WHO top-down approach condemned

The World Health Organization suffers from a failure of "worldview" that puts intervention by government and supra state agencies ahead of realistic lower-level programs, according to an Indian critic of the global agency.

Anil Patel, a speaker at the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Assocations Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, held this month, described his discovery that "improving incomes of the poor and assured supply of antibiotics that probably made the difference" in terms of reducing infant mortality since the 1980s.

Dr Patel has tracked the work of the Action Research in Community Health in India since 1980. The objective was to induct local people into running a primary health care program in western India. After 15 years of effort, he found that the real benefits were being generated by rising incomes and the availability of drugs. In particular, the falling prices of antibiotics, which Dr Patel believes would not have happened without the incentive to innovate (the drugs would not have been developed) and deregulation (the drugs would not have been available locally).