Category: Blog

Juliet S. Sorensen America’s opioid epidemic has devastated communities across the country, killing 70,000 people in 2017. Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids have been increasing since at least 1999. The epidemic spread in 2010 with rapid increases in overdose deaths involving heroin, and further spiked in 2013, with significant increases in overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. If we address America’s opioid epidemic from the premise that there is a right…

Continue reading “America’s Opioid Epidemic: A Rights-Based Approach”

Dana Moss and Mor Efrat In early 2017, 39-year-old Faida Abeed from Deir al Balah, Gaza, felt a lump in her breast. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent chemotherapy treatment and excision of the tumor. The necessary follow-up treatment is radio-iodine therapy and for that she would need to leave Gaza as the treatment is unavailable in the Strip. In October 2017, after receiving confirmation that she had…

Continue reading “Politics Deny Cancer Patients their Health Rights in Gaza”

José Ramos-Horta Around the world, people have experienced one of the most widespread and shameful human rights failures of our time—the global war on drugs. Barely a day passes without some tragedy or abuse fuelled by misguided drug policies hitting the headlines. Day by day, the costs of the war on drugs are tallied in the suffering, death, and missed opportunities across the entire drugs market chain, from production to…

Continue reading “Human Rights Day Message—Put Human Rights in Global Drug Policy”

Bernadette O’Hare Many people want to live lifestyles that are in harmony with their values, and to make choices that do not inadvertently harm the economic and social human rights of others. Their priorities may be shaped, in part by the most pressing concerns in the world, such as the environment, inequality between and within countries, and include the planet (climate change), people (the impact our choices have on others)…

Continue reading “Active Global Citizenship: Ethical Living to Promote Human Rights”

Renzo Guinto This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Alma-Ata Declaration, a landmark global health policy document that reinforced health as a fundamental human right and emphasized that gross health inequalities are by no means acceptable. It also prescribed primary health care (PHC) founded on essential health services and community participation as a vital strategy towards achieving ‘Health for All’ by year 2000. In 2018, we still do not…

Continue reading “ALMA-ATA at 40: Time to Expand to Planetary Health Care”

Martha Roberts, Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Farah Shroff, Smita Pakhale, and Lori Hanson As an engaged participant in the 1978 International Conference on Primary Health Care, which issued the Alma-Ata Declaration, Canada affirmed that: The existing gross inequality in the health status of the people particularly between developed and developing countries as well as within countries is politically, socially and economically unacceptable and is, therefore, of common concern to all…

Continue reading “ALMA-ATA at 40: Insights from Canada”

Gillian MacNaughton and Diane F. Frey In the 1970s, two international milestones emerged to advance health for all. In 1978, the International Conference on Primary Health Care—a joint project of the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF—adopted the Declaration of Alma-Ata. The Declaration called “for urgent and effective national and international action to develop and implement primary health care throughout the world and particularly in developing countries.”[1] It also reaffirmed…

Continue reading “ALMA-ATA at 40: From Siloes to Synergy—Linking Primary Health Care to Human Rights”

Curtis F.J. Doebbler The 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration defined the ‘Health for All by the Year 2000’ strategy. Its call for inclusiveness was underpinned by a commitment to the right to health, driven by the World Health Organization (WHO) and its then Director-General Halfdan Mahler (left). The declaration focused on the most vulnerable among us, our children. It advocated an approach to primary health founded in the right to health for all. Alma-Ata signalled…

Continue reading “​ALMA-ATA at 40: Time for WHO to Walk the Talk of Human Rights”

Anthony Costello Few doctors realize that their work is often about human rights. A few years ago Flavia Bustreo, then Assistant Director-General of WHO, and Paul Hunt, the first UN Special Rapporteur on the right to the highest attainable standard of health, wrote to me to ask for some case studies of our community women’s group programs in Asia and Africa. It hadn’t occurred to me that mobilising women through…

Continue reading “ALMA-ATA at 40: The Power of Sympathy Groups and Participation”

Carmel Williams In 1978 when the Alma-Ata Declaration called on urgent action by all governments to protect and promote the health of all, primary health care was described as ‘essential health care, based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology made universally accessible … and at a cost that the community and country can afford to maintain…’. It was also, in the first paragraph, acknowledged as a…

Continue reading “ALMA-ATA at 40: Its Values are Relevant to the Data Economy”