[procaare] Africa 'will die out before our eyes'

["Mail & Guardian" <procaare@healthnet.org>]

Perspective: Africa 'will die out before our eyes'
By Jeremy Clarke
Mail & Guardian Online
21 January 2007
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Nairobi, Kenya - African governments' failure to deliver on a 2001 vow to 
spend 15% of budgets on health has cost the continent 40-million lives, 
activists including Nobel winners Desmond Tutu and Wangari Maathai said 
yesterday.

"The governments are to blame of course, but nothing has been done about it 
because ordinary people have not demanded it," Kenyan environmentalist 
Wangari Maathai said in a call to action.

"We can only get governments to honour their promises if they think their 
existence is threatened," she added on the sidelines of the World Social 
Forum [WSF], an annual meeting of global activists which Africa is hosting 
for the first time.

The activists called a meeting to publicise health needs ahead of the 
African Union (AU) summit in Ethiopia at the end of this month. An AU summit 
in Nigeria in 2001 pledged to allocate at least 15% of national budgets to 
health care. But more than five years on, most of the AU's 53 member states, 
including those with the worst public health crises, have not even begun 
meeting this pledge, the activists said.

"It is very possible that our continent will die out before our eyes.

This is no exaggeration," South Africa 's retired archbishop Desmond Tutu 
said in an open letter to African heads-of-state delivered at the meeting.

"An estimated 40-million Africans have died from health-related conditions 
as a result of the Abuja commitment not being met. This surpasses the total 
deaths from all modern African and global conflicts including the two world 
wars."

Tutu added that "almost unbelievable annual death rates" could cost Africa 
another 120-million lives by 2015". Malaria kills more than one million 
Africans a year, nearly 90% of the global total, the petition said. An 
estimated 4,8-million children under the age of five die annually, half from 
pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and HIV/AIDS.

A petition to AU leaders said the number of lives lost annually to 
preventable and treatable problems was more than the populations of either 
Eritrea , Libya , Sierra Leone or Togo . Maathai said responsibility does 
not just rest with governments, however, but also with ordinary Africans.

"We need to make enough people understand the little things they are doing 
in their own houses everyday that are undermining their health," she said. 
The ubiquitous mountains of plastic bags in Africa's slums were a major 
health hazard as they collect water and become breeding grounds for 
malaria-carrying mosquitoes, she added.

Companies were producing too many, while people were failing to dispose of 
them properly, Maathai argued. "We have to say to the Kenyan government, we 
know you are more interested in elections this year, but we call on you to 
stop the production of these thin plastic bags that spread malaria."

Online: http://www.mg.co.za/articledirect.aspx?articleid=296372