PHA-Exchange> PHM: NGOs Warn of Economic Policy Impacts on Medical Services

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From: "UNNIKRISHNAN  P V (Dr)" <unnikru at yahoo.com>
Subject: HEALTH: NGOs Warn of Economic Policy Impacts on Medical  
         Services(PHM Media coverage in Inter Press Service)
By Gustavo Capdevila

Civil society organisations are calling on the World Health
Organisation (WHO) and health ministers around the globe to recognise
and take action to prevent the disastrous impacts that certain economic
policies have on public health.

GENEVA,May 17(IPS) -  Ravi Narayan, a doctor from India and
representative of the 
People's Health Movement, said that civil society activists are
concerned because the supposed benefits of the WHO association with the
World Bank .;are not reaching the poor.

Ellen Verheul, of Wemos, an Amsterdam-based non-governmental
organisation (NGO) specialising in health and development issues,
questioned governments that claim to promote universal access 
health services while ;supporting World Bank strategies that promote
the commercialisation of health care and charging full cost to
patients.

The NGOs' criticisms were heard also by WHO director-general Gro Harlem
Brundtland during an informational meeting about the World Health
Assembly, which took place this week in Geneva.

 Most of the NGOs' reproaches, which often also extended to the World
Trade Organisation (WTO) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), were
based on the direction taken in health policies in recent decades.

David Nabarro, executive director of the WHO director-general's office,
denied that the institution has renounced its people-centred health
strategy to apply others promoted by major transnational corporations,
such as pharmaceutical companies.

The 199 WHO member-states have not given any indication that they think
;the organisation is abdicating its core health responsibility or its
role as the international health standard-setting organisation of the
UN system said the official.

Nabarro said the evidence in favour of the WHO is the increasing number
of initiatives that member-states entrust to the organisation,
corroborating the validity of its health policies and regulations.

In a press conference, he responded to criticisms alleging that the WHO
has abandoned its Health for All strategy.

The WHO budget, which is approximately 1.25 billion dollars a year and
is subject to continued cuts in government contributions, is
approximately equivalent to the budgets of two district general
hospitals in Britain, he cited as an example of the organisation's
financial limitations.

With that sum, the WHO cannot attend to the health needs of the entire
world, Nabarro said.

The WHO heard similar criticisms during a meeting of the People's
Health Movement of Africa, held last month in Tanzania.

Africa and other continents have regional People's Health Movements,
founded in December 2000 in Dacca, the capital of Bangladesh, to carry
out international actions with the aim of achieving Health for All.

In many African countries, most of the people with HIV/AIDS receive
medical attention in poor households, services that are provided .;by
women who receive little or no assistance from government health or
welfare offices, said the African assembly's representative, Mwajuma
Saiddy Masaiganah.

The assembly, said Masaiganah, sent her to deliver a message to the
WHO: The measure promoting the re-use of female condoms is unacceptable
and other means to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and 
other diseases must be sought.

 After all, rural women cannot afford to buy a condom that costs almost
a dollar, which many families in Tanzania, for example, do not earn in
a week, she said.

In Latin America, meanwhile, progress was made in the health programmes
that have been in place since the 1960s, particularly those aimed at
eradicating smallpox, polio and measles.

However, with the structural adjustment programmes and the heavy debt
payments, health care systems have been severely affected, said María
Zúñiga, a Nicaraguan national who represents the regional People's
Health Movement.

The dynamic of the global immunisation efforts of the past few decades
was similar, said Narayan, pointing out that vaccination coverage grew
constantly worldwide until the late 1980s.

 But since the early 1990s, figures from the WHO and the World Bank
show that immunisation rates have fallen in India, China and other
countries, which the Indian expert blamed on new economic policies.

 Europe must also defend its health systems, said Verheul, underscoring
that they are increasingly being subjected to market forces under rules
established by the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).
";We, as civil society organisations, want to work with the WHO on
these issues, and we want the WHO to take the lead", stated the Dutch
activist.