منبع: Tricontinental
On 23 July, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the world now has 15 million people infected by COVID-19. ‘The pandemic has disrupted the lives of billions of people. Many have been at home for months’, he گفت:. The trauma of the Great Lockdown is taking a serious psycho-social toll. ‘It’s completely understandable that people want to get on with their lives’, Dr. Ghebreyesus said. ‘But we will not go back to the “old normal”. The pandemic has already changed the way we live our lives. Part of adjusting to the “new normal” is finding ways to live our lives safely’.
At a press conference on 23 July, in Brazzaville (Republic of Congo), Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, گفت: that ‘The growth we are seeing in COVID-19 cases in Africa is placing an ever-greater strain on health services across the continent’. There are now about 10,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases amongst healthcare workers in Africa. ‘This has very real consequences for the individuals who work in [the healthcare sector]’, Dr. Moeti said. ‘One infection among health workers is one too many. Doctors, nurses, and other health professionals are our mothers, brothers, and sisters. They are helping to save lives endangered by COVID-19. We must make sure that they have the equipment, skills, and information they need to keep themselves, their patients, and colleagues safe’. Matters are as bad – or worse – elsewhere; in late May, two organisations of Brazilian nurses (the Federal Council of Nursing [COFEN] and the International Council of Nurses [ICN]) اعلام کرد that Brazil had the highest numbers of nurses – mostly زنان – die from COVID-19.
نظرات صمیمانه دکتر معتی مرا به یاد ما انداخت شماره پرونده 29 (2020 ژوئن) ، سلامتی یک انتخاب سیاسی است. Our researchers spoke with healthcare workers in Argentina, Brazil, India, and South Africa to learn about the conditions of their work and their concerns about how their governments have been managing the pandemic. ‘Even before we got into COVID-19’, said Lerato Madumo, the President of the Young Nurses Indaba Trade Union in South Africa, ‘our health system was already ailing. At the top of the list was the shortage of nurses. We went into this pandemic with a skeleton nursing staff’. Each of the people we spoke to told us that their public healthcare systems had been weakened by austerity budgets, often enforced by wealthy bondholders and the International Monetary Fund, who demanded the debt service payments and did not care that this money came out of the public health, public education, and public welfare budgets. It is a good reason to join the call to لغو بدهی کشورهای در حال توسعه
در ماه آوریل، WHO - همراه با شورای بین المللی پرستاران و پرستاران در حال حاضر - منتشر کرد گزارش called ‘State of the World’s Nursing 2020’. The key number in this report is that the world has a deficit of nearly six million nurses. Stunningly, 89% of the shortage is concentrated in the Global South, ‘where the growth in the number of nurses is barely keeping pace with population growth’. It is worth pointing out that فشار توسط صندوق بین المللی پول برای پایین نگه داشتن دستمزدهای بخش دولتی در ازای کاهش بدهی منجر به دستمزد پایین برای پرستاران می شود که بسیاری از آنها پس از آن مهاجرت to higher wage countries, creating what Zuhal Yeşilyurt Gündüz calls a ‘care drain’.
وقتی از پرستاران صحبت می کنیم، عمدتاً در مورد زنان صحبت می کنیم و در اینجا باید روی بی توجهی و تبعیض تمرکز کنیم. یک WHO مقاله from March 2019 has a sentence that should give pause to all the sanctimonious rhetoric about gender equality: ‘Women represent around 70% of the health workforce, but earn on average 28% less than men’. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, under the leadership of our Deputy Director Renata Porto Bugni, we are conducting a close study of the gendered impact of the CoronaShock, which will elaborate on such facts. This report will be out in the coming months.
Based on the interviews with health workers conducted by our team for سلامتی یک انتخاب سیاسی است, our dossier developed a sixteen-point agenda to shift the priority of healthcare systems in capitalist countries. Six of them bear special focus:
- Substantially increase COVID-19 testing for health workers.
- با تهیه PPE و ماسک با کیفیت بالا و همچنین سایر تجهیزات ضروری از کارگران محافظت کنید. کارگران خط مقدم باید برای مقابله با این بیماری به اندازه کافی آموزش ببینند.
- فورا بودجه را برای ایجاد مدارس آموزشی برای کارکنان بهداشتی از جمله پزشکان، پرستاران و کارکنان بهداشت عمومی پرداخت کنید.
- افزایش حقوق بهورزان و پرداخت مکرر و منظم آنها.
- Acknowledge that workers have the right to withdraw their labour if they decide that to work entails an imminent risk to their health or life (this is based on the International Labour Organisation Conventions 155 and 187).
- Guarantee the inclusion of health workers’ unions on committees that formulate policies for the health sector in general and for the COVID-19 crisis in particular, and that they have a voice in helping to determine such policies.
اینها خواستههای ابتدایی هستند، سیاستهایی که هر فرد حساسی پس از مشاهده فاجعهای که در طول این همهگیری بر جمعیتهای دولتهای سرمایهداری تحمیل شده است، با آن موافقت میکند. بسیاری از این موارد در دستور کار ده نقطه ای ما برای جنوب جهانی پس از COVID-19 دوباره ظاهر می شوند. باید به این لیست اضافه کنیم:
- Pressure the IMF and the US Treasury Department to no longer dictate the levels of public sector wages as a condition of loans, so that governments in the Global South can compensate their healthcare workers adequately
In September 1947, a doctor in Faqus (in northern Egypt) saw two patients who showed signs of food poisoning; the next day, two more patients arrived, and he advised them to go to the general hospital. The health officer of Al Qarnah (in middle Egypt) ‘was rather perplexed about the reporting of ten deaths during that day’, as a WHO گزارش later noted. Egypt had experienced six previous cholera pandemics (1817, 1831, 1846, 1863, 1883, and 1902), and yet this time the medical officers were unsure what was causing the illness. Cholera spread across the country before the ‘army of doctors, sanitary officials, nursing staff and disinfectors’ could break the chain of infection; 10,277 people died during this outbreak. Rumours that cholera was brought to Egypt by British soldiers garrisoned in the country during World War II were dismissed by the British authorities.
In Iraq, Nazik al-Malaika (1923-2007) heard reports of the cholera outbreak on the radio. Her distress became a beautiful poem, وبا (ترجمه در اینجا توسط حسین حداوی).
شب است.
به ضجه های پژواک گوش کن
بر فراز سکوت در تاریکی....
غم و اندوه پر از درد و رنج
درگیری با ناله ها
در هر دل آتشی هست
در هر کلبه خاموش، غم،
و همه جا، روحی که در تاریکی گریه می کند.شب است.
به صدای پای رهگذر گوش کن،
در سکوت سپیده دم
گوش کن، به دسته های عزاداری نگاه کن،
ده، بیست، نه... بی شمار....
همه جا جسدی نهفته است، عزادار
بدون مداحی یا لحظه ای سکوت...
اعتراض بشریت به جنایات مرگ.
...
وبا انتقام مرگ است.
...
حتی گورکن هم تسلیم شده است
مؤذن مرده است
و چه کسی مردگان را مداحی خواهد کرد؟...
ای مصر، قلب من از ویرانی مرگ پاره شده است.
Even the gravedigger has succumbed to the disease, but so too have the health workers. Our hearts are torn by the ravages of death, by the deep distress of the coronavirus pandemic, the hunger pandemic, the pandemic against hope. Yet, even in the gloom, the poet reminds us that ‘humanity protests against the crimes of death’.
ZNetwork صرفاً از طریق سخاوتمندی خوانندگان آن تأمین می شود.
اهدا