Aid packages sent to children in Sudan's malaria-plagued Darfur region "contain anti-malarial medicines that do not work," said Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) on Tuesday at a Congressional hearing on neglected diseases before an International Relations subcommittee. Brownback's assertion comes as no surprise to those who have followed global health issues lately. The United Nations agencies responsible for international health campaigns have made a series of tragic missteps in recent months.
The World Health
Organization (WHO), an arm of the United Nations, has been fending off
"malaria malpractice" allegations from public health experts most of
this year. A recent article in the British medical journal The Lancet
blasted the agency for providing ineffective malaria medicines to suffering
Africans. And now the drugs in question in Sudan,
supplied by the UN agency, UNICEF, are believed to be doing more harm than good
as well.
The United States
funds nearly one quarter of the UN's total budget and one fifth of the WHO's
budget. Given the extent of the problems at these agencies, it's time for
Congress to act.
UNICEF and WHO have been supplying the drug chloroquine to malaria sufferers in
numerous African countries. The drug has been a mainstay in anti-malaria
programs for the past 50 years. But it is beginning to show signs of failure
due to drug resistance. In Ethiopia
and Sudan,
for example, failure rates have reached as high as 88 percent. More effective
treatments are available, and yet these global health bodies continue procuring
bad medicines.
This is not the first time the UN has been caught squandering dollars on flawed
public health interventions and acted outside of its charter. In 1995, the
inventor of an experimental malaria vaccine known as SPf66 granted WHO an
exclusive, worldwide license to his patent. Even though the WHO is not a
regulatory agency and has been hostile to the global patent system, it did so
in this case and the results, according to a New York Times expose in
1996, were deeply troubling. The WHO had conducted human trials of this vaccine
on refugees in
WHO's Roll
Back Malaria campaign, launched in 1998, has largely failed. Pledging to halve
malaria cases by the year 2010 and seeking hundreds of millions of dollars to
achieve success, the program -- now at the halfway mark -- has actually seen an
increase in malaria deaths in impoverished regions.
In addition to
its malaria control problems, the Geneva-based agency has endured a
scandal-plagued summer over AIDS treatment. In a rush to meet its target of
treating 3 million people living with HIV by 2005, the WHO endorsed the
widespread use of knock-off AIDS drugs manufactured in India. But as it turns
out, several of the drugs approved by WHO for AIDS treatment have not met
important bio-equivalence tests. As such, three years after approving the
drugs, treatments of unknown efficacy are in use in the field by healthcare
officials who are ill-equipped to pull them, offer alternative treatments, or
even inform their patients they might be receiving bad drugs. Worse, the
possibility that these shoddy healthcare practices could facilitate future HIV
resistance -- thus worsening the deadly disease -- has given health experts around
the globe grave concerns.
Of all the
global health bodies, the WHO is the trend-setter for international health
policy and as such deserves the closest scrutiny. Some in
On behalf of
the
