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Securing the right

by Lalith Polepeddi on October 9, 2008

Last night we were joined by Prof Michael Diamond, who is a professor of global health at NU. He talked to us about how we can channel enthusiasm for global health to help build sustainable solutions in a talk titled "Moving Beyond Compassion: Making a Sustainable Impact on Improving Health."

I enjoyed how Prof Diamond drew the distinction between unsustainable vs sustainable global health projects. He juxtaposed specific examples such as arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh and an organization called Riders for Health.

To recap, the water project in Bangladesh was an unsustainable solution. In a Bangladesh village, people were drinking water from the same areas they would wash clothes and excrete waste. These unsanitary conditions prompted NGOs to undertake a project where they installed hundreds of water handpumps to help villagers have easy access to clean drinking water. What they didn't realize was that a bed of arsenic leeching into the same underground water layer being tapped by the water pumps. Slide 1 in the attached PPT shows a boy whose left foot was amputated due to years of arsenic poisoning. This unsustainable global health project caused more harm than it did good because their enthusiasm was accompanied with little background knowledge and even less follow-up.

On the other hand, a program called Riders for Health exemplifies a sustainable global health project. They manage health in remote areas by sending health workers on motorcycles to deliver health care. The riders are trained in maintaining the motorcycle to make for reliable, long-lasting, and cost-effective vehicles. The riders' network spans 10.8 million people across Africa, many of whom are receiving health care for the first time in their lives. This sustainable project was achieved through education, cultural sensitivity, and continued follow-up.

We must learn from successful global health projects by analyzing why they were successful. Take the Riders for Health as an example. Rather than give motorcycles to health workers and tell them to go deliver healthcare, this organization trained the workers as to how maintain the motorcycles. I think back to the epic movie Spiderman, where Peter Parker is told by his Uncle Ben that "With great power comes great responsibility." This is true when modified for global health because, "With great education comes great responsibility." When the community is given quality training in a culturally sensitive manner, then the community takes responsibility and ownership of the new tools/medicine they are given. Back to Spiderman, "With great responsibility comes great power." When a community is empowered they can soundly defeat the health issues troubling them. This is what we must do. We must educate ourselves in order to train communities to solve global health challenges.

We educate ourselves and learn how to train others by really understanding Prof Diamond's first slide, which was a quote from the Alma Ata Declaration. It was:

Health, is…not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, [it] is a fundamental human right

A right is defined as a moral principle to which someone is entitled. If everyone is entitled to health, how can it be secured? The forefathers of the US secured our rights by writing them down. Perhaps the Bill of Rights still is as effective as it was 200 years ago because the US federal infrastructure was built based on these rules.

But now we are talking about a global infrastructure that wasn't built on the concept that health is a universal human right. How will writing down the statement "health is a fundamental human right" matter?

I say students will make it matter. Our different experiences and fields of study afford us a diverse range of perspectives that we can contribute to solve global health challenges. In this case, I should modify the question I wrote above to instead read:

"How will I make the statement 'health is a fundamental human right' matter?"

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