Help to correct the WHO in Avain Flu information in Taiwan

Dear friends, I forward this mail from a friend to everyone here. The WHO has wrongly and possible politically classified Taiwan like China as an avian flu affected area. It is really upsetting.

My friend asked me to help him to make good argument and potentially a petition to protect against WHO’s wrong information.

here is his mail…

I sincerely wish you can advise me in continuing and expanding the arguements to the WHO, as shown in 2 continuous letters to the WHO DG Dr. Lee, since March 9th, when WHO apparently violated basic principle of public health, and released on her website information based on nothing, and showing Taiwan with avian flu virus in our poutry and human populations.
gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/F … 060308.png

Unfortunately, these information were totally wrong, without consultation and confirmation with any health professonals in Taiwan or elsewhere.

We wish you can add the arguements and advise us, and we plan to write the argrements and protests daily, until WHO changes her website.

I appreciate for your instructions and wish to hear from you,

===========

March 10, 2006

Dear Director-General Lee,

We wrote to you and your colleague in the Secretariat regarding the errors on your Website related to the avian flu occurrences in poultries and human beings yesterday, and till now, we have not received any reply or response from you on this request to correct these and similar mistakes your colleague have made continuously and repeatedly. These further evidence ineffectiveness of the WHO and inaccurateness of the information WHO has claimed the rights to carry for your Members and the global health community, and further ruin the trusts WHO had gained since 1948, when delegates of our country joined the others to sing the WHO Charters.

Moreover, we seek your support to provide explanation on what was the rationale and reasons for this error ever to exist. The International Health Regulations 2005, which many of us have worked together in the past years in order to improve the global surveillance and reporting on important infectious diseases, clearly recommend an effective and accurate reporting and confirmation, supported by solid consultation and assessment by the concerned parties, in this case, Taiwan, before WHO or the Secretariat will announce publicly.

However, your colleague in the WHO even never consulted the responsible health authority, our Ministry, and the Taiwan CDC, or any other Member of the WHO who had competence in this regard before you released the Map openly on your website. We recently have the visits by several experts from the WHO reference laboratories on avian flu in Taipei, and comprehensive information have been shared with these experts by our Ministry and health professionals. Apparently, these experts, who understood the real facts in Taiwan, have not even been consulted at all by your colleague. Apparently, the WHO, which you have urged as “One WHO” since 1998 has been fragmented and will further lose the credibility at all.

With this, we again urge you to openly and clearly clarify the errors been made on this specific information, and correct the website, and reply to this request timely. We hope your urgent reactions will help fill the gaps that WHO has made in the past decades by neglecting the existence of Taiwan’s independent public health system from one of your other Member, and we look forward to working with you more closely in all related issues.

We understand your recent trip to affected countries in Africa will help you refresh how the diseases have hampered the communities and the human lives. That is why Taiwan has worked so much in providing assistances to countries in need of support to elevate their public health capacities. You are certainly welcome to visit or send your experts to Taiwan that we can share unique experience with each other and together provide better services to your Members.

We wish you find these information constructive and helpful and our requests sincere and urgent that we can together avoid errors like this by your Secretariat, and we look forward to hearing from you on these matters soon.

What should the map look like?

Forget the WHO… they don’t really care about all of humanity. Look at how politically motivated their actions are.

Look at how politically motivated your accusation is.
The WHO’s just following the UN playbook, it’s not going to (and it shouldn’t) get involved in every single dispute on how to color a map.

It’s just a map that visually shows rough extent of the flu in the world. Most people will just say, oh, Turkey and Asia are where bird flu is. Okay. About the only people who would notice whether an island the size of Taiwan is colored a certain way are Taiwanese. So, it’s not like people are going to check this map to make a personal or business decision relating to Taiwan. They’d check something a lot more specific.

Three comments:

  • I don’t “blame” the Taiwan folks up in arms over this. You’ll note the WHO traditionally deals with political issues sensitively, that some disputed regions are actually shadowed in gray. The Kashmir region (the ‘ass’ part of the rooster that is China) is gray’ed out.

  • Boy, I sympathesize with the ridiculous political games that the WHO (which is supposed to be about health) has to play.

  • And finally… I say, I hope these zealots keep focusing on asinine, meaningless things like this. (By ‘this’, I also include the campaign to force Google Maps to reclassify ‘Taiwan’). It keeps them out of trouble by distracting them from doing things that might actually make a difference. (For example: making a gazillion, gazillion dollars so that Taiwan can finally break free of China’s economic mass.)

SURE… the WHO only cares about health! Like when there was SARS, and Taiwan was completely ignored, eh?! F**king EH.

What the fack was the WHO supposed to do about Taiwan and SARS? WHO doesn’t provide ER service, in case you didn’t know.