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Dr. Abdulrahman Bizri, member of the Lebanese parliament and the parliamentary committee on public health, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and chair of the national COVID vaccine committee and response.

By Randa El Ozeir
BEIRUT & TORONTO , Jul 8 2024 (IPS)

This summer is bringing an additional challenge to the public health front in Lebanon, along with higher-than-normal temperatures.

An uptick in food- and water-borne communicable diseases, mainly viral hepatitis A, has been registered in the country, according to recent statistics released by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health from numbers collected in hospitals, health centers and laboratories.

The hepatitis A virus (HAV) causes hepatitis A, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which causes inflammation of the liver. The virus is primarily spread when an uninfected (and unvaccinated) person ingests food or water that is contaminated with the feces of an infected person. The disease is closely associated with unsafe water or food, inadequate sanitation, poor personal hygiene and oral-anal sex.”

An unrelenting, thorny economic crisis has been ravaging the country for years and is considered the main culprit for the deterioration of basic facilities, community installations and public services.

Dr. Abdulrahman Bizri, member of the Lebanese parliament and the parliamentary committee on public health, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and chairperson of the national COVID vaccine committee and response, blames the collapse of Lebanese currency, the negligence, the intractable economic, political and livelihood crises, the mismanagement and the prevailing misconduct for the complications of preventing and containing diseases, including communicable types.

“All these factors led to failure in sustaining health infrastructure, such as sewage, and providing clean water to households for direct or indirect human use through produce and/or livestock, which resulted in the spread of many diseases, namely the infectious ones transmitted through contaminated water, such as cholera, hepatitis A, acute diarrhea, dysentery, salmonella and other diseases.”

Staff Shortages and Budget Cuts

Government dysfunction, scarcity of maintenance and investment and corruption slowed down the development of services and responses to health outbreaks.

Dr. Hussein Hassan, professor and researcher in food safety and food production at Lebanese American University (LAU), points out two additional elements that have deeply affected the public health situation: the reduced funding and the exodus of medical doctors.

“In hospitals, for example, we have staff shortages due to the brain drain while we are suffering from inefficiency and ghost workers. Unfortunately, we also have bribery and budget cuts that delay much-needed projects.”

Can the Ministry of Health (MoH), with its current shape in light of government spending, decrease its ability to manage and protect against communicable diseases?

Bizri says that “MoH is facing an uphill battle due to its limited and low capacities. It relies heavily on the support of the international community,  for example, WHO, UNICEF, and UNHCR, among others, to control these diseases.”

Dr. Hussein Hassan, professor and researcher in food safety and food production at the Lebanese American University (LAU).

Bridging the gap requires a comprehensive and holistic approach to dealing with the situation based on short-term and long-term steps to be taken on many official and public levels. Hassan believes that “we need to strengthen the surveillance of outbreaks, execute mass vaccination campaigns, provide affected individuals with required supplies, and improve the water and sanitation in crowded areas by installing purification systems and even distributing bottled water.”

Large Presence of Syrian refugees

Poverty, poor public awareness, inadequate education, a social environment with minimal knowledge and disregarding good hygiene practices contribute to communicable disease transmission.

Bizri refers to the sizable presence of Syrian refugees who live in difficult and bad conditions, congregated in unorganized camps with insufficient reliable health structures or safe drinking water. He applauded the three-way partnership between the Lebanese Ministry of Health,  international organizations like WHO and UNHCR, and the considerable Lebanese medical private sector in fighting diseases threatening the country.

“Lebanon succeeded in containing many epidemics that had the potential to prevail. The Lebanese medical body, including civil society, massively volunteered to control the spread of these diseases. The health sector spearheaded the efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic and is still at the forefront of fighting communicable diseases.”

However, he has reservations regarding the “skeptical role of UNHCR in its fight against many of the epidemics menacing Lebanon as an outcome of the concentrated existence of Syrian refugees, since it does not deal transparently with the Lebanese government and its official institutions.”

To ensure continuity of public health preventative and controlling programs, Hassan mapped out some long-term measures to be put in place, including “economic and political stability, strengthening the healthcare system, investing in improving water supply and sewage systems, and developing and implementing maintenance programs related to water safety, particularly among refugees.”

He acknowledges the crucial role played by international collaboration and financial and technical support delivered by non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Mistrust has dented the relationship between the healthcare system and the citizens.

“I believe that Lebanese citizens lost faith in the health sector long ago,” said Bizri. “Yet they keep depending on this sector, which offers affordable health and medical services compared to the private healthcare costs in Lebanon. The country boasts advanced medical services and treatments, but its public health is still enduring a significant deficit.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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The post Az ukrán hadsereg részleges visszavonulása Csasziv Jarból: Orosz erők közelednek appeared first on Biztonságpiac.

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By Daud Khan
ROME, Jul 8 2024 (IPS)

Immigrants are essential to Europe’s economic survival. They are needed for doing the jobs that most Europeans no longer want to do. Jobs that involve manual labor in agriculture and industry; or providing home help, care for the elderly; or working un-social hours in the catering business.

Daud Khan

So, why are a growing number of European political parties, including mainstream parties, taking an ever stronger anti-immigration stance and why are people voting for them?

I have previously argued that no one really wants immigration to stop, or for immigrants to leave. What the anti-immigrant parties want to do is to create a new subclass of low paid workers who have no rights and no political power (Europe’s Shift to the Far Right and its Impact on Immigration | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net). Such a “new immigrant proletariat” would enhance profits of those employing such immigrant workers, as well as raise overall living standards of the general population.

Recent events in Italy appear to confirm my hypothesis that low-paid illegal work in deeply imbedded in the system.

On 17 June, in a farm south of Rome an agricultural worker was critically injured and subsequently died. Satnam Singh’s right arm was caught in an agriculture machine and was chopped off. The owner of the farm placed the truncated arm in a box; he then deposited the box, and the injured Satnam Singh, outside his house and drove off. Satnam was eventually taken to hospital, but the delay in getting him medical aid meant that it was not possible to save his life.

What came to light in the subsequent investigations is that Satnam has no stay permit, no work contract and was paid a pittance for back breaking work in debilitating heat and biting cold. The Minister of Agriculture was quick to denounce the event leading to Satnam Sigh’s death and police are prosecuting the owner of the farm. However, the minister was also pointed out Italy’s agriculture sector is viable, dynamic and law abiding, and should not be criminalized due to a single unfortunate event

However, studies and surveys, mostly done by the trade unions, put a lie to his statement. In the case of the agriculture sector, of the roughly 1 million workers, some 230,000 are estimated illegal 1. Like Satnam, they are low-paid and badly treated. There are also allegations of different forms of abuse, as well as widespread use of amphetamines and painkillers to make them work harder.

Moreover, what is also emerging from various investigations is how the system, which supposedly aims to create more legal and controlled immigration, actually works to ensure an ample supply of illegal immigrants. The system works as follow:

Under Italian Law (the Bossi-Fini Act of 2002) Italian employers can ask for foreign workers to legally enter Italy to work in specific sectors, including agriculture and the tourism sector. The implicit agreement is the once they are in Italy, the employer who sponsored their entry would provide them a work contract and wages that are in line with industry standards.

However, in many cases the sponsoring employer does not show up to pick up the workers – let alone provide a job or a contract. The arriving workers find themselves in a foreign country where they cannot speak the language, without a job and without papers. The phenomenon is particularly acute in some regions of Italy such as Campagna (around Naples) where only 3% of workers who enter Italy legally actually sign a contract with the employer who sponsored their entry into the country.

It is here that the so called “contractors” step in. These contractors pick up the newly arrived workers providing them with immediate help and assistance. They then act as intermediaries to arrange jobs for them at wages that are a fraction of what Italians doing the same job would be paid. Moreover, these unscrupulous contractors skim off much of what the workers earn for renting them a house and for providing transport to and from work.

And all this is happening in front of everyone’s eyes, including those of various local and national authorities. For example, authorities know which companies sponsored foreign workers to enter Italy. They also know how many work contracts these companies signed with these immigrant workers. Recent reports show that in the Naples area 22,000 sponsored workers entered the country but not one of the signed a contract.

Similarly, the owner of the farm where Satnam Singh died had declared to the local authorities that he had only one tractor and no workers – facts that were patently untrue but no one ever bothered to check.

These and other facts are often well covered in reports done by the trade unions or by investigative journalists particularly after an accident or an untoward event happens. Moreover, there is nothing really clandestine about what is happening. One has only to drive around the agriculturally rich areas around Rome or the central or northern parts of Italy to see an army of workers from South Asia attending to livestock or toiling in the fields that supply the city with fresh fruit and vegetable. In more southern parts of Italy, it is young men from Africa that are picking oranges and tomatoes.

Similarly in cities such as Rome and Milan there are armies of illegals who work as “riders” delivering food to people’s homes; working as cooks, dishwasher and waiters in restaurants and bars; or working as cleaners or caregivers in people’s homes.

The system seems to suit everyone and if every so often a Satnam Singh dies – well so be it.

1 https://www.fondazionerizzotto.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Sintesi-VI-Rapporto_301122.pdf

Daud Khan is a retired UN staff based in Rome. He has degrees in economics from LSE and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a degree in Environmental Management from Imperial College London.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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