Approximately 13,000 public health professionals attended this year's annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA) in Boston. The Opening General Session on Sunday, November 5, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center featured keynote speakers Helene Gayle, president and chief executive officer of CARE USA, and Paul Farmer, founding director of Partners in Health and Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
HELENE GAYLE
Gayle called poverty a fatal disease that kills millions of people every year through deprivations such as a lack of food, clean water, and access to essential medicines. She described a three-part strategy to combat poverty.
- Embrace a rights-based approach in public health.
- Form partnerships with communities.
- Make women agents for change.
PAUL FARMER
Paul Farmer said the orthodoxies of health and human rights should broaden to include social and economic rights. He asserted that discussions of cost-effective, sustainable policies were prevailing components of human rights discussions, but that scaling up services-particularly within the context of the AIDS epidemic-will be hard to accomplish without considering essential needs such as food, clean water, and education. He decried hidden costs in so-called free antiretroviral programs implemented in some countries, providing an example of a patient who enrolls to receive free treatment only to find out that a chest x-ray or ID is required-at the patient's expense.
Farmer discussed the practicalities of public health, using maternal mortality as an example. Reducing risks to mothers in countries such as Malawi requires measures such as ensuring the availability of operating suites, sutures, and clean drapes. To that end, Partners in Health is teaming up with Physicians for Human Rights, as they have in the past with the Health Action AIDS Campaign.
The Opening Session included comments from Georges Benjamin, executive director of APHA, who focused on the importance of communities in building public health. As an example, APHA has recently launched a "Get Ready" campaign for flu preparedness.
Outgoing APHA president Patricia Mail delivered an address that described the organization's commitment to values such as respect for life and the care of the living, education, diversity, charity, and the objectivity of science.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and Boston Public Health Commission Executive Director John Auerbach described some of the city's and state's public health accomplishments, such as passing a health care reform bill and banning smoking in workplaces.
Sarah Ciambrone accepted a check for $10,000 from APHA to be used by the Boston Health Care for the Homeless program, and Linda Degutis, chair of the APHA board, called attendees to their feet to honor 17 members who passed away this past year.
Copyright, 2007, President and Fellows of Harvard College
