PHA-Exchange> Food for a widening thought gap

[Claudio]

Human Rights Reader 103
 
People who file claims to secure their right to health and adequate nutrition cannot wait for a whole generation.
 

1.Malnutrition packs the mortality equivalent of a 9/11 every 3 ½ hours, except that most of the victims are small children, all the deaths stretch out in tortuous misery for weeks, and there are another quarter-million such attacks, each with 3,000 victims, who instead of being killed, are left disabled or seriously ill. (J. Teton). Many of the malnourished children are child laborers --350 million of them worldwide.

 

2. Currently, only about 10% of ODA goes to health and nutrition projects and programs in developing countries. This means that external funding for health care and nutrition in developing countries is currently only in slight excess of $8 billion a year. 

 

3. Unregulated private health care providers today are the first port of call for many poor people. Governments must, therefore, bring them into the public domain through better regulation. (Human Development Report 2003) 

 
4. The disturbing news though is that we have evidence of widening gaps in health and nutrition worldwide (in terms of numbers of those affected by many types of preventable ill-health and malnutrition).

 

5. This, most likely because health and nutrition are more about power imbalances than about morbidity and mortality; they are more about control over the basic determinants of ill-health and malnutrition than about the treatment of diseases and the rehabilitation of the malnourished. We need to view and act upon both in a way that addresses power relationships and related rights issues. 

 

6. It is not enough for human rights activists to make information on these  risks available to public authorities. It is organized claim holders who have to ensure these risks are indeed recognized-and-acted-upon. 

 
7. Why? Because health care is increasingly used as a subtle and widespread instrument of social control. Western medicine attributes the causes of illness to faulty-individual-behavior or natural-misfortune rather than to social-injustice, economic-inequality and oppressive-political-system that disregard human (people's) rights. Western medicine thus fights disease at the individual level rather than promoting community health from a holistic, human rights-based perspective. (i.e., 'disease fighters' vs 'health promoters'). 

 

8. More efforts have been devoted to denouncing this fact than to do something to mitigate its effects. I am aware that this Human Rights Reader is not immune to this criticism and this may be considered its greatest weakness.

 

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn

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Mostly taken from D+C Vol. 31:6 and Aug/Sept 2004, Perspectives in Global Development and Technology, Vol 3, No. 1-2, 2004, IFPRI Forum, March 2004, and F&D, 41:1, March 2004 (FMI).
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