Professor Paul Farmer of Harvard University stressed the urgent need for public health improvement in third world countries during his lecture, “Pathologies of Power: Health and Human Rights in the 21st Century” Wednesday night. Farmer, in addition to being a medical anthropologist at Harvard is also an infectious disease physician. He has worked in communicable disease control in the Americas for over a decade and is a renowned authority on tuberculosis treatment and control.
“Having Professor Farmer speak at Wesleyan and meet in forums with students is an amazing opportunity,” said Lee Grodin ’05, a student organizer of the event. “He is incredibly busy so we are lucky to get in on his tour. His work to call attention to the global inequalities in health care can open our minds to how we can address the situation.”
Student organizers raised $700 for Farmer’s organization Partners in Health (PIH) through several bake sales and personal contributions.
Farmer delivered his lecture to a packed crowd at the Center for Film Studies’ screening room, while an overflow audience listened via speakers outside the room.
Farmer opened his lecture with a discussion of the scarcity of AIDS treatment for third world citizens in comparison to the U.S.
“I would hear my patients in Haiti begging for these medications,” Farmer said. He argued that a major culprit in limiting the access of antiretroviral medicine is their high wholesale cost.
Farmer lives in Haiti for most of the year, where he finds an endemic lack of public health and medical facilities.
“I am not a Haitian but an American,” he said. “I have not known these privations but have seen them,”
He said that 280,000 Haitians are estimated to be suffering from AIDS, and roughly 200,000 Haitian children have been orphaned by the illness.
He also told several personal stories about people in the third world dealing with HIV and AIDS, including one of Haitians with AIDS who had to purchase coffins for themselves.
He stressed that a hands-on approach is vital in treating victims of diseases like HIV and AIDS.
“If you sit in a clinic you miss a lot.” Farmer said, “If you don’t go to people’s houses, you won’t learn a lot of about these diseases. We are very militant about community based care.”
There were, however, several success stories, including one about a Haitian man named Joseph who, over six months, made an unprecedented recovery from a very frail state brought on by AIDS. Farmer displayed before and after pictures of Joseph, the earlier showing a dejected and emaciated young man where as the latter one, taken after months of treatment, presented a much healthier and vibrant individual. He stressed that attentive and thorough medical care had significant benefits.
“Women who earlier had been taken care of by their five year olds were now walking around thanks to the medication [and medical attention],” he said.
Farmer closed the talk by insisting that any major change in global health care would have to come from ordinary people and not governments.
“We are never going to have national healthcare if we rely on those in power,” he said. “We have to rely on people like us and it’s the same with global health care.”
Farmer has devoted much of his career to improving health care in poorer nations. He is a founding director in Partners in Health, a charity organization that brings health care to the impoverished. He is currently an attending infectious disease physician and Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“Paul Farmer is a man who asks not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your world,” William Johnston, professor of East Asian studies, history, and Science in Society, said to introduce Farmer.
“I was very impressed with his modesty concerning the magnitude of his good deeds,” said Alex Rosen ’08. “He seems to genuinely think that he hasn’t done enough and needs to do more.”