Prevent Disease.com - Millions Condemned to Die as Health Policies Fail



		Millions Condemned to Die as Health Policies Fail Excerpt by Jeremy Lovell, Reuters Health More than 80 million mothers and children will die unnecessarily over little more than a decade through misguided policies and lack of cash, aid agencies said. The Millennium Development Goals -- a series of objectives agreed by international bodies -- aim to cut child mortality by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015 and maternal mortality by three-quarters over the same period. But a report from the Grow Up Free coalition, which groups catholic aid agency CAFOD, Save the Children, Tearfund, EveryChild and HelpAge International, said misguided health policies proposed by the World Bank and a lack of investment by national governments meant there was no chance of meeting the targets. "Over the next 12 years, more than 80 million children and mothers will die if we fail to meet these goals. The Grow Up coalition challenges all those with the responsibility and power to prevent these unnecessary deaths," said CAFOD's head of public policy George Gelber. The coalition said the number of anticipated deaths from preventable diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia over the period was equivalent to the combined populations of Kenya, Malawi, Zambia and Sudan. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. At current rates of reduction, the Millennium Development Goals on child and mother mortality rates would not be met for more than a century and a half in some African countries, it said. It called on the annual meetings next week in Dubai of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to get to grips urgently with the problem. "We stress that while we cannot make progress without more resources, at the same time we need a careful analysis of why policies have failed in the past and how we must implement new policies," Gelber said. The report accused the World Bank's health development model, Investing in Health, of having diverted scarce resources away from broad-based and co-ordinated primary healthcare programs to far narrower projects focusing on cost reduction and with the responsibility shifted to the private sector. It said national governments had to be held accountable for proper implementation of health programs geared to the needs of their own populations, and international agencies had to come up with more money and drop the mantra that a solution that worked in one area could be applied to all. Reference Source 89 For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".