warns that the world is "dangerously unprepared" for future pandemics like the deadly Ebola outbreak and proposes financial "pandemic facility"... According to Kim, "...market mechanisms would help us to push improvements in our preparedness for epidemics."
warns that the world is "dangerously unprepared" for future pandemics like the deadly Ebola outbreak and proposes financial "pandemic facility"... According to Kim, "...market mechanisms would help us to push improvements in our preparedness for epidemics."
Counterpoint:
The following excerpts are from a talk(10/13/2014) by Robert G. Wallace (Institute for Global Studies U. of Minnesota; http://ias.umn.edu/2014/10/13/wallace/ )
“Pathogens routinely trace society’s inequalities and expropriations like water traces cracks in ice… Ebola represents such a case. The shifts in land use in the Guinean region where the new strain apparently emerged are connected to the kinds of neoliberal structural adjustments that, alongside divesting public health infrastructure, open domestic food production to global circuits of capital… [The corporate agribusiness land acquisitions in Africa] are markers of a complex policy-driven faith change in agroecology…that undergirds Ebola’s emergence here.” says Wallace
He concludes his lecture:
“…commoditizing the forest and neoliberal dispossession may have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to a point that no emergency intervention can drive the pathogen population low enough to burn out on its own. The pathogen will continue to circulate with the potential to explode. In short, neoliberalism’s shifts aren’t just a background upon which such emergencies take place. It is the emergency as much as the virus itself. And history has demonstrated this time and again. Faith changes and social organization, for better and for worse, change epidemiologies. Domesticated livestock served as sources for human diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, plague, pertussis, rotavirus, tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, etc. Ecological changes brought about upon landscapes by human intervention selected for spill-overs of cholera from algae, malaria from birds, and dengue fever and yellow fever from wild primates… We can pretend otherwise for Ebola, but in protecting the rationals for institutions and policies that likely brought about such outbreaks, if as byproducts of a greater economy alone, we will surely only compound the problem. If not by Ebola this year, then perhaps something else next.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-31013636
Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank,
warns that the world is "dangerously unprepared" for future pandemics like the deadly Ebola outbreak and proposes financial "pandemic facility"... According to Kim, "...market mechanisms would help us to push improvements in our preparedness for epidemics."
Counterpoint:
The following excerpts are from a talk(10/13/2014) by Robert G. Wallace (Institute for Global Studies U. of Minnesota; http://ias.umn.edu/2014/10/13/wallace/ )
“Pathogens routinely trace society’s inequalities and expropriations like water traces cracks in ice… Ebola represents such a case. The shifts in land use in the Guinean region where the new strain apparently emerged are connected to the kinds of neoliberal structural adjustments that, alongside divesting public health infrastructure, open domestic food production to global circuits of capital… [The corporate agribusiness land acquisitions in Africa] are markers of a complex policy-driven faith change in agroecology…that undergirds Ebola’s emergence here.” says Wallace
He concludes his lecture:
“…commoditizing the forest and neoliberal dispossession may have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to a point that no emergency intervention can drive the pathogen population low enough to burn out on its own. The pathogen will continue to circulate with the potential to explode. In short, neoliberalism’s shifts aren’t just a background upon which such emergencies take place. It is the emergency as much as the virus itself. And history has demonstrated this time and again. Faith changes and social organization, for better and for worse, change epidemiologies. Domesticated livestock served as sources for human diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, plague, pertussis, rotavirus, tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, etc. Ecological changes brought about upon landscapes by human intervention selected for spill-overs of cholera from algae, malaria from birds, and dengue fever and yellow fever from wild primates… We can pretend otherwise for Ebola, but in protecting the rationals for institutions and policies that likely brought about such outbreaks, if as byproducts of a greater economy alone, we will surely only compound the problem. If not by Ebola this year, then perhaps something else next.”