World Bank acused to cheat with anti-malaria projects
| A group of public health experts has accused the World Bank of publishing false statistics to exaggerate the performance of its anti-malaria projects, and of funding inappropriate treatments against the disease in India. But in a rebuttal the World Bank counters that the accusations include many “inaccuracies and misunderstandings”. It does concede that its past efforts to fight malaria were understaffed and under-funded, but says that its recently amended strategy to fight malaria will function better. The World Bank launched the Roll Back Malaria campaign in 1998 and in 2000 pledged $300-500 million to fight malaria in Africa. But Amir Attaran at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada, and his colleagues claim that the organisation has failed to lend Africa the promised funds and has obscured its allocation of money with “Enron-like accounting”. Attaran, a lawyer and biologist, says that the organisation should not have set a target it could not reach: “They should not have done it unless they had a means of honestly meeting it.” The World Bank admits that it did not reach all of the 2000 funding goals, but says that it had already readjusted its targets when it launched its Global Strategy & Booster Program in 2005. In this new scheme, it hopes to commit $500 million to $1 billion towards fighting malaria with help from partner organisations. The new approach involves a greater emphasis on malaria prevention, according to Suprotik Basu, a public health specialist for the World Bank’s Booster Program for Malaria Control. He says that this includes more emphasis on the distribution of tools such as mosquito netting to keep away the insect that transmits the disease. Attaran and colleagues also accuse the World Bank of downsizing its staff of malaria experts from seven to zero, soon after promising to do more to combat the disease. Read more... This was seized 4 u at The Lancet |
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