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https://www.reuters.com/investigations/they-help-preserve-americas-dominance-pacific-theyre-paying-painful-price-2025-09-24/>
"EBEYE, Marshall Islands - Every Friday on this tiny Pacific isle, Korab Lanwe
does his rounds. The people he visits have severely swollen, discolored legs,
or wounds that won’t heal, or have lost a limb. They are so ill they cannot
leave their homes of plywood and metal sheets. Lanwe inquires if they are
taking their meds and checks their blood pressure. The result is often grim.
Lanwe, who operates from an office with a rotting ceiling and boarded-up
windows, is Ebeye’s diabetes coordinator. His homebound patients are in the
advanced stages of a disease that plagues at least a third of the roughly
10,000 residents of Ebeye – a strip of sand 60 football fields in size, located
20 minutes by boat from an American base that has become pivotal in the U.S.
showdown with China.
Despite Lanwe’s efforts, his rudimentary hospital can do little as his
patients’ limbs turn gangrenous and their kidneys fail. There are no dialysis
machines for them, nor a prosthetics lab to replace the legs that surgeons
amputate. Many people on Ebeye don’t live beyond their 50s.
“It scares me. I’m basically thinking about my kids. Their future, the island’s
future,” says the 42-year-old Lanwe. “We might be losing our people.”
Every morning, not far from his office, residents who are able to work wait at
the island’s harbor, from which a U.S. Army ferry will take them about three
miles south to Kwajalein – an island 10 times Ebeye’s size. There, residents of
Ebeye serve as laborers while the Americans test U.S. missiles and monitor
Chinese rocket launches."
Via Frederick Wilson II.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
