An old killer returns
TB: scourge of the poor!
THE OUTBREAK of tuberculosis (TB) among school children in Leicester has delivered a stark reminder that some of the dreaded killer diseases that used to haunt this country until the 1950s are rife in many parts of the world.
The conditions for the disease are actually worsened by our own "TB" – Tony Blair and his New Labour government, which has become one of the most hard line advocates of "neo-liberal" policies at home and abroad.
Blair recently added his support to a government policy document which upholds the "right" of pharmaceutical companies to coin billions in profits from the sale of patented drugs for fighting diseases like TB and AIDS at inflated prices to debt-ridden Third World countries.
And Labour government policies are encouraging the process of globalisation, which is rapidly creating new pools of poverty and ill health.
TB is above all a disease of the poor. It flourishes in overcrowded, damp, and decrepit housing stock, and among malnourished men, women and children without access to basic medical services.
As public health officials were quick to point out in Leicester, TB can be treated swiftly and effectively with modern antibiotics: but without treatment it can again emerge as a leading cause of incapacity and early death.
The Leicester outbreak is large enough and rare enough in Britain to attract news headlines, though the disease has for several years been making an unwelcome comeback in many deprived inner city areas, notably parts of London and Glasgow.
But this proliferation in Britain is small beer compared with the rampant growth of TB and other avoidable disease on a world scale, as the increasingly globalised economy serves to widen the gap between an ever wealthier minority, and a much larger layer that is sinking ever deeper into the most grinding poverty.
Billions of people eke out an existence on $2 or less per day. Not only do their living conditions leave them vulnerable to TB, malaria and other devastating diseases, but they lack the means to buy health care and the drugs they need when they fall ill.
The cost of any form of treatment has been systematically increased by the austerity programmes of the World Bank and IMF, which have tried to limit any health provision in Third World countries to a minimal primary care service, often linked to full recovery of costs through the imposition of charges for drugs and medical care.
Neo-liberal ideologists, aping Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase that "There is no such thing as society", refuse to recognise the importance of social provision of health care, and attempt to force all health provision into a straitjacket of free market economics, in which the poor who suffer the most illness inevitably receive the least health services.
The idea of a concerted international drive to tackle the disease is anathema to Tony Blair’s new friends, the bankers and business chiefs who are making big profits from the present system, and who resent any move that would share out their wealth or force them to pay more taxes.
But at Leicester shows, any attempt to eradicate TB in the advanced countries while it remains endemic elsewhere in the world is doomed to failure.
The tabloid press has of course been quick to seize upon the high proportion of children of Asian origin in the Leicester school at the centre of the new British outbreak – although the precise origin of the disease is unknown, and most of the children diagnosed as victims were born (and many vaccinated) in this country.
Once again there is a tacit racist assumption that "foreigners" can be blamed for health problems which in fact start much closer to home, in a system and a government that promote and widen social inequality.
Socialists want to see the back of TB – the scourge of the poor, here and abroad.
Our prescription starts with the maximum support for the Socialist Alliance and Scottish Socialist Party challenge in the coming general election.