This is in praise of the Toronto Star. I will list some ten columnists, explain what each has done, and give a pointer you can click on, to an example.

Other Star columnists not mentioned here are missing simply because, looking up ten took long enough, and these were the ten I happened to think of first. They are not the only good columnists at the Star.

And, I have included James Travers, deceased, among the ten as I think his could be the most important column mentioned here.

Ready? My list of columnists includes:

1. Rosie DiManno. Fearlessly following up on the G20 disaster, where bad people were initially allowed to vandalize businesses outside the G20 fenced area, and then where decent citizens were subjected to overzealous policing. This is only one such article. DiManno writes about Toronto, about things city citizens should know and perhaps act upon or against.
2. James Travers. Changing a country, one backward step at a time. A stunning critique of Stephen Harper.
3. David Olive. Politics, this one on our military purchasing incompetence. Olive is always well researched, to put it mildly.
4. Heather Mallick.Politics. This one is on Justin Trudeau and is upbeat. (see later for a differing opinion, eh?)
5. Royson James. Social issues. This one is city politics and Rob Ford.
6. Tim Harper. Politics. This one is about American tax reach and its consequences, especially for those ‘deemed’ to be American and living abroad.
7. Chantel Hebert. Politics. This one is also on Justin Trudeau, and is not upbeat.
8. Kevin Donovan. Social issues. Donovan was one of two reporters who saw the crack video before the police found it on some hard drive. The article linked here is about bad charities, which spend most of your donation on themselves and advertising.
9. Edward Keenan. I think this is a newer columnist, but I’ve been noticing his work lately. Social and political issues. This one is also on the Fords.
10. Ellen Roseman. Financial help for small people, especially being treated badly by large corporations. This pointer is to her website, from whence you can find several articles. I ‘met’ Roseman in the sense I was at a financial session where she spoke. I ‘met’ Roseman again by eMail when I had a problem with a credit card company. Her contact list must be longer than the Toronto phone book. She is effective.

Now for the point of all this, and the dumb question.

A random selection of articles that I happened to be able to find is of course uneven in its coverage of issues in Canada, Ontario, and Toronto. I trust it will serve to show readers the scope of reporting information delivered by Toronto Star columnists. This is a major source of relevant, current information.

Without this, would Adam Nobody have lost his case in court? Would ordinary Canadians simply not notice the ‘boil the frog’ technique of adding small changes to our laws? Would our military continue weird and inefficient (to put it nicely) purchasing practices?

I could ask a similar question about the other seven columnists. I’m sure you get my point, but here’s the dumb question:

What happens when print media becomes less interested, less motivated, or simply less well-funded, and gradually waters down the present high level of columnists and their informative opinions? Will we become ignorant sheep? Or are we already?

I said it would be a dumb question.

Very early in the AIDS catastrophe, I read an article about how new infections spread. This was likely in Nature or Scientific American, and I’m not sure which. The article was not deeply technical, but explained how a new sickness can suddenly be everywhere.

What disgusted me then was, the AIDS epidemic was still tiny and the article was, obviously, ignored by those prophylactic institutions that supposedly guard our health. In simple terms, it was explained how the disease was about to spread. The prediction turned out to be dead on for AIDS. It went something like this:

A new disease arises in some remote locality. Generally it has jumped to humans from local animals. The number of cases is small, and remoteness may keep them unnoticed by the world at large.

Communication (travel) allows some carriers to spread the disease to new centres. Often the sick will be perceived as being in a minority group (gays and needle users, in the AIDS case.) This will allow the general public to be complacent. Meanwhile more carriers bring the disease to more locations, to larger and larger cities with more interpersonal contact.

(( One story has it that the North American ‘patient zero’ was a gay male flight attendant landing in various Canadian and US cities. (I personally believe this, having seen ‘patient zero’ trackback reports. “And who are your friends?” led back to a very small number of individuals.) ))

Suddenly the disease is capturing ‘normal’ people, i.e. not the original minority group(s). With AIDS, when sufficiently present, the normal ‘fooling around’ of heterosexuals was enough to greatly increase the spread of the disease. In some places, prostitution was a major factor.

The point here is that ‘regular society’ abruptly finds itself in an exposed position, as the disease is no longer limited to minorities of one kind or another.

The eventual size of the AIDS epidemic was in fact warned of, but ignored.

Back to Ebola.

Ebola was originally confined to poor African countries. Travel being limited, nobody much noticed. Health workers seemed to be at risk, but that was ‘over there.’ So we did little, with the WHO being harangued by the head of Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) for their inaction.

Now Ebola is present in a few North American hospitals. BBC News reported Spain as having “the first Ebola case outside of Africa” – the first Spanish resident, I assume they mean.

I predict we will continue to sit on our duffs until many hospitals are housing Ebola cases. Then it will not be safe to have any serious health problem, because one will be unwilling to go to Emergency.

I predict the disease becoming more communicable as time goes on. We are ‘selecting’ for communicability, eh?

Back to the comparison with AIDS.

While an Indian pharmaceutical company can produce a month’s worth of AIDS cocktails for about $6.00, it sells for about $1300.00 in North America. AIDS is an ideal pharma company disease: you pay, and are glad to be alive to pay, for the rest of your life.

Ebola has had a different twist: pharma companies are rushing relatively untested vaccines and compounds to be tried ‘live’ on Ebola victims. This is an amazing reduction in cost: Phase III trials of drugs are Really Expensive and can take years. The WHO decided, probably with the moral right on their side, to allow experimental drugs to be tried on human subjects. Given the high Ebola death rate, it seems to be by far the lesser of two evils.

So, to repeat the dumb question: did we learn nothing from AIDS? Will Ebola spread more rapidly than our response can contain it? Will there be expensive cocktails to control it? Will those with funds gladly pay?

Comments, anyone? Coherent ones with real eMail addresses will appear here.