by Playfuls Staff |
21st March 2007
During the SARS crisis of 2003, when a virulent form of pneumonia started in Asia and claimed hundreds of lives, Taiwan health officials were forced to surf for information on the [more] internet about how to fight the disease.
That's because they are shut out of the world's premier public health agency, the World Health Organization (WHO), which has excluded Taiwan since the early 1970s when the People's Republic of China took Taiwan's seat in the United Nations.
Taiwan physicians warned Wednesday in Washington that the isolation presents a danger to global health, with Taiwan the only country in the world denied full access to support and information from WHO.
The physicians, some of whom represented private health organizations, have been meeting with US officials in recent days in the hope that Washington will broaden its support for the country's admission as an observer to WHO.
Japan and the US have directly advocated for Taiwan's observer status over the last years, but only 25 of 191 full members have joined the cause.
The physicians said they had hoped to convince the US to apply more pressure to the European Union and Canada to rally behind observer status for Taiwan - but were not optimistic that they had succeeded.
Both the EU and Ottawa say they can't allow Taiwan to have observer status - already accorded to the Red Cross, the Palestinian Authority, the Vatican, Kosovo and several other entities - because it would violate their "one-China" policy, which sees Taiwan as a breakaway province of Beijing.
"If we are not in the network, there is going to be a hole," Dr Shuh-Min Wu of the Foundation of Medical Professionals Alliance in Taiwan told reporters.
Legislator George Liu of the Taiwan Solidarity Union party and chairman of the Legislative Yuan's foreign-affairs committee took the argument one step further.
"This is not a political issue but an issue of human rights," he said.
The delegation has been visiting world capitals ahead of the annual World Health Assembly in May, where matters of membership are decided. A simple majority would suffice to give Taiwan observer status, a vote that failed in 2004.
"We don't mind fighting another 10 years, but I don't want a disaster to happen," Wu said.
The delegation said they were "disappointed" that the Pan American Health Organization had refused to meet them in Washington. Taiwan has cultivated close ties to several Latin American countries, among the few capitals in the world that still grant Taiwan full diplomatic recognition.
Taiwan successfully contained the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which claimed hundreds of lives despite the island's isolation, using a rigorous system of containment, ship and plane searches, temperature-monitoring of arriving passengers, hospital closures and masks for foreign workers.
The physicians pointed out that Beijing kept the world in the dark about its own SARS problems and has "lied" to the world about how much support it gives to Taiwan on health issues.
Beijing not only kept WHO's representatives from immediate access to its own worst-hit regions but also blocked for two months WHO's sending help to Taipei during the SARS crisis.
In the absence of outside help, the relatively wealthy Taiwan has also tackled AIDS and bird flu, providing anti-viral treatment free to about 10,000 patients. The country is also gearing up for avian flu and producing the much-demanded Tamiflu, using the experience of the SARS epidemic.
"We could share our knowledge and our expertise" if admitted to observer status, Wu said.
China has agreed to allow Taipei to participate in some WHO activities, allowing it to attend some of WHO's technical meetings. WHO, however, needs Beijing's approval to send experts to Taiwan for disease control.
Wu called this level, officially called "meaningful participation," a "numbers game" that takes four weeks for WHO and China to decide if Taiwan's representatives can attend a meeting or help in disease control.
"Taiwan left outside of the health security network is a danger to the world," said Dr Wu Yun Tung, Taiwan's ambassador-at-large on WHO issues and a member of the World Medical Association.
The WMA supports Taiwan's admission to observer status.
The delegation said that some countries in Eastern Europe have also come forth to give moral if not political support to Taiwan.
They said that for the European Union in general, Taiwan seems too far away to pose a threat to its public health - despite the frequent spread of disease through airline travel.
China experts like Elizabeth Economy, an Asia specialist at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, have called for a compromise that would allow Taiwan to participate in WHO the way it does in the World Trade Organization, where it is admitted as an entity.
"It is really indefensible (that China) equivocated over whether to permit WHO officials to visit Taiwan in the midst of the SARS crisis and to block Taiwan's participation in the WHO as an observer," she said shortly after the SARS crisis.
By Pat Reber, Dpa
© 2007 DPA
