London: Experts battling malaria accused the World Bank(WB) of reneging on promises to help fund the fight against the disease in a column of The Lancet published on Tuesday.
The World Bank disputed many of the issues raised in the opinion piece in the online version of the British medical journal The Lancet. Though the bank acknowledges its malaria programmes have been understaffed and under funded in the past, its officials insisted it has learned from its mistakes and has moved to set things right.
Malaria kills more than one million people a year, many of them young children in Africa, even though it is both preventable and treatable. As much as 40 per cent of the world's populations are at risk, mostly in the globe's poorest countries, the World Health Organisation said.
The 12 experts who signed the Lancet piece written by immunologist Amir Attaran charged that the bank failed to honour a pledge made in 2000 offering between $300 million and $500 million in loans to fight malaria in Africa.
They also said the World Bank claimed success against the disease by falsifying data and approved clinically obsolete treatments for a potentially deadly form of malaria -- charges the institution hotly denies.
"The bank failed to lend Africa the funds for malaria control that it said it would, and rather than admit this with candor, the bank concealed the fact by using un transparent and contradictory accounting," wrote Attaran, who also is a lawyer at the Institute of Population Health at Canada's University of Ottawa.
Comments
0 comment