Dr Yogan Pillay, Director: HIV and TB Delivery at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, speaks at the Protea Hotel Cape Town Waterfront Breakwater Lodge. Pic: Supplied
Cape Town - A two-day symposium held in Cape Town marked the official launch of the Health Tax Alliance, urging the government to increase taxes to regulate the consumption of tobacco, alcohol and sugar products.
A number of public health researchers, advocates and advocacy groups, gathered at the Protea Hotel Cape Town Waterfront Breakwater Lodge, yesterday.
Delivering the keynote address was Dr Yogan Pillay, Director: HIV and TB Delivery at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who formerly served as the deputy-director-general of health programmes in the Department of Health.
Pillay’s address was based on the paper he co-authored with Dr Kumanan Rasanathan on behalf of the Equity and Healthy Societies Group, titled: “Can current interlinked crises stimulate the structural and policy choices required for healthy societies?”
“I think we all recognise that there are colliding crises, so there are a large number of crises that are causing the planet to become sick and sicker and the position we take is to think about planetary health more broadly,” he said.
Some of these causes included health crises such as Covid, Mpox, HIV and non-communicable diseases, and inequities, he said.
“We also suggest that unhealthy societies result from inadequate or inappropriate structural and policy choices, at global, national, and sub-national levels, including inadequate responses to the commercial determinants of health,” Pillay said.
Rural Health Advocacy Project, a division of Wits Health Consortium, division director Russell Rensburg said: “Given that the country at the moment is experiencing some financial challenges, our reading is that over the next five years, there won’t be a lot of money for health. So we then came up with this idea that taxes are a very important tool and we looked at the people working on health taxes and we tried to get all of them in the room.
“We all need to agree what good health is and I think our work will be about what is the political responsibility in showing how we prioritise health and I think health taxes is one of those mechanisms...
“We can’t do anything about illicit trade, that’s a different kind of problem, but the core focus of tobacco taxes is to reduce new entrants into smoking.
“Same thing with sugar, if we have less sugar in our beverages, we can still continue drinking, but if they’re killing us, then there should be a responsibility on the corporations, same with our food that is high in salt.”
shakirah.thebus@inl.co.za
Cape Argus
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