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Asia

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.

UN's Russian roulette for poor patients

Sub-standard AIDS and malaria drugs can cause parasite resistance and clinical failure. Yet the Global Fund has been using taxpayer's money to procure such drugs for millions of low-income patients.

Get Real About AIDS

UNAIDS has systematically perpetuated myths about the nature and scope of the AIDS pandemic in order to keep the disease high on the political agenda.  As a result, many billions of dollars have been wasted on prevention programmes that have no basis in science.

One in Three malaria drugs failing in Africa

New field research shows that a third of legal, not counterfeit, malaria drugs collected in six African cities fail at least one quality test - and aid agencies continue to fund these and other untested substandard drugs.  The Global Fund, bureaucrats and activists have become part of the problem : patients, health workers and governments in poor countries need to start protesting loudly against this hypocrisy.

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.

U.N. study says starve the poor

At a time when food prices are rising sharply, the UN's anti-market and anti-technology approach to agriculture will only make food scarcer and drive prices even higher.

Attack on patents hurts the poor

The “patients not patents” campaign has a simplistic appeal but will only make things worse for the poor, as well as distracting attention from the real causes of ill health: poverty and corruption.  Africans must not let their health and growth be damaged by populist propaganda.

What's killing the poor is poverty

There is a growing notion that rich countries should slash imports from poor countries whose antiquated factories are heavy carbon emitters: this eco-protectionism is in fact good old-fashioned protectionism and would hit the poor hardest.

A dose of reality on climate change

Britain’s Department of Health says we face killer heatwaves and the Royal College of Physicians president says "the effects of global warming on health could eclipse those of smoking, alcohol and obesity." But more people in the UK routinely die of cold than of heat. And the cure for so-called tropical diseases is not cool temperatures but prosperity.

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.