Health, Trade and Human Rights

Citation

(2007), "Health, Trade and Human Rights", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijhcqa.2007.06220cae.003

Health, Trade and Human Rights

Theodore H. MacDonaldRadcliffeOxfordISBN 1 84619 050 9

Keywords: Health equality, Human rights, Third World health

Health, Trade and Human Rights shows how a policy of “free” rather than “fair” trade increasingly undermines Third World health. It clearly illustrates how the looming environmental crisis combined with growing levels of health inequity will have adverse effects and details precisely how the “basic human rights” enshrined in the UN Charter have gradually become subsidiary to the dictates of free trade, enforced by the World Trade Organization.

This groundbreaking new book argues the need for impartial, data-based, and transnational arbitration of equity in health and other human rights – and suggests how this might be accomplished without violence to national rights, with an emphasis on “regional free trade”.

Health, Trade and Human Rights provides vital, thought provoking information for general readers with an interest in the Third World and social welfare. Academics and students studying development, international studies and public health will find it invaluable, as will healthcare professionals, international healthcare organizations, care agencies, and international charities. Policy makers and shapers in communities and government will find the content revelatory as will political activists and those with an interest in equality and globalization.

[The book] criticizes the basis, the method and the extent to which the politics of wealth continues to undermine and violate the right of the poor to good health. The combination of experience with scientific rigor is presented in accessible everyday language. It is seductive; inviting the curiosity of the reader to last until the very end of the book. MacDonald’s message is clear and unambiguous: war is no longer the father of all things. Instead, justice is the mother of all peace (Mogobe Ramose, in his Foreword).

Astonishingly accessible, informing and inspiring. Statistically sound, penetratingly accurate, admirably balanced. Theodore MacDonald writes with passion, as well as with sense. Much of what he has to say is drawn from his own experience working as a medical doctor and a mathematician in a broad range of the world’s poorest nations. But overarching that is a powerful insight into social and economic issues, along with well-honed skills as a communicator. I am pleased to recommend this splendid book (Desmond M. Tutu, in his Foreword).

Contents include:

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  health planning for an international trade;

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  global variations in health;

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  effect of neoliberalism on primary healthcare;

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  debt, environment and health;

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  the environment – our ultimate arbitrator;

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  big tidal waves and tsunamis;

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  the Third World face of HIV/AIDS;

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  the people’s health movement; and

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  the optimistic view as a solution.