World Bank Falsified Information On Malaria Treatment, The Lancet

international | rights, freedoms and repression | other press Wednesday April 26, 2006 19:12 by pat c

Yet another example of the double dealing by the World Bank. On this occasion however the bare faced fraud carried out by the World Bank has been exposed. They have been shown to have blood on their hands.

pat

According to a group of health experts, the World Bank published bogus financial and statistical accounts and squandered money on useless malaria treatment. The World Bank says the accusations are unfounded. The World Bank, with an annual budget of $20 billion, is the world's major aid organisation which focuses on eradicating poverty.

The report appears in the journal The Lancet.

The authors of the accusation, Amir Attaran (University of Ottawa, Canada) and colleagues say that since 2000, the World Bank has:

-- Hidden how much it spends on malaria

-- Not kept its promise of $300-500 million for malaria control in Africa

-- Reduced its number of malaria experts from 7 to zero not long after pledging to focus more on the disease

-- Exaggerated its performance by inventing bogus epidemiological statistics

-- Backed treatments in India which The World Health Organization said were obsolete and should not be done

The report suggests that as the World Bank has no experts left, it should hand over $1 billion to other organisations which do have them, such as the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM).

Full story at the link.