Health Workers Poaching From Sub-Saharan Africa Should Be Deemed a Crime: Experts
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TORONTO—The poaching of doctors, nurses and pharmacists from sub-Saharan Africa by developed countries ought to be viewed as an international crime, a group of public health researchers from Canada and other countries argue in a leading medical journal.
The researchers, a number of whom are from the B.C. Centre of Excellence for HIV-AIDS, say the practice of richer countries filling their health-care vacancies by recruiting in South Africa and other personnel-poor African countries is a violation of the human rights of the people of affected African nations.
“There are more Malawian physicians in Manchester (England) than there are in Malawi,” said lead author Edward Mills, a medical epidemiologist with the B.C. Centre.
“The problem is probably the biggest public health problem in all of Africa.”
Dr. Julio Montaner, the director of the centre—and the next president of the International AIDS Society—is the senior author on the commentary. It will be published Saturday in The Lancet.
Countries such as Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia are home to thousands of doctors, nurses and pharmacists from Africa. Some have chosen to immigrate themselves, but many have been lured to their new homes with offers of an enormous increase in pay, moving expenses and help to navigate the visa and citizenship processes.
The number of doctors from sub-Sarahan countries alone who are working in the four countries is staggering—an estimated 13,272.
Mills himself was on an operating table in South Africa last year after suffering an accident. He said the physician’s cellphone buzzed several times throughout the procedure; the doctor told him the calls were from recruiters.
When Canada or another wealthy country recruits in South Africa—as the Shoppers Drug Mart chain was attempting to do with pharmacists last fall—the effect is like tumbling dominos. South Africa in turn fills its vacancies by recruiting from other, less affluent African countries.
The problem in many countries is dire, with doctor to patient ratios that are completely untenable. In Malawi, there is one doctor for every 50,000 people, while in Canada there is one for every 500.
While the battle to get affordable antiretroviral drugs to Africans with HIV-AIDS is paying off, the health-care workers to deliver the drugs don’t exist, Mills said.
He noted that in Northern Uganda, nurses aides—people with a year or two of training—are now being trained to undertake the delicate task of starting HIV-positive infants on antiretroviral therapy. It’s a job best performed by pediatricians, but there are none to do it.
Many of the plundered countries have taken to training health-care staff to sub-optimal levels—medical officers instead of doctors—so they are less desirable to foreign recruiters, Mills said, noting it is the only way they can hang onto personnel.
He and his colleagues contend that the impact of this poaching of Africa’s health-care professionals constitutes an international crime that is contributing to the deterioration of essential health-care services on the continent.
Dr. Amir Attaran, a Canada Research Chair in law, population health and global development policy, sympathizes with the aim of the argument. But he said he does not agree with the position that poaching health professionals is a crime under international law.
“I don’t have any difficulty saying that it would be lovely and I would prefer to live in a world where it were criminal,” said Attaran, who teaches in the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Population Health and the faculty of law.
“But their argument is that already customary international law tells us that this recruitment should stop. . . . That is an incorrect understanding of what customary international law is.”
Attaran co-authored an article published in January by the Canadian Medical Association Journal which denounced Shoppers Drug Mart for recruiting in South Africa. He said Canada’s policy in the early 1990s to cut back enrolment spots in medical schools created a situation where this country can’t now—and won’t be able in the foreseeable future—meet its own need for doctors.
“If you want to look at it over a course of two decades, our management of health systems in this country has gone from nearly negligent to morally reprehensible,” he said.
“The negligent decision was we wouldn’t train, and it would save us a few dollars here and there. The reprehensible one is we go: ‘Oh, we should have trained. We didn’t. Gosh. Well, let’s just poach.”
(Posted on February 26, 2008)
Comments
I’m sorry, but when my life is on the line, I want the best…the heirs of the great Hippocrates X, the inventors of penicillin, the CAT scan…bring me the sub-Saharan black doctors!!!! That is the unmatched educational and scientific legacy I trust.
Posted by Ryan Chaserian at 7:03 PM on February 26
What about the rights of the doctors to live and practice where they choose? If they want to leave Africa shouldn’t they be able to? It doesn’t matter if they were “lured” away, it is THEIR choice.
Posted by What? at 7:19 PM on February 26
Wonderful! the answer is celar. We need to refuse visas to immigrant doctors and nurses and hir our own, so we don’t “poach” in a foreign country. While we are at it, we need to stop recruiting teachers, policemen, administrators, professors and any oher professional people.
And we should start immediately with India and China.
Both are such poverty-stricken godforsaken places that at least a billion people are living without adeqquate food, shelter or medical care.
So make all the Indians and Chinese stay home for the sake of their own people!
It is because we LOVE them that we want their talented immigrants and student s to stay home.
Next time some liberal lays that you-are-a-racist rap on you, hit ‘em back with how liberals are nasty because they love “poaching”, they love robbing Africa and India and China of their talented people.
How they love tearing poor Filipinas away from their families [see today’s other articles] to suckle their white babies because white liberal career women are too coldhearted and money-grubbing to take care of their own children.
Posted by Big Bill at 8:09 PM on February 26
Do I snort the magic powder or blow it into the air?!?…
Posted by Tim Mc Hugh at 8:56 PM on February 26
I wouldn’t let one of those third-world excuses for a doctor touch me.
A number of years ago I required services at an ER and was attended to by some foreigner, whom I innately distrusted and refused his services. He told me that “you should be more grateful that I am willing to treat you”. EXCUSE ME?! I am paying my own bill!
They all can stay home and attend to their own.
Posted by kitty at 9:08 PM on February 26
The real issue here is most of these people are, in fact white. Whites are fleeing africa, although they’ve lived there for generations. Why? Because blacks are making it clear they intend to ethnically cleanse them.
In africa, whites fill MOST legitimate roles requiring professional labor, especially medicine. Why? Because the IQ necessary for these jobs is extremely rare among african blacks.
Like most hallmarks of civilization, black nations are extremely dependent on whites to maintain them. Without whites, these hallmarks of civilization collapse. Whites are fleeing ethnic violence in africa. Most doctors are white. So, the healthcare system collapses.
This is an non-sustainable situation in africa. Without whites, most of the population is doomed to a grim death (mostly from HIV + TB). There is nothing that can reasonably be done about it either. Whites will do what we always do….attempt to help. Like what happened in New Orleans, they will be shot at. Then they will leave.
Posted by at 9:25 PM on February 26
The article did not mention whether the poached doctors were black or white. While a number are undoubtedly black, I suspect that a number of them, especially from South Africa, may be whites. Two things need to be said. If sub-saharan african countries valued their medical workers so much, why do they not provide inducements of their own to keep these people in their home countries? The answer to this question is the obvious. The living conditions in these countries are so backward, and the people and governments so corrupt and self serving, that they don’t value what they have and so treat it carelessly, especially if you happen to be white in one of these pestilence ridden hell holes. The second thing to be said is that africa need not worry for too much longer if all these medical workers being taken to the white homelands are black. It won’t be very long before the white countries themselves become aids infested hell holes filled with the teeming non-white masses also being imported. Why leave one hell hole for another?
Posted by Baron at 9:28 PM on February 26
The doctors should be free to leave and countries should be free to lure.
African countries could try to lure them back with awards of land, or maybe sell a large portion of their country to a country that has a good constitution. If there was a large libertarian country taking up a quarter of what used to be Rwanda, a lot of productive people would move there, especially if it protected liberty better than the United States does. If the country was shaped strangely enough no part of it would be very far for the Rwandans to travel to go to the doctor.
Also, even more simply,
Afrcan countries could improve their standards of livings by luring lots of productive people with ultralibertarian regimes.
Posted by powerplay at 9:30 PM on February 26
“The poaching of doctors, nurses and pharmacists from sub-Saharan Africa by developed countries ought to be viewed as an international crime, a group of public health researchers from Canada and other countries argue in a leading medical journal.”
“Developed” countries actually try to “poach” doctors and nurses from the most backward and “un-developed” place on the earth?
Posted by idareya at 9:37 PM on February 26
Displacing native-born Amrericans from their tech jobs should be hanging offense, if you ask me.
Posted by at 9:42 PM on February 26
According to vdare.com, there are more Ethiopian Doctors in the city of Chicago,(not the greater metro area but just the city), than there are in Ethiopia.
Posted by at 9:53 PM on February 26
A Crime?!! The West sends billions to Africa to treat these diseases only to be stolen by corrupt African officials. Is that not a crime? Africa has ample aid money to pay its doctors enough to retain them. The money is lost through corruption and incompetence on the part of blacks. Naturally after all the West does for Africa, they still manage to blame us for all their problems. Giving them money is like throwing money down an infinitely deep hole.
Posted by new yorker at 10:40 PM on February 26
What about the rights of the doctors to live and practice where they choose? If they want to leave Africa shouldn’t they be able to?
Are you out of your mind? Do you want to be treated by a black doctor?
Yes, “poaching” African doctors is a crime — a crime against advanced western medical standards!
Posted by Mike T at 11:02 PM on February 26
Amir Attaran is a bit sensitive about the subject, because he’s also a foreigner who chose to live in the West.
Any talk of limiting the invasion by Pakistanis, Chinese, Indians, or other foreigners into white countries gets a cool reception from those same people.
Posted by at 11:03 PM on February 26
“The poaching of doctors, nurses and pharmacists from sub-Saharan Africa by developed countries ought to be viewed as an international crime, a group of public health researchers from Canada and other countries argue in a leading medical journal.”
There’s an untold story behind this politically correct rag and the oddball who wrote it, and that is these people are not qualified to practice medicine on a par with US standards, but no mention of it is made by the rabid multicults, which constitutes a vicious crime against the public these people will be practicing on.
Blacks in the US are uncommon who can qualify for medical school without getting awarded an affirmative action slot. Considering that black group I.Q. here is 85, which includes mulattos, and only about 70 in Sub-Saharan Africa, I can’t be convinced that these black Africans are somehow qualified to be doctors, because they passed the requirements of some third world butcher factory they declare a medical school.
Whoever is encouraging these black incompetents to migrate here should be vigorously sued everytime they screw up, which I’m pretty sure will be a constant occurrence.
If the racist Obama sneaks past the sentries and gets into office, universal healthcare will require a complete inundation of foreigners, several of whom will no doubt be from Africa, and I imagine the laws will be written to mandate that an individual has to accept an MD the program “assigns” to him, which will be the same as committing murder.
The more things continue to deteriorate, from the economy, to the military, to society in general, the more I’m convinced that the only answer is self-sustaining communities in remote areas for today’s white realists. Entire self-sufficient towns could be built.
Posted by Robert Kelly at 11:28 PM on February 26
I think this article actually brings up a valid point. White people in America and Europe should also be concerned about this because the reality is that, as long as life is miserable in Africa Africans will continue to risk life and limb to leave for whiter pastures. Therefore, robbing Africans of their best minds (whether it be doctors, business men or engineers) is immoral. Perhaps if their governments spent less money feeding Swiss bank accounts and saw to it that those doctors were comfortable in their own countries, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Posted by jewamongyou at 11:42 PM on February 26
Insofar as Western countries are poaching white doctors from South Africa, I say good luck to them and the doctors. They are well trained and very experieenced - particularly in treating trauma cases.
I would suggest that they look very carefully at the qualifications of more recent graduates, though. Particularly black ones with affirmative action degrees.
My daughter recently consulted her regular doctor who told her that the practice had been forced to take on a black partner. The only one they could find was a recent graduate of one of South Africa’s formerly prestigious universities. This man had failed his final exams, but the government let the university know that that was not acceptable, so they arranged for him to do an oral exam. Furthermore, they let him take his cell phone into the exam, and phone a friend when he was stuck for an answer.
Result? Another incompetent African witch doctor with a genuine-looking but quite bogus medical degree. Good luck, Canada, you’re welcome to them.
Posted by AnalogMan at 12:58 AM on February 27
I couldn’t agree MORE!…I’m fed up with seeing MORE and MORE FOREIGN doctors of COLOR and LESS and LESS WHITE AMERICAN DOCTORS!
Posted by Suzan Donoghue at 12:11 PM on February 27
“There are more Malawian physicians in Manchester (England) than there are in Malawi,” said lead author Edward Mills, a medical epidemiologist with the B.C. Centre.”
Does it ever occur to these PC whiners that the reason a bright young man or woman unlucky enough to be born in some African pest-hole like Malawi signs up for Med School in the first place, is because it’s their TICKET OUT OF AFRICA?
There’s no doubt in my mind that, far from being “poached” by the West, most of these 3rd World medics are APPLYING for positions in our countries. Because they want OUT of their own countries. And I can’t blame them.
But just because I can’t blame them, doesn’t mean I want them either.
Physician, heal thyself — and heal thine own country whilst thou is at it.
Posted by The Incredible Shrinking White Man at 1:45 PM on February 27
It’s interesting that these two stories run back to back… I wonder what percentage of doctors who immigrate to Canada are men… and how many of them go on to take brides from somewhere like the Philippines.
Posted by at 11:45 PM on February 27