A local court in the Almaty oblast has blocked the website for the World Health Organization in Kazakhstan because of its newsletter on suicide. The court said the WHO provided “information on ways to deprive a person of life, as well as information propagandizing a suicidal mood.” Evidently, any discussion of clinical depression will kill a reader on sight. The October decision, which affects the whole country, has just come to light.
The WHO website (who.int) includes a newsletter, "Suicide prevention." Quoting from it: “It is estimated that around 20% of global suicides are due to pesticide self-poisoning, most of which occur in rural agricultural areas in low- and middle-income countries. Other common methods of suicide are hanging and firearms. Knowledge of the most commonly used suicide methods is important to devise prevention strategies which have shown to be effective, such as restriction of access to means of suicide.”
The World Health Organization is an agency of the United Nations. Today’s website (who.int) advises on how measles increasingly threatens 40 million children. It offers advice and data about Covid-19 and the health emergency in Ukraine. And it provides dozens of large databases, including statistics on “death and disability globally, by region and country, and by age, sex and cause” for 2000 through 2019.
Why doesn’t the government override this inane decision by a city judge and restore access to a vital resource?
—Leon Taylor, Baltimore tayloralmaty@gmail.com
Reference
Olga Loginova.
(2022). World Health Organization
website blocked in Kazakhstan. Vlast’
(Power). November 25.
No comments:
Post a Comment