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.
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 to health services while ”supporting World Bank strategies that promote the commercialisation of health care and charging full 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 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, 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.
(IPS)