‘Shortchanging World Health’

The reason behind “the connivance of the State Department’s Office for International Organization Affairs (in) crippling (the United Nation World Health Organization’s) ability to fight disease and advance public health” (“Shortchanging World Health,” Editorial, July 16) is that that office has come under the control of an extreme right-wing group campaigning to get the U.S. out of the U.N. called the Heritage Foundation.

Nine Heritage hatchet men hold key posts in that office; most shocking of all is the choice for director of policy planning and research, Roger Brooks, who, while at Heritage, wrote attacks on U.N. peacekeeping operations, the U.N. Department of Public Information, UNICEF, and the U.N. Convention on the International Sale of Goods that were later shown to have 80 omissions, distortions and outright misstatements of fact between them!

Chiefly to protect multinational corporations, the Heritage Foundation--which preaches a buyer-beware, public-be-damned, profits-over-people economic philosophy one thought went out with President McKinley--has urged U.S. withdrawal from WHO over the Infant Formula Code, a similar proposed code regarding pharmaceutical drugs, and a proposed ban on cigarette advertising no different than what U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has proposed. The Heritage gremlins at State have evidently found something better than withdrawal--bankrupting WHO by withholding most of the U.S. assessment. Is it WHO today, the Federal Drug Administration and the surgeon general’s warning tomorrow?

JOHN W. OSBORN JR.

President

Southern California Division

United Nations Assn. of the U.S.A.