Asia

"Since the first cases of a then-unidentified pneumonia were reported in late December, hoaxes, half-truths and flat-out lies have proliferated, mostly through social media."

The rampant spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), first identified in Wuhan, Hubei, China, has stirred panic and an unwelcoming sentiment towards Chinese people across the world.

People are increasingly aware of the role that water has in shaping society and how it impacts quality of life. This is the first book to provide a holistic perspective on water, capturing the full breadth of the science, technology, policy, history, and future outlook for the most important substance on earth — written at a level accessible to non-experts in each of these areas.

The field of global health has roots in the AIDS pandemic of the late 20th century, when the installation of health care systems supplanted older, low-cost prevention programs to help stem the spread of HIV in low- and middle-income Africa. Today's global health is rooted the belief that healthcare is a human right, and that by promoting health we can cultivate equity and social justice in places where such values aren't always found.

Albert Calmette (1863–1933) was a well-known French physician and bacteriologist. He started his career as a naval medical officer and participated in several expeditions to the French colonies, including Saint-Pierre et Miquelon and Gabon. In 1891, he founded the Pasteur Institute in Saigon in French Indo-China, which is now Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and became its first head. He returned to France in 1894 and was asked to found another Pasteur Institute in Lille in Northern France, where he worked as its manager from 1896 to 1919.

This special section of Health and Human Rights Journal focuses much-needed attention on tuberculosis (TB) and human rights—particularly the right to health.

Trained in India and at Johns Hopkins University where she and her husband, Dr Ajay Bang, learnt public health and research methodologies, the couple returned to India to set up a health clinic in Maharashtra's neglected Gadchiroli district, about 170 km from Nagpur, where the Gonds are the dominant tribal group. As co-author Rupa Chinai points out, this is a very old centre of settlement of about 3000 years, from here stretches eastwards the tribal crescent that arcs across Central India and encompasses the ancient Dandakaranya forest.

Institutions matter for the advancement of human rights in global health. Given the dramatic development of human rights under international law and the parallel proliferation of global institutions for public health, there arises an imperative to understand the implementation of human rights through global health governance. This volume examines the evolving relationship between human rights, global governance, and public health, studying an expansive set of health challenges through a multi-sectoral array of global organizations.

We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?

From the Publisher Modern human rights, born in the aftermath of the Second World War and crystallized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, reflect a broader, societal, approach to the complex problem of well-being. While health is mentioned only once in the document, human rights are about the societal preconditions for physical, mental and social well-being. Health care professionals are generally unaware of the key concepts, meaning and content of modern human rights.