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South America Posts

South America

Health tourism can be healthy

Healthcare costs are rising everywhere: in the developed world things can only get worse with ageing populations, while in poor countries there is minimal progress plus a debilitating brain drain.  But health tourism could change all that: health tourism is simply free trade in services – a World Trade Organisation clause that has been ratified by very few countries, although Thailand, Singapore, South Africa and India are already demonstrating how to make big bucks in this specialist trade.

Bottoms up to Earth Day

The top-down solutions to environmental problems favoured by the Green movement have failed to protect the environment, and have impoverished millions in the process.

Cuba Libre?

The only important question about Fidel Castro's resignation is whether it means any real change to the life of ordinary Cubans after decades of economic and political oppression. Economic freedoms and private property are the keys to any economic development and the debate must start now.

Medicines for the poor: not the Oxfam way

Registration of new medicines fell sharply in the last year in the USA, while Oxfam calls for a compulsory pricing structure and backs the compulsory licenses sought by Thailand and threatened by Brazil and Indonesia. There are indeed other problems facing pharmaceutical companies but the campaign against patents is a major one: when Big Pharma gives up investing in innovation, where will new medicines come from? The price of punishing Big Pharma is to punish the poor harder.

Counterfeit drugs

It's not just the criminals who are threatening health with counterfeit or substandard drugs, but also the questionable procurement practices of international aid agencies.

Adaptation not emissions cuts is policymakers' best approach

Current climate change talks in Bali are focussing on a "Kyoto-2" with global caps on emissions of greenhouse gases. But such a treaty would harm the poor, hampering their adaptability to climate change, while doing little to prevent it.

WHO's got its facts wrong?

The World Health Organisation makes great sport of taking the pharmaceutical industry to task for its inability to provide everyone in the developing world with the drugs they need. This so-called market failure is being used at negotiations in Geneva this month to bring research and patents under official control, managed by the WHO--but the WHO has trouble managing itself.

Patents - protecting your money and your life

Downloading pirated songs from the internet is cool. Dying from counterfeit medicine is not. But the pirates and the slack law enforcement that give you the first also give you the second. And many Governments and humanitarian groups will tell you this is a good thing.

A deadly double standard in AIDS treatment

Increasing patient resistance to ARVs and anti-malarial drugs pose a huge threat to the health systems of poorer countries - yet drug resistance is being encouraged by the short-sighted policies of multilateral organisations and NGOs.

Slum dwellers need rights not projects

Aid organisations are calling for grandiose schemes to rehouse the world's slum-dwellers, but the reverse of this - bottom-up development through secure property rights and the rule of law - is the only "solution" to inadequate housing and poverty.