A fascinating Swedish ‘edutainer’
As a young doctor in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Hans Rosling addressed an angry mob that had surrounded him wielding machetes.
After explaining through an interpreter, and much frantic sign language, that he knew the cause of the illness afflicting them, but that he needed to carry out blood tests, an old woman stepped forward and rolled up her sleeve. The rest followed.
About 20 years later, he was communicating with similar armwaving hyperactivity in a 20-minute TED talk that has been viewed by millions.
The affable Swedish physician and statistician made the world sit up and take notice with a dazzling presentation of infographics that showed how the world has become a better place, defying the doommongers who talk of the planet’s spiral into unsustainability.
The ‘‘edutainer’’ generated gasps and applause with a dynamic graphic of bubbles (representing countries rich and poor) moving upwards for higher life expectancy and leftwards for reduced average family sizes. The bubbles were all heading at different speeds and trajectories to the top left-hand corner over the course of 50 years.
The graphic’s aim was to ‘‘fight devastating misconceptions about global development’’.
Rosling’s winsome and humorous presentation style made him a hit on YouTube.
Among those captivated by the ‘‘data rock star’’ were Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, who cited Rosling’s graphics showing the massive returns on investment in global health as one of the main reasons why he ploughed billions of dollars into development projects. Time magazine listed Rosling as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
He further entertained his audience with a demonstration of sword swallowing halfway through his presentation, but his message that the battle against global poverty was being won made him powerful enemies in the scientific community.
Rosling attracted particular opprobrium for claiming that the world’s population explosion would be over by 2100. He said that it would grow from 7 billion today to reach a peak of 10 or 11 billion by the end of the century and then level out.
He explained in a 2010 BBC documentary, Don’t Panic - The Truth About Population, that this was because in countries such as Bangledesh families of two children were now the norm. His graphic showed how the number of people living in extreme poverty had halved in the past quarter of a century and was now 20 per cent of mankind. The UN goal to eradicate global poverty by 2030 was entirely reasonable, he claimed.
Hans Rosling was born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1948. His father worked in a coffee factory and told his 4-year-old son about the hardships faced by the east African labourers. It made him want to become a doctor. He studied medicine at Uppsala University and qualified as a physician in 1976 before working in northern Mozambique for two years, serving 300,000 people.
Many of his patients were presenting with a mysterious condition spreading through Africa that caused numbness and even paralysis in the legs. Rosling researched his PhD on the disease that came to be known in the Democratic Republic of Congo as konzo, Yaka for ‘‘tired legs’’.
He undertook a region-wide survey and found that the populations with the highest rate of disease survived on the bitter shrub cassava, which was the only crop that grew in certain areas suffering from drought. The plant needed to be soaked in water for days to purge it of toxic cyanogenic glycosides.
Because water was scarce and families were starving and desperate for food, they were not soaking it. Rosling demonstrated that the toxins were causing the paralysis.
Rosling lectured on international health at Uppsala University from 1983 and became professor of international health at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm in 1997. Colleagues and PhD students admired, and also dreaded, the wide scope with which Rosling would analyse their work.
He married Agneta Thordeman in 1972. She was a midwife who became a psychiatrist. They had three children: Ola, Anna and Magnus. He remained an endearingly eccentric figure, with no interest in fashion and seemingly little in food or sleep.
When he heard about the ebola outbreak in Africa in 2014, he cancelled all his lectures. His liver was already starting to fail so he flew to Japan to buy the antibiotic drugs that were not widely available and travelled to Liberia where he asked to be introduced to the chief epidemiologist. He had noticed the confusing maelstrom of information on the disease and worked with the Liberian government to set up a data centre in Monrovia that would chart the spread of the disease and establish a ‘‘big picture’’.
One of his favourite boasts was that if you searched the internet for ‘‘sex, money and health’’, his name came up before any number of dubious other results.
The Times