Blog posts call for policy action condemning intelligence community's use of health campaigns

"It remains to be seen if a new surge of efforts -- a letter of protest from leading public health experts, a petition -- asking the Obama Administration to prohibit spies from pretending to be overseas aid and health workers will force a change in policy," Tom Paulson and Tom Murphy write in the Humanosphere blog. However, "[s]uch protests didn't even garner an official response the last time," they state. Paulson and Murphy summarize the history of resistance to polio vaccinations and aid workers in Pakistan and note Brett Keller, a public health and policy graduate student and a development, launched and based the petition "on a policy paper that made the same call a month ago, written by Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development" (CGD) (1/9). In a separate post on CGD's "Global Development: Views from the Center" blog, Kenny proposes "a declaration by the U.S. that public health interventions will not be used to gather intelligence [that] could play a vital role in tipping the balance towards successful polio eradication -- and enhance U.S. national security" (1/9).