The Global Pulse Journal Blog

This event is organized by the New York Medical Student Coalition Against Torture (NYMSCAT@gmail.com). Email to learn more, request materials, and get involved!

As I have written previously, medical professionals, students, and human rights groups in New York State are teaming up for action to pass the nation’s first law holding medical professionals accountable for assisting torture and abuse of prisoners.  AMSA is proud to join the list of organizations putting their support behind the proposed legislation:

• National Physicians Alliance
• Committee for Interns and Residents
• American College of Physicians-NY
• NY State Nurses Association
• NY Civil Liberties Union
• Center for Constitutional Rights
• Human Rights Watch
• Amnesty International
• Physicians for Human Rights
• I Have A Dream Foundation
• Metro NY Religious Campaign Against Torture
• (full list and statements at whenhealersharm.org/)

ANTI-TORTURE LOBBY DAY in Albany: Join AMSA and PHR with medical students from across the state in our first Anti-Torture Lobby Day in Albany on May 18th!  This is our chance to meet with our local lawmakers and tell them that ending torture is important to us as ethical medical professionals and Americans.  We will meet at 9AM for a white-coat press conference and advocacy training with experts from the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, and follow up with advocacy meetings.  If you are a NY State resident and a medical or pre-medical student, don’t miss this chance for real-time local action for human rights!

Don’t forget to sign the petition: Stop Torture NY.org

Read AMSA’s statement of support after the cut:

Read the rest of this entry →

Farheen Qurashi, AMSA’s Jack Rutledge Legislative Director 2009-2010, and Mary Carol Jennings, AIDS Advocacy Network Chair 2009-2010, contributed to this post.  To join this event in NYC on May 13th, please contact Farheen at jrld@amsa.org.

On the campaign trail, President Obama pledged “to provide at least $50 billion by 2013 for the global fight against HIV/AIDS, including our fair share of the Global Fund, in order to at least double the number of HIV-positive people on treatment and continue to provide treatments to one-third of all those who desperately need them.”  HIV/AIDS patients and their advocates, including AMSA members, were important in getting then-candidates Obama, Clinton, and Biden to commit to these figures.

However, since taking office, the Obama Administration’s budgets have flatlined funding for AIDS programs.  Our commitments to fighting AIDS have not even kept pace with inflation: PEPFAR funding increased by only 2%  in 2010, while annual  inflation in most African countries is 7%.  Now, clinics around the world are reporting turning away patients with clinical AIDS who would previously have been treated, due to funding cuts (ITPC, 2010).

On May 13th, AMSA will be gathering for a white-coat protest at a Democratic Party fundraiser at St. Regis Hotel in NYC, to remind President Obama of his promises.  We will be joining activists from ACT UP, Africa Action, African Services Committee, NYC AIDS Housing Network, VOCAL-NY Users Union, Housing Works, Health GAP, Philadelphia Global AIDS Watchdogs, and other allies.  Join us, and let the President know that extending AIDS funding to meet the global need is important to you!  Please contact Mary Carol Jennings (marycaroljennings@gmail.com) for more details.

UPDATED: [05.11.2010] More information and disclaimer after cut. Read the rest of this entry →

The following is a guest post by Farheen Qurashi, AMSA’s Jack Rutledge Legislative Director 2009-2010.

U.S. student activists

Just a few days ago, we celebrated World Health Day – the progress we’ve made in providing aid to patients around the world, the diseases prevented and the treatments admitted. But, we still have a long way to go, and as we celebrated, we also remembered that there is much to accomplish and continue in global health aid.

Two weeks ago, Rep. Barbara Lee (CA-9^th) introduced HR 4933, the Global HEALTH Act of 2010. This is a key piece of legislation that makes bounds towards creating a comprehensive and integrated global health aid strategy, focusing on strengthening health systems of developing countries to provide comprehensive primary to tertiary care as well as expanding the vital health care workforce – including doctors, nurses, midwives and community health workers—in needy areas. There is a dire international shortage of all kinds of health workers, and this is a bottleneck to providing sustainable and adequate care to patient populations – strengthening the health workforce is a key part of strengthening an overall health system.

Importantly, the Global HEALTH Act:

• Creates the Global Health Workforce Initiative, which emphasizes training, retention, and support for needed health workers
• Mandates the creation of a multi-year, in-depth strategy for health systems strengthening, and authorizes necessary support for this strategy
• Ensures country-ownership and accountability to health strategies
• Authorizes support for health strategies to ensure the swift achievement of US global health goals
• Prioritizes the needs of marginalized and vulnerable populations like women and girls, sex workers, etc.

On the cusp of the US’s own health system reform movement, we must also remember our patients in need around the world. The Global HEALTH Act makes a much-needed and bold step forward for global health aid, and AMSA is proudly one of its original supporters, along with Physicians for Human Rights, Health Alliance International, Health GAP (Global AIDS Project), and other organizations.

The Global HEALTH Act, HR 4933, is currently awaiting discussion in the Foreign Affairs and Financial Services Committees of the House of Representatives. For the ideas within the bill to receive recognition, support, and success, we must ask our Congressmen to show their support by co-sponsoring the legislation.

To send your Congressman a message, click here.

To find out more about the Global HEALTH Act, click here.

To read the full text of the bill, click here.

This is the second in a series of posts for the American Public Health Association’s National Public Health Week.

Today, Wednesday April 7th marks World Health Day 2010. This year, the UN Secretary-General’s Message for World Health Day centers on the theme of urbanization and health with the campaign “1000 cities – 1000 lives.” The theme of Urban Health was chosen in the setting of a world in which the majority of the population is living in urban versus rural areas for the first time in history. At the same time, poverty is also shifting from sparsely-populated rural areas to urban areas especially in developing countries.

Disparities in people’s income, opportunities, living conditions and access to services along with numerous threats to public health including inadequate sanitation and refuse collection; industrial and traffic pollution; infectious diseases that thrive on squalor and crowded conditions; high rates of tobacco use; physical inactivity; unhealthy diets; crime, violence and the use of harmful substances are complex issues depending not only on public health measures but also social policy and governmental structures.

Source: Wikipedia

This is the first in a series of posts for the American Public Health Association’s National Public Health Week.

Most of us associate biodiversity with images of tropical rain forests and coral reefs. While these ecological hot-spots are an important source of medications and global ecosystem services, biodiversity also plays a key role in neighborhoods across the US through regulating the spread of diseases such as Lyme disease. But how is that possible, you might ask, and what can you do about it?

Lyme disease  affects hundreds of thousands of people across the US, with a greater concentration in the northeast. Recent decades have seen an explosion of urban sprawl across the northeast leading to decreased species diversity along with people living in close proximity to fragmented habitats.  But how are these related?

The connection is explained succinctly in Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity:

“The Blacklegged Tick (Ixodes scapularis) is the vector of Lyme disease, as well as of several other pathogens in the eastern U.S., and the primary reservoir for Lyme disease in this region is a common rodent, the White-Footed Mouse (Peromyscus leucopus)…Mice live in many different habitats, from pristine old-growth forest to degraded woodlots, garden sheds, and even kitchens. Several studies have demonstrated that populations of White-Footed Mice become very concentrated in small forest fragments, probably due to the absence of other vertebrate species that prey upon, or compete with them (forest fragmentation…affects predators over prey disproportionately). As a consequence, tick populations in small forest fragments have many White-Footed Mice, but few other mammalian hosts on which to feed, resulting in a high proportion of the ticks being infected and able to infect people. In contrast, in more extensively forested areas, the combination of fewer White-Footed Mice and more abundant, alternative, reservoir-incompetent hosts (an incompetent reservoir for Lyme does not pass on the Lyme bacteria to ticks that bite them, or does so poorly) results in a lower proportion of the tick population being infected.”

This phenomenon is known as the Dilution Effect: As species richness declines there is a subsequent decrease in the “dilution” of host-species making Lyme disease easier to spread. As the authors note, the dilution effect is not unique to Lyme, the same mechanism also operates in Hantavirus and West Nile Virus and possibly many others. As sprawl-based development patterns spread to more areas of the planet, we can only expect to see an increase in the number of dilution effect diseases unleashed upon populations worldwide.

So how can you increase biodiversity in your community and thereby help protect the health of your family and neighbors?

Get involved with your local conservation commission and bring these dangers to their attention. Find ways to support local parks and nature preserves. Also, if you have a yard or garden, try to plant local species that help support wildlife.  Most importantly: Education! If you are in college or school, talk to your professors about integrating awareness of biodiversity into curriculum.  Thanks to the UN and various donors, Sustaining Life is available at a very affordable price and can serve as a great textbook without placing a great financial burden on students. In addition, local schools can serve as great sources of biodiversity through gardens and planting of local species on grounds. Often these locals are less expensive to maintain, requiring less water and fertilizer.

These are just some ideas…we’d love to hear from GP readers with their experiences and success stories.

Home to over 400 million people, the Ganges river winds through India’s history, culture and countryside. Unfortunately, rapid industrialization and urbanization has left an unholy mark on the Ganges as dangerous amounts of untreated industrial pollution and human excrement enter the river every day.  These conditions are all too common in rivers worldwide  and create an environment ripe for diseases ranging from schistosomiasis to Cryptosporidium.

But long time advocacy is finally paying off as the WSJ reports that World Bank and the Indian government are set to spend $4 billion to “to ensure that by 2020 no untreated municipal sewage or industrial runoff enters the 1,560-mile river.”.  The methods proposed also have the benefit of being less carbon and electricity intensive than traditional wastewater treatment plants – key aspects for a country with chronic brownouts in a warming world.  In order to reach their goal, the government and partners will need to engage the most neglected slums which, if done right,  has the potential to create environmental justice at the same time as cleaning the river.

Of course, governments have a tendency of announcing lofty environmental goals which are then forgotten in the next election cycle. The Ganges also had a previous cleanup effort that failed to reach its goals, partly because of lacking public participation. Hopefully things will be different this time, but GP would love to hear from anyone with on the ground insight.

Note:  The GP editorial staff’s thoughts and hearts go out in solidarity to the residents of Port-au-Prince and their families, as well as our colleagues in Haiti.  We will be updating this post as more information becomes available.

————–

Earthquake Crisis in Haiti

Original post by Wilnise Jasmin [01.14.2010 @ 6:53 AM EST]

As you may have already heard, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck about 10 miles southwest of Port-au- Prince, Haiti at about 5 pm Tuesday night. The quake ravaged the infrastructure of Haiti’s fragile government and destroyed some of its most important cultural symbols.

“Parliament has collapsed,” Mr. Préval told The Miami Herald. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.” He added: “All of the hospitals are packed with people. It is a catastrophe.”

President Obama promised that Haiti would have the “unwavering support” of the United States.

Haitian authorities and humanitarian aid organizations are struggling to respond amid devastation. Read the rest of this entry →

This is a guest post by Vanessa Coleman, coordinator of the International Women’s Health Leadership Institute and the International Women’s Health Working Group.

This New Year as you set down and make resolutions, we at AMSA urge you to make another one. Ghandi once said “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Imagine how much of a difference we could make in our practices, medical schools and in our communities if each of us 30,000 AMSA members made this resolution? Apply for AMSA’s inaugural International Women’s Leadership Institute and BE THE CHANGE.

Read on for details. Read the rest of this entry →

Between World AIDS Day (Dec. 1) and International Human Rights Day (Dec. 10), PHR is gathering 10,000 signatures asking the U.S. Senate to ratify the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 2010.

Conceived as a “Bill of Rights for Women,” CEDAW sets a common international definition for gender-based discrimination, and establishes an agenda for ending it. States ratifying CEDAW are required to institutionalize gender equality through domestic legislation, repeal and replace all discriminatory provisions in their laws, and establish public institutions of recourse for women who require protection against discrimination.

Discrimination is bad. Women should have equal rights. Surely this is something we can agree on? Not so fast. Read further for the controversial stuff. Read the rest of this entry →

Learn more about biologics at www.affordablemedsnow.org