Poor pay for their poverty with their lives!
Posted by bmhegde on 1
Until and unless the lowest of the low get the bare minimum needs of existence there is no meaning in talking about equitable health care. In fact, the present gulf between the rich and the poor even in the US is the largest in the history of that country. More than two thirds of the world population, nearly four billion people, gets an average of less than $200 per year. Just because there are more cell phones in China than the total population of US it does not mean that the poor Chinese had all the bare minimum facilities to survive. The poor all over the world pay for their poverty with their lives; poverty is the mother of all illnesses. Oppression, suppression and denial breed criminals and terrorists in addition, a health risk for the rich!
It is the equal opportunity, the real level playing ground, that is lacking. “The most important difference between laissez faire and non-linear economics is that laissez faire assures us of a stable and benign economic equilibrium. If that balance is slightly tilted it would come back to its original form eventually. By contrast, non-linear economics shows that the equilibrium could be unstable,” wrote Kenneth Freidman in his classic The Myths of Free Market. The rich-poor gap might grow exponentially and bring on catastrophic results at the end! Health care depends on equal opportunities and trying to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. Even the World bank report showed that both in Cambodia and Gujarat in India the poor got better deal thanks to NGOs, and not governmental efforts!
Indian masses in the villages and city slums are under nourished. The sanitary levels are so bad that a recent survey in India showed that 70% of Indian kids had only less than 50% haemoglobin, thanks to the ubiquitous hookworms. There are enough vaccines to prevent some of the childhood killer diseases. People forget that a vaccine can only stimulate the anti-body production in the child’s body. The anti-bodies are basically proteins. If a child has such bad nutrition that it has only 50% globin in the blood how could we expect that child to produce enough anti-bodies to get protected from any illness, vaccination notwithstanding?
Iron pigment in the blood in a child is needed for the growth of the hippocampus major, an area that is responsible for memory and other vital functions. The hippocampus major, for its growth in a foetus inside the mother’s womb, also needs the iron pigment from the mother’s blood. Expectant mothers are also impoverished. Hence the child is born with poorly developed hippocampus major to begin with. Today’s information over loaded educational system demands the child to remember so many facts and such a child gets left behind. Even primary education is denied to a sizeable percentage of kids in India. A recent survey in Delhi showed that 30% of the kids there (20,00,000 kids) can not go to the Govt. free schools, for lack of dresses and food. Illiterates have greater health problems.
To help control the “so called” epidemics of killer diseases in the pooer countries like India we need understand their root cause. The heart, pancreas and other organs in the foetus are all made in the first trimester of pregnancy. An undernourished mother at this stage can not keep the infant alive. If the child does not die in the womb it gets born with very small underdeveloped organs. This child when it grows in a food plenty atmosphere, would have the gene-food mismatch(Barker’s Hypothesis) resulting in precocious diseases. The remedy is not building more hospitals and spending more money in that area, but in improving the sanitation and nutrition of the poor mothers so that their kids are not born in the first place with defective organs.
Let us look at the health scenario in the poverty ridden parts of the world. The deprived immune system of the poor because of the bad sanitary system and the resultant hookworm and other infections takes a very heavy toll of lives in the young. The large majority in this world (more than 80%) do not get clean drinking water. Universal supply of clean drinking water would automatically abolish 80% of the disease load in hospitals and millions of unnecessary deaths. Clean food, uncontaminated by human and/or animal excreta, is another rarity for the poor people. This is the next cause of illness and death. Even the carbon monoxide in the cooking smoke in villages kills women by thousands and is deadly to children below five years of age.
The Patents Bill, recently passed by the Indian Parliament, to get a pat from the WTO, will, I hope, not make matters worse for the poor. Essential drugs will be beyond their reach. To get at the bottom of the real truth one has to read the following book just published. The New York Times book review section put this book on their best seller list. The blurb tells you that it is CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN by John Perkins, a former employee of an International consulting firm, published by Barrett-Koehler. He talks about the corporatocracy. It shows the real face of poverty and illnesses.
Corporatocracy is a new addition to the long list like democracy, autocracy, plutocracy, monarchy and the other economic isms. Long live human kind on this planet bereft of all cracies except humanocracy (economic humanism). The world still is round with less than five percent of the population sitting on the top holding 95% of the wealth and the rest hanging on without knowing where their next meal comes from. The Mathew Law still works in this world. “He who hath shall be given”. While the rich sit on the top, the poorest of the poor regularly drop down from below to the bottomless pit to perish for ever due to hunger, malnourishment and disease. “The meaning of good and bad, of better or worse, is simply helping or hurting.”