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July 19, 2005
Nature, God, Health and everything
Every morning two plenary sessions having to do with all aspects of health, and every afternoon, workshops and roundtables with the ultimate goal of forging campaigns around everything health related: food security, essential medicines, traditional healing, the human right to water and sanitation, environmental degradation, toxics, and so on and so forth. To give a sense of the tone of things, the first plenary session on Monday was opened by Hugo Blanco, a health activist from Peru. He opened with this:
“For good health, we need good food. For good food, we need sustainable agriculture. For sustainable agriculture, we need to preserve biodiversity and protect the natural world. Judeo-Christian monotheism situates God outside of – and over and above – the natural world. In order to preserve health on a global level, we need to come to a new understanding of nature that situates God as nature itself, and recognizes the human being as a steward, not a conqueror.”
Other talks in this same session covered the impacts of colonization on aboriginal health in Australia, the growing recognition of indigenous medical systems in Guatemala, and the growing use of complementary alternative medicine in Cuba. Dr Marta Perez Vinas from Cuba shared this:
“Until the 1990´s in Cuba, allopathic medicine was the norm, even though a sophisticated system of medicine existed thanks to the early blending of West African and indigenous cultures. The indigenous people were completely exterminated, but the Afro-Cuban medical system retained some of the knowledge. In the 1990´s, the state began to support natural and traditional medicine, drawing on these traditions as well as Chinese medicine, homeopathy, microdosis, osteopathy, massage, etcetera.”
Interestingly, acupuncture is quickly becoming the most widely used modality in Cuba, and is most commonly used for surgical anaesthesia.
Dr. Vinas closed with this call: “Indigenous communities must not only defend their traditional medicine, but they have the responsibility to teach the rest of us, to transform society and improve the health for all.”
This is one of the real undercurrents of the People´s Health Movement, and its growing respect for traditional medicines is sure to be one of the movement´s greatest strengths…
In the afternoon, a long workshop on extractive industries: the devastating impacts of oil drilling in Ecuador, Nigeria, and Nicaragua, and of mining in Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala and the Phillippines. The study of oil impacts in the Amazon that I helped work on 4 years ago was presented by Accion Ecologica, with gruesome photos and shocking data: 57% of people living in the oil region of Ecuador have some form of cancer. The number for those living within 250 meters of an oil well is 65.7%. And 83% of people in the area have some kind of illness that is directly related to contamination. According to Dr. Adolfo Maldonado, who executed the study, five years after an oil well is opened, people within 1.5 miles of the operation are 5 times more likely to contract leukaemia. This, he tells us, is the same data that was found after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
After the sessions, finally the entire delegation that I am responsible for has arrived. Brahm Amadi of the People´s Grocery shows up to share a room with me and Angel Valencia, and Anil Naidoo, a Canadian and member of the Council of Canadians and Friends of the Right to Water, shows up as well. Anil and I will present a session on Water as a Human Right, issuing a call for the People´s Health Movement to take up this campaign that he and I and others at Hesperian Foundation have begun to move forward. To see the document that we are starting with, check this link:
www.righttowater.net.
After dinner Anil and Brahm and I go out to have a drink, Anil and I to plan our session for the next day, all of us to discuss our sessions and campaigns. A more focused, motivated, and good-spirited crew of fellow-travellers could not be found.
Posted by jeff at July 19, 2005 07:19 AM