The real stories

Since its founding in 1971, Doctors Without Borders, the world’s largest private medical relief organization, has provided medical relief to victims of natural disaster and war in more than 70 countries. More than 15,000 volunteers have gone to the most remote and dangerous places, enduring hardship, disease, violence and, as in the case of a physician recently lost when her small plane went down over hurricane-stricken Nicaragua, death.

And each year, Doctors Without Borders publishes a list, the 10 most under-reported humanitarian stories of the year. This year, the year in which the news media was obsessed with one tiresome, pointless and often erroneous story, the list is particularly compelling. Here it is.

Five million people in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakstan live in a toxic wasteland, the legacy of being the Soviet Union’s chemical dumping ground. Their soil is poisoned, the Aral Sea is virtually dead.

More than 2.6 million Sudanese suffer famine.

Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and malaria afflict a half-billion people in the Far East.

Cholera, spawned by El Nino floods, is at epidemic levels in 14 African nations.

From Romania to Guatemala, the global economic downturn has created millions of street children.

Hundreds have been mutilated by political thugs in Sierra Leone.

Afghan women, by the millions, are denied any form of health care.

There are more than 100,000 war refugees huddled in camps in the tiny African nation of Guinea-Bissau.

AIDS is rampaging through the southern Sahara.

Sleeping sickness claims 300,000 victims a year in Southeast Asia.

The tragedy of these tragedies is that they all could be alleviated. Doctors Without Borders has the expertise, the compassion; the energy; it needs the money. Which it could get if the generous people of the world’s richest nation knew of these crises. Which they don’t because starvation, disease and brutality aren’t sufficiently sexy — literally — for front pages or the nightly news. The made-up phenomena of compassion fatigue, the alibi that all famines start to look alike after a while, is often cited. What about Monica fatigue?

Each page of the 2,000-page Starr report cost roughly $20,000. Here’s what $20,000 can buy in the real world: infection-fighting antibiotics for 40,000 people; safe drinking water for 53,000; 1,142 suture kits; 20,000 vaccinations against meningitis, measles and polio; one complete cholera clinic, building and supplies included.

You can’t get your money back from Judge Starr, but you can help Doctors Without Borders. To make a pledge, call 1-888-392-0392 or write Doctors Without Borders USA Inc., 6 East 39th St., 8th floor, New York, N.Y. 10016.