The Perfect Enemy | Dr. Zorba Paster: India shows public health doesn’t need to be political
July 13, 2025

Dr. Zorba Paster: India shows public health doesn’t need to be political

Dr. Zorba Paster: India shows public health doesn’t need to be political  Madison.com

Dr. Zorba Paster: India shows public health doesn’t need to be political
Dr. Zorba Paster: India shows public health doesn’t need to be political

I write this column, have a radio show I’ve been doing for three decades with my buddy Tom Clark, and appear on News 3, the CBS station in Madison, all to improve public health.

Now, that may seem like a lofty statement, and it is, but public health begins with health literacy. And health literacy begins with communicating about important health problems. That’s not just by the written word, as here, but through all sorts of other media, including Facebook.

The informed patient is the best patient. That’s what a mentor of mine, a gadfly named Bob Mendelsohn, believed. He held a lot of provocative views, but one view he really ascribed to was direct health communication.

That was back in the 1970s, when the American Medical Association said physicians should not use the media for health education but should communicate through the doctor’s office, one on one. My, oh, my! How life has changed for the better there.

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Now, moving on to something else I happen to do — work to help Tibetans in the diaspora in India and Nepal get heathier. I’ve been involved with this quest for decades, since my wife, Penny, and I first visited India in 1976.

For the past decade, I’ve been working with my good friends at Johns Hopkins on a project to rid Tibetan children of tuberculosis. They have one of the highest rates of TB in the world, far outstripping the rate of non-Tibetans in India, which itself has one of the highest TB rates of any country.

I recently came back from Dharamsala, India, home of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, where I helped celebrate the 50th anniversary of Delek Hospital, the center of this TB eradication project. More than 300 people, dignitaries from all around India and around the world, listened as speakers talked about the fine work Delek has done and its success in this regard. It was a big thank you.

In the wake of that visit, I’d like to talk a bit about COVID-19 and how they handle it in India.

There were several events leading up to and following the big Delek anniversary celebration. At all of these, everyone took a COVID test before the event. It wasn’t a big deal. They all had COVID kits, or knew where to get one, and tested for COVID. If they were positive, they stayed home.

What impressed me so much was that there we were in India, in an area with limited resources and a place that is much poorer financially than Wisconsin, yet they took public health very seriously.

In India, everyone tests for COVID before weddings and parties of any sort. For example, there was a gala at the Radisson Hotel for the Delek staff, and it was assumed everyone would just test for COVID. No biggie.

Contrast that to life back home. Penny and I have attended a couple of events in Madison in the past few months. I won’t go into all the details, but both were outside in warm weather and were attended by up to 100 people. It was not expected that we would test for COVID before going to the celebration.

In both of these cases, we were informed someone there had COVID. In both cases, those people were intimately involved with the event, welcoming guests and mingling in the crowd.

So in India, which has far fewer COVID cases than we have in the U.S., it seems like people just take having the disease seriously and test all the time, especially before going to events, to make sure they keep everyone safe. It’s not a political issue there, and it shouldn’t be a political issue here.

My spin: I find this very perplexing. I find that good public health in this country has, at times, gone off the rails.

When it comes to helping people in hurricane-ravaged areas, no one in their right mind would say don’t do it. Hurricane response is a matter of public health and so is COVID response, but somehow COVID is viewed differently here.

There have been, as of this writing, just more than 100 deaths attributed to Hurricane Ian, while there have been somewhere north of 1 million deaths from COVID. We come together for Ian, but we fly apart on COVID.

In India, they come together for both natural catastrophes and infectious catastrophes.

Stay well.

This column provides general health information. Always consult your personal health care provider about concerns. No ongoing relationship of any sort is implied or offered by Dr. Paster to people submitting questions. Any opinions expressed by Dr. Paster in his columns are personal and are not meant to represent or reflect the views of SSM Health.

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