One of the most famous health organisations known in the world is the World Health Organisation (WHO), who mission is “to provide leadership on global health matters, shape the health research agenda, set norms and standards, articulate evidence-based policy options, provide technical support to countries and monitoring and assess health trends”. It is the leader of all health institutions, and it operates under the United Nations.
One of the examples of their work was when there Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003. When the doctor in Vietnam saw that his patient that a disease he had never seen before, he immediately contacted the WHO. It is the WHO’s job to then let the world know about the dangerous disease, try to destroy or contain it, and to eventually find a cure for it. It sounds glamorous, the job that they do. It is for the better good for all nations, and it should benefit everyone. However, with the increasing inequality and stratification, the things that WHO do to contain or destroy these diseases will create social problems and effects that are not shown to public.
I do not only wish to refer to only the WHO as the institution, but all health institutions around the world. Even in Singapore, we have the Ministry of Health (MOH), which is ‘part’ of the WHO (but they are not a major role player in it. Notice that only majority of the whites are the ones running the WHO), and controls the health system and security in Singapore. In almost every part of the world, sick people are sent to the hospital. While most of them do recover, some people die, and there is a stigma that is carried along with the term ‘hospital’. Something ‘bad’ has happened to you.
People with communicable diseases are isolated so as to ensure the safety of other people and the population. With this isolation, comes stratification. Just like acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), we are taught that we should try to keep away from these people as they are ‘dangerous’ and transmitting the disease to you. It could be said that it is the WHO which is the one who tells the world about the disease, but the social stigma is created by society. Because people value their lives, we are often taught not to mix around with people who are sick because we would endanger our own.
It is the institutions which influence our thinking and our way of life. They are the ones which tell us what we should do and how we should act. We all think of it as rational movements which will improve our lives. Yet we fail to see that many other individuals’ freedom to live have been sacrificed in order to create a socially acceptable healthy environment to the WHO’s ‘norms and standards’. We should not be isolating them, but rather the institutions should create some awareness of the state of these people, and how to give these people some hope to live in the future. Or do they think that because of our already present stratification, creating awareness would cause more discrimination amongst them? There might be many reasons to this argument, but certainly, I foresee that by keeping the public in the dark, it will create more social problems in the future. When the problem is not addressed, it will get worse as time goes on. Our stigmatisation will just grow deeper unless we are given awareness that these people exist, and that these people does have a right to live as well as any other normal individual. It is the United Nations who created the Human Rights Declaration, yet they believe in total isolation of the diseased. Rather ironic, don’t you think?
