What in the world are the folks at the World Health Organization thinking these days? They're supposed to be devoting their energies, expertise, and considerable budget to...world health, I believe. You remember: poverty, famine, disease? Yet only a week ago their director general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, announced that the world's most important health challenges now include "junk food," cholesterol, and alcohol. What happened to malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS? (On the bright side, she also mentioned a previously under-appreciated but looming global threat, tobacco.)
Am I the only one who still believes that the WHO should be trying to alleviate diseases and conditions that cause preventable disease and death in the less developed world? Malaria still takes between one and two million lives annually, mostly women and children. Diarrheal diseases kill even more, again largely infants and children, and AIDS casts its shadow ever more widely.
So why is the WHO concerning itself with cell phone radiation and alcohol abuse? They have even scheduled an emergency (!) meeting to discuss the "new report" by a Swedish group that a chemical found in some fried and baked foods might be a cancer-causing agent. To quote ABC's John Stossel, give me a break! The health authorities in the EU, USA, and other Western states have more than enough regulatory clout to deal with these "problems" on their own, without the world body's help, while developing countries still need help combating the major killers mentioned earlier.
Why is Dr. Derek Yach, WHO's person in charge of a division called "noncommunicable diseases," targeting "junk food"? For countries lucky enough to consider readily available cheeseburgers health "problems," more physical activity and a well-balanced diet is the appropriate remedy. So-called junk food can be part of a healthy diet, if it is not consumed in excess. Imagine the joy on the faces of starving African children were they to be confronted by a pizza or Big Mac! As for alcohol: in moderation, alcohol consumption has been shown to be a health benefit in middle-aged and older populations. Compared to malnutrition and infectious diseases, these new issues seem to be a needless diversion of scarce resources for the WHO.
And how is the WHO "helping" the poorer countries deal with their serious health problems? They recently passed a regulation banning or severely restricting "persistent organic pollutants," or POPS, among which are a number of synthetic pesticides and the powerful insecticide, DDT. The banned pesticides have never been proven to be a health threat to humans at doses used in agriculture and their use has led, in part, to the dramatic increase in crop yields over the past forty years. This in turn has enabled most of the billions of the world's inhabitants born since 1960 to be adequately fed without converting millions of acres of forest to cultivation. The loss of these products may lead to diminished crop production and recurrent starvation, for no good reason.
Even more tragic is the WHO-endorsed loss of DDT, which remains the most effective and affordable method of malaria control known. Despite its bad reputation among environmental activists, there is no evidence of adverse human health effects from this chemical, whose inventor won the Nobel Prize in medicine for its discovery. Countries using DDT to control malaria experienced dramatic decreases in mortality from this disease, as well as from other insect-borne illness; conversely, when its use was banned, malaria returned to claim its millions of victims. Yet the WHO's POPS treaty will lead to more such tragedies. Is this what a health group should be doing?
If WHO would remember its real mission and refocus its efforts on the leading causes of death in the world, they would make more progress in attaining their primary goal: saving lives.
Gilbert Ross, M.D. is Medical/Executive Director of the American Council on Science and Health.
