GUEST COLUMN
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Community Health
Meet Our Featured Guest Columnist:
Dr. Jack Geiger
Dr. Jack Geiger is a founding member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and established the first community health centers in the United States.
Q: How did you first get involved in health and human rights issues?
A: I've been involved in civil rights and human rights for 65 years, since I first started as a teenager in 1942. That was in college in Madison, Wisconsin, and I ended up working with Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph on the first planned march on Washington, which not many people know about, the threat of which produced FDR's executive order banning discrimination in defense plants. A year later, I was one of the people who started, I think, the second chapter in the country of the Congress of Racial Equality with Jim Farmer and it has just gone on in one way or another since then.
A: I've been involved in civil rights and human rights for 65 years, since I first started as a teenager in 1942. That was in college in Madison, Wisconsin, and I ended up working with Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph on the first planned march on Washington, which not many people know about, the threat of which produced FDR's executive order banning discrimination in defense plants. A year later, I was one of the people who started, I think, the second chapter in the country of the Congress of Racial Equality with Jim Farmer and it has just gone on in one way or another since then.
Meet Our Featured Guest Columnist:
Dr. Juan Manuel Canales Ruiz
Dr. Juan Manuel Canales Ruiz is a physician, epidemiologist, and health and human rights advocate. For over twenty-five years he has worked with indigenous populations in conflict-affected regions in Mexico and Ecuador. He has founded community health and education programs and currently works at the Hospital San Carlos Altamirano in Chiapas, Mexico. Dr. Canales Ruiz is the 2006 recipient of the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights.
Q: What does health and human rights mean to you?
A: Health has been a banner of the fight for social movements in the past and by the unionists, generally the organized population. Public health services should be of good quality and with human warmth, so that the patient has confidence and won't be mistreated by those who work in hospitals, health centers, and health clinics.
In the past century after two world wars where human rights of the civilians were violated, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Men and Women had to be written, spelling out all human rights. Governments around the world are signatories of the Declaration, thus are obligated to comply, upholding all human rights, [including the right to health].
A: Health has been a banner of the fight for social movements in the past and by the unionists, generally the organized population. Public health services should be of good quality and with human warmth, so that the patient has confidence and won't be mistreated by those who work in hospitals, health centers, and health clinics.
In the past century after two world wars where human rights of the civilians were violated, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Men and Women had to be written, spelling out all human rights. Governments around the world are signatories of the Declaration, thus are obligated to comply, upholding all human rights, [including the right to health].