Modernized societies guarantee health research impact

 

Dear Editor, my comment on your Editorial The State of Health Research Worldwide’ ideas:[1] “A different approach for improving health research and translating policy into action is urgently needed. Past and current efforts have failed”, and “Current institutions (GFHR, World Bank, and WHO) do not have the scientific leverage to change political attitudes. The institutions we need, as yet, do not exist”, is as follows:

 

In 2004-2006, I suggested to the Mexico-Summit,[2] that modern economic growth was essential to achieve self-sustained social, political, scientific, and health development;[3-5] and to the WHO/RPC-HPSRJ, and PAHO-PAJPH, the Sachs’ primary living/health care approach and biopsycho-econosocial paradigm of the sub-Saharan Africa’s UN-Millennium Village-Projects,[3] to obtain more impact from investments in science.

 

Could the G8 empower the UNDP in the UN Executive and World Assembly, to boost the self-sustained modern development, needed to improve health research impact, or a new world super-agency is necessary?

 

Many developing country’s populations still show patterns of subsistence lifestyles and living levels of settled-agrarian and/or forager societies (between 100,000 BC and 1800), mixed with advances from industrial societies, but rejecting modern values, freedoms-rights, working-styles, and socioeconomic growth yet. Therefore, without modernizing their societies, no health research achievements will improve their handicapped and unhealthy-living standards of generalized extreme-poverty with equity-at-the-bottom.  

 

There are several case-study countries of self-sustained modern development and high-impact of health research from the 1800s on, as: 22 integral developed countries, Russia, and in smaller scale Cyprus and Cuba; and recently, seven-East Asian Tigers, three-provinces of India, and Southeast China.

 

References:

 

1. The Lancet. The state of health research worldwide. Lancet 2008;372(9649):1519. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2808%2961627-X/fulltext

 

2. Stusser RJ. Reflections. In: COHRED. Voices from Bangkok to Mexico. Report to the WHO Ministerial Summit on Health Research; 2004 Nov. 16-20; Mexico, F.D. Geneva: COHRED; 2004. http://cohred.org/cohred/content/781.pdf

 

3. Sachs JD. The end of poverty. Economic possibilities for our time, 1st edn. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

 

4. Fogel RW. The escape from hunger and premature death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the third world, 1st edn. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

 

5. Clark G. A farewell to alms. A brief economic history of the world, 1st edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.