This year’s annual meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA) is to take place just after the reins of the government are handed over to a new president and a new group of ministers. Although much concern has been focused on whether the minister of health would receive an invitation to attend the WHA and whether it would be practical for him to go, there has been relatively little discussion about how Taiwan could contribute to world health.
The WHA is a platform for drawing up policies and offering recommendations about how to handle major world health problems. It is also a forum for practitioners who have been successful in disease prevention to put forward achievable goals and offer guidelines.
For example, it was at a WHA in 1958 that the then-Soviet Union deputy minister of health Viktor Zhdanov proposed a strategy that led to the eradication of smallpox. Smallpox was a disease that was communicable between people without human carriers, such as hepatitis B, or animal reservoirs, such as influenza viruses. Effective vaccines administered with bifurcated needles were also available to boost a recipient’s immunity.
With these conditions, all that was required to achieve the eradication of smallpox was for public health authorities around the world to fully cooperate. The eventual success of the program also salvaged the reputation of the WHO, when its worldwide malaria prevention program was beginning to fail.
The guidelines for global health operations are formulated in the specialist committees and technical briefings at each year’s WHA, in accordance with WHO and UN global health development targets. Strategies and methods have to be decided based on expertise in public health and clinical experience with a global outlook and concern for humanity.
All these factors make it possible to create more efficient ways of promoting global health goals. This is supported by the WHO’s 1950s publication of a series of technical reports about major infectious diseases, such as hemorrhagic fever viruses, which demonstrated that the more expertise one has in public health, the more opportunities one has to contribute to world health.
Two decades ago, Japanese academics discussed the importance of global health at an international conference on infectious diseases, namely how to cure people from parasitic diseases in Africa. For example, onchocerciasis (river blindness), which could lead to whole families walking blindly, led by a child who had not been infected. This aroused the sympathy of developed countries, who could apply their technological resources to help other nations achieve their health aspirations.
However, since 2009, when Taiwan joined the WHO as an observer, the efforts of the non-governmental sector have seemingly far outweighed the actions of government institutions.
One obstacle is the limit that the Ministry of Science and Technology imposes on the number of research projects that professors can apply for. The international departments of the Ministry of Health and Welfare have undergone downsizing, mergers and budget cuts. There is a shortage of public health talent in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the amount of money available to such governmental agencies for cultivating talent is pitifully small.
The old mentality of emphasizing medical treatment over public health prevails and people without expertise are put above those who do have it. Consequently, enthusiastic experts suffer from a severe lack of funding.
One wonders how many people there are among the authorities who know about how other countries are planting the seeds of global health, or even how Taiwan could contribute to the world in public health.
The presidential inauguration brings in a vice president and health minister who come from the public health sector, as do two legislators-at-large. Let us hope that this might lead to the cultivation of young talent in the field of global healthcare.
It is worth thinking about what efforts Taiwan should make. The prevalence of enterovirus and dengue fever is a perennial worry for Asian parents. There is also room for more effort in preventing HIV/AIDS, pneumonia-related respiratory infectious diseases and newly emerging zoonosis diseases that can be transmitted between humans and animals.
Notably, Taiwan has made practical achievements in hepatitis B prevention, enterovirus guidance, discovering the epidemiological conditions for emerging severe cases of dengue hemorrhagic fever, reducing onward transmission by early treatment of HIV-infected persons, enhancing infectious disease surveillance using health informatics and Tainan’s use of big data to assist health education and evaluation of prevention and control of dengue in the last year.
All these achievements could be used in sharing experiences with other nations.
Only if Taiwan has a high level of humanitarian concern and scientific literacy, while offering its expert contributions can this nation’s achievements in public health win the respect of people around the world.
King Chwan-Chuen is a professor at National Taiwan University’s College of Public Health and Joseph Wu is an instructor there.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this