Paul Farmer
Paul Farmer
Paul Edward Farmeris an American anthropologist and physician who is best known for his humanitarian work providing suitable health care to rural and under-resourced areas in developing countries, beginning in Haiti. Co-founder of an international social justice and health organization, Partners In Health, he is known as "the man who would cure the world," as described in the book, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth26 October 1959
CountryUnited States of America
It is one of our more stable cities in terms of a population that has stayed, ... It's not a city where people leave in large percentages or arrive in large percentages, except as tourists. So I think you're going to see a very strong impulse among the people there to rebuild.
We have opened a hospital that was abandoned since the genocide 10 years ago and put some hundreds of patients on anti-retroviral therapy, for example, in the middle of rural Africa. We have also, needless to say, focused on whatever it is that ails the people who are coming to this hospital and the clinic sites around. And, that is everything from distress during labor, to malaria, of course to other projects. We do not have any doubt that this project will be a great success.
Well, we've worked with our friends in Haiti to establish nothing short of a modern medical center in one of the poorest parts of that country.
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.
If you look at people who seek a lot of care in American cities for multiple illnesses, it's usually people with a number of overwhelming illnesses and a lot of social problems, like housing instability, unemployment, lack of insurance, lack of housing, or just bad housing.
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.
I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor.
One of the things we have to acknowledge is that if you look at Haiti, many billions of dollars have gone into development aid there that have not been effective.
I've been working in Haiti 28 years - I thought I'd sort of seen it... I've gone through a number of coups, the storms of 2008, I thought, you know, that I'd seen things as bad as they were going to get, and I was wrong.
I don't know much about climate change. But I'm pretty sure we better figure out what to do to lessen its impact - at least its health impact - and that's not going to happen unless you have a lot of young talent interested in these topics.
At the same time, the fact the world's poor are calling upon us to help is a marker, in my view, of the limitless potential of human solidarity.
It was apparent from the early 80s that in order to do something lasting and significant in Haiti we would need a springboard in the States.
Well, I don't think that the role of the pharmaceutical industry is any different from that of other transnational corporations.
You look around the U.S., and the nature of the people who settled in New Orleans is such that you couldnt go to another part of the country and find that mixture. Thats one reason the ties are so strong.