Global Pulse Blog

The UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals was held this past week in New York City. Occurring at a crucial time, with five years remaining until the 2015 deadline, world leaders met to discuss needed actions to reach the eight global development targets agreed to by the world’s countries and leading development institutions in September 2000 at the Millennium Summit when the United Nations Millennium Declaration was adopted, committing the UN nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets – with a deadline of 2015 – known as the Millennium Development Goals. The Millennium Development Goals include:

• End Poverty and Hunger
• Universal Education
• Gender Equality
• Child Health
• Maternal Health
• Combat HIV/AIDS
• Environmental Sustainability
• Global Partnership

The Millennium Development Goals Report 2010 summarizes the progress which has been made thus far while striving to meet these goals as well as potential actions, strategies and policies which could be implemented to continue positive progress.

As a participant in the May 18th medical student day of action with the New York Coalition Against Torture, I would like to thank our readers for their support — whether in coming to Albany, contacting their NY state representatives, or signing the PHR petition. The event was very successful and inspiring, and  we have received a lot of positive feedback. I look forward to updating the GPJ community on the effort’s progress. In the meantime, I have a more detailed review of the event at the ACLU’s blog:

During the white-coat advocacy day on Tuesday, the medical student group conducted over 25 meetings with lawmakers and staff, met with the bill’s sponsors, and hand-delivered copies of the petition signed by hundreds of their peers and fellow New York State residents. They also conveyed the support of state and national professional organizations for this landmark legislation…(more)

The medical student action event was also mentioned on the Huffington Post and on PHR’s Health Rights Advocate blog. Since then, NYCAT has also released a letter of support for the Gottfried-Duane Bill signed by prominent leaders of medicine in New York state, including medical school deans, hospital CEOs, and Nobel Prize laureates.

Medical students and NYCAT members with Assemblyman Gottfried in Albany

Related reading:

• ACLU’s resources on torture
• The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT)
• NRCAT, ACLU, and PHR: Working together against inhumane detention conditions at home?

UPDATE [06-08-2010]: PHR’s newest report, Experiments In Torture, raises concerns that the actions of CIA doctors who participated in waterboarding and other methods amounted to illegal human experimentation. Read coverage of the report in The New York Times and commentary at The Washington Post and The Atlantic.

Looking for ways to get involved closer to home? NRCAT has a list of events across the country for the month of June.

Related: China bans the use of torture in extracting confessions.

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 →

Evidence about the role of American physicians, clinical psychologists, and other health professionals in abuse and coercive interrogation at military detention sites has been accumulating slowly but incontrovertibly in the wake of the War on Terror.  In August 2009, Physicians for Human Rights released its most recent report describing in detail how the CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize, plan, and carry out unlawful interrogations at detention sites.  Licensed health professionals observed physically abusive interrogation sessions and advised on how to increase the prisoner’s suffering.  They kept records of waterboarding, and consulted medical literature on hypothermia to determine “precise gradations” of the procedure.  When not aiding “coercive interrogations” directly, health professionals were still involved in facilitating and monitoring them, and also observed clear medical evidence of abuse without intervening — practices that subverted and violated well-established medical ethical obligations, to say nothing of the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Constitution, and U.S. military law (JAMA).

To date, the U.S. has barely begun to address the gravity of what has taken place.  In the absence of a meaningful national response, medical professional organizations and the legislatures of individual states are stepping up to the challenge.  With the introduction of the Gottfried-Duane Bill in the State Assembly and State Senate, New York is posed to become the first state  in the country to explicitly prohibit health professionals licensed in the state from assisting in torture, interrogations, and prisoner abuse, while providing them with strong legal protection to resist any future coercion to participate in such acts.

The bill is meant to stop physician-assisted torture ever becoming a reality again, as well as to help health professionals address abuse and medical neglect of prisoners in domestic jails and detention centers.  Co-sponsored by 30 members of the State Assembly from both parties, the bill was favorably reported by Assembly committees last year, and is currently being revised in preparation for the floor vote.  It is supported by the NY state chapter of the American College of Physicians; by nursing, psychology, and social work associations;  and by civil liberties and human rights advocacy groups.

More on the Gottfried-Duane Bill, and why you should care, after the jump.

Click here to sign PHR’s petition in support of the Gottffried-Duane bill.

(There is a link for out-of-staters to show solidarity, too.)

StopTortureNY.org

Read the rest of this entry →

Reporting live from Manhattan…

We aren’t quite running down the streets with masks on our faces panicking yet (which, it’s not clear how good of an investment they are anyway; see Susan’s comment on masks on the previous flu post), but we did close four schools, as the number of confirmed cases in New York City rises to 51, the first US swine flu death is confirmed in a toddler in Texas, and the World Health Organization raises the pandemic alert level to Phase 5. The net worldwide case count is uncertain due to re-testing of previously identified cases in Mexico.

City health agencies are concerned about the effects of recent downsizing due to the recession on their ability to function at top form:

At a news conference on Monday, Dr. Richard E. Besser, the acting director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the public health system was in “a tough situation.”

“We hear about tens of thousands of state public health workers who are going to be losing their jobs because of state budgets,” he said. “It is very important that we look at that resource because this outbreak was identified because of a lot of work going on around preparedness.”

But according to John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, now may be a reasonably good time to catch the bug.

For further reading while you’re holed up in your room ordering delivery and avoiding crowds:

• Link to the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene swine flu info page. Hospitals and clinics are working with the DOH to keep up surveillance and testing of possible cases, and precaution measures are being used for cases of influenza-like-illness.
• Link to the New York Times swine flu tracking map (this one nicely reports suspected cases as a separate category).
• The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, Penguin, 546pp — available here on Amazon, and a good read / horror story depending on your current P.O.V. and paranoia tendencies. It has a great chapter about the beginning of both microbiology and American medical education as we know them. This is the book that first got me interested in public health history.