GUEST COLUMN
|
January 2010
Meet Our Featured Guest Columnist: Laura Janneck
Laura Janneck served as the American Medical Student Association’s Global Health Education Coordinator in 2008. She was inspired to attend medical school after seeing the slums of Brazil and recognizing the links between poverty and disease.
Q: What does "health and human rights" mean to you?
A: More and more, people are coming to understand health as a human right, as something that all people are entitled to, no matter where or under what circumstances we are born. Just as civil rights have gained widespread recognition in the past 50 years, social and economic rights such as health care are taking hold in our collective consciousness as fundamental to the human condition. This recognition holds us responsible for ensuring that these rights are upheld. We cannot stand idly by as human rights such as the right to the highest attainable standard of health are violated. Each of us is responsible to challenge the structural violence and systems of inequity that violate the right to health, and to create a world that upholds this right for everyone.
A: More and more, people are coming to understand health as a human right, as something that all people are entitled to, no matter where or under what circumstances we are born. Just as civil rights have gained widespread recognition in the past 50 years, social and economic rights such as health care are taking hold in our collective consciousness as fundamental to the human condition. This recognition holds us responsible for ensuring that these rights are upheld. We cannot stand idly by as human rights such as the right to the highest attainable standard of health are violated. Each of us is responsible to challenge the structural violence and systems of inequity that violate the right to health, and to create a world that upholds this right for everyone.