Health for All by the Year 2020: A Sustainable World Must Be a Healthy World

Johannesburg, South Africa
August 2002

At the World Summit in August 2002, Dr. Rath outlined a program for achieving health for all by the year 2020. This program will have far-reaching implications on the health of hundreds of thousands of people in both developing and industrialized countries alike, for generations to come.

After the World Summit, we have been inundated with messages of support for Dr. Rath’s “Health for All by the Year 2020” program from people all over the world. Dr. Rath’s presentation in Johannesburg triggered the long overdue adoption of natural health measures into the public health policies of several countries in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.

As a result of Dr. Rath’s Health for All by the Year 2020 program, newly enlightened governments around the world began to reject the pharmaceutical industry’s “business with disease,” a burden to which their citizens had been yoked to for years. The inalienable truth that natural health measures are a safe, effective and affordable means to cure worldwide endemic diseases can no longer be ignored.

Read Dr. Rath’s program for Health for All by the Year 2020.

Health for All by the Year 2020: A Sustainable World Must Be a Healthy World
The Dr. Rath Health Foundation helps to coordinate natural health programs and clinical studies. As a non-profit organization, it is dedicated to promoting natural health information and protecting the right to natural health against the global interests of the pharmaceutical industry.

Matthias Rath, M.D. is the world-renowned scientist and physician who led a scientific breakthrough in the natural prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease, and more recently, cancer. His discoveries have already saved many lives around the world.

Dr. Rath leads an internationally recognized independent research institute dedicated to eliminate today’s most common diseases with effective, natural, and affordable therapies.

Dr. Rath is a member of the American Heart Association (AHA), the New York Academy of Sciences, and other international organizations. In 2001, he received the prestigious Bulwark of Liberty Award from the American Association of Preventive Medicine for his courage in standing up against the pharmaceutical industry’s plans to ban worldwide natural health information by means of the United Nations’ Codex Alimentarius Commission.

1. Health is a basic human right
Every person is entitled to make use of this right without any restriction. Public institutions and private organizations are to be held accountable for providing lifesaving health information to people around the world. The obstruction to the right of essential health information for all constitutes a crime against humanity.

2. Today, health is not available to every human being – for good reasons
These reasons include social injustice, military conflicts and others. Another significant reason is the fact that the most profitable industry on earth – the pharmaceutical industry – is an investment conglomerate that feeds on the existence and continuation of diseases, despite contrary declarations. The low-cost prevention, treatment, and elimination of diseases threaten this multi-trillion dollar “business with disease.”

3. Most efforts to improve health on a global scale have failed thus far
The World Health Organization’s “Health for All by the Year 2000” effort could not reach its goals because it did not distinctly separate itself from the global “business with disease.” Rather than taking advantage of global advances in medicine, it focused on changes in administrative healthcare.

4. Advances in the field of natural medicine have been made over recent years
This will reduce the worldwide incidence of common diseases in industrialized countries, as well as developing ones to a fraction of their current frequency. The primary cause of the world’s most common health conditions is a chronic deficiency of micronutrients, which are essential for optimum cellular energy metabolism and optimum connective tissue stability.

5. In the industrialized world
Heart attacks, cancer, strokes, diabetes and high blood pressure are the leading causes of death worldwide. Using the available knowledge in nutritional research and Cellular Medicine, these health conditions can be significantly reduced and hundreds of millions of lives saved.

6. In the developing world
Two billion people suffer from deficiencies in micronutrients, according to United Nations organizations. Avitaminosis is a leading cause of disease resulting in blindness for millions and promoting infectious diseases in hundreds of millions. This is because avitaminosis compromises natural cellular defense mechanisms in the body. By taking advantage of nutritional medicinal knowledge already available today, billions of lives can be saved in third world countries.

7. Eradicating today’s most common health problems only depends on one factor: how fast the information about this breakthrough on natural health can spread
While the scientific knowledge to effectively combat these diseases is available and the essential nutrients to prevent these health conditions can be produced at low costs, in any quantity, anywhere in the world, public dissemination of this lifesaving information is being obstructed.

8. The pharmaceutical industry tries to protect its global drug markets at the cost of natural remedies
Effective, non-patentable, and affordable natural health approaches threaten the very existence of the pharmaceutical industry. The multi-trillion dollar global pharmaceutical market depends on synthetic drugs that allow an excessively high investment return based on the patentability of those drugs. To secure the continued existence of the pharmaceutical industry as the most profitable on earth, large corporations have embarked on a global battle to outlaw the dissemination of natural health information. To that effect, the pharmaceutical industry abuses the United Nations’ Codex Alimentarius Commission and other national and international bodies.

9. The people of the world face one of the largest challenges in human history
The profit interests of a few shareholders are threatening the right to health and life for billions of people. The goals of these two interest groups are incompatible by their very nature. Similarly, in the battle to save human lives against the profits from patented drugs, every government and every public and private institution has to take a decision on which side they stand. And it is history, which makes us accountable.

10. Health for All by the Year 2020 is in sight
What is needed immediately is a worldwide effort to promote the importance of natural health benefits.

I call upon:

• The United Nations organizations and other international organizations to promote natural health policies by all means available.
• Politicians in every country to implement natural health as an integral part of national health policies.
• Health professionals to utilize natural health approaches to improve the health of your patients.

I call upon every man and woman to spread this lifesaving information in order to protect your life and the lives of millions of others.

Johannesburg, August 2002
Matthias Rath, M.D.