Plan widens the research and development gap

Differences on latitude have people suffering from flu on winter in the UK when people is affected from Chagas in Venezuela. Sanitary and demographic differences have people suffering from diabetes and coronary failures in the US when people die from Malaria in Africa. There are epidemiological particularities for every country. Each country should actively advocate for structural elimination and cure of the illnesses predominant in their territory as a public health priority. Underdeveloped countries tend to have a significant deficit on the resources allocated to the health sector, particularly when compared with their developed peers. This lack of resources, parallel to extreme poverty and incapability of the people to finance research by themselves, obligates governments to use most of it advocating for short term priorities. This leaves internal research and development mostly incapable to meet the challenges of the country. [[http://www.scidev.net/en/health/neglected-diseases/]][[http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-03/13/content_4295423.htm]] The huge differences in medical research budget among developed and developing countries explain why great advancements have been made on curing erectile dysfunction or on coronary failures when poor achievements appear on curing tuberculosis, malaria or AIDS in Africa. [[http://books.google.com/books?id=h25piGXAHukC&dq=erectile+dysfunction+research+funding&source=gbs_navlinks_s]] [[http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Ourresearch/Portfolios/Overview/index.htm#P78_4441]] Attached to research comes literature production and knowledge. Almost all of medical literature and papers have been and are being produced in developed countries. This sets up the agenda for worldwide medical teaching, and in an attempt to keep up to date doctors get biased towards the priorities in developed countries. All in all, this notion of a group of countries breeding all knowledge and the other only imparting that knowledge is one of the greatest problems in the status quo. This perspective has doctors in underdeveloped countries instructed in how to cure people in developed ones, and prioritizes the appeasing of the underdeveloped health problems, rather than their elimination. The motion and the counterpart's plan are both based on this perspective. The proposition views the status quo as a great business opportunity for an industry of creating doctors destined to foreign markets. Promoting medical migration to developed countries would further bias research, because in developing countries medical researchers are the ones that lack opportunities the most. This kind of migration would leave developing countries with much less endogenous research and literature production that can properly advocate for the health problems of the majority of people in the world. According to a statistics report by the National Science Foundation, a U.S. federal government agency, "Growth in health-related R&D in the 1990s has supported research on cancer and AIDS as well, but a great deal of the new funding has been directed toward other disease areas. ... but perhaps part of the growth comes also from the influence of disease-specific lobbying groups". [[http://nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c4/c4s1.htm#c4s1l1]]. Here we see how North American health research priorities and funding are greatly influenced by the more than 60 medical special interest groups registered to the National Institutes of Health, which include the "Tobacco and Nicotine special interest group" (did you see Thank you for smoking?) or the "Mouse Club" (which advocates for research on "Murine Molecular Genetics") [[http://www.nih.gov/sigs/sigs.html]]. In order to meet the 21st. century's health challenges we must prioritize research on health problems affecting the majority of the people, instead of taking actions such as the counterpart's plan, which further promote research on the problems of the wealthy.