Public Health Superstars Highlighted on PBS

Last night PBS premiered “RX for Survival - A Global Health Challenge,” a three-part, six-hour series on worldwide public health. Focusing on innovations in the last century, including vaccines and antibiotics, the series highlights efforts to eradicate disease around the world and comes at a timely moment: The Massachusetts State Legislature is debating a bill that would change healthcare coverage in the state and the White House just yesterday, released a plan to address the potential avian flu problem in the US. The series is produced by PBS’s NOVA Science wing and hometown-station-makes-good, WGBH. While Bostonist would like to think it’s coming from ourAllsong (but soon-to-be-Brighton) neighbors, we are fairly confident that most of the content came out of offices in NYC. But there is a focus on two local Public Health Superstars, Paul Farmer and Jim Young Kim, (both graduates of Harvard Medical School). who appeared as prominent figures in the second hour of the show last night with their fight to eliminate curable diseases in underserved populations.

Founders of the organization Partners in Health (Bostonist once confused this with Partners Healthcare, which is totally different), Farmer and Kim, were included in US News and World Report’s “America’s Best Leaders” earlier this week. Bostonist was happy to see the Hub connection when “RX for Survival” mentioned Boston in the coverage of Partners in Health's techniques: Drug smugglers are often stigmatized but, for the first time when watching a PBS presentation, one in particular was lauded. Jim Young Kim was shown walking through the Lima, Peru airport, breezing by customs with a suitcase full of medicine to treat TB. It’s sort of a reverse smuggling, from Boston to South America. Even with a note indicating the cargo as a "Gift from Harvard Medical School," customs practices in Peru have been a hangup for PIH's effort.

Trying to edumacate ourselves, Bostonist is tuning into the series. We’re bound to miss one of the next installments, but, well, it’s on PBS, so we’re sure it will be rebroadcast. With all the newsy talk about health crises with Katrina, earthquakes in Pakistan, and the continuing AIDS problems in Africa, to mention only a few, an accessible PBS special is teaching us some basics we didn’t know before, even if it's still a bit sensationalized. Bostonist’s recommendation: take your bathroom breaks during the dramatizations of 18th century discoveries. It’s on PBS, there are no commercials.

Image courtesy of Partners in Health