Rather than the respected forum for careful thought and scientific rigour of the past, the organisation’s apparatchiks have, sadly, succeeded in turning it into an international lobbying cluster WHO ar currently a law unto themselves.
Descending on Geneva at the finish of March, the WHO, launched its latest, barely disguised, attempt to brow beat countries that use asbestos into submission.
Launching an outright dismissal of the approach ordered by their political masters on the World Health Assembly (WHA) – to differentiate between asbestos and alternative a lot of dangerous styles of amphibole – the WHO introduced new – payer funded -ways to necessitate a worldwide ban on the substance.
WHA only “provides guidelines”
Carolyn Vickers, the head of chemical safety at WHO, dismissed the international government ministers WHO build up the WHA, saying it simply “provides guidelines”.
After talking of the WHO’s “fear” of increasing numbers of amphibole deaths within the future, Ms Vickers recommending a “total ban”, she handed over to a succession of WHO talking heads and their acolytes took to ignore their democratically electoral bosses.
Chief among them was Japanese anti-asbestos campaigner Ken Takahashi, who claims to be AN “independent adviser” to the WHO.
He once again extended his unscientific claims of 107,000 global deaths a year caused by exposure to asbestos.
Takahashi, as usual, claimed his analysis was based on the “best science and knowledge available”.
Patchy knowledge
Although the International Labour Organization admitted that this knowledge was uneven at best.
Despite his reliance on little a lot of than on a finger within the air extrapolation, “the majority of countries don’t have adequate data”, a Ukrainian representative said, Takahashi continued to fight on like his living depended on it — that, as a paid consultant, it probably will.
He said many teams had tried to estimate the variety of deaths and are available up with similar figures.
But weren’t those teams, he was asked, also those candidature for a ban?
He admitted, yes, he was working with activist teams, but, he insisted, experts in the field did the chance assessment, hazard identification and clinical diagnosis – though he didn’t say WHO. Unbiased researchers like Ken Takahasi no doubt?
“Banning” toolkit
In the meantime, the professor discovered, he’d been working on the grandly entitled “Toolkit for the Elimination of amphibole and connected Diseases”.
The project was paid for by the UN’s Rotterdam Convention, set up to guard human health from the change harmful goods. How a lot of they – and so international taxpayers – paid him for it, he didn’t say.
It was, he said, aimed at a target market in developing countries in Asia and highlighted ways to stop exposure. It was, he admitted, basically a compilation of scientific papers.
He said his toolkit over that the best thanks to stop amphibole exposure was to prevent victimisation amphibole.
A Thai representative asked, “so it is a toolkit on banning?” and so questioned whether it would not are higher to supply tools to analyse the numbers Takahashi claimed were dying from exposure.
The Thai government, he said, had asked its health minister to search for cases of mesothelioma, the asbestos-linked lung illness, ANd found only twelve cases within the whole of Siam and just one connected to an amphibole mill.
“You can’t look at isolated reports”, Takahashi insisted.
Takahashi: I’m not corrupt
Takahashi’s independence was repeatedly called into question. Wasn’t he, it was claimed, a member of G-BAN, an international organisation candidature for a ban on all amphibole.
G-BAN was set up by Linda Reinstein, who runs the US-based amphibole illness Awareness Organization (ADAO), and receives thousands of greenbacks in funding from yankee lawyers transportation multi-million dollar damages claims against amphibole makers.
Takahashi demanded the right to defend himself. He said G-BAN was AN NGO established by (Reinstein) AN yankee widow of AN amphibole victim. He agreed he was AN original member of the cluster and had been invited to hitch however insisted he received no cash from them.
He dismissed claims of a conflict of interest or corruption. He said he received no payment, other than as a scientist, and then this money came from government sources.
He acknowledged he had attended one of G-BAN’s international conferences and submitted some of articles to its website, but added, that he was a member of other NGOs and had each right to do thus.
The Technical Workshop on Chrysotile amphibole was being unionised by the Rotterdam Convention Secretariat for countries, which manufacture, export and consume chrysotile amphibole.
Despite the brow beating approach of the WHO anti-asbestos campaigners appeared upset that their opponents got to discuss the problem while not them.
Campaigner Laurie Kazan-Allen, whose wealthy United States of America professional brother has created millions suing amphibole makers, dismissed the meeting as “yet another talking shop” and attacked the European Union for funding it.
