Global March for Health begins in Bangladesh ! - Press Releases
PRESS RELEASE - December 1,
2000
Global March for Health begins in Bangladesh !
Palestinian medical workers straight from strife-torn Gaza, Ukranian ecologists from
Chernobyl and Maori activists from New Zealand - all will take part in a Global March for Health on 3
December, the eve of the first ever People’s Health Assembly in Savar,
Bangladesh between 4-8 December 2000.
Delegates from around the world have already started arriving in Bangladesh to take part
in this historic international meet of health workers, environmentalists and mass movement
representatives to `hear the
unheard’. Preparations are in full swing at the sprawling, green campus of the
Gonoshasthaya Kendra, which is hosting the meet to feed and accomodate over 1500
participants from over 90 countries which also includes several ministers of health,
well-known academics and officials from international agencies.
The Global March for Health, which will be attended
by hundreds of international delegates will start at 3 PM from the Gonoshasthaya
Kendra’s campus and end at the Shriti Souda, Bangladesh’s National Monument to
its war heroes. The People’s Health Assembly (PHA 2000) plans to launch a worldwide
initiative to make the concept of `Health
for All’ the centre of all national and global policy making and issue a
People’s Charter for Health.
Along with hundreds of grassroots activists the event will be attended by James Orbinski,
President of the Nobel Peace Prize winning Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without
Borders), Pascoal Mocumbi, Prime Minister of Mozambique and Hafdan Mahler- former Director
General of the World Health Organization. Among others, prominent activists coming to the
Assembly include anti-nuclear activist Dr Rosalie Bertell from Canada, Dr Eqbal Bappukunju
of the people’s science movement in Kerala, India and David Werner, author of the
renowned `Where there is no doctor’.
The five-day event has been uniquely planned to give maximum opportunity to people from
the grassroots to recount their experiences through testimonies, stories, songs and drama.
Their tales, fresh from the frontlines of the battle to ensure Health for All, will blend with serious
academic discussions and workshops on a variety of subjects.
Speakers at the PHA 2000 will present and debate papers on the impact of globalisation on
health policies, the commercialisation of genetic resources and ways to make essential
drugs cheaper and accessible to the poor among other themes. A special session at the PHA
2000 will involve a panel discussion where health workers from Africa, Asia and Central
America will confront a senior World Bank representative over the agency’s negative
record of pushing policies that hurt the poor.
The five-day event is designed to give space for people to express themselves in their own
idiom. The output of various sessions of the PHA 2000 will go into the formulation of the
People's Charter for Health which we hope will be the guiding spirit behind health policy
formulation in future.
