Strengthening preventative and curative health services for indigenous people

Improving health care for ethnic minorities

Implementation

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities.

Agenda 21 suggests that services might be strengthened by resource and self-management preventative and curative health services.

Counter-claim

Health officials may be wrong in their attempts to match healthcare, and especially drugs, with race because genetically there is no such thing as race in the human genome and so no such thing as race-based medicine.

Geographical origin (ancestry) appears to be more relevant than a person's self-identified race. For example in the USA, whites are more likely than persons of Asian and African heritage to have abnormally low levels of an important enzyme (CYPD2D6) that metabolizes drugs belonging to a variety of therapeutic areas, such as antidepressants, antipsychotics and beta blockers; other studies have shown that blacks respond poorly to several classes of antihypertensive agents.