Bhopal Union Carbide victims still suffer

BHOPAL (PTI Sunday, January 28, 2007) Inadequate research on ill effects of methyl iso-cynate (MIC) on Bhopal gas tragedy victims seems to have proved to be a stumbling block in their treatment even as newer areas of study continue to evolve due to fresh predicaments faced by people living around the Union Carbide factory.

Tissues and foetuses have been preserved by Madhya Pradesh Medico-legal Institute for further research, but no organisation appears to be 'sensitive' towards conducting studies.

"Vital information about the effect of MIC on foetus, chromosomal
aberration and genetic fallout could be collected through studies on 25 foetuses voluntarily preserved for research after the tragedy in 1984," institute Director DK Satpathy said.

Ironically, no scientist or organisation has come forward for the
research despite request letters sent to several institutes, including
the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), he said.

For more…… http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1076636

A New Front for India's Health

Health is as much a political as a medical issue and it is time Indian political organizations gave top priority to public health issues in their work.

This was among the conclusions arrived at by a meeting of activists who in Chennai to discuss ways to change the dire situation of public health in the country.

The meeting was the first in a series of consultations being undertaken in different parts of the country as a step towards the formation of the Indian Health Front, a broad coalition of activists and organizations working on both health and related political issues.

Similar consultations are planned to be held in Bangalore, Kolkota, New Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai culminating in a national conference in Bhopal on 3 December 2007, the 23rd anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster.

A wide range of issues related to the public health situation in the country were raised by participants, who were mostly from Tamil Nadu but also from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Starting off the meeting Amal, one of the organizers, said that the challenges of solving problems of public health in the world's second most populous country with development indicators often worse than sub-Saharan Africa were immense. He explained that the idea of setting up the Indian Health Front was not to compete with any existing organizations but to add more hands to take up the huge tasks ahead and add a radical political direction to the movement.

The Indian Health Front he said would try to network all those interested in working on such issues in an open and non-sectarian manner.

Amal also emphasized that apart from addressing health policy and its proper implementation the new front would also try to make direct interventions in the community to tackle public health problems. There was a need today, he said, to build new traditions of social solidarity, mutual cooperation and compassion in Indian society.

Geeta Ramakrishnan, veteran labour and women's rights activist, spoke about the health problems of the urban poor and said that the Indian State had completely failed to meet their needs. In particular, she pointed out that unorganized labour, which formed over 90 percent of the country's workforce, had little or no health care at all. The State, instead of taking care of their health needs was busy privatizing healthcare and making it unaffordable for ordinary people.

Dr Rakhal Gaitonde spoke about the situation of health care in rural areas and said that the situation of infant and maternal mortality or access to health facilities was dismal even in a state like Tamil Nadu, which was relatively better compared to other parts of the country.

Abhay Shukla, Convenor, Jan Swasthya Abhiyan gave an overview of the campaign's history, activities and key objectives. The JSA is a campaign launched in 2000 jointly by 18 national networks working on health and related issues.

According to him from the experience of the JSA there were five important tasks ahead of the public health movement, namely:

• Making health a sustained mass issue
• Developing an overarching strategy to deal with problems of both public and private health systems
• Developing an integrated set of demands on health care and its social and economic determinants
• Carrying out constructive health service delivery work and building models that can be the basis for demanding a new approach to health issues
• Developing transitional demands which can be demanded with justification today but which would also take us towards a new system tomorrow

Dr Srinivasan of Medico Friends Circle said that the crisis of healthcare delivery services in India had deepened in the last thirty years. He gave an overview of the history of the MFC, which was formed in 1975 and its regular activities.

G.Ananthakrishnan presented a paper on the potential for introducing a universal health insurance in India. Dr Padma Balasubramaniam and Pratyush Bharati made presentations on the experience of Cuba's health care system and the changes being brought about in the health sector by Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

In the discussions that followed participants pointed out that the health status of the population was closely linked to the social, economic, cultural and political situation in the country. Poverty, manifested in the form of low income, malnutrition, lack of drinking water and poor access to energy sources it was pointed out was the biggest disease in itself as well as the cause of most health problems.

Caste and gender discrimination, the commercialization of medical education and the lack of health facilities in rural areas were also major reasons for the poor status of health in India. In recent years, the advent of neo-liberal economic policies has compounded the problems of public health in the country by creating huge income inequalities, giving a free rein to multinationals that operated polluting industries and marginalizing people who depended on agriculture for survival.

Some participants said that the problem of impunity of multinationals, exemplified by Union Carbide (and its successor Dow Chemicals) of Bhopal gas tragedy notoriety, was only bound to get worse in the days ahead.

Apart from low investments in public health infrastructure a major problem was the poor maintenance of existing facilities and lack of implementation of announced policies. And in this situation the Indian State was washing its hands off its responsibilities by encouraging corporations to take over the health sector.

Some participants also emphasized the need not to 'medicalise' the public health system and create too much dependence on doctors, hospitals and pharmaceuticals. Instead it was suggested to help people take care of their own health in various ways, including through the use of traditional systems of medicine in the country.

Manohar of Sangama, Bangalore told participants about the various problems of discrimination, violence and lack of access to healthcare faced by sexual minorities in India.

Among the suggestions for activities to be taken up as part of the Indian Health Front's activities were:
• Campaign for free healthcare and social security for all
• Campaigning for greater State investment in basic rural and urban infrastructure such as water, energy and sanitation
• Setting up citizen's health committees at various levels to monitor public health.
• Organising healthcare workers
• Studying impact of globalization on public health
• Creating a national rural health network
• Fighting against privatization of medical education
• Working together with other organisations in the health movement

Indian Health Front

Indian Health Front
ACTION ALERT! ACTION ALERT!

ACT NOW TO PROTECT ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE MEDICINES

Dear Friends,

We write to inform you that the next hearing of the Novartis case in the Chennai High Court in India is coming up on 29 January 2007!

As you know, the Swiss Pharmaceutical company Novartis has challenged S. 3(d) of the Indian Patent Act which was designed to prevent the granting of frivolous patents. The Government of India included S. 3(d) in the Patent Act in keeping with its constitutional mandate of protecting the right to health of its citizens and by interpreting TRIPS in light of the Doha Declaration.

Novartis has dragged Indian cancer patients and the Indian Government to Court over the rejection of its patent application for a crucial anti cancer drug – imatinib mesylate; a drug that Novartis markets for $2.700 per patient per month and which generic companies offer for $200 per patient per month. Novartis has challenged not only the rejection of their patent application but also S. 3(d) of the Indian Patent Act on the grounds that it is protecting intellectual property rights.

This is not new for Novartis – in 1998 along with other pharma companies they took the South African government to court over their medicines act which allowed compulsory licensing and parallel imports. Their reason – the protection of patent rights!

Now Novartis is up to its old tricks again. They are trying to stop affordable medications from India by challenging key public health safeguards of India’s patent act. The outcome of this case will influence key patent decisions on essential drugs for AIDS, cancer, TB, etc.

TELL NOVARTIS THAT PATIENTS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PATENTS…TELL NOVARTIS TO DROP THE CASE!!!

What can you do?

· You can sign online petitions at http://www.msf.org/petition_india/international.html & www. Oxfam.org asking Novartis to drop the case; and encourage your friends and colleagues to send the same message to Novartis!

· You can write to the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh with your concerns and ask him to ensure that the case is fully and properly defended by the government in the Chennai High Court. Write to the PM at http://pmindia.nic.in/write.htm or fax him at 91-11-23019334

· You can organise your own protest against Novartis’ actions to coincide with the hearing on 29 January 2007

· You can write to your local political leadership asking them to ensure that the Indian government is doing all that it can to defend the case.

Chennai's Kidney Racket Again

Indian Health Front
Yesterday's evening Tamil papers [Malai Malar and Tamil Murasu] from Chennai [13-1-2007] carried lead stories about kidney racket in Chennai.[Alas ,once more]
Tsunami nagar is a recently created hamlet near Ennore, for those who lost all their belongings 2 years ago to tsunami.About 100 persons ,all ladies between 18 to 30 years of age ,have sold their kidneys due to utter penury in the last 2 years.While the brokers gave them around 50,000 for a kidney, they sold it to willing recipients ,to God knows how much.
One lady says that because of the relocation her husband is not able to go to sea [he had to spend about 30 rupees a day to reach his place to take the boat to sea ]and the earnings are meagre from fishing and hence she sold her kidney.The money vanished in no time and they are back to their penury. Since she has had a major surgery she is not able to do hard work either and she is blank about her future.
Another lady,just 18 years of age with 2 children and a drunkard husband sold her kidney.The doctors have advised against sex for 6 months.Her husband took the money ,threw her out and she is in her mother's house now with her 2 children with shattered physique and home.
Another one went along with her broker to sell the kidney. Since she had very high BP she was unfit to sell the kidney. But the resourceful broker took her hair and gave her 500 rupees.Many have sold their kidneys to get their daughters married. One lady got her daughter married off by selling her kidney. The husband has deserted the wife and the mother who is already weak after the surgery-has to support the daughter too.
Please note that the donors are all women. None was a male.[I bet all the recipients would be males] and all of them in their prime of life. The organs were harvested from hospitals in Chennai and Madurai but the officials are tightlipped about the hospitals.As usual a RDO enquiry has been ordered.

Any other country, 100 persons -all women- losing their kidneys ,will be a national news and sufficient enough to bring down the government.We live in a different country with a different ethos where the horoscope of Aishwarya Rai will be the front page news of the major National Dailies and so we have to raise this issue with whatever alternative fora available to us.

Several questions.:

Who are these brokers and under whose orders do they operate?
Which are the hospitals that undertake these surgeries?
Which authorisation commitee[if at all they went through the committee] permitted a hundred [and more] women from a single locality to donate their kidneys to an extermely divergent section of recipients under the dubious "emotionally related " clause? Authorisation committee is required to verify proof of residence of the donors and 100 from a single hamlet ought to attract the attntion of even the dumbest member of this committee.
The newspapers also mention foreigners [atleast in some cases ]as the beneficiaries . If this is true ,it is a clear contravention of the law and amounts to criminal smuggling of organs.Even recipients from other states cannot have their transplants in Tamilnadu since they require permiossion from their respective states.
Who are the Nephrologists and Urologists and Anesathetists invoved in this racket. Surely they can't take refuge under the excuse that since the authorisation committee has permitted the trtansplant ,they turn the otherway.They must all be summoned and examined by the judiciary .
By now the brokers wold have melted in to thin air. So many similar rackets were reported in the past but to my knowledge not a single broker had ever been brought to book.Atleast this time we must know who these brokers are and who their masters are.
This state his supposed to have an excellent law and order machinery. Intelligence gathering is a part of routine police activity. It is very difficult to believe that the local police station did not know what is going on in this tiny hamlet. Active connivance of the state machinery must also be looked into.
Finall about our NGO friends. Tsunami has made many of them millionairres.Dollars poured to all these NGOs .Now we find that just outside the city of Chennai these victims of tsunami live in Hell's Hole under pitiable conditions and forced to sell their organs to eke out a living.And the CEOS of these NGOs travel in swanky cars,live in bungalows and attend meetings in Belgium and Sweden and Finland [and God knows which other country],explaining to their donors about the marvellous rehablilitation work they do
among the victims of tsunami.
I am digressing. To come back , I think this racket has many serious implications and only a thorough ,transparent and honest inquiry by competent legal authorities will bring the offenders to book and prevent Madras from becoming the international center for organ smugglers.

Joseph Stiglitz proposes Medical Prize Fund to break patents stranglehold

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E.Stiglitz (2001 prize), noted for his works on globalisation and its impacts, has written an editorial in the British Medical Journal on how the world can use intellectual property in pharmaceuticals for the collective good, rather than let drug companies hold out the threat of lack of innovation in their quest for profits.

The key suggestion that Professor Stiglitz makes is for the creation of a truly global-scale Medical Prize Fund that will reward breakthroughs in drug development for diseases immensely. Minor innovations can also be rewarded suitably. The drugs so developed will be made by generics manufacturers and sold affordably to everyone. This will cover essential drugs, while those that find no such public funding can always go the patents route.

The point that the editorial makes about the human cost of patenting of gene-findings related to breast cancer is noteworthy. This was done racing ahead, just marginally, of the deadline for declaration of the findings of the human genome project. Thus, poor women cannot hope to get the tests done, while welfare states must devote large amounts for what should have a cheaper test -- thereby depriving other programmes of significant funding.

It is also interesting to note from Professor Stiglitz's editorial that drug manufacturers appear to be spending more money on advertising and marketing of their products than on innovation. We were always asked to believe that without huge sums, innovation would dry up!

/ga