STWR - Share The World's Resources

15th Jan 07 - Sherwood Ross, OpEd News

More Americans are dying needlessly every day in the United States because of President Bush's failure to provide universal health coverage than are being killed in the fighting in Iraq.

The U.S. has suffered 3,000 dead in Mr. Bush's charnel house (actually, add about 300 more if you count corporate soldiers-of-fortune) but their numbers beggar in comparison to the numbers of Americans dying on the home front. I refer, of course, to the fact that the vast shift of Americans' tax dollars to the military-industrial complex is starving this nation of essential public services, notably health care, and untold numbers of Americans are dying every day for the want of it, far more than the two or ten soldiers whose names turn up in the Pentagon's casualty lists from Iraq.

Jaime Montejo, Elvira Madrid and Rosa Icela Madrid, 5th Jan 07  - IndyBay

Reflections on the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada 

“A third of the world’s population does not have access to medication, according to World Health Organization official statistics. Currently, 9 out of every 10 people who die due to an infectious disease live in a poor country. These deaths could have been avoided, in many cases, if they would have had access to the necessary medication or vaccine to prevent these illnesses.”
Emilia Herranz, President of Doctors without Borders, Spain, 18 July 2005

We are currently witnessing the criminal negligence of the pharmaceutical industry, of the Bush administration and of other governments and institutions, in the limitation of access to antiretrovirals (ARV) for people who live with HIV or AIDS, particularly in Africa, a continent besieged by HIV/AIDS. Neither the pharmaceutical companies who have ARVs, nor the governments who have the money, nor the governments who could amend their laws to make inexpensive generic ARVs available, none are prepared to prolong or rescue lives, primarily African lives. These are some of the initial reflections made by Jesse McLaren, a Canadian doctor and activist, in his speech “AIDS and Imperialism; money for AIDS, not for war”, presented at the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, celebrated August 14-18, 2006.

Jeffrey Sachs, 24th Dec 06, Project Syndicate

Many international assistance programs fail because they are badly designed and/or too complicated. The result is that the poor don't get the help they need, and taxpayers in rich countries lose confidence in the use of their aid funds.

A case in point has been malaria control. If rich countries adopt simpler and more practical strategies to help Africa fight malaria, they can save millions of Africans while building enthusiastic support among their citizens.

Malaria is a killer disease transmitted by a specific species of mosquito. It depends on warm temperatures, and thus is largely a tropical malady. Africa turns out to be especially unlucky, because it has a combination of high temperatures and the mosquitoes that are likely to transmit the disease. As a result, Africa accounts for 90% of all malaria deaths in the world - including roughly two million children per year.

Yet even in Africa, Malaria is largely preventable and completely treatable at low cost. Up until now, there has been far too little malaria control. Prevention is best accomplished by modern anti-malaria bed nets, which are treated with insecticide. These nets cover people while they sleep, and repel or kill the mosquitoes, which tend to bite during the night. The nets reduce the number of bites, and the amount of illness, but they do not eliminate them. If people get bitten despite the nets, they require treatment within a few hours of the onset of symptoms.

As authoritatively stated in an editorial in Nature, vol. 436, issue 7049 (July 2005), “Cuba has developed a considerable [scientific] research capability—perhaps more so than any other developing country outside of Southeast Asia.” Cuba has been especially successful in establishing a biotechnology industry that has effectively introduced drugs and vaccines of its own, along with a nascent pharmaceutical industry that has achieved considerable success in exports. Its agriculture and health sectors have been strong beneficiaries of its scientific research. As Nature observed: “It is worth asking how Cuba did it, and what lessons other countries might draw from it.” Indeed, the Cuban case is all the more surprising since it is not only a poor country, but one that has been confronted for decades by a ruthless embargo imposed by the United States, which has been extended to scientific knowledge. Moreover, much of Cuba’s scientific progress has occurred in the decade and a half since the fall of the Soviet Union, which previously had aided it economically and technologically.