Geneva: Communication Rights in the Information Society, Dec. 8th Report

Members of the KWRU attended the CRIS International meeting where Cheri Honkala addressed the issue of the poor being dissappeared in America. She spoke to media activists from around the world about how being denied access to the media is a life and death situation for poor families in the US and how the media blackout must be broken now.

In the afternoon, we met with representatives of the World Health Organization who recieved us to hear our testimonies about the deadly health care crisis in the United States. Cheri Honkala spoke of her experience of being without health care and of almost dying just a couple months ago from an infection caused by lack of dental care... "I am just one of millions of people in this situation in our rich country," she repeated several times.

Forty four million Americans are without health care on an ongoing basis, and eighty five million have been without health care at some point in the last four years. By official estimates, 18,000 people die every year from not having access to health care in the United States, and every day, people across the country, and especially older people, are forced to buy life sustianing medications in countries such as Canada and Mexico, becuase they cannot afford US prices. Cheri spoke of the devastating effects of homelessness, squalid housing conditions, malnutrition, lack of access to water and heat on the health of millions of poor families in the United States.

The delegation from the PPEHRC went on to inform the representatives of the WHO (who said it had been the first time the WHO had met with a grassroots group from the US) of the PPEHRC plans for a campaign for national health care this year. This campaign will bring together the movement of the poor and unemployed with the labor movement to build a unified, mass movement to force the United States to deal with the health care crisis like the national emergency that it is.

We appealed to the World Health Organization and the international community to intervene in the health disaster in the US by helping to raise the world's awarenesss of this crisis, as well as by providing humanitarian relief by sending doctors to provide life saving medical care to people without medical care in the US.

PHOTOS