Another FINE example of public health


Dooming Africa's people to disease, poverty, and dependency
Roger Bate has the details.

In 1998, the World Bank along with other health agencies launched the Roll Back Malaria campaign, promising to halve malaria deaths this decade. The Bank made an unprecedented pledge before Africa's heads of state in 2000: It would spend $300-500 million to fight malaria in Africa. This promise of funding was warmly welcomed, since contemporary economic arguments held that malaria cost Africa dearly -- perhaps on the order of tens of billions of dollars a year.

But the Bank failed to deliver. And rather than admit such failure with candor, it concealed the fact using opaque and contradictory accounting. In 2001, the Bank made the impressive claim that it had "about $450 million out in various forms of anti-malaria programs." But by 2002, it appeared to backtrack, writing that "Bank direct financing for malaria control activities is over US$200 million." In just one year, the Bank had slashed a quarter of a billion dollars of malaria control funding, and nearly halved the number of countries it assisted.

The Bank has also appeared to misuse epidemiological statistics. For example, the Bank claims that in Brazil, its $73 million malaria control project was a success because it "reported malaria cases dropped by 60 percent, from 557,787 in 1989, to 221,600 in 1996". But none of the other sources of statistics -- all of which roughly agree and seem mutually confirming -- are consistent with the Bank's claim. According to the first-hand statistics of the Brazilian government, the decline was just 23 percent. Overall, neither the Brazilian government nor the Roll Back Malaria Partnership statistics support the Bank's interpretation that its project achieved a deep reduction in malaria in Brazil.

Aside from the fact that the program is not doing what was promised, there are some other things you should know.

This isn't an isolated case. The pattern of deception here shows that.

Public health agencies respond to political imperatives, they depend on an ever increasing flow of money. Bottom line, even if they have the answer, it's seldom in their best interest to use it.

And of course no one wants to talk about the DDT option.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - April 25, 2006 at 04:40 AM  Tag


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