Hans Rosling Is on a Mission to Save the World from Preconceived Ideas. by AMY MAXMEN
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The myth buster Hans Rosling is on a mission to save the world from preconceived ideas. BY AMY MAXMEN ©2016 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2016 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. FEATURE NEWS ans Rosling knew never to flee from highest (Japan, 84) than the lowest (Swazi- 500,000 people and found that populations men wielding machetes. “The risk land, 49). He reasons that experts cannot solve with the highest rate of the disease survived is higher if you run than if you face major challenges if they do not operate on facts. entirely on bitter cassava, the only crop that them,” he says. So, in 1989, when “But first you need to erase preconceived ideas,” could grow when drought struck the region. Han angry mob confronted him at the field he says, “and that is the difficult thing.” The plant turned out to contain cyanogenic laboratory he had set up in what is now the glucoside, a precursor to cyanide. Typically, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rosling LIFE ON THE BRINK soaking cassava roots in water for several days tried to appear calm. “I thought, ‘I need to use Rosling’s ambitions were born from curiosity. removed the toxin. But with streams run- the resources I have, and I am good at talking’.” As a young boy in Uppsala, he listened intently ning dry and families starving, women who Rosling, a physician and epidemiologist, as his father, a coffee-factory employee, prepared cassava had skipped this step — to pulled from his knapsack a handful of photo- described the hardships of the East African their detriment. Dietary amino acids can also graphs of people from different parts of Africa labourers who picked the beans. Rosling and detoxify the poison, but people had no access who had been crippled by konzo, an incur- his girlfriend, Agneta Thordeman, joined stu- to meat or beans that provide them. able disease that was affecting many in this dent protests against South African apartheid At the end of 1981, owing to a number of community, too. Through an interpreter, he and the US war in Vietnam. circumstances including the death of their explained that he believed he knew the cause, The couple studied medicine — she as third child, Rosling and his family returned to and he wanted to test local people’s blood to be a nurse and he as a doctor — and travelled Sweden. Rosling became a lecturer on health sure. A few minutes into his demonstration, through India and southeast Asia on a shoe- care in low-income countries at Uppsala Uni- an old woman stepped forward and addressed string budget. In 1972, they were married and versity but spent time in Tanzania and the the crowd in support of the research. After the seven years later they moved to Mozambique Congo region as well, studying the paralysing more aggressive members of the mob stopped with their two small children. disease he had first observed in Mozambique. waving their machetes, she rolled up her sleeve. He noticed that no matter what country he was Most followed her lead. “You can do anything in, the towns afflicted looked similarly tragic. as long as you talk with people and listen to “Extreme Skeleton-thin people hobbled down dirt paths people and talk with the intelligentsia of the on makeshift crutches, or crawled with their community,” says Rosling. poverty produces legs twisted and dangling behind them like He is still trying to arm influential people anchors. One Congolese community called the with facts. He has become a trusted coun- malady konzo, derived from a word referring sellor and speaker of plain truth to United diseases. Evil to an antelope tethered at its knees. This is the Nations leaders, billionaire executives such as name that Rosling would use in 1990, when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and politicians forces hide he and his colleagues formally defined the dis- including Al Gore. Even Fidel Castro called ease and laid out the evidence for what causes it on the slim, bespectacled Swede for advice. there.” (W. P. Howlett et al. Brain 113, 223–235; 1990). Rosling’s video lectures on global health and As Rosling travelled, he trained African economics have elevated him to viral celeb- Rosling wanted to fulfil a promise he had graduate students who specialized in konzo, rity status, and he has been listed among the made many years earlier to the founder of and together they found that proper cassava 100 most influential people in the world by the the Mozambican Liberation Front, Eduardo processing was the most realistic method of magazines Time and Foreign Policy. Melinda Mondlane. Mondlane had explained that short-term prevention. However, the message Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Mozambique’s future would be challenging often fell on deaf ears because of hunger and says, “To have Hans Rosling as a teacher is one after the country gained independence from conflict. Rosling became convinced that the of the biggest honours in the world.” Portugal, because the nation was so poor and real root of konzo resided not in cassava, but But among his fellow scientists, Rosling education levels low. Rosling recalls, “He shook in economic devastation. “Extreme poverty is less popular. His accolades do not include my hand and looked me in the eyes and said: produces diseases. Evil forces hide there,” he conventional academic milestones, such as ‘Promise you will work with us’.” Mondlane was says. “It is where Ebola starts. It’s where Boko massive grants or a stream of publications in killed by a letter bomb soon afterwards — he Haram hides girls. It’s where konzo occurs.” top-tier journals. And rather than generating did not live to see independence, which came data, Rosling has spent the past two decades in 1975 — but Rosling kept his word. THE TRUE PICTURE OF POVERTY communicating data gathered by others. He The Mozambican government assigned The World Bank defines extreme poverty as relays facts that he thinks many academics Rosling to a northern part of the country, a state in which people survive on less than have been too slow to appreciate and argues where he would be the only doctor serving US$1.90 per day. Rosling can recognize it that researchers are ignorant about the state 300,000 people. Because of the scarcity of in other ways. He has seen it in people who of health and wealth around the world. That’s health care, patients were often in excruci- must walk for hours without shoes to find dangerous. “Campuses are full of siloed peo- ating pain by the time he saw them. Rosling water or to farm eroded soil. He sees it in ple who do advocacy about things they don’t recalls performing emergency surgery to those who remain short because of malnour- understand,” he says. extract dead fetuses from women on the verge ishment, whose babies are born dangerously So now, in the sunset of his career, Rosling of death. He watched helplessly as children underweight and who are trapped with no is writing a book with his son Ola and his perished from diseases that should have been options in life. daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund to simple to prevent. “Those years became a sort Ultimately, he says that eliminating extreme dispel outdated beliefs. It has the working title of trauma,” he says. poverty is the only way to cure konzo and pre- Factfulness, and they hope it will inform every- In 1981, he received a letter from an Italian vent other maladies — both social and infec- one from schoolchildren to esteemed experts nun working as a nurse at a remote health post. tious. Money, politics and culture underlie about how the world has changed: how the “Please come,” she wrote. People in the sur- disease in many circumstances, he argues. number of births per woman worldwide has rounding villages had been stricken with sud- Take an outbreak in Cuba that Rosling inves- dropped over the past few decades, for exam- den paralysis of both legs. Separating from his tigated in 1992. The Cuban embassy in Sweden ple, and how average life expectancy (71 years) family, Rosling embedded himself in the crisis. had asked him to find out whether toxic cas- JÖRGEN HILDEBRANDT is now closer to that of the country with the He was assigned to lead a survey of sava could have caused roughly 40,000 people ©2016 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2016 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. A15ll ri gDECEMBERhts reserved. 2016 | VOL 540 | NATURE | 331 NEWS FEATURE has decreased — still it’s appalling that so many remain in extreme poverty.” Rosling’s online presentations grew popu- lar, and the investment bank Goldman Sachs invited him to speak at client events. His mes- sage seemed to support advice from the firm’s JÖRGEN HILDEBRANDT chief economist, Jim O’Neill. In 2001, O’Neill had coined the acronym BRIC for the emerg- ing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, often considered part of the develop- ing world. He warned that financial experts ignored these rising powers at their peril. “I used to tease my colleagues who thought in a traditional framework,” O’Neill says. “Why are we talking about China as the developing world? Based on the rate of economic growth, China creates another Greece every three months; another UK every two years.” Rosling welcomed the new audience.