Enough people filled a Boston University classroom for a public health lecture yesterday that coordinators had to open a separate room and use a video feed for eager students and professors to watch.
Dr. Jim Yong Kim, a Harvard School of Public Health professor of health and human rights, weighed in on the future of global health last night at the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. Kim’s speech attracted the largest turnout this semester for the Dudley Allen Sargent Lecture series, coordinators said.
Kim, a former head of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department and co-founder of Partners in Health who was recently named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, described his experiences treating tuberculosis and AIDS patients in poor communities from Peru to Africa. He accented those stories with before-and-after photos of several people he treated years ago – patients so sick that international organizations would have once considered treating them too expensive or too complicated.
In 1996, Kim said, WHO official policy stated “in developing countries, people with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis usually die, because effective treatment is often impossible in poor countries.” Kim said he faced the challenge of convincing the WHO that care was in fact possible for victims of tuberculosis and other diseases: The organization had not considered, for example, that some of the necessary drugs to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru had expired patents, meaning they were generic and therefore much cheaper than the organization had believed.
Still, Kim said, drugs such as the antiretroviral treatments necessary for treating the AIDS epidemic ravaging Africa are expensive relative to the $2 to $3 per year some nations spend on healthcare per capita – America, in comparison, spends on average more than $6,000.
Kim said, in the future, students like those in the audience will need to be skilled advocates of funding for global health programs, and will need a better understanding of the management practices involved in actually delivering medicine to the people who need it most. He said it might be time to create a sort of “global healthcare delivery” degree program at schools like Harvard and BU.
Kim said he is not interested in simply providing medicine, but also designing a strong healthcare system in countries where help is needed. Partners in Health is an organization pioneering health programs for poor areas of countries such as Haiti, Peru and the United States.
“You can’t just put pills in people’s mouths,” Kim said. “You have to create primary care.”
During his time at the WHO, Kim oversaw the ambitious “3 x 5” initiative that aimed to put three million people in developing countries on AIDS treatment by the end of 2005. Though he said they missed the mark, he estimated it will actually happen by 2008.
