GOVERNMENTS SHOULD make sure that they invest in rather than cut spending on health services during the economic downturn, a senior scientist with the World Health Organisation (WHO) has stressed.
Speaking at an international meeting on emerging diseases and surveillance in Vienna yesterday, Dr Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum said the WHO was seriously concerned the global economic crisis will decrease national health investment on health and decrease overseas aid budgets for health.
“We’ve been very clear on the issue that this is absolutely the last thing you should cut. You are probably much better off investing in health during an economic downturn than you are at any other time because for one thing populations need the safety net,” he said.
He added that the investment would be cheaper in the recession and that it could stimulate the economy.
“It’s exactly in times of economic hardship that social safety nets such as health services become most important, so you will find that people are unable to afford private treatment, particularly in developing countries, and so they will rely on the national health services. There will be increased demands on the health services during an economic downturn and so if you are cutting those then you are seriously compromising the health of your population, and not only probably losing lives but potentially storing up problems of social unrest and so on,” he added.
“We have heard from our member states that most of them are committing they will not cut overseas development budgets for the next year. Beyond that we don’t have guarantees in many cases and that concerns us,” he said. A €95 million cut in the Irish overseas development aid budget was recently announced as part of the Government’s package to save €2 billion this year. In addition the HSE is faced with having to make up to €1 billion in savings this year to stay within budget.
Meanwhile, Prof Timothy Brewer, director of global health programmes for McGill University Medical School in Canada and a senior programme adviser for the International Society for Infectious Diseases which organised the conference, said he was concerned public health budgets would be the first to be cut by countries grappling with the economic crisis. This, he said, was “going to make us more vulnerable and more exposed to potential outbreaks and we’re going to be less able to respond to them when they occur”.
He added: “I’m very concerned about what’s going to happen to public health. To use an example from the US, in the 1970s New York went through a severe economic crisis and one of the things they did to deal with that was essentially eliminated their public health funding. They cut it way back. They said we have a choice: we can cut back on public health or we can cut back on police officers . . . so New York went from having over 1,000 beds dedicated to TB at the beginning of 1970 to having none in 1980. Between 1982 and 1992, New York experienced a resurgence of TB and an epidemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis that spread through 11 hospitals and ended up killing more than 300 people,” he said.
“If public health agencies do everything right, nothing happens. And it’s very hard to convince people to give you money because nothing happens and that’s really the challenge to explain to people that this is important and you need to fund it and you need to be thinking about it even though nothing has happened because when it does happen it’s too late.”