GUEST COLUMN
Young Advocates
Meet Our Featured Guest Columnist: Janet Collier
Janet Collier is a history teacher at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland. Each year, she holds the Global Health Conference for everyone in the seventh grade. Students work with teachers to research and create exhibits about the health needs of different countries. They display their finished projects, on topics from HIV/AIDS to hospital funding, at a special event for parents and the rest of the school, where they answer questions and talk about what they have learned.
A: It is important that we take personal responsibility for our health, but we cannot, as single individuals, ensure that we have safe drinking water and enough healthy and affordable food to eat, that the infrastructure around us is safely constructed, that we will not be exposed to disease or develop cancer, or that we will never be the victim of an accident, not to mention being unable to take care of ourselves due to either our youth or our age. It is in everyone's interest that the people on this planet be as healthy as they can be and receive the care they need when they aren't. The more people who can fully participate in their families, their communities, their countries, and the world, and the more people who are able to realize their full potential, the better off everyone will be. The world more than ever is a collaborative project, and the more people who can contribute their work and their ideas, the more likely we are to find solutions to our many challenges. Furthermore, how can you justify agreeing to, implicitly, the pain and suffering of innocent people due to malnutrition, disease, and injury?
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.