Posted on 04/26/2003 7:32:14 AM PDT by Dog Gone
In Christie Blachford's fine column yesterday, a blistering look at the World Health Organization through the eyes of Toronto microbiologist Donald Low, Dr. Low cut to the core of the WHO's SARS travel alarm. The WHO, he said, had no science to back its decision to put Toronto on the danger list. Well, all I can say is welcome to the wonderful world of the WHO, global headquarters for the world's worst intellectual virus: junk science.
In any reading of the facts, Canada and Toronto have SARS under control. It might not have been as crisp a response to the virus as one might have wanted, but despite the wonkiness of the health care system and a public health bureaucracy generally unprepared for genuine infectious disease crises, the risks of contacting SARS in Toronto are now infinitesimal. You have a better chance of running into Saddam Hussein in Cabbagetown than catching the SARS virus anywhere in the city.
Not that the WHO would really care. As Dr. Low put it, "They know they're wrong." Under the leadership of Gro Harlem Brundtland -- who's sustainable development virus has infected every public and corporate institution on the planet -- the WHO marches to political drummers and agenda beats that are far removed the reality of the subjects it claims to deal with. In the case of SARS, the WHO is taking precedent-setting steps to expand its powers and reach. Shutting down Toronto and turning the city into a giant quarantine fits the WHO's political style, operating methods and long-term objectives.
Since the start of the SARS outbreak, WHO officials have occasionally mentioned their Big Plan. They want to contain SARS and wipe out all trace of it. That objective was reiterated yesterday when a WHO official told a conference call "This disease can be eradicated. We have an opportunity to break the cycle and put this disease back in the box." Eradicating disease is a laudable objective -- when the nature of the disease is known. But attempting to trap a virus solely on the basis of its physical movement, as if it were a fly in the house, looks like a formula for global economic house wrecking.
Toronto's handling of SARS, based on the latest numbers, suggest it has achieved the objective, even with some bumbling and fumbling with the flyswatter. Of course, if Canada were to succeed on its own, without the WHO moving in with its sledgehammer, it would leave the WHO with little claim to responsibility.
Why did the WHO strike at Toronto? Was it a case of national ethnic profiling -- wanting to lift the burden off China and Asia and drop it into the lap of a whitish North America? Don't know the answer to that, but one can't help but be suspicious of an agency that has so many political agendas.
SARS isn't the only item on the WHO's total elimination list. The model for world health control is the WHO's tobacco control framework, a draconian bit of global lawmaking whose aim is the total elimination of tobacco use. It's the Kyoto Protocal of tobacco. A draft of the tobacco framework, which goes before the United Nations' World Health Assembly for approval next month, sets the WHO up as global lawmaker and policeman. It will set international rules that will compel all nations, and ultimately all citizens of the world, to stop using tobacco.
Quit smoking is good advice, but it doesn't belong on the WHO total control agenda. Under Ms. Brundtland, however, the WHO has been reaching high and wide into a host of areas that are beyond it's legitimate goals and capabilities. It's recently released global dietary guidelines, reviewed nearby by Steven Milloy, offers a good example of Brundtland's methods at the WHO.
By throwing its weight around over SARS, the WHO is demonstrating its global clout. It's a test run for the tobacco control campaign, and a door-opener for expanding WHO ambitions in any number of health areas.
The irony, of course, is that the main victims of the WHO's aggressive SARS clampdown on Canada are members of the Canadian health and political establishment who spend much of their own time dedicated to the same junk science agenda that animates Ms. Brundtland and the WHO. Health Canada and it's Minister, Anne McLellan; Ontario's health officials; Sheela Basrur, Toronto's public health officer -- they're all in the same intellectual game that distorts and misrepresents science and risk for political purposes.
They've consistently warped health risks; now they're paying the price. And now they know how the smokers they've quarantined in downtown Toronto restaurants, or sent out into the cold to smoke, feel. The entire city of Toronto has been locked into the back room of the planet.
The Canadian health establishment and its political backers, who are now rushing to defend Toronto and attack the WHO, are victims of their own agendas. They have spent much of the past decade grossly distorting epidemiological risk, spreading fear and alarming the population, and now they find themselves stumbling about when the wrath of the fear, administered by the grasping WHO, descends upon them.
What should really be on trial here is the role of international agencies and the faith given to multilateral decision making. A credible case can be made for a WHO role in disease control -- although it would be nice if it could achieve some results against malaria and global malnutrition. Yesterday, in fact, the WHO issued a report on malaria in Africa, where more than a million children die every year as the disease's impact gets worse.
Now they see what that leads to.
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