March 03, 2005

Culture of Life

Yet another reminder of how little non-rich, mostly non-white life is valued in this world:

Three million newborns who die each year could be saved with low-tech and low-cost measures but are condemned because funding and research is devoted to high-tech solutions used almost exclusively by the rich, an international study said Thursday.

Every year, four million babies die in the first month of life, according to research announced Thursday and being published by the international medical journal The Lancet. That amounts to more than 10,000 neonatal deaths per day.

''Virtually all (99 percent) occur in low- and middle-income countries, yet most research, publications, and funding focus on high-tech care for the one percent of deaths that occur in rich countries,'' the study said.

...

Measures to prevent three million of the four million annual newborn deaths are startlingly simple and cheap.

They range from tetanus immunization--involving two 20-cent injections--during pregnancy to exclusive breastfeeding, clean delivery, and antibiotics to treat illness.

''At less than one dollar per capita [person] per year in additional spending to provide these life saving interventions to 90 percent of mothers and babies, the cost is affordable,'' said Gary Darmstadt, a Johns Hopkins University academic and research adviser to the aid group Save the Children USA, which helped produce the study.

Mind you, we aren't just cheap and uncaring. It's worse, much worse:

If funding and services for newborns are failing to reach the world's poorest, the same is to be said of global aid in general, according to a report last week from international charities Oxfam and ActionAid.

The groups accused the wealthiest nations of failing the poor with a ''self-serving and hypocritical'' system of aid, saying 40 percent of it is ''tied,'' forcing developing countries to buy overpriced goods and services from donor countries.

It accused the United States and Italy of being the worst culprits in so-called aid ''round tripping,'' spending some 70 percent of their aid on their own companies.

Posted by zeynep at 11:16 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

January 24, 2005

"Empowering" People into the Grave

Hello, all. I'll be guest-blogging while Zeynep is in Porto Alegre at the World Social Forum. My own blog is Empire Notes. Please check out my new commentary on "The Inauguration, Democracy, and the Iraqi Elections."

A little update from the other white meat, Jeb. While George W. destroys Social Security in order to save it, Jeb is following in big bro's Orwellian footsteps by taking an axe to Medicaid and calling it "empowered care." According to the Times,

Mr. Bush is proposing that the state's 2.1 million Medicaid
recipients be allotted money to buy their own health care
coverage from managed care organizations and other private
medical networks. If enacted, the program would make
Florida the first state to allow private companies, not the
state, to decide the scope and extent of services to the
elderly, the disabled and the poor, half of them children.
This is being billed as a way to control Medicaid costs, which have risen 63% in the past five years. This places a major strain on state budgets, since they have to pay half the costs.

Of course, there are only two ways to reduce the cost. Either reduce the total amount of health care provided (by dropping people from the rolls or keeping people but capping their services) or reduce "overhead." Government health-care programs, naturally, have far less "overhead" than private ones, since they don't need to make a profit. The more services private insurance companies deny to their policyholders, the higher their profits.

Thus, even switching over and keeping the same budget outlays for Medicaid would mean a loss in the amount of health care available to Medicaid holders; actually cutting the budget would mean an even greater loss.

Thus, naturally,

Calling his proposal "empowered care," Governor Bush said
when he announced it here on Jan. 11 that it would offer
more choice and flexibility to users.
Apparently, most states already incorporate "managed care" (managing care down and profits up) into Medicaid, but the Florida empowerment will be the first in which the states put no conditions on private insurance companies profiting off of government largesse.

Good thing Jeb has categorically ruled out running for president in 2008. Ever since "Read my lips," we've known how much to trust the family.

Posted by rahul at 09:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 28, 2004

A million missing black people?

[From Justin again - last post. Readers, thank you for the thoughtful comments over this past week. You are a sharp and very nice bunch. Readers who don't read the comments section, please do, particularly yesterday's, as they have useful links and info.]

This story came from the LiP people who do a 'media picks' weekly mailing.

You have heard of the Lancet study that conservatively estimates that the US killed 100,000 in Iraq. You have heard of the UN figures that suggested in 1996 that excess mortality due to the US sanctions against Iraq was around 500,000 children. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health estimates that: "over 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had received the same care as whites."

Quoting from the Washington Post article on the topic:

The study estimates that technological improvements in medicine -- including better drugs, devices and procedures -- averted only 176,633 deaths during the same period. That means "five times as many lives can be saved by correcting the disparities [in care between whites and blacks] than in developing new treatments," Steven H. Woolf, lead author and director of research at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Family Medicine, said in a telephone interview.

Another quotable quote from the study is this: "The prudence of investing billions [of dollars] in the development of new drugs and technologies while investing only a fraction of that amount in the correction of disparities deserves reconsideration."

It would have been easy enough to guess this result. Consider that:

1) The US has no public health care system, and leaves some 50 million people with no health insurance;

2) Even in the absence of statistics about those 50 million, knowing that the black population is at the bottom of the US economic pyramid, one would be on firm ground guessing that a large percentage if not a majority of that 50 million were black;

3) People without health care will die of conditions and diseases that would not kill people who have health care, and;

4) The numbers involved really are quite large - tens of millions of people.

As a result it should not be so shocking that close to a million people died unnecessarily over 10 years for lack of health care.

Despite all that I was taken aback by the figure.

I hope others are as well.

Posted by justin at 10:29 AM | Comments (1)

November 12, 2004

Stop the Presses! Philip Morris Knew Smoking Kills!

Let me interrupt or regularly scheduled war carnage report to highlight this corporate carnage report. Philip Morris knew. And it hid that it knew.

Yes, I'm just as shocked.

Okay, I mean we knew they knew, and they knew we knew they knew. Still, it's good to have more proof:

Although the tobacco industry claimed for many years that it was not aware of the toxic effects of cigarettes, the researchers said material from internal industry documents revealed Philip Morris used a German research facility to study the health impact of smoking from the early 1970s.

"Arrangements were made to conceal the process, not only from the wider public, but also from many within Philip Morris, although some senior executives did know," said Martin McKee, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London, in research published online by The Lancet medical journal.

"We have successfully defended against them," said John Wunderli, a lawyer for Altria. [The new name for Philip Morris]

Now, don't you love that phrasing? "We have successfully defended against them." Not that they were lies, not that they were wrong but just that the accusers weren't able to prove it and overpower the corporate lawyer machinery in the past. Notice the trick. When you tell them you have new evidence now they reply that you didn't have enough evidence before. Pretty good, no?

Good thing that lawyer is probably making too much money to consider a job at the press outreach section of the Pentagon, no? He'd fit right in.

Posted by zeynep at 12:05 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 10, 2004

Eye of a Needle

Here's how Dr. Richard Nahin, "a senior adviser at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health," explains why it's a public health imperative to do research into whether being prayed for helps people heal:

He said a recent government study found that 45 percent of adults prayed specifically for health reasons, and suggested that many of them were poor people with limited access to care.

"It is a public health imperative to understand if this prayer offers them any benefit," Dr. Nahin wrote.

Umm, so what's the message here? The poor don't get access to proper health care so we should at least let them have prayer?

Posted by zeynep at 10:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack