Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9408

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: media release

Burcher S
Let Us Live and Let Them Die
The Institute of Science in Society 2007 Apr 12
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/LULALTD.php

Abstract:

A WHO staff member’s parting salvo to the international health agency and its neoliberal approach to health.

Notes:

…Social scientist, Alison Katz has left the World Health Organisation (WHO) after 17 years of devoted service, condemning its “Let us live and let them die” attitude, which sums up the neglect of millions of people over the past three decades, suffering and dying from diseases of poverty, including notably HIV/AIDS [1]. She is the second AIDS researcher to leave within the past 12 months (see On Quitting HIV [2] this series).

“For over twenty years now, the international AIDS community has persisted in a reductionist obsession with individual behaviour and an implicit acceptance of a deeply flawed and essentially racist theory.” Katz writes. She believes that the narrow and totalitarian approach to AIDS by the WHO not only has had negligible effect, but also has betrayed public health principles and perversely forbidden exploration of any alternative perspectives. Like many others, Katz questions the exclusion of a plethora of co-factors known to increase biological susceptibility to infection by all disease agents, including HIV, among which are under-nutrition, poverty, powerlessness, and the basic necessities for a healthy and dignified life.

She believes that the WHO has fallen victim to neoliberal globalisation, and by default, to the economic interests of powerful nations and the transnational corporations. In an open letter dated January 2007 [3] addressed to Dr. Margaret Chan, the incoming Director-General of WHO, Katz set out seven key points to steer her focus back to serving the public, including the critical importance of addressing the commercialisation of science, and the close relationship between industry and academia as highlighted in ISIS’ Discussion Paper Towards a Convention on Knowledge [4]…

The neoliberal approach to health

Political prejudice within the WHO

Independence of international civil servants to fulfil WHO’s mandate

WHO’s first strike and out

WHO’s challenge to achieve Health for All