WHO NEWS
New report focuses on health in a "borderless world"
WHO welcomed the first Global Health Watch report that stresses the importance of making health care accessible to people in need in a "borderless world", but said the report fails to address WHO's role in preventing global outbreaks of disease.
Global Health Watch 20052006, published on 20 July, was compiled by campaigners from three nongovernmental groups: Medact in London, the People's Health Movement in Bangalore and the Global Equity Gauge Alliance in Durban. The report covers selected issues, including the shortage of health workers in countries with a high disease burden, health-care systems and gene technology.
Billing itself as "the alternative World Health Report" as a challenge to WHO's flagship report, Global Health Watch 20052006 charges that WHO's influence has declined while "competing" organizations, such as the World Bank, were raising their public health profiles.
"Starved of resources and sometimes poorly led and managed, [WHO] is failing to find an effective response," said the report, which is due to appear every two years.
WHO spokesperson Christine McNab welcomed Global Health Watch 20052006 saying that many of its central messages particularly on access to health care for all are a core part of WHO's values. She said that WHO Director-General Dr Lee Jong-wook had "continuously stressed the importance of equity and social justice".
She said that WHO not only supported "vertical" or single-disease programmes which the report criticizes as damaging to fledgling health systems but also encouraged countries and donors to take a more "horizontal" approach to build and reinforce health systems and primary health care. Both approaches were necessary, McNab said.
McNab said that an important part of WHO's work was to minimize the risk that disease poses to people's lives and health: "In a globalized world where more people than ever are crossing borders, WHO's Member States have made clear that detecting outbreaks of old and new diseases and controlling them is vital to global health security". 