The missing public
Where is the public in public health policy?
Years ago, when this author studied policy making in public health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, his teachers harped regularly on one point. They said public health is 90 per cent about people and just 10 per cent about drugs and other medical paraphernalia. The truism seems to have been overturned today.
Public health is today all about the business of medicines, drugs, vaccines. Patents and profits are the over-riding mantras. Consider research on hiv/aids. N early 25 million people have died of the disease since it was discovered in 1981. Thirty million are living with the disease. Most health research institutions including the Bill Gates Foundation accept that a vaccine on aids is beyond the capacities of a single country, a single team of scientists or a single institution.Yet funding encourages individual research, not concerted efforts.
At the same time, drug majors like Glaxo SmithKline and Merck have discovered vaccines for cervical cancer and market it aggressively in Europe and usa. Merck has marketed Gardasil aggressively, while Glaxo SmithKline has also been bellicose about Cervarix. Millions of girls have already been vaccinated in the US and Europe. And these vaccines have supporters among European and American doctors, even legislators.
Diane Harper, professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School in the US says,
Related Content
- Assessing effectiveness of India’s industrial emission monitoring systems
- Climate-related development finance to agrifood systems: global and regional trends between 2000 and 2021
- More than a billion reasons: the urgent need to build universal social protection for children
- Addressing inequalities and getting back on track to end AIDS by 2030
- Capital Gains: Clean Air Action in Delhi-NCR- What next?
- Wastewater Zero: A call to action for business to raise ambition for SDG 6.3