As championed by the United Nations and other NGOs, the international commitment to providing ‘health for all’, universal basic schooling and adequate shelter has long been contradicted by a development approach based upon a market fundamentalism that subordinates human welfare to corporate profits – necessitating an enormous shift in global priorities.
The world's poorest people are being denied access to drugs because pharmaceutical companies are focusing their resources on diseases suffered by wealthy, middle-aged Americans, such as obesity and heart disease, a leading expert will say tomorrow.
The world's richest countries are failing to provide the funds needed for education in the developing world, the Global Campaign for Education has said.
The new study, published in Nature by a team from the University of Oxford1 is considered to provide the most comprehensive and realistic estimates on malaria to date. Researchers now estimate that there may have been up to 660 million clinical cases in 2002 alone (over 1 million new cases each day), doubling existing WHO estimates for Africa and more than tripling estimates for countries outside of Africa.
Carol Bellamy, UNICEF Executive Director, has recently launched the 2005 UNICEF report "Childhood under threat", a comprehensive and all encompassing report on the state of the world's children. The facts uncovered by the report are devastating: 15 years have lapsed since the convention of children's rights was passed, children have never been so high on the public agenda and yet, the initial promises seem broken. "Childhood under threat" uncovers that at least half of the world's children are severely deprived of one or more of the basic necessities:
It is possible for a child born just ten years from now to live in a world where AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria are on the wane. But this can only happen with considerable investment. Now. Otherwise, today’s grim picture will only get worse. Each day, these diseases kill 16,000 people—devastating entire communities and plummeting countries deeper into poverty.
Several years ago, a former President of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor remarked: “What are our institutions of learning doing? The most sophisticated crimes of our nation are committed by former students of ours some of whom graduated summa cum laude!” During the decade of the sixties, for example, Duane Pope graduated from the University of Nebraska with great honors. His instructors referred to him as “the ideal American citizen.” Besides, his friends described him as “gentle and kind to others.” Three weeks after his graduation, he organized a bank robbery, killed three on the spot and wounded five others!
The policies used by big corporations in America to achieve what they want by all means are very different from those used by peaceful democratic organizations world-wide. Responsible democratic organizations across every continent try to get what they want by educating the general public to see things into true perspective as they relate to their exclusive welfare. This way they build a wide support for the humanitarian goals they are trying to achieve. As a result, the majority of the population becomes enlightened to make appropriate choices.
