Highlights:
- Technological advances are driving too much medicine but too little care.
- WHO should declare Climate Change a PHEIC: Experts say.
- HPV Vaccines for Infants: Merck Tests Gardasil in Kids as Young as 4.
Website: https://uho.org.in
By Dr. Amitav Banerjee, Chairperson of the Universal Health Organisation (UHO)
Technological advances are driving too much medicine but too little care.
A recent article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has cautioned on the downside of technological advances in medicine. It states that healthcare systems across the world have never possessed greater diagnostic precision, therapeutic capability, or computational power. And yet patients increasingly report feeling processed rather than cared for; clinicians speak of moral distress and hollowed out meaning; and the workforce is haemorrhaging people at a rate it cannot sustain. The paradox of healthcare today is that we have accumulated extraordinary technical power while quietly losing the human, moral, and relational foundations on which its effectiveness ultimately depends. It regrets that glorification of profit, has become a stranglehold on healthcare’s moral purpose.
Medical care has not only become a business but a big industry that offers treats people mechanically instead of caring for them. Patients are given standardised protocols that disregard the uniqueness of each patient so essential for customized care.
The paper cautions against the downstream harm of overdiagnosis, overtreatment, and the growing burden placed on patients who are expected to keep on playing the sick role instead of empowering them. While medical practice is becoming more scientific with technological advances it is losing the human touch and connectedness which is eroding the doctor-patient relationship. The paper states that there is an urgent need to restore the relational balance between patients and health care providers. This calls for an approach based on the following philosophy: To ask what matters to a person is to see them as a person. It shifts the encounter from the clinician’s diagnostic frame to the patient’s lived reality. It changes the balance of power from “I am taking care of you” to “let us work together.”
This patient centred approach is aligned with one of the important goals of Universal Health Organization (UHO), i.e. empowerment.
However, UHO has concerns that with unregulated and unthinking adoption of rapidly developing technologies including increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Medicine, empowerment may remain a dream not only for patients but for doctors as well as many of them may feel insecure with market forces claiming that AI will increasingly replace doctors.
WHO should declare Climate Change a PHEIC: Experts say.
A feature in the BMJ has brought out recommendations from experts that climate crisis should be declared a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Doing so would recognise the “catastrophic threat” that a changing climate poses to human health, the commission said.
WHO estimates that between 2030 and 2050, climate change will cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths a year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea, and heat stress alone.
The experts called on WHO to formally declare a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC)-the highest level of alert, which signifies an extraordinary public health crisis requiring a coordinated, international response.
Declaring a PHEIC can unlock emergency funding and establish legally binding recommendations for WHO member states to help contain a threat.
The UHO has serious reservations on these recommendations. Firstly, most of the estimates of climate change and its impact on health are based on mathematical models which more often than not turn out false in the long run due to many known and unknown factors which may be omitted in the models.
Secondly, and most concerning, declaring climate change a PHEIC, would enable the WHO to take one more step to push the draconian WHO Pandemic Treaty and the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR), ask member states for emergency funding and impose its binding recommendations sans evidence base as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic causing much collateral harm. Rather, the WHO, as a wing of the United Nations prevail on stopping the ongoing wars which accounts for not only climate change but much human misery and are greatest threat to public health (real harms, not one estimated by mathematical models like climate change).
HPV Vaccines for Infants: Merck Tests Gardasil in Kids as Young as 4.
Consultants paid by Merck and the Gates Foundation are publicly advocating to administer HPV vaccines to children as young as 12-24 months — an age group in which the vaccine has never been tested and for which no safety data exist.
Mark Kane and Eduardo Franco laid out the campaign to extend HPV vaccination to toddlers in an opinion piece published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, an official journal of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA). Merck, donates tens of thousands of dollars annually to the IDSA foundation.
The push to vaccinate younger children comes as Merck — maker of Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine marketed in the U.S. — partners with major universities to run clinical trials of its HPV vaccine in children ages 4-8 in the U.S. and Gambia.
The advocates of this step argue that vaccination of adolescents has been hampered by bad publicity about side effects, and that school-based mandates are less effective in low-income countries where not all children attend school.
Their solution: Give the shots to infants and toddlers when vaccination rates tend to be higher, and bundle them with other routine childhood vaccines to reduce cost.
Lucija Tomljenović, Ph.D., author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers on the vaccine, called the trial “completely useless for any meaningful evaluation of HPV vaccine safety.”
Another expert, Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist, said that noted that HPV vaccines have been linked to a wide range of serious adverse events, including death. “Unsafe HPV vaccinations for 12-month-olds is unthinkable,” he said, “unless you’re an agent of Merck.”
UHO expresses serious reservations and concerns on this unscientific, irrational, and profit driven measure to vaccinate infants with HPV vaccine. This confirms that academics and journals are controlled by the pharmaceutical industry.
The weekly newsletters bring the updates on the science, battered and bruised during the pandemic, legal updates and impact of activism for a just society, across the world. These are small steps to promote Transparency, Empowerment and Accountability – the ethos of the UHO.
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