Category: Berita

Two children have recently been found to have the type of paralysis caused by polio — one in the southern part of Somalia and the other in a Kenyan camp that includes many Somali refugees.

Two healthy children related to the second child also had evidence of infection. Only about one infection in 200 causes paralysis, but the rest can silently shed the virus, which is spread by fecal-oral contact, often through sewage gutters and dirty puddles.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative recently vaccinated 450,000 children in southern Somalia. It plans to vaccinate 2.1 million children there and in neighboring eastern Kenya by June, and then to repeat that in July and again in August.

If the outbreak is not quickly contained, the consequences could be far-reaching. From 2002 to 2005, the virus spread from Nigeria, where it has never been wiped out, to 21 other countries, paralyzing more than 1,000 victims.

During those years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it moved east to Sudan, from there across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia and Yemen. From Saudi Arabia it spread as far as Indonesia and from Yemen to Somalia. Those outbreaks took months to stamp out. Saudi Arabia began requiring polio vaccination certificates of all pilgrims headed to Mecca and in 2009 began vaccinating on arrival all pilgrims from countries with polio.

Polio is very close to eradication. Last year the world had only 223 known cases of paralysis. Until recently they were found only in Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Virus has also been found this year in the sewers of Cairo, but no paralyzed children have been found in Egypt.

(source: www.nytimes.com)

 

As the World Health Assembly draws to a close and the great and the good in global health head home, it’s time to focus on some truths about health.

1. Technology is not the (only) answer

The World Health Organization tends to focus on scientific and technical matters, but is that enough?

Human beings are amazing, they really are. We have created antiretroviral drugs, we have devised methods to prevent malaria and we have invented a treatment for tuberculosis. The technology we have created is incredible, and for all the media attention given to technology as a means to solve all global ills, you would be forgiven for thinking it is a panacea as far as health is concerned.

But it’s not. Of the 39million people living with HIV only eight million have access to antiretroviral drugs, 660,000 people died from malaria in 2010, and in 2011 8.7million people fell ill with tuberculosis. All of this despite comparatively easy technological fixes being available. So technology, it seems, is only one part of the puzzle.

2. We will not improve health if we do not tackle poverty

In my role as the director of an NGO that works to strengthen marginalised communities in their struggle for health, I am constantly reminded of the root causes of ill health; the social and economic reasons that people live unhealthy lives.

I have seen people benefit from technology by having one illness treated, only to die shortly afterwards from something else. If you’re so poor you face a myriad of threats to your health, a technological fix for one will often do little more than change the cause of death. The average life expectancy for people living in a low income country is 60 years, and in the poorest areas it’s very much lower that this, whereas those in high income countries can expect 80 years of life. Across the whole of Africa life expectancy has increased by only six years in the last 20. An extra six years is not to be sniffed at of course, but it hardly reflects the scale of technological gains that some of humanity’s brilliant scientific minds have achieved.

Around the world, for millions of people, the cause of their illness is poverty; lack of nutritious food and clean water, poor sanitary conditions in which to live, and lack of education and employment. Poverty is the cause, and sickness is the result.

But of course we already knew that. Everyone knows that poverty and poor health are closely connected. Perhaps what we don’t always remember quite so well is that it doesn’t need to be this way.

3. Poverty is not inevitable

It’s estimated that the wealthiest 0.1% of people in the world own 81% of the financial wealth in the world. In fact, the richest 300 individuals in the world have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3billion.

It’s so easy to be lulled into a belief that this appalling level of inequality is inevitable. But it simply isn’t! This global imbalance in resources is an avoidable phenomenon. It has come about as a result of specific policies and decisions made by those who seek to extract wealth from others, those who are part of a poverty creation industry.

This industry, just like the global health sector, has developed its own ‘technology’ – technical tools to preserve inequality, and redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich. These tools include ingenius and highly technical practices related to tax havens, trade agreements, patent rules and other legal frameworks. It’s a well-funded technology, supported by elite lobbyists, policymakers, lawyers, and resources to co-opt (or buy-off) elected officials.

And it’s extremely efficient, so much so that the gap is widening even further and inequality is on the rise.

4. This is good news!

It may not seem like it, but yes, this is in fact good news. The fact that poverty is created by human tools and systems means humans have the ability to change it. We can create new tax laws that stop tax evasion so that the world’s poorest countries can fund their health systems. We can redraft trade agreements so that they strengthen the most vulnerable traders rather than the most powerful ones. We can change patent rules and other agreements so that public health is placed above corporate profits.

The World Health Organization’s scientific and technical work matters, but if the organisation is to fill its mandate it needs to focus much more on tackling the social and economic causes of poor health. We all do. We have the technical ability to do all these things. All we need to do is mobilise together to generate the political will.

And let’s never, not for a single moment, believe that it’s impossible. It isn’t.

(source: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk)

 

In my UN Special Envoy positions I have had the honor to work with some of the best policy makers, researchers, and practitioners of global health. And I am always excited when my path crosses with Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), and one of the brightest thinkers about the health challenges in front of us. Before her appointment as Director-General in 2006, Dr. Chan was WHO assistant director-general for Communicable Diseases and representative of the director-general for Pandemic Influenza. She also served as director of Health in Hong Kong for nine years where she successfully defeated the spate of severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003. Dr. Chan also appears to be a big fan of the NBA (see photo below).

Dr. Chan is busy hosting the World Health Assembly in Geneva this week, but I had a moment to catch up with her recently to get a sense of the main topics on her mind:

Ray Chambers: WHO’s 2013 World Health Statistics were released last week — what can we take away from that report with respect to progress toward achieving the health related Millennium Development Goals?

Dr. Chan: As we near the 2015 deadline of the Millennium Development Goals, the report shows the world has made dramatic progress in improving health in some of the poorest countries, especially in reducing the deaths of children under the age of 5 and women, improving nutrition and reducing deaths and illness from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. This is very encouraging; but it is not enough. With fewer than 1000 days left, we must ask ourselves the difficult questions: Have our efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals reduced the unacceptable inequities between the richest and poorest countries enough?

Remember, the over-arching objective of the MDGs is reducing poverty. Progress is measured by how well the health of the poor improves. If we miss the poor, we miss the point. One of the biggest obstacles identified in reaching these goals is weak health systems. For example, a health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. We must have both.

Ray Chambers: What are some the specific trends you can share from the Report?

Dr. Chan. Significant progress has been made in reducing child deaths by 40% from nearly 12 million deaths in 1990 to less than 7 million in 2011. But still far too many children are dying simply because they are born too soon. Every year more than one million premature babies die. Three quarters of these babies’ deaths can be prevented with simple and cost-effective interventions.

A disturbing trend is the increase in overweight children. In fact in many regions, more than 5% of children are overweight today, increasing their risk of diabetes and other health problems even before adulthood in some cases. Diabetes is also on the rise in adults. Today almost 10% of the world’s adult population has diabetes, putting them at increased risk of heart disease and stroke. Diabetes increases the risk of amputation, renal failure, visual impairment and blindness. Making healthy foods more available, increasing physical activity and avoiding tobacco can help reduce these alarming trends.

Another concern: in far too many countries, the essential medicines for improving health are simply not available in the public sector, forcing people to the private sector where prices can be up to 16 times higher and thus out of reach.

Ray Chambers: What are the countries that are succeeding doing that other countries should follow?

Dr. Chan: There are many countries doing remarkable work to improve health with very few resources. Those that are making progress consistently think outside the box. For them, obstacles are just challenges to be overcome. Take Afghanistan, for example, where many women live so far from a health clinic they do not see a doctor even once during a pregnancy and often they deliver at home without a trained health worker. I will never forget meeting some women there who wanted to change that. They were not trained health workers, they could not even read or write. But they were so determined to help they volunteered their time using cards with visual images to monitor the progress of a woman’s pregnancy and helping with deliveries in their communities. This is the type of innovative thinking that saves lives. This is the key to success.

(source: www.huffingtonpost.com)

 

The World Bank Group would help countries tackle two major challenges as they advance toward universal health coverage: to ensure no family is forced into poverty because of health care expenses, and to close the gap in access to health services and public health protection for the poorest 40% of the population in every country, the World Bank Group President, Jim Yong Kim has said.

He therefore called on countries gathered at the 66th World Health Assembly to ensure universal access to quality, affordable health services to help end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost shared prosperity.

In a press release issued May 21, 2013, it said worldwide estimates are that out-of-pocket health spending forces 100 million people into extreme poverty every year and inflicts severe financial hardship on another 150 million people.

“To free the world from absolute poverty by 2030, countries must ensure that all of their citizens have access to quality, affordable health services. “We have the opportunity to unite global health and the fight against poverty in action focused on clear goals,” Kim said.

“Every country in the world can improve the performance of its health system in the three dimensions of universal coverage: access, quality, and affordability,” he added.

(source: www.spyghana.com)