Dr. Paul Farmer spoke at Boston University yesterday on “The Current State of Global Health.” PHOTO BY SUSIE TERASAKI/DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF
Over 600 students, faculty, and general public filled Boston University’s Jacob Sleeper Auditorium yesterday afternoon as Dr. Paul Farmer, founding director of Partners in Health and advisor to Hope Through Health, gave Boston University’s 25th annual Stanley P. Stone Distinguished Lecture. Farmer drew upon his medical efforts in Haiti and the ebola crisis in West Africa to highlight the major challenges facing global health today.
In a prior interview, Farmer cites the end of ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea: “We brought down Ebola, but it took out the health system along the way.” Now the health systems in these countries need to be repaired, but challenges such as the absence of trained specialists and weak infrastructure stand in the way. He named these, along with prevention versus care, fixed costs, cost of inaction, and non-sustainability as the “six pitfalls of global public health.”
During his talk, Farmer emphasized healthcare as a right for all. He also called upon universities such as BU and Harvard to commit their resources to rebuilding, saying that the biggest threats to progress are “a failure of imagination and a lack of persistence.” Hope Through Health firmly believes that health is a human right, and continues to work to ensure quality and affordable healthcare for our patients in Togo!
Read more about his talk here.