echo chamber 
for fear of being called a bad name 
.....I may be crazy but I'm not stupid 
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 09, 2014 1:26 pm
echo chamber for fear of being called a bad name .....I may be crazy but I'm not stupid 
by elfismiles » Thu Oct 09, 2014 1:45 pm
by MayDay » Thu Oct 09, 2014 2:16 pm
by MayDay » Thu Oct 09, 2014 2:28 pm
Ebola is ecosystem collapse
The global environment is collapsing and dying under the weight of inequitable over-population and ecosystem loss.
“We learn the meaning of enough and how to share or it is the end of being.” ― Dr. Glen Barry
The surging Ebola epidemic is the result of broad-based ecological and social collapse including rainforest loss, over-population, poverty and war. This preventable environmental and human tragedy demonstrates the extent to which the world has gone dramatically wrong as ecosystem collapse, inequity, grotesque injustice, religious extremism, nationalistic militarism, and resurgent authoritarianism threaten our species and planet’s very being.
Any humane person is appalled by the escalating Ebola crisis, and let’s be clear expressing these concerns regarding causation is NOT an attempt to hijack a tragedy. Things happen for a reason, and Ebola was preventable, and future catastrophes of potentially greater magnitude can be foreseen and avoided by the truth.
The single greatest truth underlying the Ebola tragedy is that humanity is systematically dismantling the ecosystems that make Earth habitable. In particular, the potential for Ebola outbreaks and threats from other emergent diseases is made worse by cutting down forests [1]. Exponentially growing human populations and consumption – be it subsistence agriculture or mining for luxury consumer items – are pushing deeper into African old-growth forests where Ebola circulated before spillover into humans.
Poverty stricken communities in West Africa are increasingly desperate, and are eating infected “bushmeat” such as bats and gorilla, bringing them into contact with infected wildlife blood. Increasingly fragmented forests, further diminished by climate change, are forcing bats to find other places to live that are often amongst human communities.
Some 90% of West Africa’s original forests have already been lost. Over half of Liberia’s old-growth forests have recently been sold for industrial logging by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s post-war government. Only 4% of Sierra Leone’s forest cover remains and they are expected to totally disappear soon under the pressure of logging, agriculture, and mining.
My recently published peer-reviewed scientific research [2] on ecosystem loss and biosphere collapse indicates more natural ecosystems have been lost than the global environment can handle without collapsing. Recently published new science reports that 50% of Earth’s wildlife has died (in fact been murdered) in the last 40 years [3].
Loss of natural life-giving habitats has consequences. We are each witnesses to and participants in global ecosystem collapse.
There are other major social ills which potentially foster global pandemics. Rising inequity, abject poverty, and lack of justice threaten Earth’s and humanity’s very being. These ills and global ecosystem collapse are causing increased nationalistic war, migration and rise of authoritarian corporatism. West Africa has been ravaged by war and poverty for decades, which shows little signs of abating, particularly since natural habitats for community based sustainable development are nearly gone.
War breeds disease. It is no coincidence that 1918 flu pandemic – the last great global disease outbreak that killed an estimated 50-100 million – occurred just as the ravages of World War I were ending. Conditions after ecosystems are stripped by over-population and poverty are not that different – each providing ravaged landscapes that are prime habitat for disease organisms.
West Africa’s ecological collapse has brought people into contact with blood from infected animals causing the Ebola epidemic. Once human infection occurs, ecologically denuded, conflict ridden, over-populated, and squalid impoverished communities are ripe for a pandemic. As the Ebola virus threatens to become endemic to the region, it potentially offers a permanent base from which infections can indefinitely continue to spread globally.
Perma-war is not a strategy to fight Ebola
Perma-war is not a strategy to fight Ebola
Since 911 America has slashed all other spending as it militarizes, viewing all sources of conflict as resolvable by waging perma-war. Africa needs doctors and the U.S. sends the military. Both terrorism and infectious disease are best prevented by long-term investments in equitably reducing poverty and meeting human needs – including universal health-care, living wage jobs, education, family planning, and establishment of greater global medical rapid response capabilities.
We are all in this together. Our over-populated, over-consuming, inequitable human dominated Earth continues to wildly careen toward biosphere collapse as sheer sum consumption overwhelms nature. West Africa’s 2010 population of 317 million people is still growing at 2.35%, and is expected to nearly double in 25 years, even as squalor, lack of basic needs, ecosystem loss, and pestilence increase. This can never, ever be ecologically or socially sustainable, and can only end in ruin.
Equity, education, condoms, and lower taxes and other incentives to stabilize and then reduce human population are a huge part of the solution for a just, equitable, and sustainable future. Otherwise Earth will limit human numbers with Ebola and worse. It may be happening already.
We are one human family and in a globalized world no nation is an island unto itself. By failing to invest in reducing poverty and in meeting basic human needs in Africa and globally (even as we temporarily enrich ourselves by gorging upon the destruction of their natural ecosystems), we in the over-developed world ensure that much of the world is fertile ground for disease and war. There is no way to keep Ebola and other social and ecological scourges out of Europe and America if they overwhelm the rest of humanity.
Ebola is what happens when the rich ignore poverty, as well as environmental and social decline, falsely believing they are not their concern. There can be no security ever again for anybody as long as billions live in abject poverty on a couple dollars a day as a few hundred people control half of Earth’s wealth.
We learn the meaning of enough and how to share or it is the end of being.
Walmart parking lots and iPads don’t sustain or feed you. Healthy ecosystems and land do. The hairless ape with opposable thumbs – that once showed so much potential – has instead become an out of control, barbaric and ecocidal beast with barely more sentience of its environmental constraints than yeast on sugar.
Ebola is very, very serious but can be beat with public health investments, courage, and by dealing with underlying causes. In the short-term, it is absolutely vital that the world organizes a massive infusion of doctors and quarantined hospital beds into West Africa immediately, even as we work on the long-term solutions highlighted here.
Ultimately commitments to sustainable community development, universal health care and education, free family planning, global demilitarization, equity, and ecosystem protection and restoration are the only means to minimize the risk of emergent disease while achieving global ecological sustainability. Unless we come together now as one human family and change fast – by cutting emissions, protecting ecosystems, having fewer kids, ending war, investing in ending abject poverty, and embracing agro-ecology – we face biosphere collapse and the end of being.
A pathway exists to global ecological sustainability; yet it requires shared sacrifice and for us all to be strong, as we come together to vigorously resist all sources of ecocide. It is up to each and every one of us to commit our full being to sustaining ecology and living gently upon Earth… or our ONE SHARED BIOSPHERE collapses and being ends
I desperately hope that Ebola does not become a global pandemic killing hundreds of millions or even billions. But if it does, it is a natural response from an Earth under siege defending herself from our own ignorant yet willful actions. We have some urgent changes to make as a species, let’s get going today before it is too late.
by stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Oct 09, 2014 2:39 pm
seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 09, 2014 12:26 pm wrote:you post that article in the 'other one' ....I don't want to unfairly contribute to the one sided
by Iamwhomiam » Thu Oct 09, 2014 3:13 pm
by DrEvil » Thu Oct 09, 2014 5:19 pm
West Africa: Companies Fill Gaps in Ebola Response
By Tami Hultman
New York — When United States Ambassador to Liberia Deborah Malac needed help last month to support the arrival of international health workers, she turned to a private-sector group that had already inventoried their resources for a coordinated response to Ebola.
Malac told the corporate group that teams from the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization needed to get to southeastern Liberia, a largely undeveloped region of forests and rivers, far from most basic services. Finding safe accommodation posed a problem, and communications, transportation and logistics could also be difficult, she said.
The response was swift.
Within hours, David Rothschild, executive director of agribusiness firm Golden Veroleum Liberia, which has palm oil operations in the country's southeast, offered housing he described as clean but "rudimentary" in two counties, Sinoe and Grand Kru.
William Cook, operations director of gold-mining company Hummingbird Resources, offered housing in a guest house with electricity and running water – rare amenities in the remote region – near the town of Greenville and in an exploration camp further inland.
In neighboring Sierra Leone, U.S. acting ambassador Kathleen Fitzgibbons cited the need for road grading and site preparation for an Ebola treatment center in the iron-ore producing town of Lunsar, which would be operated by the International Medical Corps. Within hours, London Mining, with heavy equipment available, came to the rescue, cutting weeks or more from the construction process.
The prompt corporate response is the result of a months-long preparatory process to coordinate actions that began with aggressive programs information and education programs. Since March, when the Ebola threat re-emerged in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, after a relatively small rural outbreak earlier in the year, companies with operations in the area had been preparing for an emerging crisis. By month's end, the disease had spread to Guinea's capital Conakry and was on the move through Liberia.
Companies forge Ebola collaboration
Four months before the World Health Organization declared Ebola a public health emergency on 8 August, the leaders of international companies with operations in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia were evaluating their options for combating what they realized was a looming threat. Some of them started sharing information and ideas.
"Companies began doing what they do best," said Dr. Alan Knight, a scientist and Managing Director at ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel company. "That includes understanding the impact on our own people and getting them to an awareness of how to protect themselves and their families. And we looked at the assets we had that we could use against the outbreak on our own patch."
After informal discussions in Washington, D.C. in early August, at the time of the U.S. African Leaders Summit, companies with operations and employees in the three most-affected countries were polled and a common spreadsheet – still being expanded and updated– was developed to show who has buildings, vehicles, communications infrastructure, machinery and health facilities and where they are located. Country teams were formed, with ArcelorMittal taking the lead in Liberia, London Mining in Sierra Leone and Rio Tinto and Alcoa in Guinea. Other companies volunteered services central to emergency planning and implementation.
Washington DC-based communications and strategic planning firm KRL International has helped connect the corporate group to the global response. "Some of these companies have nation-wide logistics and supply chains tested over a decade," said KRL founder and managing director Riva Levinson. "Many of them have thousands of trained personnel. Attaching these resources to the global deployment against Ebola can help bend the curve of the virus's spread away from the worst-case projection of 1.4 million by January."
Arcelor's London office organized two conference calls in August, followed by a third on 1 September. Participants on the second call included dozens of corporate executives, diplomats, representatives of first-responder health organizations working in the three most-affected countries and Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, a Geneva-based United Nations entity.
Although the discussion was polite and respectful, both health workers and company officials expressed frustration at what they saw as the failure of governments and global health institutions to mount an adequate response to a catastrophe in the making.
Pushing for greater response
"We were getting better at doing what we could do with our own people," said Knight, who oversees Arcelor's corporate responsibility and sustainability programs. "But at that stage, the advocacy role developed."
The same day, James Dorbor Jallah, the national coordinator of Liberia's Ebola Task Force, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, "Ebola is moving at the speed of sound and the aid organizations are moving at the speed of a snail."
In an interview aired on the NBC television program 'Meet the Press' on 8 September, President Barak Obama said that two months earlier he had told his national security staff that Ebola was a top priority. He announced an assistance package that included over 3000 military personnel to implement the plan.
By then – according to front-line responders such as Medicines San Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders and the Christian group Samaritan's Purse, whose Dr. Keith Brantley was the first American Ebola case – a level of response that could have contained the epidemic earlier was now too little, too late.
The following day, 11 companies that were part of the Ebola group issued a statement supporting the deployment of military assets to fight the disease but urging "a larger coordinated global effort" on the scale of past responses to earthquakes and hurricanes.
When the United Nations General Assembly began in September, the companies numbered more than three dozen and were operating as the Ebola Private Sector Mobilization Group (EPSMG). Corporate executives came to New York to press the argument for a coordinated global response that included the private sector. They met with officials of the United Nations Office for Partnerships, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the United Nations Global Compact, which connects companies to the UN's peace and development agenda.
The Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU) convened a roundtable discussion in New York that the group's president, Peter Tichansky, called "an emergency, urgent discussion of the private-sector mobilization". It was the first physical meeting of a larger group of companies participating in the initiative, and it included government officials and aid organizations.
Rosh Bardien of London Mining, joining the session by phone, reiterated other companies' assurances to the governments and people of west Africa. "We will not abandon you," she said. "London Mining is very committed to the people of Sierra Leone. We will remain committed. And we will continue to work together to get through this crisis."
Enlarging the supply/logistics funnel
Levinson said that policy planners should take advantage of the extensive local presence of corporations in the three countries. "Now that Ebola's threat to the stability of the region and to global health security is evident," she said, "governments and individuals are offering support. But the reality is that the funnel to get personnel and logistics capability into these small post-conflict countries and distributed to the right places is limited. The private-sector network is already through the funnel and in the field."
ArcelorMital CEO for Liberia, Joe Matthews, said that companies have the ability to help alleviate critical shortages of staff and capacity, including speeding the construction of isolation and treatment centers that are essential to containing the disease.
"With our collective footprint in the three most affected countries," he said, "we have the wherewithal to provide logistical support to the various groups willing to mobilize personnel to these countries. Our companies can provide these medical teams and front-line health workers with transportation, drivers, decent accommodations, catering, laundry, as well as trained workers who can support this effort with administrative support. This would be an unprecedented private response to a global emergency – which can provide real support to those willing to risk their lives to help the people of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea."
ArcelorMital, for example, has 3200 Liberian employees and Golden Veroleum has 3400. London Mining employs 3,500 people in Sierra Leone, and the company paid over $37 million in fees and taxes in two years. Over 6000 Sierra Leone citizens work for African Minerals Limited and about 1000 Guineans work for Rio Tinto. They and other major investors say they are trying to keep basic operations going in the face of a sharp drop in expansion projects due to the withdrawal of contractors reliant on expatriate expertise.
Maintaining corporate operations – and putting some idled staff to work supporting the Ebola response - provides critical economic support to families and to the national budgets of the three hardest-hit countries. Liberia's finance minister, Amara Koneh, says the country's growth rate has already shrunk from a projected six per cent for this year to just over two per cent, a disastrous drop in government resources to spend on health and the Ebola emergency.
Gyude Moore, deputy chief of staff for Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, attended the BCIU roundtable. Despite recent government and UN actions, he said, the virus is still running ahead of the response. "Two weeks ago we needed 1000 beds in Monrovia," Liberia's capital, Moore told the group. "We had 260." VIDEO: Ebola Steals What Makes Us Human.
He said all those turned away would be cared for by family and community members who cared for them, without means of protecting themselves, continuing the exponential increase in infections. Moore said the region's porous borders, with family members often living on both sides of an international boundary, demands a regional approach to stifling the virus. "So everything you continue to do for us in the region," he told the companies, "is deeply appreciated."
And the last decade of progress "is now threatened," he said, "by an enemy that is much bigger than even the civil war that we went through, that Sierra Leone went through."
EPSMG's corporate leaders also joined other private sector and organizational partners at a UN Foundation-sponsored panel on Ebola at UN headquarters, attended by UN Foundation founder and chair Ted Turner and President and CEO Kathy Calvin, which was followed by a high-level Ebola session hosted by the Secretary-General.
Arcelor's Matthews, speaking on the panel, pushed for shortening the lead time to get commitments made by governments and organizations converted to functioning interventions in communities. "Coordination is needed," Matthews said afterwards, "but it is secondary to getting moving. I'm sure there'll be mistakes along the way, but we're better off making mistakes and moving faster. That's the only way to bend the curve".
UN sounds the alarm
Moving faster may remain a challenge, especially for governments and international institutions, but the conservation around Ebola has shifted into high gear. A week before the session, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution calling the outbreak "a threat to international peace and security". It was sponsored by 134 member states, a record number for any Security Council resolution in United Nations history.
Tony Banbury heads a new UN Mission for Emergency Ebola Response (Unmeer) and works alongside Dr. David Nabarro, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's appointee as Ebola coordinator. Banbury paints a grim picture of the current situation. "Right now," he said, "the spread of the disease is exponential and the response is linear."
Every day after an earthquake or a cyclone, he said, things get a little better. "In this," he said, "for the first time in my career – and I've been doing this my whole career – every day, things get worse. A number of world leaders like [President] Jim Kim from the World Bank have said it, and I've heard it again and again: 'This is the most difficult, hardest, complex, frightening crisis any of us have ever dealt with."
Every day the danger of mutation and spread to other countries increases.
"It is very clear," Banbury warned the high-level group at the United Nations, "that this crisis is of unprecedented proportions and risks. It is not a public health crisis; it is much deeper and more complex than that. Whole societies are at risk. Years and decades of investment in development, in women and children and societies are at risk."
Private sector support is urgently needed, he said. "We need everyone in the room to please do something. And I hope the big companies will do something big."
Unmeer now has a director for private sector partnerships who arrived five days ago in Accra, Ghana, where the UN has established an 'air bridge' for getting supplies and logistics support to the three countries that have been semi-isolated due to the boycott by many international air carriers and shipping lines.
Despite the still escalating crisis, in a round of meetings in Washington DC last week, before returning to Liberia, the Liberian president's representative Gyude Moore delivered a message that tried to walk a delicate line between doom-saying and hope. "Our people are resilient," he said. "We can overcome this."
Levinson agreed – but with a qualification. "This is a fight we can only win as a global community," she said. "Our humanity demands that we support the affected countries, and our own national security requires that we stop the disease at its source. Putting up travel barriers, as some politicians and media are now advocating, will only prolong human suffering and make it more likely that we will be fighting this outbreak, including fighting it close to home, for years to come."
In an interview, BCIU's Peter Tichansky expressed fear that the Ebola crisis will "get a lot worse before it gets better" and said more funding is essential. "It's taking a while, he said, "and the urgency hasn't yet been totally felt."
Meanwhile, those dealing with the Ebola crisis up close are desperate for more and faster action. Antonio Vigilante, a United Nations official in Liberia, said late last month that Liberia alone needed some 1.3 million personal protective suits, and the need grows daily. The White House said yesterday that although the United States has procured 140,000 sets, only 10,000 have been delivered so far.
by Laodicean » Fri Oct 10, 2014 7:57 am
by seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 10, 2014 12:54 pm
WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 10-12, 2014
Is Microsoft Medicine the Solution for Ebola?
The Origins of the Ebola Crisis
by TARIQ ALI and ALLYSON POLLOCK
Tariq Ali: Today we are going to discuss medicine and what is going on in Africa but not just there, in other parts of the world too, and how privatised medicine is now dominating the field except in a few oasis there are still left Cuba, Venezuela, etc. With me is Professor Allyson Pollock, one of the best known public health scientists and experts in her field anywhere. Ebola. What are its origins and how did it spread so quickly in these three African countries and is now causing panic elsewhere?
Allyson Pollock: Well Ebola is a virus, nobody quite knows what the origins are, some think it might be from the bat, and it is spread through bodily fluids, so that is an important mechanism. In most normal situations it should be very easily contained by quarantine and by isolation but the big problem in the countries where it is most prevalent, which is Sierra, Liberia and Guinea, is that these are very, very poor countries, where the infrastructure has increasingly been ripped out, especially in terms of health systems and the, um, virus is now in urban areas where there is close human contact, so it makes it very difficult to control and contain especially when it is happening in areas where there is a lot of overcrowding and poverty and poor sanitation.
Tariq Ali: And the Western health community, so to speak, the World Health Organisation, was slow to react, I felt, in terms of what could have been done at an early stage of this disease.
Allyson Pollock: Well I suppose the WHO was hoping, as in the previous outbreak - large outbreak in the 1970s, that it would be fairly easily contained. Perhaps what happened that they hadn’t reckoned with the fact that these countries where it is emerging are actually among the very poorest countries? Liberia and Sierra Leon have been through their own long periods of civil war, conflict with displaced refugees where the gross domestic product and the economy has very badly suffered and what we have seen in all these countries is a real hollowing out of all sorts of public services but especially health systems. So it is very, very difficult to contain it and we have got real issues of poverty. So, I suppose the first hope was that these would be fairly, err, the disease would be fairly easily contained but actually of course it is a virus that has a very high case fatality rate, they say about 55% chance of dying if you contract the virus. So this is very serious but one of the big problems is that the Western world, especially the US government is coming back with solutions of guns and magic bullets so we’ve been here before; the announcement by Obama that he is going to send in 3,000 troops and the parallel announcement that they are going to focus on rapid vaccine production. And this is a complete removal from the social and structural determinance of public health because the origins of all public health are in very simple and basic solutions. It’s about clean water, sanitation, good nutrition – so the evils of poverty. And, on top of that you need very good health systems with proper doctors and nurses and facilities that you can isolate people and you can also do what’s called ‘contact tracing’ so you need to go back into the community to find out who the affected individuals have been in contact with so that you can then quarantine and isolate those individuals to make sure that they actually then don’t get the disease and then pass it on during the incubation period. And all of that has been stripped out.
This is what these countries are looking at, they’ve had a total erosion and collapse of their public health care systems and this is the tragedy. So the population has very, very few doctors and nurses. They simply cannot cope and of course the public facilities that are there are overcrowded, they are in terrible conditions and they are completely and utterly understaffed. So this problem of an epidemic was going to hit them, it could have been Ebola, it could be something else – it could be cholera or whatever. This was actually going to come home to hit these countries very hard indeed. This was entirely predictable and it’s been predictable for more than 20 years and it is what the public health lobby and the public advocates have been talking about. The solution to these epidemics is not the magic bullets of vaccines and it is not sending in the troops. It’s structural, it’s social, it’s economic, it’s environmental and it is putting in all the public health measures.
Tariq Ali: But the entire world capitalist system as it functions is basically not in favour of public health services, they are in favour of privatised solutions, privatised facilities which means that in most countries increasingly you have a two or three tier system; you have very good quality hostpitals for the rich and people who can afford them, you have a second tier for more middle class people who also have to pay but not so much and their facilities aren’t so good and then you have public hospitals, not just in Africa but in countries like India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which are a total complete disgrace and nothing is done about it on a global level at all because this is not a priority. I mean it is just outrageous. Do you think, I mean, given that this is how the health system functions from what you said, the obvious solution, medium-term and long-term, is to create a strong social infrastructure in these countries but that is what the International Monetary Fund asked them not to spend money on, the last four decades so what do you think they can do?
Allyson Pollock: Well I think you are raising important issues; what is the role of the IMF, the World Bank, the African Development Bank because again if we look at Liberia and Sierra Leone and Guinea, which actually have a lot of natural resources, what is happening to these countries, in terms of their economics is that increasingly the lands are being privatised and being occupied by foreign investors who are coming in and they are simply stripping out the resource and the assets. Liberia has a GDP, gross domestic product, of a couple of billion dollars, and a population of five or six million, so how are they meant to rebuild when actually you’ve got foreign directors coming in and public private partnerships and great flows of money going out and you don’t have any mechanism for redistribution because redistribution means you are trying to build a fairer society and you are trying to put the resources back in.
So it starts with the economy, it starts with what’s happening to the land, it starts with the fact that palm oil and cocoa and rubber are important cash crops and there’s land, and these ownership, has been transferred and I mean this is very well documented by important organisations like Global Witness but also the Oakland Foundation in the US, who have actually chartered what is happening to the land and remember, many of the farmers, for instance in Liberia, 70% of the population, live in rural areas. They will be subsistence farmers so this is an issue and when you have the population spending 80% of the money on food and then you have all these cordons around them, then of course you have got a real problem because the poverty is actually going to be accelerated in these countries because of the Ebola virus, because the borders are closing and because you don’t even have economic flow any more. So I think we need to start with the economics because that is the cause of the structural problems and then we’ve got the World Health Organisation, which is the international global authority on health. It has the law making powers but systematically over 20 years it has been completely starved of funds and such funding as it gets are tied to all sorts of conditions and those conditions are being set by large, global NGOs such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which have no democratic base, no accountability and which in turn are doing untold harm through their vertical disease programmes because they are not rooted in public health and the public health systems. And a good example of a vertical disease programme is when you take Ebola and then you bring in your operation to tackle Ebola and you ignore all the other causes of disease, such as TB or malaria, or poverty, malnutrition and at the same time when you focus all the efforts of the industry on vaccine development.
But actually vaccines are not what these countries need. It’s proper redistribution and public health measures and we learn nothing from history; that is what is shocking. All the great reforms, all the great collapse of infectious disease epidemics was actually not down to drugs and vaccines, it was to redistributive measures, which included sanitation, nutrition, good housing and actually above all a real democratisation. And with it came education and all the other measures that we need. Now I’m not saying we don’t need vaccines, but one of the big problems is that that vaccine developments itself is now in the hands of these large very powerful foundations like NGOs, like GAVI – the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative, who in conjunction with big companies like GSK and Merck, are out to seek patents and the reason why they like vaccines is it gives… because vaccines mean mass immunisation, it means numbers and numbers mean money. And of course is being paid for by the West and Western governments when this money could much more easily flow into the governments themselves to re-build their health systems because we are talking about re-building public health infrastructure and that includes putting in community primary health care, community health systems, infection control units at community level, putting in hospitals and training nurses and doctors. And the big, other big problem in all of these countries is not just a brain-drain, because a few doctors and nurses are there, they want to leave and that is happening also in Nigeria, or they want to work in the private sector or they want to work for these NGOs because the money is much better and so the whole public health system is completely hollowed out. And this is a real problem because the Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates, do not believe in the public sector, they do not believe in a democratic, publically owned, publically accountable.
Tariq Ali: So in fact the WHO, because of governmental policies, and the priorities of the Washington consensus, i.e.. neoliberalism, privatisation of medicine, inability to control Big Phgarma, has effectively ditched what it used to do? In the sense that it can’t do what needs to be done, shore up, strengthen, build if necessary in some of these countries public health systems.
Allyson Pollock: Well, there is a very important paper recently in the British Medical Journal, I think by David Legg, which actually sets out what has been happening to the WHO over two decades where the US refuse to give the funding that it should have done and then what you have is when Western governments and the US come in, they tie it to conditionalities, which is usually around the Bill & Melinda Gates priorities and not around the essential public health priories and the WHO has its hands tied. And actually it is the world health organisation, it has got the law making powers and yet it has never exercised these functions we are talking about democratic deficits that are happening when large global funds like the Gates Fund or the Buffett Fund can actually determine what the world priorities are and so distort what the priorities should be for public health because it is tied to the economics, they need to industrialise, they need to medicalise and they need to pharmaceuticalise. But there is a big backlash coming, a big backlash in the Western world, much more critical thought about the ethicacy and the safety and the appropriateness of the drugs and vaccines and medications and this group is beginning to be more and more articulate and more and more and more concerned. But one of the big problems is that because of this huge amount of money that the Bill & Melinda Gates Fund have, is that the technicians, like myself, the public health tribes, have been captured because of their success in predicated upon getting jobs, or research, tied to the interests of the Global Fund. So the critical thought is being hollowed out and so at the same time are the essential public health functions because public health is there as Ibsen would say, to be the enemy of the people, but actually it is there to be critical, to appraise and to think rationally and to remind everybody about what the social determinance of health are, and it is not rocket science. It doesn’t need magic potions or millions of dollars spent on genetics and the laboratories, it needs very, very basic things, but they are essential because they are what the public health infrastructures are built on.
Tariq Ali: Contrast this, what’s going on in the bulk of the world with a tiny country like Cuba, which has managed to construct a public health system, which is precisely many things that you are arguing for. It is very oriented to preventive medicines which stop a disease from spreading, and has now amongst the best record of both public health services and its affects in terms of what Cuban’s citizens and increasingly because the help they have given Venezuela, Venezuelan citizens and other South American citizens who never used to have health are now in much better shape than many people, for instance, in Eastern Europe which went in for big privatisation; leave alone Africa and large parts of Asia. You’ve studied the system I think?
Allyson Pollock: Well yes I think the Cuba’s system is very inspiriting and anybody who has been to Cuba can’t but feel the public health benefits of it. I mean they are a country that really know the meaning of austerity and yet their GDP, which is the equivalent of many of these poor countries, but they don’t have this extraordinary inequalities because their vision and campaign has been around public health and health for all. So they have done extraordinarily well and quite remarkably well. I mean the real problem comes as what’s happening now and will they get side-tracked by neoliberal policies and the need to get drugs to market, and the need to sell drugs; it is a very important time for Cuba to think about it. But actually they need to all the time be remembering what their GDP is and what they’ve achieved with their GP compared with some of these poorer countries in the world like Sierra Leone and Liberia – Liberia especially.
Tariq Ali: The other thing of course is that the Cubans have sent out a lot of their doctors to parts of Africa, South America, to whenever there is a disaster . I remember during bad floods in Pakistan, really bad, a whole team of Cuban doctors arrived and were taken to the remotest parts of the country where women were not allowed by their menfolk to see doctors because most doctors were male. And when they saw the Cuban team, which was 60% women, 40% male doctors, the men in these communities said ‘ah you have women doctors; you are doctors, and they said, ‘yes, yes’, they say, ‘okay you can see the women whenever you want’. So amazing rapport developed between them and the women were very pleased and so were their kids and a Cuban doctor told me that they said to us, ‘where do you come from you people?’ and she said, ‘we come from Cuba’. ‘Where is that?’, and she said, ‘it’s a tiny island in the Caribbean’ and they said, ‘who is your leader? I mean who/what is the government’. So they were careful because they were on a medical mission but they said, ‘do you want to see a picture of Fidel Castro who is our leader’ and said ‘yes’. So they showed a picture of Castro and the women said, ‘my god, he’s got a beard like they have in that village 20 miles from here, do you want to go and see those beards’. [laughs]. But they were incredibly impressed and the entire media in Pakistan was talking about what they’d done, they said we don’t want any help from the government, we arrive with our tents, our equipment, all we want is receptacles in which we can heat clean water and the rest we will do; we will bring our medicines with us. And the thing is this is the other point which rises that unlike the health services constructed in Western Europe after the 2nd World War including the National Health Service, the governments in these countries never actually set up pharmaceutical industries to compliment those health services. Nor did they even seriously consider nationalising them, because that would have brought the prices of medicine right down and they need never have charged prescriptions. So let’s come for a minute to a subject you know very well – the health service in Britain and in the European Union countries, I mean what is happening to that Allyson? It is one thing to talk about Africa but what is happening to the health services in Europe.
Allyson Pollock: What is happening now in Europe as many people are aware is that, we have got neoliberal policies coming from the US both the health care industry in the US, which have exhausted the funds of America because health care is running it about 18, 18% of GDP, compared with 9 or 10% average in Europe, so the European health care investors need to find new markets and they are busy attempting to penetrate and open up the health care systems of Europe. And of course the biggest trophy for them is the United Kingdom NHS because it was for a long time the most socialised of all the health care systems. So we’ve had devolution; so Scotland, Wales and England all have their own health care services and Scotland and Wales which are very tiny, they don’t cover more than 8 or 9 million people, they have retained a national health service but England, which many people don’t realise this, England abolished its national health service in 2012 with the Health and Social Care Act. What remains of the NHS is a funding stream, or a government pair, and the NHS has now been reduced to a logo and what the government is now doing is accelerating a break up of what remains of the national health service under public ownerships, so closing hospitals, closing services and privatising or contracting out. So just as we heard in Liberia and Guinea about how the public lands are being transferred like the enclosures to private owners from abroad, the same thing is happening with our pubic services, our public hospitals, our public facilities are also being enclosed in a way and given over to private-for-profit investors and this is happening in extraordinary speed in England. Faster than anywhere in Europe. And this is a major global neoliberal project, if you like.
Tariq Ali: To privatise health.
Allyson Pollock: Well to privatise not just the healthcare system but also ultimately the funding. Now in the US, just under half of that 18% GDP is actually paid for by the government but the government is in effect a tax payer and then channels the money into private-for-profit corporations. The government in England abolished the health and social care act because it wanted to open up new funding streams. So it wants to reduce the level of services that are available publically, create a climate of discontent with the NHS, forcing people who are in the middle classes, that’s like you and me Ali, to go and privately and pay either out of pocket or with our healthcare insurance, so that we desert, we exit what is left but at the same time the government is reducing all our entitlements because there is no longer a duty to provide universal healthcare. That duty that has been in place since 1948 was abolished in 2012. So that duty has now gone and so now the government can reduce all the entitlements, reduce everything that is available and increasingly we are going to have to pay out of pocket or though private health insurance. And the private health insurance industry are here, they are here form the US and they are absolutely gearing up with the new structures the government has put into place to move into private-for-profit health insurance; that is what we are going to be seeing. And actually the new system the government is putting in place is modelled on the US and yet that will come at huge loss and it will also be a public health catastrophe because it will mean that many, many millions will increasingly go without care and of course markets render people invisible, they are not seen. Nobody knows. The doctor in front of you only sees the patient that come to them; it doesn’t see the many tens of thousands who are being denied access to healthcare, which is why in the US the doctors are not out on the street campaigning. But in the UK the doctors are out on the street campaigning, they are putting in, they are standing now for the National Health Alliance Party, they are now putting in candidates to stand against the conventional parties. And so you see that the doctors are still prepared to fight for universal health care but once our NHS has gone completely, it’s been abolished, but once all the remnants have gone, you have to use the parallel of the oak tree, it seems to be blooming and flourishing but the roots have been severed and that can take many months or years for that to completely decay. But once it has gone the doctors will no longer be there. They’ll be like the doctors in the US interested in themselves, interested in their own pockets and not interested in universal access to healthcare. And this is the crime of the century, if you like, the way in which the English coalition, both Conservative and Liberal Democrat, have actually abolished our NHS but they have had a lot of help along the way from the Labour government before them.
Tariq Ali: Labour more or less set the basis for it when they were in power.
Allyson Pollock: Absolutely. Alan Milburn the Health Secretary did this in in 2000. In 1997 the Labour government had its, had its chance to reverse the privatisation and marketization policies, to get rid of the private finance initiative and they had a very good Secretary of State who was quite determined to some of that….
Tariq Ali: Frank Dobson?
Allyson Pollock: Frank Dobson. But they got rid of him extra quick and instead of which we got Alan Milburn and his ten-year plan and now he has gone off to join the very healthcare companies that he helped to build up. And I mean I think that is the tragedy as when that bill was going through parliament to abolish the NHS, many of the peers, and many of the MPs had conflicts of interests because they had actually interest in the healthcare companies that they were establishing.
Tariq Ali: It is outrageous really. And Milburn himself is one of them.
Allyson Pollock: Well, it is a travesty for democracy, it really is and as a public health doctor it is an absolute catastrophe because at the moment we know, people of all ages, with serious mental illnesses who cannot get access to health care, people with stroke, people with chronic illnesses, chronic diseases who are increasingly being denied access to healthcare and they are voices in the wilderness, they are not being heard because there is no collective mechanism for them to be heard any more. And the doctors and nurses are absolutely in despair. Now we do have solution; my colleagues we’ve written an NHS reinstatement bill which we hope that whichever party comes to power, they will actually run with to reinstate the NHS, so there is a solution out there, which is drafted and written and ready, that would restore and reinstate the NHS.
Tariq Ali: It is perfectly legitimate to make huge profits from the basic needs of ordinary people?
Allyson Pollock: Yes from people’s diseases and people’s illnesses. Well it began with a pharmaceutical industry and the vaccine production, it is perfectly acceptable to make profits from them, so why shouldn’t we now go and make profits from illness and care. But of course the NHS in England was set up, to be redistributive. It’s funded through taxation, which is meant to be progressive and the money is meant to flow according to need. But what we are now beginning to see is that money will flow according to the needs of shareholders and not patients, and that is a very real concern. Of course. It is all down to political will. Everything can be reversed but it comes down to politics, to democracy and people making their voices heard.
Tariq Ali: Agreed.
by Col. Quisp » Sun Oct 12, 2014 6:45 am
by 8bitagent » Sun Oct 12, 2014 1:13 pm
Col. Quisp » Sun Oct 12, 2014 5:45 am wrote:Dallas HCW tested positive. https://www.dshs.state.tx.us/news/relea ... 41012.aspx
by coffin_dodger » Sun Oct 12, 2014 1:36 pm
8bitagent wrote:second person now has Ebola in America
by seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 12, 2014 1:56 pm
2nd Ebola case in Texas caused by breach in protocol, CDC chief says
Dr. Daniel Varga
By KURTIS LEE, MICHAEL A. MEMOLI contact the reporters Hospitals and ClinicsHealthDiseases and IllnessesEbolaU.S. Centers for Disease Control and PreventionThomas Eric Duncan
CDC official says 'clearly' a breach in protocol led to second Ebola case in Texas
First U.S. transmission of Ebola reported with a healthcare worker in Dallas
Healthcare worker who contracted Ebola caring for Dallas patient was "heroic"
A federal health official said Sunday there was “clearly” a breach in protocol that led to the infection of a Dallas healthcare worker with Ebola in what is thought to be the first U.S. transmission of the deadly virus.
“We’re deeply concerned about this new development,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“I think the fact that we don’t know of a breach in protocol is concerning, because clearly there was a breach in protocol. We have the ability to prevent the spread of Ebola by caring safely for patients.”
In a separate CDC briefing, Frieden said the worker had been monitoring herself and was promptly isolated when she developed symptoms.
We are broadening our team in Dallas and working with extreme diligence to prevent further spread.
- David Lakey, commissioner, Texas health department
“The level of her symptoms and indications from the test itself suggest that the level of virus she had was low,” Frieden said.
Officials at the Texas Department of State Health Services said “preliminary” test results late Saturday indicated the presence of the virus in a healthcare worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where a Liberian patient, Thomas E. Duncan, died last week.
“We knew a second case could be a reality, and we’ve been preparing for this possibility,” David Lakey, state health department commissioner, said in a statement.
“We are broadening our team in Dallas and working with extreme diligence to prevent further spread,” he said.
Frieden said the CDC is in the process of identifying the health worker’s contacts and conducting a full investigation of procedures at the Texas hospital to determine how the transmission occurred.
He said all healthcare workers who cared for Duncan are now being treated as if they had been potentially exposed.
“Infections only occur when there’s a breach in protocol,” Frieden said. “We know from many years of experience that it’s possible to care for [patients] with Ebola without risk to healthcare workers, but we also know that it’s hard, that even a single breach can result in contamination, and one of the areas that we look at closely are things like, how you take off the gear that might be affected or contaminated.”
Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, where Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan was treated. A healthcare worker who participated in his care has been diagnosed with the virus. (LM Otero / Associated Press)
Frieden said the healthcare worker had extensive contact with Duncan in the days leading up to his death. Additional tests to confirm the infection of the healthcare worker are expected to be completed Sunday by the CDC, Frieden said.
“Unfortunately, it is possible in the coming days that we will see additional cases of Ebola. This is because the healthcare workers who cared for this individual may have had a breach of the same nature of the individual who appears now to have a preliminary positive test,” Frieden said.
He said CDC investigators will be looking at “the interventions that were done to try desperately to keep the index patient alive,” a reference to Duncan’s care. This included dialysis and intubation.
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said that the second infection was something for which Texas health officials were prepared.
“That healthcare worker is a heroic person who helped provide care to Mr. Duncan,” Jenkins told reporters Sunday.
“We expected that it was possible that a second person could contract the virus. Contingency plans were put into place, and the hospital will discuss the way that the healthcare worker followed those contingency plans, which will make our jobs in monitoring and containment much easier in this case than in the last one,” Jenkins said.
The healthcare worker identified in the latest case reported a low-grade fever Friday night and was immediately isolated and referred for testing, officials said.
Health officials said they are now in the process of identifying those who may have had contact with the healthcare worker, and those people will be monitored depending on how much exposure they may have had.
Authorities provided no information about the identity of the new patient except to say it was a healthcare worker who had provided care for Duncan, 42, who was admitted three days after initially seeking help for symptoms on Sept. 25.
Dr. Daniel Varga of Texas Health Resources said the worker was in full protective gear when providing care to Duncan during his second visit to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. Varga did not identify the worker and said the family of the worker has “requested total privacy."
Duncan was the first patient diagnosed in the U.S. with the often-fatal hemorrhagic fever, which has killed more than 4,000 people in western Africa.
He apparently contracted the disease in Liberia before traveling to Dallas. Neighbors in the Liberian capital of Monrovia said Duncan had helped a neighbor try to reach a hospital when she showed symptoms of what later turned out to be Ebola.
The neighbor died, and Duncan flew to the U.S. to join his fiancée and other relatives. He developed a 103-degree fever shortly after arriving and was initially sent home with antibiotics, then admitted when his condition worsened.
He died Wednesday.
Sunday’s announcement marks a deadly new milestone — the first case of Ebola transmitted in the U.S.
It is significant that it involved a healthcare worker, because U.S. public health authorities have long said they have been expecting the appearance of Ebola and are confident that they are prepared to prevent its further spread.
Hospital officials have said Duncan was treated by more than 50 people in a secure, 24-bed intensive care unit.
Authorities have been closely monitoring all of those who had contact with Duncan before he was placed in isolation, especially a high-risk group of 10 which includes his fiancée and three relatives.
Three paramedics who treated Duncan have also been under observation.
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Oct 12, 2014 2:25 pm
by winsomecowboy2 » Sun Oct 12, 2014 9:25 pm
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