Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Grecian Formula Wholesale

The increase of tuberculosis is linked to IMF loans

Today in The New York Times : "The increase of tuberculosis is linked to loans from the IMF," by Nicholas Bakalar. As I am not persuaded that our media will cause a lot of (currently, it is rather the subjects season Paris-Plage), I give you translation house
A new study has discovered that the rapid increase in the number of tuberculosis cases in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is strongly correlated to obtain loans from the Monetary Fund (IMF).

Critics have suggested that the Fund's financial requirements lead governments to reduce spending on health to obtain loans. This, the authors say, helps explain the link established by their study.

The Fund strongly refutes this conclusion, saying the former communist countries are in much worse without loans.

"TB is a disease that takes time to develop," says William Murray, a spokesman for the Fund, "so the increased mortality rate is certainly related to something that occurred prior financings the IMF. This is only a scientific hoax. "

The researchers studied health statistics in 21 countries and found that obtaining an IMF loan was associated with an increase of 13.9% of cases of tuberculosis each year, from 13.3% the number of people living with the disease and 16.6% of deaths due to TB.


The study, published Tuesday in the journal PLoS Medicine , controlled statistically a number of other factors that influence the rates of tuberculosis, including the prevalence of AIDS, inflation rates , urbanization, unemployment rates, age of the population and improved medical care.

The study coordinator, David Stuckler, a research associate at Cambridge University, defended it against critics of the Fund, indicating that the researchers examined whether the increased mortality could not cause obtaining loans rather than the reverse.

Instead, they found that the increase in tuberculosis mortality followed the loan, each extra percent of loan is linked to a 0.9% increase in mortality. And when a country leaves a funding program of the IMF, the mortality rate fell by 31% on average.

"When you find a correlation, you raise an eyebrow," says Stuckler. "But when you find more than 20 correlations in the same direction, you begin to establish a strong link between cause and effect."