Why the world's premier public health organization must change or die.
BY JACK C. CHOW | DECEMBER 8, 2010
Among the many victims of Haiti's deadly cholera outbreak may be an unexpected casualty: the World Health Organization. As the epidemic broke out on the island, spreading quickly from rural areas to the capital, Port-au-Prince, the World Health Organization (WHO) and its regional division, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), sent expert teams, mapping the epidemic and advising the government on how to best defeat the outbreak. Relief workers hustled to contain the disease in rural areas before it spread to the capital, where living spaces are more compact, sanitation systems are overwhelmed with raw sewage, and more than a million earthquake survivors are still huddled in tent camps. But reach Port-au-Prince it did, and today at least 1,800 Haitians have fallen victim. Cholera, like most any outbreak, demands a nimble, fast-moving, and adaptive response. Unfortunately, that's just about everything the WHO is not. The 11 months since Haiti's earthquake, coupled with the relentless rise of pandemics in impoverished countries in recent years, have made painfully clear that the agency can no longer adequately perform the job of being the world's chief defender against disease.
Comentário de Jorge Rocha Gomes:
ReplyDelete" Pois e Aloyzio, na medicina do trabalho o segredo medico e invocado, vez por outra, para defender nao o direito do trabalhador mas o interesses do empresario.
Exemplo: nao fornecer, apesar de dispositivo legal que obriga, os resultados de exames laboratorias de monitoramento biologico de trabalhadores expostos a fatores de riscos ocupacionais."