GUEST COLUMN
Infectious Diseases
Meet Our Featured Guest Columnist:
Dr. Paul Farmer
Dr. Paul Farmer is the founding director of Partners In Health, an international aid organization that combines research, training, advocacy, and direct health care services to help people living in some of the poorest areas of the world. Partners In Health empowers local communities by training local residents as doctors, nurses, and outreach workers and allows the views of local residents to shape the actions of the organization. Dr. Farmer developed programs to provide treatment for tuberculosis and HIV patients in Haiti at a time when many argued that these diseases were too expensive to treat in impoverished communities.
A: Social and economic rights, which include the right to health care, have been termed the "neglected stepchildren" of the human rights movements and held up in opposition to the political and civil rights now embraced, at least on paper, by many of the world's governments. So striking is this division within the rights movements that some have come to refer to social and economic rights--that is, the right to health care, clean water, primary education, a decent livelihood, and other basic entitlements--as "the rights of the poor."
Meet Our Featured Guest Columnist: Tanyaporn Wansom
As a member of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), Tanya Wansom raise awareness among medical students about vital health issues. She has trained future physicians to educate local middle school and high school students in their communities about HIV/AIDS, and participates in events such as calls to Congressmen to encourage funding for AIDS relief in Africa.
A: To me, health and human rights means that people, regardless of who they are or where they come from, should have equal value placed on their lives. Although I know this isn't true in the world today, I think it's unconscionable that 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day, which is less than many people in the United States spend on their daily cup of coffee.
As a global AIDS activist, I also equate the lack of access for first-line HIV/AIDS medications as a failure to value others' lives. When life-saving medication can be bought for less than a dollar a day and people are still dying without the opportunity to access these medications, I view this as tantamount to telling them that their lives are not worth that much to the world.