jazeera’s 101 East program.

THE HANGOVER PART II: SEX, DRUGS & POPULAR SEQUELS

In “Farangs,” a short story by Thai-American writer Rattawut Lapcharoensap, a guesthouse owner grumbles about foreign tourists and their narrow tastes. “Pussy and elephants,” she says. “That’s all these people want.”

Actually, we foreigners want much more. We want a drug-dealing monkey and an ass-kicking monk. We want a facial tattoo, men with breasts, and Mike Tyson tunelessly singing “One Night in Bangkok.” And we get them all in The Hangover Part II, a sequel to the highest-grossing R-rated comedy in U.S. box-office history.

The movie has reportedly angered and embarrassed Bangkok foreign residents like myself, and it’s true that the plot makes my adopted city look seedy and life-threatening. Our three American heroes, Stu, Phil and Alan, wake in a grim Bangkok hotel to discover that they have lost the teenage brother of the Thai woman Stu is about to marry. To find him, and save the wedding, the groggy trio must retrace their steps through a night of epic debauchery. Helping them is that monkey, who before long is mock-fellating an elderly Buddhist monk.

None of this made me fume or blush. Fatuous, clichéd or selective depictions of Bangkok by visiting filmmakers are so commonplace that foreign residents quickly stop registering them. Most of us don’t stay there because the sex is cheap, but because we’re pursuing careers, raising families and enjoying our lives. Thais are easygoing and treat foreigners with a respect we don’t often deserve. Bangkok is one of the world’s safest capitals. Food is cheap and delicious. A white-sand beach is only ever a short drive away. It’s never cold, not even when it rains.

What did puzzle me at first was why Thais weren’t more upset by The Hangover Part II, and why the government of Thailand — which, as a major tourist destination, is rightly obsessed about its global image — allowed it to be filmed here.

One reason could be that the movie isn’t nearly as unflattering to Thais as reports have suggested. The film’s only real Thai characters belong to the sophisticated family that the idiotic Stu has managed, inexplicably, to marry into. His fiancée is smart and beautiful; her father is snarky but successful; her brother is 16, plays the cello and studies at Stanford. Many Thais would regard this as a dream family.

None of the bad guys are Thais. That includes the flaccid and forgettable Mr. Big played by Paul Giamatti. The monks don’t look Thai either; with their burgundy robes and prayer beads, they seemed more Tibetan. Even the insect that makes a cameo in the Bangkok hotel room looked to me like a Madagascan hissing cockroach and not the local variety. The owner of the film’s only brothel is also a foreigner, as are its customers, which lets Thailand off the hook for its most notorious industry.

Thailand is sensitive about its image, especially when it comes to its booming sex trade. When I first visited Bangkok in the early 1990s, the government was livid about an entry in a Longman dictionary that described the capital as known for Buddhist temples and “a lot of prostitutes.” The dictionary was banned. “We do not deny the existence of the problem,” explained a government spokesman. “But we do not believe it should be used as the definition of this city.” This, he said, would be like using football hooligans to define London.

That government spokesman was called Abhisit Vejjajiva, and today he is Thailand’s Prime Minister. Last year, he visited the Hangover set. This is not necessarily because he shares the movie’s view of Bangkok, or likes its juvenile humor (although Abhisit attended a posh English school and must know a few fart jokes). It’s because Thailand’s earnings from foreign film productions doubled to $60 million in 2010, according to the Department of Tourism. Perhaps a quarter of that sum came from The Hangover Part II.

While brainless foreign movies get the prime-ministerial seal of approval, Thai filmmakers receive scant government attention — except from prudish censors. In his 2006 film Syndromes and a Century, Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul showed monks playing a guitar and with a radio-controlled toy. The censors told him to cut these scenes. Apichatpong balked, and it was two years before a heavily edited version of the movie was released in Thailand. While celebrated abroad, Apichatpong remained relatively unknown at home until his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year.

The two Hangover movies have now earned close to a billion dollars. I love infantile and tasteless humor — I’m British — but I may be alone in finding Zach Galifianakis too smug and joyless to be truly funny (although I did laugh when a Buddhist monk beat him up with a stick). The father of the bride compares his American son-in-law to a favorite Thai breakfast dish, johk. “Soft white rice in lukewarm water,” he says. “You feed it to small babies.” He could be describing the film.

The Hangover Part II won’t win a Palme d’Or or many other awards. Worst Hollywood Film Recently Shot in Bangkok? That prize goes to Bangkok Dangerous (2008), starring Nicolas Cage. Most Disappointing Sequel Set in Thailand? Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). Big Budget Movie with Most Thai Clichés? Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000).

Even the original Hangover can’t compete with Very Bad Things (1998), with Jeremy Piven and Cameron Diaz. It is also a black comedy about a bachelor party in Las Vegas going dreadfully wrong. You might remember it. After a night of booze and drugs, five buddies kill a prostitute and a security guard, chop up the bodies and bury them in the desert. It’s very funny. But maybe not if you live in Las Vegas.

Published in TIME.com

EAT, PRAY, DUCK: BALI’S ONGOING WOES
Trash, traffic and trigger-happy cops. Isn’t Bali supposed to be paradise?

By Andrew Marshall

The annual monsoon transforms Bali. Rain sweeps across slumbering volcanoes. Moss thickens on ancient temple walls. Rivers swell and flush their trash and frothing human waste into the sea off Kuta Beach, the island’s most famous tourist attraction, where bacteria bloom and the water turns muddy with dead plankton. “It happens every year,” shrugs Wayan Sumerta, a Kuta lifeguard, who sits with his love-struck Japanese girlfriend amid dunes of surf-tossed garbage. So why, in early March, did the Bali authorities warn tourists that swimming there for over 30 minutes could cause skin infections? The lifeguard tenderly strokes his girlfriend’s naked leg. “I guess some people just have sensitive skin,” he says.

Itchy ocean? Just add it to Bali’s growing list of seemingly intractable problems: water shortages, rolling blackouts, uncollected trash, overflowing sewage-treatment plants and traffic so bad that parts of the island resemble Indonesia’s gridlocked capital Jakarta. And don’t forget crime. In January, amid a spate of violent robberies against foreigners, Bali police chief Hadiatmoko reportedly ordered his officers to shoot criminals on sight. You’ve heard of the Julia Roberts movie Eat Pray Love, which was partly filmed in Bali? Now get ready for its grim sequel: Eat Pray Duck.

Most of Bali’s woes stem from a problem that rival resorts would love to have: too many tourists. In 2001, the island welcomed about 1.3 million foreign visitors. Ten years later — and despite bombings by Islamic extremists in 2002 and 2005 that killed 222 people, mostly Australian tourists — the island expects almost twice that number. And there are millions of Indonesian visitors too.

Hotels, shopping centers and restaurants are springing up everywhere to accommodate them. The cranes looming over Kuta are building at least three malls and a five-star hotel. But the less glamorous stuff — roads, power lines, sewers, parking spaces — often remains an afterthought. “The infrastructure is not keeping up with the development,” says Ron Nomura, marketing director at the Bali Hotels Association. The island’s lack of reservoirs, he says, is a case in point. “Can you believe there is this much rain and we don’t have enough water?”

When it comes to Bali, newspaper editors have a seemingly bottomless stock of “Paradise Lost?” headlines. Its rich Hindu culture is so distinctive that many people mistake the island for a separate country rather than a province of the world’s most populous Muslim nation. That Bali’s tourism industry has survived terrorism attacks and a global recession is a cause for pride. But amid unchecked growth and a creaking infrastructure, it is also a source of complacency. “It’s like Bali is slowly committing suicide,” says local journalist Wayan Juniarta.

Bali’s Governor I Made Mangku Pastika knows it. In January, he issued a moratorium on new construction in certain built-up areas, and later warned that his lush birthplace might turn into a “dry land full of concrete buildings.” Pastika is popular — he investigated the bombings as Bali’s then police chief — but his moratorium isn’t. “Some people says he’s trying to slow down Bali’s growth,” says Nomura. “That’s not necessarily true. What he’s looking for is more responsible growth.”

He probably won’t find it. Nobody I talked to reckoned that Pastika’s measures would influence who built what where. Bali’s spiritualism might be a bewildering blend of Hinduism, Buddhism and animism, but the island’s planning code is simple: if you build it, they will come.

And on the way, they’ll get stuck in traffic. Complaining about the congestion around the airport or in tourist areas like Kuta is now one of Bali’s newest pastimes. Even in Ubud, the seat of the island’s art and culture, once sleepy streets are clogged with buses carrying Chinese tourists, who visit the island in ever greater numbers. Vehicle ownership on Bali is rising at an annual rate (12.42%) that far outstrips the growth in new roads (2.28%), according to government statistics. “Traffic will get worse and worse,” I Made Santha, Bali’s traffic chief, predicted in February.

Equally damaging to Bali’s prestige is the perception among some expatriates that the island is increasingly unsafe. Lusiana Burgess, the 46-year-old Indonesian wife of a retired British pilot, was robbed and killed in her North Kuta home earlier this year and her murderer remains at large. An Australian woman awoke in her villa to be gagged and assaulted by four thieves. Then an American man was stabbed during another robbery attempt in Kuta. A week after that, police arrested and — following an apparent escape attempt — shot dead 34-year-old M. Syahri, from the neighboring island of Lombok, who was suspected of robbing a number of foreigners.

The statistics actually show a slight decrease in serious crime from 2009 to ’10. But Chris Wilkin, a former oil-company executive from the U.K. who retired in Bali six years ago, remains uneasy. “It was very quiet when I moved here,” he says. “It wasn’t a big attraction for the criminal classes. Now, with the boom, word has got round that there are easy pickings to be had.”

Wilkin, whose Indonesian wife rents villas to expats and knew Burgess, believes the threat of violent robbery will discourage foreigners from leasing properties in remote places. Investing in CCTV, intrusion alarms and bedside panic buttons may only “give a false sense of security,” he says. Recently, Wilkin accidentally set off his burglar alarm. Nobody went to investigate, not even the private security guards in his own complex.

Expat anxiety hasn’t dented Bali’s popularity among its core visitors, the Australians. And why should it? Officially, the Australian government still advises its citizens to “reconsider your need to travel” to Bali due to a “very high threat of terrorist attack,” yet more than a hundred flights arrive from Australia every week. The dangers to new arrivals are those commonly faced by tourists everywhere: dodgy food, motorbike accidents, and — as a sign at my Kuta hotel suggests (“No Jumping from Any Balcony into Pool Is Permitted”) — beer-fueled misadventure.

A new terminal at Bali’s shabby airport is due for completion in 2013. But unless other infrastructure is improved, this will serve only to channel yet more tourists onto a critically overburdened island. For now, however, such doubts are largely forgotten in the rush to cash in on the Bali boom. “Goodness shouts, evil whispers,” runs an overused Balinese proverb. But money talks.

For the Balinese reaction to this story, please see Read With For Not Laughing

Cholera kills 120,000 people every year, estimates the World Health Organization. Could mass vaccination—now being tested in Bangladesh’s cholera-prone capital—prove a new weapon against an old disease?

By Andrew Marshall

DHAKA — Anita Ashfaqunnesa skips over a ditch oozing with raw sewage, her spotless white shawl trailing behind her like a superhero’s cape, then squeezes between shacks built on an old rubbish dump. Three years ago, she explains, this slum in northern Dhaka didn’t exist. But with hundreds of thousands of rural job-seekers pouring into Bangladesh’s capital every year, it now teems with families, and the water they use for drinking, cooking and bathing comes from pipes that run alongside, and often through, the sewage ditches. That’s why the area’s oldest living resident is not a person, but a disease. “Cholera is a common ordeal here,” says Anita, 33. “People don’t fear it, but they are happy to hear there’s a vaccine coming to prevent it.”

Anita is one of a small army of field workers collecting household data for the biggest oral cholera vaccination program in history. It starts on Feb. 17 and will involve 240,000 residents in Mirpur, the district that reports most of Dhaka’s cholera cases. Two-thirds of them will receive two oral doses of a cheap new Indian-made vaccine. “We think of it as a demonstration project rather than a trial,” says Dr. Stephen Luby, Bangladesh country director for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). “We don’t have a big question in our minds over whether this vaccine is going to prevent cholera. What we’re trying to do is illustrate the feasibility of using it as a public health intervention.”

Mass vaccination could be a new weapon against an old disease. In Zimbabwe, where cholera claimed 5,000 lives in 2008 and 2009, a swift vaccination program could have cut the death toll by 40%, calculated the authors of a study published in Jan by PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Such results are avidly followed in Haiti, where cholera has killed about 3,800 people and sickened 189,000 since October. A committee that includes experts from the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) recently recommended a small-scale cholera vaccination project. This rankled Haitian health officials, who want millions to be protected against a disease that foreign peacekeepers almost certainly brought with them after last year’s earthquake.

Anita Ashfaqunnesa in Mirpur

Nobody in Bangladesh disputes the origins of the disease. The Ganges delta, which India and Bangladesh straddle, is cholera’s homeland. Six of the seven pandemics since the 19th century have originated here. Every year, WHO estimates, there are 3-5 million cholera cases and up to 120,000 deaths worldwide. Dhaka’s dilapidated water and sanitation systems provide ideal conditions. Bounded by rivers that are too filthy to purify, the city pumps up nearly all its water from hundreds of deep wells. It is never enough, especially when those pumps need electricity to run, and Bangladesh is plagued by power shortages too. With no positive pressure in the water pipes, sewage and other contaminants easily leak in.

The only thing Dhaka doesn’t lack is people. With 13 million residents and counting, it is a fast-growing megacity in the world’s most densely populated large country. New arrivals squeeze into already overflowing slums, or squat on wasteland with zero infrastructure. “Wherever there is human misery you will find cholera,” says Dr. Mark Pietroni, Medical Director of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) in Dhaka, which is implementing the vaccine project with the Bangladesh government. “It thrives on malnutrition, overcrowding and poor hygiene.”

Cholera outbreaks in Dhaka are as predictable as the seasons. There are two each year: roughly one before and one after the monsoon. Dhaka Hospital at the ICDDR,B treats thousands of cholera patients, who during outbreaks not only crowd its wards and hallways, but spill out into tents in the parking lot, forming what might be the world’s only hospital ward with speed bumps. Left untreated, cholera can kill in hours. But treat it promptly and properly, mainly with oral rehydration salts, and death rates are under 1%. At Dhaka Hospital, even the sickest patients make near-miraculous recoveries; arrive with just one breath, say locals, and you’ll leave alive.

But as Dhaka’s population grows, so does the hospital’s patient load. Every March and April, a thousand new patients a day is standard. “Cholera is a dreaded illness because of its rapid onset, severity and potential to cause outbreaks that easily overwhelm public health systems,” says Dr. Regina Rabinovich, director of Infectious Diseases at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “That’s why it’s important to invest in the development of new, more effective vaccines.”

Enter Shanchol, a two-dose vaccine produced by Shantha Biotechnics of Hyderabad and developed with funding from (among others) the Gates Foundation, which also gave $16.5 million to the ICDDR,B for the cholera vaccine project. Shanchol is safe and efficacious: a trial in the Indian city of Kolkata involving nearly 70,000 people showed that the drug gave 67% protection for at least 2 years. Just as importantly for mass vaccinations, it is cheap: its two doses cost about $3, or about a tenth the price of its only rival, the Dutch-made drug Dukoral. Shanchol is expected to get WHO approval this year.

Bangladesh’s state-run immunization programs are widely trusted, so persuading a cholera-weary populace to take the vaccine shouldn’t be hard. Some 80,000 adults and children will receive it; another 80,000 will receive the vaccine, plus active encouragement to treat household water and wash their hands with soap. But assuaging those who don’t get it might be trickier. This includes 80,000 people who will unknowingly receive a placebo, forming a control group that helps validate the project’s results. “That’s what we perceive is going to be our biggest problem: not everybody gets it,” says Luby, who was seconded from the CDC to head the ICDDRB’s Program on Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Sciences.

One of the project’s broader aims is to get a better idea of cholera’s mortality rate. “Right now most of the estimates that people throw around are quite speculative,” says Luby. Mortality at the ICDDR,B’s hospital may be less than 1%, but some patients are dead on arrival — negotiating this vast city’s gridlocked streets can use up precious hours — and others expire at home.

Mass vaccination has its critics. Today’s drugs do not offer long-term coverage or protect against every cholera strain. And even a cheap vaccine, in high quantities, is expensive and could divert resources from the only thing proven to eradicate cholera: improved water and sanitation infrastructure. (London suffered centuries of cholera epidemics until the Victorians built sewers.) Improving Dhaka’s infrastructure is vital, agrees Luby, but the task could take decades. The same is true for hundreds of cities in our rapidly urbanizing world, and indeed for disaster zones such as Haiti. While that infrastructure is being built or rebuilt, how do you protect a vulnerable population from cholera? Mass vaccination is one answer. “What we’re trying to do is generate some evidence on what’s feasible and cost-effective,” he says.

Participants in the Mirpur project will be monitored for years. But the vaccine’s impact could be felt as early as March or April, when the more severe of Dhaka’s biannual epidemics strikes. “That’s why we’re aiming to have this community immunized by the time that worst peak comes,” says Luby. Haiti — and the rest of the world — will be watching.

Correction: The people in the control group will not receive a placebo, knowingly or unknowingly. My apologies for the error.

Blog post: You’ve Got Cholera

Watch “Thailand’s Tropical Gulag,” a film by Orlando de Guzman and Andrew Marshall, on Al Jazeera’s “People & Power” programme.

IS THE THAI MILITARY TORTURING DETAINEES?
Thai soldiers have adopted the worst practices of the only military they admire more than their own: America’s.

By Andrew Marshall

There is one way the latest WikiLeaks deluge could help beleaguered U.S. officials. It might encourage an Iraq-weary American public to forget the last WikiLeaks deluge: war logs suggesting that the U.S. military had ignored torture by its Iraqi allies. But those allegations still resonate in Thailand, and not just because this staunch U.S. ally is fighting an insurgency of its own. Since 2004, more than 4,400 people have been killed in southern Thailand in a bloody conflict between government security forces and shadowy separatist militants. Most Thais are Buddhists, but the southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat are largely populated by Malay-speaking Muslims, who have chafed under rule from faraway Bangkok for a century.

I recently visited the region with director Orlando de Guzman to co-produce an al-Jazeera documentary on the death of a 25-year-old militant suspect called Sulaiman Naesa. He was detained in May at Pattani’s vast Ingkhayutthabariharn army camp. The Thai army says Sulaiman confessed to his part in nine killings, then later tied a towel to the bars of his cell and hanged himself. Sulaiman’s parents say their son was a semi-literate villager, not a militant, and that the blood and bruising on his corpse proves that soldiers tortured him to death.

What really happened? We’ll probably never know. His parents saw no point in an autopsy. “How could we fight the government?” asked his mother Maetsoh. But Sulaiman’s case should refocus international attention on human-rights violations in southern Thailand — specifically, on an ever growing body of evidence that suggests that the military routinely tortures Muslim detainees. It is also worth asking why the U.S. is remaining quiet about it.

The Thai army was keen to show our crew a human face. Lieut. General Pichet Visaijorn, then the regional commander, gave us a personal tour of his pet projects. They included free dental surgery for local people at his headquarters in Yala. We watched an army dentist fit an elderly Muslim with a set of false teeth. The man grinned. “Are they beautiful?” urged Pichet, grinning back. “Do you like them?” Then the smiles faded. Our next stop was Ingkhayutthabariharn, home to the military’s main detention and interrogation facility. It is called the Reconciliation Promotion Centre — an Orwellian touch, considering the camp’s notoriety. For Muslims, Ingkhayutthabariharn is a “terrifying word,” says Sunai Phasuk of New York City–based Human Rights Watch. “They know anything could happen to them in there.”

Sulaiman Naesa

Sulaiman was found dead in a one-story cell-block that soldiers call “the resort.” (His cell door is pictured above.) “Everyone was scared there,” a former inmate told us. The inmate said he spoke briefly with Sulaiman, who said that soldiers had kicked him so hard in the stomach that he hadn’t eaten for four days. He said he saw detainees beaten and plastic bags put over their heads to simulate suffocation. So many detainees have complained of torture in southern Thailand, and for so many years, that it is amazing the world hasn’t paid more attention. Abuses reported by detainees include severe beatings, electric shocks, forced nudity, exposure to extreme cold or heat, needles inserted into open wounds and holding detainees’ family members hostage — including, in one case, a 6-year-old boy.

The army has not called these allegations isolated incidents or blamed rotten apples; it has flat-out denied them. “We have never committed torture,” Lieut. General Udomchai Thamsarorat, the regional commander, told me. “We’re here to help people, not hurt them.” Blanket denials don’t impress the experts. “The security forces continue to use torture even though senior commanders claim to have prohibited it,” the Brussels-based International Crisis Group said in November. In the two months leading up to Sulaiman’s death, Amnesty International received eight reports of torture — six from Ingkhayutthabariharn.

Denials don’t fool the locals either. In Pattani, I know a teacher of Malay who, as an exercise, asked his students — all Muslims — to write a newspaper-style report. A dozen of them turned in stories about relatives or friends who had been detained or tortured. When I asked a Muslim paralegal why more people don’t speak out about such abuses, he replied, “We hate the army, but we fear them also. The fear is stronger than the hate.” Such views seemed to barely register with the officers I spoke to. Lieut. General Udomchai said he was “100% confident” that his troops were winning Muslim hearts and minds. A civil affairs officer told me that local people “trust us more and more,” before explaining that Thailand was one big loving family in which Muslims were “naughty teenagers.”

Torture is illegal and morally repugnant. It’s also counterproductive: stories of abuse by security forces are potent recruiting tools for insurgents. Though torture is well proven to produce unreliable intelligence, the military still evidently regards it as an acceptable and effective weapon against a ruthless enemy. Sometimes, torture is used not to extract information but to exact revenge for murdered colleagues. Insurgents regularly burn, behead or mutilate the corpses of soldiers they have killed.

Who can hold the Thai military to account? Not the courts: an emergency law in southern Thailand grants the security forces immunity from prosecution. And not Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who is beholden to the army for crushing the anti-government Red Shirt protests in May. The U.S. should have more luck. Its security ties with Thailand go back more than half a century, and it has trained more Thais under its International Military Education and Training program than any other nationality. But there’s a problem. On the subject of torture, the U.S. has no moral high ground left to occupy — especially in Thailand.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks on the U.S., the Central Intelligence Agency set up a global network of secret prisons where terrorism suspects were subjected to waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and other forms of torture. The system’s first two detainees were brutally interrogated at a prison in Thailand in 2002. In November, the U.S. Justice Department decided that CIA officials would not face criminal charges for destroying videotapes that showed the torture.

The CIA never revealed the exact location of its secret prison, reportedly closed in 2003. And Thailand denied all knowledge of it. Yet many of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques refined at these facilities — prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation, use of dogs — keep resurfacing in detainee testimony to international human-rights groups. This is not proof that Americans are teaching Thais how to torture, but it isn’t a coincidence either. The Thai army seems to have adopted the worst practices of the only military it knows and admires more than itself.

In January 2011, Thailand’s insurgency entered its eighth year. Peace doesn’t stand a chance until Thailand’s generals see torture for what it is: a cancer in their ranks. Want to win the hearts and minds of Muslims? Then investigate and prosecute the soldiers who abuse them. What people really want is justice, not free dentures.

Watch “Thailand’s Tropical Gulag,” a film by Orlando de Guzman and Andrew Marshall, on Al Jazeera’s “People & Power” programme.

BANGKOK BODYSNATCHERS

They’ve been accused of robbing the dead, ransoming corpses back to loved ones, and practicing witchcraft and cannibalism. But what would Bangkok do without its volunteer ambulance crews?

By Andrew Marshall  Photos by Jason P. Howe

TIGER is driving way too fast down a dark Bangkok backstreet and the Shih Tzu is going nuts. It’s spinning like a furry top on my lap, wound up by the sirens and the flashing lights and the sheer velocity of Tiger’s ambulance, a death-black Mitsubishi pick-up truck with just enough room in the back for a plastic stretcher, an oxygen tank, some medical supplies and a petite 30-year-old Thai woman called Shrimp—Tiger’s wife. The Shih Tzu is called Sunday. It rides up front.

We hang a right on Rama IV, and suddenly one of Bangkok’s busiest roads is unscrolling before the golden Buddha statue glued to Tiger’s dashboard. Up ahead, more lights and sirens, as ambulances arrive from elsewhere in the city. Their goal: a 19-year-old lying unconscious on the warm tarmac, surrounded by blood and bits of motorbike. Stopped nearby is the truck that flattened him.

Tiger and Shrimp leap out of the Mitsubishi. The teenager’s jaw is clenched shut, a sign that the brain inside his helmet-less skull is dangerously swollen. Tiger and his colleagues scrape him off the road onto a plastic stretcher, then slot him into the back of another pick-up. It screams off to a nearby hospital.

As the presence of a four-month-old novelty dog might suggest, Tiger and Shrimp are no ordinary paramedics. In fact, they’re not paramedics at all. By day, they work at a Thai record company. By night, they are unpaid volunteers for Ruamkatanyu (literally, “united in gratitude”), one of a handful of feuding private charities in Bangkok which collect the dead and ferry the injured to hospital. Their nickname: the bodysnatchers.

“Quiet tonight,” says Tiger, a big, low-browed guy who, like Shrimp, wears a green aviator jumpsuit—Ruamkatanyu’s uniform. We’re parked at the entrance of a mosquito-infested alley on Sukhumwit, one of Bangkok’s best-known streets. Shrimp is showing me the Mitsubishi’s basic medical equipment which, like the vehicle itself, is paid for by volunteers. Tiger is cradling the Shih Tzu like a baby, planting kisses on its head. “Tiger’s a real pussy,” jokes another volunteer. “He cried when his hamster died.”

Bangkok does have government-run ambulances but they are rare—there are fewer than 150 in a city of more than 10 million people—and slow. Your options are: (a) bleed to death waiting for one; or (b) call Ruamkatanyu. It has thousands of volunteers and Bangkok depends on them. Yet the bodysnatchers are often despised as hoodlums and vultures. They’re accused of stripping the dead and the injured of valuables, ransoming corpses back to loved ones, and practicing witchcraft and cannibalism.

For Ruamkatanyu’s members, such popular prejudices only reinforce their passion for the job, their tribal loyalty to each other, their esprit de corpse. Nobody likes the bodysnatchers but they don’t care. They’re like Millwall supporters with first-aid kits.

*

THEY CONGREGATE in Bangkok’s side-streets and on the forecourts of petrol stations in pimped-up Izuzu and Toyota pick-ups with bucket seats, roll-bars, tinted windows and Ruamkatanyu stickers on the doors. The roofs bristle with radio antennae, the backseats brim with subwoofers. On the dash: Buddhas and nodding dogs. Most volunteers are nicknamed after animals, as is Thai custom, or take English handles.

Frog and Wow are two of Ruamkatanyu’s 24 full-timers, with at least 110 hours training (volunteers usually have only 16) and heaps of experience. Frog is 22 but has been riding with the snatchers since he was 10, when a neighbor took him along. His finest hour was saving a dying motorcyclist with 30 grueling minutes of CPR. His monthly salary is 6,000 baht – around £120.

George, 26, a volunteer, joined after being injured in a motorcycle accident. His cousin, who was driving, broke his leg. George lay there, useless and in agony. “I couldn’t do anything, except wait for Ruamkatanyu to arrive,” he says. His crew—Apple, Ton, Donut, and two fifth-form schoolgirls in jumpsuits called March and Gate—have their own website. It’s mostly photos of babes, cars and corpses—a severed leg extruding from wreckage, a guy with his belly opened up like an anatomy diagram. By day, George works in a coffee shop.

Then there’s Oh and Wanchai, both volunteers. Oh is a soldier. Wanchai drives the Australian ambassador’s armoured car.

For Thai Buddhists, donating time or money to Ruamkatanyu is a way of making merit or accumulating good karma, thereby improving the chances of an auspicious reincarnation in the next life. Many volunteers are movies stars or TV celebrities, such as Bin Bunluerit, known to the world (if known at all) as Poros, King of India, in Oliver Stone’s Alexander. But one of its best-known members isn’t even Thai. He is a six-feet-tall lapsed Scouser called Marko Cunningham.

Marko was 5 when his family emigrated from Liverpool to New Zealand. Now 39, he calls Thailand home (he teaches English here) and Ruamkatanyu family. Marko first went with the group to donate relief supplies to flood victims outside Bangkok. Then, when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed thousands of people at beach resorts on and around Phuket, Ruamkatanyu dispatched hundreds of volunteers to retrieve the dead. Marko joined them.

He spent two gruelling weeks working at a temple-turned-morgue in Khao Lak. The corpses were bloated at first, but later liquefied inside the maggot-ridden body-bags. Marko grew so accustomed to death that, to avoid the tropical heat, he slept alongside the bodies kept inside refridgerated trucks. The title of his new book is Sleeping With The Dead.

“When I started out at Ruamkatanyu I was the token foreigner,” he recalls. “The tsunami sealed the deal. Boom! I was one of the boys.” Leaving Ruamkatanyu now, he says, “would be like walking away from family.”

After the tsunami, he was invited to join a Ruamkatanyu ambulance unit in Bangkok, and soon Marko was not just collecting bodies but saving lives—and delivering babies, diving into burning buildings, cleaning up after shootings, stabbings and suicides, and capturing escaped pet pythons. He learned Thailand’s language, its ways of life and death. He learned to smile and talk to the newly dead, so that their spirits enter the afterlife happy.

The action you see depends on the location, explains Marko. Different places, different shit. On the outskirts of Bangkok, where gridlocked streets give way to fast-moving highways, it’s multiple pile-ups. On Sukhumwit, where his mates Tiger and Shrimp hang, it’s bars, brothels, punch-ups, robberies, knife-fights and suicides.

And foreigners. A week before, a taxi had knocked a farang off a motorbike. “He’d lost a lot of blood,” recalls Shrimp, in Thai. “We don’t speak English, so we couldn’t say, ‘Stay still, we’re here to help.’” So the farang thrashed around like a dying replicant. It took a few Ruamkatanyu volunteers to lash him to a stretcher.

Tiger once stopped an American from topping himself—grabbed the guy as he was jumping off a bridge into traffic. Shrimp says you get a lot of farang suicides around here, usually hangings, nearly always men. Why are farang guys always trying to kill themselves? “They marry Thai women,” she replies, deadpan.

*

RUAMKATANYU SPRANG from a random act of kindness. About 60 years ago a Thai-Chinese trader called Somkiat offered to pay for the funeral of a penniless villager. Word spread. The trader set up Ruamkatanyu to deal with other requests to collect the destitute dead. Sometimes the dead weren’t dead, just injured, which is why the ambulance service began. It was primitive. Patients weren’t given on-the-spot medical attention, just slung into pick-up trucks for an agonising (and often one-way) trip to the hospital.

Ruamkatanyu is better-equipped these days, at least by Thai standards, thanks entirely to public donations. At its busy office in Wat Hualamphong, not far from Bangkok’s central train station, you are greeted by a wall of cheap wooden coffins. Beneath them, people queue up three deep at donation desks. They will gain good karma by helping to buy such coffins for the destitute dead. Afterwards, to complete the merit-making process, they join the scrum of worshippers to light incense in the adjoining shrine. Golden Buddhas and bearded Chinese gods peer down through thick fragrant smoke.

Ruamkatanyu’s original HQ is in Bangkok’s port area. At its entrance is a shrine of 13 jawless human skulls, their foreheads plastered with gold leaf. They belong to some early nameless victims whose spirits are believed to protect the building. Skull-worshipping: no wonder the bodysnatchers are mistakenly accused of witchcraft. As for cannibalism, blame an outfit called Sawang, based in the freewheeling Thai beach resort of Pattaya.

Last year photos showing Sawang volunteers dismembering and apparently eating a dead body went viral on the internet. A grinning volunteer holding aloft a severed hand; a hook shucking brains from a skull; people cooking something in a large wok; and then Sawang staff eating that something from bowls. Marko says the photos show a rare ceremony in which bones are cleaned before being cremated or entombed; afterwards, the volunteers eat vegetarian food. “Strange and somewhat horrifying,” he admits. But not cannibalism.

Bodysnatching is a growth business. Thais are famously laid back, but put them behind a steering wheel and they morph into brake-for-nothing speed-freaks. They send text messages while piloting motorbikes. There are few discernible rules of the road. Drunk driving is a national pastime. You can buy a driving license for the equivalent of a tenner – often from the police.

All this explains why more than 12,000 people die in road accidents in Thailand every year. (In Britain, it’s about 3,000.) That’s 33 deaths a day. And that’s a lot of work for the bodysnatchers.

*

RUAMKATANYU IS NOT the only show in town. Its main rival is an older charity called Poh Tek Tung. Their members clashed regularly in the past, sometimes even fighting over corpses at accident scenes—thus the nickname “bodysnatchers.” To keep the peace, Bangkok was carved in two: Ruamkatanyu patrol the north, Poh Tek Tung the south, and every 24 hours they swap.

But this fragile equilibrium has been disturbed by the recent arrival of ambitious new bodysnatching groups. Some private hospitals give cash to crews who bring them patients. These transactions are illegal and Ruamkatanyu forbids it. But for its upstart rivals, hospital kickbacks are a powerful incentive to invade Ruamkatanyu’s turf. “These smaller groups shouldn’t even be here,” says Marko angrily. “They are fighting for territory and money.”

He recalls one of the first big fights, a year or so ago. It was around 4AM and members of Siam Ruamjai (ironic translation: “Thailand United”) attacked his colleagues at a Bangkok petrol station with bats and knives. Ruamkatanyu fought back, and a wave of shootings, fire-bomb attacks and fist fights followed. “They shot at us,” explains Bomb, 25, who drives a hearse-like Mitsubishi. “We shot at them.”

Then came last year’s Songkran, or Thai new year—better known to the rest of us as the Water Festival. It’s a busy time for the bodysnatchers. Marko calls Songkran “seven days of sex, alcohol, drugs, fights, car accidents and general mayhem.” He and Wow went to pick up an injured man who had been knocked off his motorbike by a bucket of water thrown by a reveler. As they were driving away, there was a gunshot, and a bullet passed through the ambulance’s right flank. It missed Marko and the patient’s head by inches.

Marko looked outside and saw an ambulance speed away. It belonged to Pi Roon, a second rival group. Last December, Pi Roon swarmed another Ruamkatanyu hang-out. Oh, the soldier, raced there to help, but was set upon by Pi Roon volunteers with clubs and samurai swords. Luckily, Oh carries a Glock pistol. He fired it into the air, which dispersed the mob long enough for him to escape.

Recalling the incident, Oh seems shaken. “If I hadn’t defended myself that night, I’d be dead,” he says. He still has a two-inch scar on his buzz-cut head.

For a while, some volunteers stopped wearing their Ruamkatanyu uniforms, for fear of being targeted by rivals. They now carry guns. One volunteer has a machete. Tiger keeps a Louisville Slugger baseball bat on his backseat. “There will be more violence,” predicts Marko.

*

RIVAL GANGS ARE ONE occupational hazard. Sleep deprivation is another. It is not uncommon for Ruamkatanyu staff to go 48 hours without sleep; a volunteer might put in 80 hours a week and still hold down a day job. How do they do it?

Ruamkatanyu forbids alcohol and drugs, but the use of methamphetamine—known in Thai as ya ba or “crazy medicine”—is pretty rife, according to Marko. The pills are usually dissolved in energy drinks. Marko once inadvertently drank a bottle of Red Buffalo which a colleague had spiked with three ya ba. He spent the night pacing Bangkok’s streets, trying to get his blood-pressure down.

Other hazards include being shaken down for money by police, getting hit by reckless motorists at accident scenes. Broken relationships and depression abound. One of Marko’s colleagues killed herself, another was gunned down in a car-park, possibly by a rival group. A third, called One, was hit by a police car. “Fucking sad,” says Marko. “At his funeral even the toughest Ruamkatanyu guys were crying.”

Marko struggles to explain why he does what he does. But strip away the death fetishism and waft away the incense smoke, and Ruamkatanyu’s appeal isn’t much of a mystery. Driving fast. Saving lives. Girls in jumpsuits.

1:50 a.m. The radios crackle again. There’s been an explosion in a market in Klong Toey, Bangkok’s biggest slum. Marko, Tiger and Shrimp race there, along with what seems like every Ruamkatanyu ambulance in the city. There has been a lot of violence at Klong Toey market lately. It had been slated for redevelopment, but the vendors refused to budge so someone has hired thugs to frighten them off. Last year two market guards were shot and killed.

The market is busiest in these pre-dawn hours. We arrive to find that somebody has lobbed a grenade into the crowd, injuring six people. Two are being ferried out in Ruamkatanyu pick-ups. This part of the market is hung with chunks of brightly lit, freshly butchered meat. There is a crowd around a noodle stall, staring at grenade fragments.

Marko looms above the crowd. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he says, worried. “There might be a second bomb.” Marko, who once narrowly avoided being trapped in a burning hotel, has learned to distrust his bravado. “The longer you’re in Ruamkatanyu, the more invulnerable you feel,” he says. “It’s not very healthy.”

As we walk back to the Mitsubishi, unsmiling men push past us, their trolleys piled high with bags of blood, bone and gristle.

Stinging Season: Can We Learn to Love the Jellyfish?

By Andrew Marshall

They’re alien-looking, they’re stealthy, and they can hurt. Jellyfish are the pests of the sea, coming out in droves every summer to turn a day at the beach into a world of pain. After a three-mile-long armada of jellyfish stung hundreds of vacationers on Spanish beaches earlier this month, the question might seem perverse: Can we ever learn to love the jellies?

Fernando Boero thinks we can. A professor of zoology and marine biology at the University of Salento in Lecce, Italy, Boero is the brains behind JellyWatch, the first attempt to mobilize the public in a wide-scale survey of the Mediterranean Sea’s least popular resident. Run under the auspices of the Mediterranean Science Commission (CIESM), the scheme was piloted in Italy in 2008, meeting such success that Israel joined a year later. So have France, Tunisia and Turkey, with other jelly-vexed nations expected to follow. “Nobody was looking at jellies over a vast scale,” says Boero. “There are similar initiatives for birds or butterflies, but nothing like it for marine science.”

JellyWatch relies on “citizen scientists” — mostly beachgoers — who are encouraged to record their sightings and send photos by e-mail either to Boero or to the website of Italian science magazine Focus. The photos are uploaded onto a map to show which species occur when and where — data that CIESM hopes might one day allow for short-term forecasting of jellyfish swarms or blooms. Some send shots of their blistered skin, others images of rarely or never-before spotted species. In June, a dive-shop operator on Pantelleria, a volcanic speck of an island between Sicily and Tunisia, sent in photos of an Atlantic jelly called Catostylus tagi — its first sighting in the Mediterranean. “Without JellyWatch, we wouldn’t know about its presence,” says Boero.

Meanwhile, a composite image of JellyWatch sightings for May, June and July shows Italy’s 5,000-mile coastline to be fringed with multiple species. Boero says it reveals useful information about where they are and how many are out there. Take Pelagia, the mauve stinger, billions of which famously devoured a huge salmon farm off Northern Ireland’s coast in 2007: thanks to JellyWatch, scientists know it’s more abundant in the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian seas, and appears all the way from spring through fall. Members of the public are “becoming the eyes of the scientific community,” says Boero. They are also becoming jellyfish lovers, sending in their photos with messages of appreciation. “People admire their elegance and beauty,” says Boero. “They don’t see them just as a nuisance.”

JellyWatch received more than 500 reports from Italy in the first half of August alone. But citizen science can’t provide all the answers; despite their seeming ubiquity in summer news reports, jellyfish are elusive and mysterious creatures. Mauve stingers, for example, disappear in the winter, and nobody knows where they go. And crucially, scientists still don’t understand enough about the impact of jellyfish on marine ecosystems. “It’s not easy to observe them,” says Boero. “It’s impossible to see them from satellites, so standard observation from space is useless.” And looking for them by sea isn’t easy, either. The Adriatic coast of Apulia — the heel of Italy — is usually thick with tentacle-less Rhizostome, but bad weather can drive them into deeper water. So even when a research vessel chases a major sighting, it might arrive to find a jelly-free sea. “Citizen science is the only option,” says Boero.

The charismatic ambassador for matters gelatinous — who once named a jellyfish Phialella zappai, after Frank Zappa — hopes JellyWatch will help change popular perceptions toward the much-maligned creature. Boero wants people to know that while there are species of Mediterranean jelly that sting, none are deadly — unlike those lurking in Australian waters — and some are even edible.

Those involved with JellyWatch — and a similar project, jellywatch.org, launched in February by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif. — hope the project will boost public interest in science in general. “The best way for the public to understand and appreciate science is to participate in it,” wrote Jonathan Silvertown, an ecology professor at the Open University, in a 2009 paper called “A New Dawn for Citizen Science.” And not before time. The Mediterranean is undergoing a “major convulsion,” warns Bella Galil, a senior scientist at the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research Centre in Haifa, with one symptom being an increasing number of jellyfish blooms: in June and July, the venomous Rhopilema nomadica, a tropical species thought to have arrived via the Suez Canal in the 1970s, formed two vast swarms of 60-plus miles long off Israel’s coast.

The accelerating influx of such alien species piles further pressure on a rich but vulnerable marine ecosystem that must already cope with pollution, 200 million tourists annually and warming water and acidification attributed to climate change. Overfishing has removed species that prey on jellies, which further disrupt the aquatic food chain by feasting on fish larvae. The impact on fish stocks is dire but hard to quantify. “We cannot separate the man-made causes from the jelly effect,” says Galil. “We can only calculate the amount of food an individual jelly consumes and sigh.”

Vacationers are probably sighing too. “Totally futile” is how Galil describes efforts to protect Mediterranean beaches with anti-jelly booms or nets. These can actually cause jellyfish to break apart and allow the stinging cells on their tentacles to sweep ashore. “People like the sea to be a swimming pool,” says Boero. “If they see a living being, they are horrified. But they have to be aware that there is life in the sea, and it has to be respected.” Whether we love or loathe jellies, it seems all we can do is learn to live with them.

The picture above is a detail from the Jellywatch poster, by Alberto Gennari and Fabio Tresca. You can download it here.

HENRY DUNANT AND HEIDEN
A Swiss town celebrates the Red Cross founder it never much liked

By Andrew Marshall/Heiden

IF you don’t count the “whey diet”—a grim 19th-century health regime that involved drinking nothing but a pungent, watery by-product of goat’s milk—then the picturesque Swiss town of Heiden has just one historical claim to fame. Fortunately, it’s a big one.

The year is 1887. Nestling in the Alpine foothills, Heiden is well known among high-society Europeans for its health spas, crisp air and bracing view over Lake Constance. A doctor called Hermann Altherr visits a patient at a local guesthouse. It is an old man, exhausted and stricken with eczema, and clearly of limited means. Like an explorer chancing upon a long-lost jungle ruin, Altherr is startled to discover that his patient is Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross movement. The doctor—and much of the rest of the world—had assumed him long dead.

Dunant spent the last quarter of an extraordinary life in Heiden, most of it in a single room in the town’s old hospital. He died there on October 30, 1910. Today, a museum in the same building presides over a series of events to mark the centenary of his death. Heiden rescued Dunant from obscurity—it was here that a telegram arrived in 1901, announcing that he had won the first-ever Nobel Peace Prize—then fell into obscurity itself. Now the town hopes its most celebrated resident will put it back on the map.

In its heyday, Heiden was regarded as a lower-altitude alternative to swankier Swiss resorts such as Davos and St. Moritz. But the Great Depression killed off its spa industry, and today it must compete for tourists with countless other scenic and well-preserved Swiss towns. Heiden (pop. about 4,000) is part of Appenzellerland, a bucolic corner of eastern Switzerland famous for its dairy farms. The region is often overlooked by visitors on their way to the dramatic snow-capped peaks in the distance. This is a shame, since few places feel more authentically Swiss. The official website for Appenzellerland yodels and lows.

This year Heiden is making a noise about its most eminent resident, with exhibitions, concerts and an international youth camp. The Japanese city of Nagasaki has donated a replica of its Peace Bell. “It’s not just about remembering Dunant,” says Monika Gessler, Project Coordinator for the Dunant Year 2010 Association. “It’s about giving young people an understanding of his values: solidarity, humanity and moral courage.”

Dunant was born in 1828 in Geneva, about 200 miles away, to staunchly Calvinist parents who encouraged his early passion for social work among orphans, paupers and prisoners. He was a mediocre student, however, who dropped out of college to become an even worse businessman. In 1859, Dunant traveled to Solferino, in northern Italy, where he evidently believed that Napoleon III might pause from fighting Imperial Austria to intercede in his troubled business affairs in French-occupied Algeria. Then 31 years old, Dunant arrived in time to witness the aftermath of a nine-hour battle which had littered the rolling Italian countryside with tens of thousands of dead and wounded.

Medical care was meager—the French army had more veterinarians than doctors. So amid what he later described as “chaotic disorder, despair unspeakable, and misery of every kind,” Dunant mobilized local volunteers—mostly women and girls—to care for the injured, whatever their nationality. Four years later, he and four other Genevans set up the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, later to become the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Today, the movement has 97 million volunteers, supporters and staff in 186 countries.

Its distinctive emblem—an inverse of the Swiss flag—now decorates the windows of many Heiden businesses, as the town gears up to mark Dunant’s death. The celebration is laced with irony, explains museum guide and local historian Corina Schmid-Maddalena. “Dunant couldn’t stand Heiden people,” she says cheerfully, “and they thought he was arrogant. He refused to speak German, while most locals couldn’t speak a word of French.” Reclusive and prone to bouts of depression and paranoia, Dunant was convinced that somebody was poisoning his food and opening his mail. During all his years in Heiden he made only a handful of friends.

Even today, you sense that not every Haedler—as Heiden people are called in one of Appenzell’s thick dialects—cherishes Dunant’s memory. Many locals have never visited the museum, admits Schmid-Maddalena. Perhaps they know that Dunant ended up here reluctantly, after a shocking reversal of fortune.

A decade that for Dunant began with triumph—in 1864, a year after the creation of the Red Cross, 12 governments adopted the first Geneva Convention—ended in disaster. His neglected business affairs collapsed, pauperizing him and wiping out investments by many friends and relatives. Bankrupt, he resigned from the International Committee in 1867 and left Geneva in shame, never to return. Everything broke down around me, everything went dark,” he wrote. He lived in a handful of countries over the next two decades, a fugitive from his creditors. Once, at a speech in the British city of Plymouth, he fainted, apparently due to hunger.

Settling in Heiden, ill-health brought him to Dr. Altherr’s attention. But it was a 1895 article by a Swiss journalist which reintroduced Dunant to the world. “Without you, the Red Cross, the supreme humanitarian achievement of the nineteenth century would probably have never been undertaken,” read the citation for his Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with the French pacifist Frédéric Passy. Dunant had his prize money administered from Norway, so that his creditors couldn’t get it.

“Would you like to try some whey?” asks Schmid-Maddalena, rummaging through a refrigerator during a tour of the museum. (Fortunately, she serves a drinkable modern variety, fortified with orange juice.) The tour includes a reconstruction of Dunant’s room with his original armchair, its upholstery worn thin during his years of seclusion. Nearby hangs an equally ragged artifact from another era: a Red Cross flag used as a blanket by an ICRC delegate kidnapped in Angola in 1982.

The flag is a reminder of how much war has changed, and how fragile Dunant’s cherished concept of neutrality sometimes seems. Almost everyone who perished at Solferino was a soldier, but civilians—among them humanitarians—do most of the dying in modern conflict. In 2008, more aid workers were killed than armed United Nations peacekeeping troops. Kidnappings continue: in March ICRC worker Gauthier Lefevre was freed after being held hostage in Darfur for 147 days.

“Let us raise our spirits and our souls above the narrow horizon of our small countries to see only humanity,” wrote Dunant. His second-floor room—now the super-tidy office of a medical technician—still has its fine view of Heiden’s clock tower, a landmark Dunant grew to hate as its bell fastidiously tolled away his final hours in quarter-hour segments. “How tiresome it is to die so slowly,” he told Dr. Altherr. Dunant lived to the age of 82. He spurned both Heiden and his hometown of Geneva as a final resting place, requesting to be buried in Zurich “with no ceremony of any kind.”

His death didn’t sever Heiden’s connection with the Red Cross. Consider this curious postscript. The year is 1944. With war in Europe raging to a close, a Heiden woman called Claire Kellenberger gives birth in the same hospital building in which Dunant drew his last breath. It is a boy. She calls him Jakob. Today, he is president of the ICRC.