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" Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water. "

Paul Farmer

Political

Care

Medical

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" The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right. "

" I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality. "

" The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems. "

" The idea that because you're born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you're born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that. "

" We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers. "

" At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease. "

" Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects. "

" So I can't show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable. "

" You can't have public health without a public health system. We just don't want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system. "

" The only way to do the human rights thing is to do the right thing medically. "

" I critique market-based medicine not because I haven't seen its heights but because I've seen its depths. "

" I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor. "

Paul Farmer

Grew

Bus

" Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care. "

" Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody. "

" I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling. "

" Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious, perhaps a weakness, as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean, they lost all these medical training programs because they didn't have them anywhere else. "

" I think we will see better vaccines within the next 15 years, but I'm not a scientist and am focused on the short-term - what will happen in the interim. "

" I mean, everybody should have access to medical care. And, you know, it shouldn't be such a big deal. "

" For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act. "

Paul Farmer

You

Tools

" But as for activism, my parents did what they could, given the constraints, but were never involved in the causes I think of when I think of activists. "

" But if you're asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick. "

" Again, conventional Catholicism does not much appeal to me. "

" What the American public thinks is very important to the future of global health. Many people are moved by the idea that there is unnecessary suffering in the world, and we could do a lot to stop it. We have the technologies necessary to stop most of the suffering. "

" The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame. "