Talk:Philip Stevens

Moving unreferenced text here. Diane Farsetta 11:34, 11 June 2008 (EDT)

I’ve just got back from Geneva, where the two-week long boondoggle that is the World Health Organisation?s annual meeting has just come to a close.

High on the agenda were spurious initiatives against obesity and a global plan to ‘promote healthy lifestyles’. Meanwhile, there was not one session on Africa.

What is going on at the WHO? Bearing in mind its limited resources, it should be focusing on genuine global threats such as avian flu, as well as communicable diseases that disproportionately affect the poor.

Instead, the WHO has elected itself an international health nanny, lecturing mainly healthy people in rich countries. It?s surprising they don?t yet have a global strategy on the dangers of running with scissors.

The problem is that the WHO is funded almost entirely by a handful of wealthy western countries. So, in order to ensure this cash doesn?t dry up, the WHO bureaucrats end up pandering to the priorities of Western politicians, instead of those of people in poor countries.

That means money is wasted on crazy schemes that try to regulate everything from baby formula to food additives, while at the same time millions of children in Africa struggle to eat at all.

Western donors should insist the WHO gets back to basics.

Philip Stevens is director of the Campaign for Fighting Diseases, who have just published The World Health Organisation: A Time for Reconstitution