Harvard Public Health addresses Global Challenges on its 75th
by Irma S. Jarcho The Harvard School of Public Health, celebrating its 75th anniversary this year (1996-97), hosted the Second International Conference on Health and Human Rights in early October 1996. The concluding Plenary Sessions were held the morning of Saturday, 5 October.
Of particular interest was Plenary Session IV, which focused on three global challenges: emerging diseases, women in developing countries, and children. The speakers were Deo Barakamfitiye, speaking on emerging diseases; Mabel Bianco, speaking on women in developing countries; and Stephen Lewis, speaking about children.
Dr. Barakamfitiye painted a grim picture of the health and human rights situation in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are epidemics of meningitis, cholera, measles (probably the biggest killer), plague, and shigellosis. Hemorrhagic fevers include Lassa and Ebola, Rift Valley, and Yellow Fever. The biggest killers of children under five include malnutrition, malaria, and especially infectious diseases. The economic significance of malaria is great -- and growing. Tuberculosis is now approaching global proportions, with two million deaths a year worldwide.
In addition to the toll of diseases there are unsettled conditions in Africa -- the forced displacement of some 30 million Africans, not just in Rwanda, Liberia, and Sudan, but in other countries. These displacements have a dramatic impact on health and human rights.
Dr. Bianco spoke on "The Dilemma of Women's Health in Developing Countries," with special emphasis on Latin America. Sexual and reproductive rights are almost non-existent among women in Latin America, for example. There has been an increase of malnutrition among pregnant women, and poor women can't go to clinics because they have no money.
In Latin America, also HIV and AIDS have emerged as a new problem. Increased numbers of cases have been reported in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.
Dr. Lewis, in turn, concentrated on the rights of children. Although the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child approved a treaty now ratified by 187 of 193 countries, there has been little real improvement in the situation. Child labor has incre ased, in part because of the consequences of armed conflict in developing countries. The rights of children should start at birth, yet some 600,000 women die in childbirth each year.
Considerations of space preclude my reporting further or, perhaps, the picture everywhere is so bleak that I have supped full of horrors.
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