The Constant Gardener

But the most powerful weapon that the international medical community has for raising money is the specter that the unchecked explosion of cases in the Third World will let divergent strains merge into something incurable and highly contagious that will attack the West.

(footnote by Tessa, written in a mysteriously restrained hand, as if she is deliberately holding herself back from sensation:

"Arnold says, Russian immigrants to U.S., particularly those coming straight from the camps, carry all sorts of multiresistant strains of TB — ACTUALLY in a higher proportion to Kenya, where multi-resistant is NOT synonymous with HIV'-POSITIVE. A friend of his is treating very bad cases in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge area, and numbers are already frightening, he says. Incidence throughout U.S., amid crowded urban minority groups, said to be constantly increasing."

Or, put into the language that stock exchanges the world over understand: If the TB market performs as forecast, billions and billions of dollars are waiting to be earned, and the boy to earn them is Dypraxa — always provided, of course, that the preliminary canter over the course in Africa has not thrown up any disturbing side effects.

It is this thought that prompts Justin to return, as a matter of urgency, to the Uhuru Hospital in Nairobi. Hastening to the counting table, he again rummages in the police files and unearths six photocopied pages covered in Tessa's fever-driven scrawl as she struggles to record Wanza's case history in the language of a child.

Wanza is a single mother.

She can't read or write.

I met her in her village and again in Kibera slum. She got pregnant by her uncle who raped her and then claimed she had seduced him. This is her first pregnancy. Wanza left the village in order not to be raped again by her uncle, and also by another man who was molesting her.

Wanza says many people in her village were sick with bad coughs. Many of the men had AIDS, women too. Two pregnant women had recently died. Like Wanza, they had been visiting a medical center five miles away. Wanza did not want to use the same medical center any more. She was afraid their pills were bad. This shows that Wanza is intelligent since most native women have a blind faith in doctors, though they respect injections above pills.

In Kibera, a white man and a white woman came to see her. They wore white coats so she assumed they were doctors. They knew which village she had come from. They gave her some pills, the same pills she is taking in hospital.

Wanza says the man's name was Law-bear. I get her to say it many times. Lor-bear? Lor-beer? Lohrbear? The white woman who came with him did not speak her name but examined Wanza and took samples of her blood, urine and sputum.

They came to see her in Kibera twice more. They were not interested in other people in her hut. They told her she would be having her baby in the hospital because she was sick. Wanza was uneasy about this. Many pregnant women in Kibera are sick but they did not have their babies in hospital.