Medicine

A century's worth of efforts to better understand the epidemiology of tuberculosis (TB) and to develop new vaccines, drugs, preventive interventions, and case-finding approaches have provided important insights and helped to advance the field of epidemiology as a whole. Wade Hampton Frost developed methods for cohort analysis that formed the early basis for adjustment of confounding variables.

Ryan examines the history of tuberculosis and the scientists whose research eventually led to the ability to cure TB in individuals: Gerhard Domagk, a German who worked literally while WW II bombs destroyed his surroundings; Jorgen Lehman, a Dane, who envisioned a cure via a molecule of aspirin; and Selman Waxman, US soil scientist, who with his associate Albert Shatz, discovered streptomycin.

For nearly thirty years, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has traveled to some of the most impoverished places on earth to bring comfort and the best possible medical care to the poorest of the poor. Driven by his stated intent to "make human rights substantial," Farmer has treated patients―and worked to address the root causes of their disease―in Haiti, Boston, Peru, Rwanda, and elsewhere in the developing world. In 1987, with several colleagues, he founded Partners In Health to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care.

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.

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.

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor.

More than 35 years since the HIV/AIDS pandemic began, HIV continues to cause almost two million new infections each year, and the “end of AIDS” by 2030 remains elusive.1 Violations of human rights continue to fuel high rates of new infections among key populations and a generalized epidemic in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, as political shifts worldwide threaten not only HIV funding but also progress toward the globalization of human rights, civil society mobilization and advocacy founded firmly on human rights principles have a more vital role to play than ever.

Testimony of Dr. Renslow Sherer, Cook County Hospital, and Phil Wilson, AIDS Project LA, at the First White House Conference on AIDS.

The number of people living with HIV in the USA increased by 50% to 1.115 million persons from 1996 to 2006 and may exceed 1.5 million by 2015. The rising caseloads are straining the HIV care system, while recession and the unknown fate of health reforms are sources of uncertainty. HIV care in the USA evolved within a fragmented healthcare system. Unique community-based support and education linked to diverse multidisciplinary HIV care teams contributed to ‘AIDS exceptionalism’.