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Last fall the United Nations Human Settlements Program published a historic report, The Challenge of Slums, warning that slums across the world were growing in their own hothouse, viral fashion. One billion people, mainly uprooted rural migrants, are currently warehoused in shantytowns and squatters' camps, and the number will double in the next generation.
The authors of the report broke with traditional UN circumspection to squarely blame the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its neocolonial ‘conditionalities' for spawning slums by decimating public-sector spending and local manufacturing throughout the developing world.
During the debt crisis of the 1980s, the IMF, backed by the Reagan and Bush administrations, forced most of the third world to downsize public employment, devalue currencies and open their domestic markets to imports. The results everywhere were an explosion of urban poverty and sharp fall-offs in public services.
A principal target of IMF austerity programs has been urban public health. In Zaire and Ghana, for instance, "structural adjustment" meant the laying off of tens of thousands of public health workers and doctors. Similarly in Kenya and Zimbabwe, implementation of IMF demands led to huge fall-offs in healthcare coverage and spending.
In South Asia, likewise, investment in public health has lagged far behind the growth of slums. The five largest cities of the region alone have a total slum population of more than 20 million, and standards of sanitation are symbolized by ratios of one toilet seat per 2000 residents in the poorest parts of Bombay and Dhaka.
Thanks to global neo-liberalism, then, disease surveillance and epidemic response are weakest precisely where they are most important: in the mega-slums of Asia and Africa. That's where the brushfire of H5N1 could turn into a deadly biological firestorm.
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full at -
http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1227