Food for a widening thought gap
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Human Rights Reader 103
People who file claims to secure their right to health and ade-
quate 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 vic-
tims, who instead of being killed, are left disabled or seri-
ously ill. (J. Teton). Many of the malnourished children are
child labourers -- 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 widen-
ing 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 reha-
bilitation 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 informa-
tion on these risks available to public authorities. It is or-
ganized 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 at-
tributes 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 fight-
ers' 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, Vietnam
mailto:claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn
--
Mostly taken from D+C Vol. 31:6 and Aug/Sept 2004, Perspectives
in Global Development and Technology, Vol 3, No. 1-2, 2004, IF-
PRI Forum, March 2004, and F&D, 41:1, March 2004 (FMI).