Disease and Diplomacy. Tuberculosis as a political weapon.

Last year 9 million people contracted tuberculosis and 1.5 million died from the disease. That's bad news for the public health infrastructures of the BRICS, who account for nearly half the TB cases worldwide.

At the same time, however, non government actors with global political agendas, including philanthropies, the pharmaceutical industry and speculators, seek to disrupt  government funded “social net” public health programs.

Events running concurrent with BRICS gatherings like the recent Brasilia meetings in early December 2014, provide these non-state actors with a platform to evangelize their agenda to “offshore” the diplomatic initiatives and public health programs of individual nation-states. Many will  be showing up in Russia to run their complementary meetings around the next BRICS "summit" during mid-2015.

By 2050 BRICS could be co-opted into being members of the "western global governance" alliance 

When the BRIC idea was floated by an opportunistic Goldman-Sachs economist shortly after 911 the idea was to bring the capital resources of emerging economies into a the major powers sphere as an engine of growth. But the crisis of 2007-2008 and early warnings of Cold War-style "currency war" propaganda saw the BRIC nations and their sphere start to take sides in response to their Western counterparts.

As a result the "health security" theme made a classic American-style "bracket creep" into the scenario. Now, BRICS coexist with Western major powers. What the Western powers offer resembles “TED talks” and other mass reeducation projects that project Western cultural and economic hegemony.

While the BRICS and the their growing BRICS "sherpa" operators craft a BRICS policy, the complementary effort  by the "best practices" crowd in the West promotes the modernization and standardization of the management of infectous, viral and other diseases as well as sophisticated file sharing system that raises privacy issues. 

Exploiting the popularity of the “emotions based” economy via conversational social media this TED-style set-up packages-- that the overarching agenda of the "Power Elite" quietly accepts in principle looking forward--  in a humanitarian wrapper.

Because the West exploits this opportunity as a primus inter pars opening, the BRICS health security efforts are overshadowed, move slowly,  and are much smaller in scale

Disease now a Cold War 2.0 weapon.

The manufacturing and monetization of "health security" makes it a strategic and economic issue This poses diplomatic challenges for the BRICS as a group, and as individual nation-states.

Nearly one quarter of all people with TB live in India. according to data provided by World Health Partners, an NGO that brands itself as an organization that “makes markets work for the poor.”  

India's third largest state in terms of population (104 million) Bihar State, is strategically located on the India-Nepal border. A successio of state governments in Bihar have welcomed western initiatives to fight tuberculosis. Bihar also offers low wage labor that can be trained in India's "offshoring" data and server farms industries and in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals like TB vaccines and other medicines. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been an enthusiastic supporter of "made in the West" initiative to combat TB in Bihar. A high profile visit by Gates to India is planned for 2015. 

Soros-fuded group seeks to block aid to low income nations

While major power elite players support projects like Bihar, tthe Open Society Foundations funded principally by hedge fund billionaire George Soros argue that directly funding programs in low income nations( as the BRICS plan proposes), is a flawed approach.

A consequence of this strategy as it relates to TB amounts to Soros and his minions advocating the mass killing off of young people, particularly women. According to the WHO, over 95% of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, and it is among the top 5 causes of death for women aged 15 to 44. For example WHO statistics indicate that:

• In 2013, an estimated 550 000 children became ill with TB and 80 000 HIV-negative children (who do not have the AIDS virus) died of TB.

• TB is a leading killer of HIV-positive people causing one fourth of all HIV-related deaths worldwide.

Credibility issues dog "health security."

A recent headline in the U.S. newspaper and online publication "The Miami Herald" noted that the American online zine www.politifact.com has named the Ebola Scare as the 2014 "Lie of the Year." The Obama administration, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the World Bank led by an America, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and big name NGOs all supported the "Ebola Scare" saying that  over $20 billion was needed immediately to contain the outbreak during  the next 18 months." Their effort faltered.

While tuberculosis has not obtained that kind of negative notoriety, there is a large body of Cold War 2.0 disinformation and misinformation out there about TB and diseases that is linked to inherently political agendas. Just as former U.S. president Jimmy Carter used food as a political weapon against the Soviet Union, tuberculosis has become a political weapon. Helping all people surive should take priority over the old Vietnam era mantra of "winning hearts and minds."  But the "human condition" a branded French philosophical theme that had some status during the 20th century, has no relevance with the truncated attention spans of the 21st century. There is plenty of blame to be spread around.