A Sobering Start To A Day In Geneva
Yesterday I got to spend the entire day in Geneva, and the following entries are from notes and journal entries I made through out the day there.. I spent the entire day walking around and riding the free bikes they have all over the city. Amazing day.
Geneva is beautiful.
It’s a big, beautiful city, and it’s the sort of place one feel like things are getting done. And they are. It’s the home to the United Nations and countless other organizations, each one trying to help humanity in it’s own way.
That’s one way of looking at it. There is another way, too..
My friends dropped me off near the UN about 8 am..and I started walking.
Since I started out walking from the UN complex, I ran into alot of protesters. Not everyone agrees with the way things go behind closed doors here, and it’s refreshing to see that people are allowed to say so.
The first protesters I ran into were a French couple who have been protesting daily in for the independence of the World Health Organization. They’ve been there everyday from 8am to 6pm, carrying placards and handing out literature to passerby on the street. I had to admire their commitment–I mean, it snows there in the winter, and they continue on anyway!
What are they so impassioned about? Well, let’s talk first about the World Health Organization.
In simple terms, WHO is supposed to be the international health authority of the world. It is supposed to provide international guidelines, using science and medicine, to protect the health of all peoples around the globe.
The question is, is it doing this? Well, it does have a constitution that basically is supposed to serve as it’s bylaws, and according to that constitution, it is not.
The constitution clearly states that any scientific or medical guidance that WHO recieves has to be free of commercial interest. That basically means that companies and other agencies can’t influence the decisions of WHO.
Stay with me here. I sense you drifting off. Just keep reading thru the rigamorole and you’ll be glad you did.
Anyway, WHO has a big problem, and it’s name is the International Atomic Energy Agency. For some reason, WHO got very friendly with this group in 1959, and put that friendship into writing. The problem is that the International Atomic Energy Agency was started to promote civil nuclear energy. So now that they are friends, WHO can’t do anything to help people who have been affected by the misuse of nuclear energy, because due to it’s friendship with this other organization, it is now subordinate to it.
Basically, what that means is that it can’t do what it was designed to do–help people who need it in the areas of health.
The WHO needs to become independent so that it can take care of the people of the world, without worrying that it has to first support private interests.
All this wouldn’t mean so much to me–or to you–if I hadn’t become aware of, just yesterday, what this actually means.Before yesterday, all of the above was just a bunch of words to me. But when you look at these words and see how they create policies that harm real people, it all takes on a lot more significance.
A good example to use to illustrate what this means is the castastrophe that happened in Chernobyl. To refresh your memory, look it up on Wikipedia. But, basically, the entire city was exposed to massive amounts of radiation on April 26th, 1986.
It seems that WHO did help–to a point. Even after the event happened, ten years later they had a big conference where they brought together lots of different people to talk about Chernobyl and how the radiation had affected the health of the people there. Over 500 experts presented at the conference and they showed that there were going to be some terrible long term affects to the people in Chernobyl because of the huge amounts of radiation they had been exposed to.
Who knows why, but WHO never made public what these experts said. So the people of Chernobyl continued to suffer.
And not just the people of Chernobyl, but the people of all the communities near the place, too.
WHO has done lots of other things towards helping the people in Chernobyl since then, but they haven’t really addressed the bigger issues of nuclear power, radiation, and exposure and how they all ahve long term affects on people’s health and well being.
Here are some statistics of some of the ways health has been impacted for the people who suffered from the Chernobyl disaster:
6,000 children with thyroid cancer
4, 421 children born with severe birth defects
1,000 children with leukemia
80% of all children are ill with debilitating illnesses in the areas that were contaminated
All the land remains contaminated, and in the words of one child,” Our garden is dead.”
All food sources have to be brought in, which is too expensive, so people are hungry.
The people who cleaned the mess up were called “liquidators”. Due to their hard work and sacrifice, they not only cleaned up an environmental disaster, they averted a large scale catastrophe of larger contamination outside of Russia. But they also died (over 30,000) and more than 80% suffer from debilitating illnesses.
What does all this mean? Well, it means that if the WHO was independent from this other group, it could have helped the people of Chernobyl more. It means that it could have prevented what is still an ongoing human loss of health and life. It means that even though some of us like nuclear power plants for the cheap energy they provide, they aren’t worth the larger cost.
It’s the job of the World Health Organization to inform every man of his rights regarding receiving complete information about his health, his children’s health, and his family’s health–with regard to what must be avoided and why. And they can’t do this right now. This has to change.
It’s hard to relate to all this. Even as I write it, it seems kind of..distant..to me and my readers. But it’s not. It’s a real problem, and although it seems very far away right now, it deserves our attention.
I’ve written all of the above from notes I made while talking to the protesters. At the bottom of my notes I wrote: “Note to self: Do something about this.”
It may seem kind of funny to think that I can do anything–but I can. If it was my family that was affected , I’d be making phone calls, writing letters..doing whatever I could think of. But..it is my family who has been affected, because I’m a citizen of the world.
You can find more info on this by going to www.independentwho.info
gigi
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