Yesterday afternoon at the Loeb Theater, Harvard hosted a forum celebrating the tenth edition of their journal Health and Human Rights. This edition is the journal's first to be presented in open-access format, meaning that anyone can read it without paying the exorbitant fees associated with most journal articles. Bostonist was in the front row as Agnes Binagwaho, Gavin Yamey, Philip Alston, and Paul Farmer (profiled as “a man who would cure the world” by Tracy Kidder) discussed the past, present, and future of global health policy.
The most compelling aspect of the discussion dealt with the dilemmas faced by doctors worldwide, and particularly in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, in instituting the best practices for treating AIDS and other serious outbreaks. Most hospitals have extremely tight budgets, forcing them to rely on free (and sometimes factually incorrect) abstracts of published research, rather than the expensive full papers. This can cause trouble: Yamey noted that one South African hospital worsened its AIDS treatment program because of erroneous information contained in the abstract of a journal article. Yamey went on to say, “removing access barriers will… share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich.” This sentiment was echoed by Binagwaho, who heads up the effort to combat AIDS in Rwanda, and noted that increased Internet availability combined with open-access publication will enable rapid implementation of new treatment techniques at the community level.
While the talk lauded the effect that freer dissemination of research results could have on impoverished communities, it failed to propose effective ways to distribute such information. On the whole, the speakers seemed surprisingly confident that continued efforts by the public sector—whether through the auspices of the UN or individual governments—would have the intended impact on the lives of the world’s poorest people. Alston described his work with the UN in investigating extrajudicial killings in Guatemala, then (along with he Farmer) excoriated the Guatemalan government for not bringing in enough revenue to improve the country’s health care infrastructure. Both failed to consider that a higher tax take in that case could easily go towards rearming those death squads, not revamping health coverage.
More on access to information after the jump.
Perhaps predictably, the speakers championed the idea of including a right to receive health care in the larger framework of human rights. However, as in the example above, the panel members sometimes appeared unconcerned that many of the poorest countries have governments that show little regard for any rights of their citizens. The right to health care would undoubtedly be just another addition to the list of rights that are already ignored and even trampled on. Nonetheless, this strengthens Binagwaho’s point that freer availability of cutting-edge research enables local reforms that evade the waste, fraud, and abuse that plague governments worldwide and are particularly crippling in developing countries. Hopefully, removed from the time constraints of yesterday’s presentation, issues of implementing and defending health care rights are more effectively addressed in the journal itself.
We applaud the nobility of yesterday’s speakers, contributors to Health and Human Rights, and others across the world working to draw attention to the problems faced by those at the bottom of the global economic ladder. We also encourage you to read the journal and get involved in any way you can if you think you have some solutions at the ready. In addition, if you are interested in the topic of technological progress in the developing world, Rwandan President Paul Kagame is speaking at MIT this afternoon at 3:30.
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
