The spectre of more world epidemics like SARS can be combatted by raising health standards in the poorest countries through a new global health insurance scheme, Medecins sans frontieres co-founder Bernard Kouchner said, reports the Montreal Gazette.

Kouchner calls the idea World Health Security. With colleagues at Harvard University's Medical School and the Conservatoire national des arts et metiers in Paris, where he teaches, he has asked the World Bank for $200,000 to do a feasibility study on it in the developing world. Though vague on the details of how it would work, Kouchner said eventually the World Bank could extend microcredit to grassroots organizations in poor countries to help them fend off disease—a kind of insurance policy against getting sick, given directly to poor people. In the industrialized countries of the North, "we're bloated with money compared with those who have none," said Kouchner.

"As long as we don't care about the diseases of the poor, we the rich will run a great danger of getting sick, too."

"We spend $2,000 per person per year on health. The poor of this planet get just $3 to $5 each. And that can't last," he said. "We're a big family on this Earth, and when the poor get sick we have to think of them. As long as we don't care about the diseases of the poor, we the rich will run a great danger of getting sick, too. "It's all one whole. You can't allow diseases to travel and not offer prevention and treatment. That's not possible."

Speaking to reporters, he predicted that soon "infectious diseases will touch everyone (and) either we stop travelling, which would be difficult, or every year there will be new health alerts."

With SARS, he added, "now a general awareness of public health has been awakened across the world, and that necessarily has to lead to another awareness: of the necessity of helping the whole world and not just the rich countries. And that's where the idea came from for global health insurance."




Reprinted with permission from the World Bank.

To read another Global Envision article about disease in a globalized world see A Global Disease.