Subjects Archives: Health

On 28 July, tens of thousands took to the streets of El Alto, the predominantly working-class and Indigenous city that overlooks La Paz, in a mobilisation called by the Bolivian Workers Centre (Central Obrera Boliviana, or COB), the country’s chief trade union federation, together with other worker, peasant and Indigenous organisations (gathered under the title of the “Pact of Unity”) to demand the TSE hold a general election on 6 September.

The danger doesn’t only come from the symptoms of a virus: it comes from our distorted relationship with the natural world.

The Japanese-owned (Mitsui-operated) MV Wakashio was en route to Brazil from China to fetch iron ore from a port owned by the notorious mining company Vale. Here the ship is seen having run aground near Blue Bay, one of the area’s most pristine sites for coral, already threatened by bleaching due to the climate crisis. Now the marine life and fisherfolk must survive this spill.

In the spring, we shut down our lives and our economy in hopes of reducing the spread of COVID-19 enough to be able to manage it through widespread testing and contact tracing. In spite of that shutdown, today the virus is raging virtually uncontrolled. We didn’t stick with it until the job was done.

“Russia’s health workers and teachers will be the first ones to receive the vaccine in the country,” Russia’s Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said.

Patrick Cockburn examines the threads between the pandemic and the media’s coverage of age of endless war.

Jhuliana Rodrigues works as a nurse technician at the Hospital São Vicente in Jundiaí, Brazil. “It is very difficult,” she says of her job these days. Brazil has just passed 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, with 3 million Brazilians infected with the virus.

In saying that the terrible explosion in Beirut is an ecosocialist issue I am not counterposing this claim to the fact that this is also an issue of corruption, of government incompetence, of health and safety and many other things.

What can a virus tell us about climate breakdown, in its causation and in humanity’s response?

Six months ago, on January 30, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). Ten days before this, the Chinese government had said—to great alarm—that the coronavirus could be transmitted from human to human.

“Now this liberal virus, which pollutes contemporary social thought and eliminates the capacity to understand the world, let alone to transform it, has profoundly penetrated the whole of the ‘historical left’ formed in the aftermath of the Second World War” (Samir Amin, 2003, 41)

No one should have been surprised by COVID-19. Epidemiologists have been warning for decades about the increasing danger of novel virus pandemics that could cause major human suffering, disrupt the economy and exacerbate the growing inequalities that characterizes the modern world.

All told, 54.1 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past nineteen weeks.

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 comparison between teachers and meatpacking workers is highly significant and must be taken as a sharp warning by teachers and all education workers.

World leaders like Trump and Johnson trying to get back to business as usual while the virus continues to spread are deliberately sacrificing public health, writes John Clarke.

Capitalist food production is based on ecological destruction, imperialism, inhumane labor practices, and the degradation of human health. A socialist program that guarantees healthy food for all is the only alternative.

“If the small economy of Cuba can improve the health of millions of the world’s people, imagine what could be accomplished if America’s enormous productive capacity changed from creating useless and destructive junk to producing what people throughout the world actually need.”

Lear Corporation—one of the world’s largest auto parts manufacturers—rose to position 148 on Fortune magazine’s famous list of the 500 largest firms in 2018. It operates with roughly 148,000 workers spread across 261 locations.

The health of the 79-year-old poet has deteriorated alarmingly over the past few weeks. He has been in prison since late 2018 in the Elgar Parishad case which critics say is aimed at silencing dissent in India.