In response, my mentors argued that "desperate diseases require desperate measures".
Its long-suffering people are too frequently caught in the crossfire of rampaging wars, afflicted in their millions with AIDS and other desperate diseases, preyed upon by greedy despots and prevented by corrupt leaders and bureaucracies from obtaining basic schooling, medical attention and access to economic opportunity.
There is desperate poverty, disease and hunger, compounded by other scourges that limit opportunities for Africans to improve their lives: political instability, deficient education systems and in some cases longstanding military conflict.
"Usher syndrome is a desperate, miserable disease," says human geneticist Paul Sieving of the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
There's no doubt that Thackery and his staff do good every day, but they're working in a poor neighborhood full of desperate immigrants; disease and death remain overwhelming realities, and the staff's victories are drops in a bloody bucket.
But from the point of view of a disease foundation desperate to find a cure, everything is wrong with it.
The period's booming economy inevitably alternated with busts, and desperate poverty and intractable disease expanded along with the trolley lines and factories.
Do you not know that (in these exciting times when the Chinese are losing employment, and naturally mad at the white race) you are taking desperate chances of having disease introduced among us that will render desolate our firesides?
The 38-year-old, who played more than 300 games for Rangers in a six-year spell at the club from 2000 to 2006, said he is desperate to beat the disease for his daughter, Isabella.
Malaria is a disease in desperate need of new chemotherapeutic approaches.
