James
van Luik:
Publisher
& Editor
Saturday
113002
Volume
1, No. 5
2
Articles:
Vaccines Benefit
Mainly the Rich
schools to share
student data with the Pentagon
“There is a
saying in the villages of the Narmada valley –
‘You can wake someone who is sleeping. But you can’t
wake someone who is pretending to sleep.’” Arundhati
Roy
1. According to the World Health Organization Vaccines Benefit Mainly the Rich
By
Irwin Arieff
UNITED
NATIONS – Vaccinations have prevented millions of deaths
around the world but children in wealthy nations are getting the
lion’s share of the shots – and the benefits, the
United Nations said on Wednesday, November 11th.
While
young people in rich countries have access to the latest and
costliest vaccines available, just 50 percent of children in
sub-Saharan Africa are immunized during their first year of life
against common diseases like tuberculosis, measles, tetanus, and
whooping cough, three U.N. agencies said in a joint report.
In
poor and isolated parts of some developing nations, vaccines
reach fewer than one in 20 children, said the report by the World
Health Organization, the World Bank and the U.N. Children’s
Fund UNICEF.
“Immunization,
as powerful and successful as it is, has yet to reach its
enormous potential,” the report said. “The right to
protection from preventable diseases is the right of every child
and it is well within our collective capacity to realize that
right.”
A
quarter of the world’s children lack protection from common
preventable diseases, according to the report. Nearly 3 million
people -- 2 million of them children – die every year from
those diseases, it said.
While
vaccines for diseases like meningitis and pneumonia are widely
available in rich nations, children in developing countries are
dying from these same ailments, it found.
According
to the report rich nations annually provide $1.56 billion in aid
to immunization programs.
An
extra $250 million a year would cover the cost of basic vaccines
for at least another 10 million children, it said.
A
further $100 million would cover the cost of newer vaccines for
these children, including those protecting against
hepatitis B and haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib).
Hepatitis
B now causes 520,000 deaths a year worldwide while HIB kills
450,000 children in developing countries, the report said.
Developing
nations which currently spend as little as $6 a year per person
on health including immunizations, also need to increase their
spending, it said.
The
low levels of protection against diseases that ravage primarily
the developing world are also having a significant impact
on vaccine research, the study found.
Drug
companies find they have little incentive to invest in vaccines
for diseases that attack mostly the poor, such as Shigella
dysentery, dengue, Japanese encephalitis, leishmaniasis,
schistosmiasis and cholera, the report said.
It
called on pharmaceutical firms – with help from wealthy
governments – to redouble their efforts to develop vaccines
against malaria, which kills about a million people a years, most
of them African children and tuberculosis, which killed 1.7
million people in 2000, mostly in the poor nations.
2.
Military Recruiters: A U.S. federal education bill requires high
By
Susan
Milligan
Washington –
A little noticed provision in a new federal education law
requires high schools to provide names, addresses, and phone
numbers of students to military recruiters. Schools that refuse
to comply face losing federal education funding under the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Under the rule,
part of the No Child Left Behind Act signed earlier this year,
Pentagon recruiters are entitled to students’ contact
information unless parents opt out of sharing the data, a
requirement that has alarmed civil libertarians and school
administrators.
“We don’t
wish to appear antimilitary. The military is a great first step
out of high school for a lot of kids, land it is a fine career
for some people,” said Bruce Hunter, a lobbyist for the
American Association of School Administrators.
Nevertheless, the
association opposed the provision because it took discretion away
from local school boards. “We weren’t happy because we’re
a big local control outfit.”
The law also
requires high schools to allow military recruiters the same
campus access as administrators give to colleges and job
recruiters. Some school, including those in San Francisco and
Portland, Ore., had refused military recruiters access to their
campuses on the grounds that the Pentagon discriminated against
gays and lesbians.
Education
Secretary Rod Paige sent a letter last month to school
administrators explaining the new regulations. Department
spokesman Jim Bradshaw said the rationale for the rule was that
the military “felt this was needed to boost
recruitment.”
Major Sandy
Troeber, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said the rules were
“brought about by congressional support for military
recruiting efforts.” The Selective Service already requires
men in the United States to register for the draft within 30 days
of their 18th birthday.
But a fact sheet
provided by the Pentagon said that the cost of recruiting had
doubled in the past decade and that “access to students can
significantly reduce the cost of recruiting.”
The Pentagon had
been trying for years to insert the recruitment provisions into
education legislation to counter what they saw as a lack of
cooperation form some high schools according to lobbyists and
congressional aides. But this year the education bill was so
loaded with other contentious issues, such as school vouchers,
funding matters, and testing standards, that lawmakers who might
have fought the new recruitment rules had their energies focused
on other provisions.
“It wasn’t
on anybody’s radar. It was buried so deep in the
legislation,” said Kathleen Lyons, spokeswoman for the
National Education Association. The group has only recently begun
studying the issue and hasn’t yet taken a position on it,
she said.
Senator Edward M.
Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts and major negotiator on the
Leave No Child Behind Act, had fought successfully for several
years to keep the military recruitment rules out of education
bills, but couldn’t win the battle this year, especially
since bigger education issues were dominating the debate. Senator
Tim Hutchinson, Republican of Arkansas, engineered the inclusion
of the new language, said a Kennedy staff person.
“All this
provision does is provide military recruiters with the same
access to directory information that colleges currently enjoy,”
Kennedy said in a statement.
Civil libertarians
are concerned about the rule nonetheless.
“We opposed
it primarily on privacy grounds, that students or parents should
be able to control access to directory information, such as
names, addresses, ages,” said Christopher Anders,
legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
“That information shouldn’t be sent out to military
recruiters unless parents want it sent out.”
Under federal
privacy laws, schools generally must have written permission from
parents or students to release any information about a student’s
education record, according to the Education Department.
Exceptions including handing records over to a transfer
school, to law enforcement in some cases, and to officials who
need the information in cases of health or safety emergencies.
Schools have been
able to release what is called “directory information,”
such as names addresses, phone numbers, and date and place of
birth, but they had also to give parents the option of refusing
disclosure of their child’s information. School boards have
been able to make their own decisions as to whether or not to be
involved in providing directory information to outside
individuals or organizations.
The difference
under the new rule is that schools will not have the discretion
to refuse to provide such information to the military; they must
provide the information to recruiters and allow them on campus at
the Pentagon’s request.
Groups such as the
American Friends Service Committee and the Central Committee for
Conscientious Objectors, an antimilitary draft organization, have
been fielding complaints about the new rules, but are not sure
whether they can successfully challenge them, especially in the
environment created by the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Analysts are looking at whether the rules violate existing
privacy law said Oscar Castro, an AFSC official.
Jill Wynns,
president of the San Francisco Board of Education, said the board’s
attorneys are looking at the law to see whether the Bay Area
school system can keep any part of its current written policy,
which prohibits military recruiters from coming on campus and
bars the release of any student information to military
recruiters “or any one who asks for it.”
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Arundhati Roy has authored these two excellent books: “The God of Small Things” (a beautifully written novel). And “Power Politics” (a series of excellent political essays).