HANOI--30 Oct--Medianet International-AsiaNet/InfoQuest
Today's most vulnerable human being is a woman of child-bearing age, living in a poor, rural community threatened by climate change, an international conference has concluded.
Hundreds of health, development and human rights experts and officials meeting in Hanoi this week called for a new global health strategy. They said the world's most intractable humanitarian crises — including the deaths of 500,000 women in childbirth each year — could not be solved by looking at each health challenge in isolation.
To improve the well-being of billions of the most vulnerable, every aspect of disadvantage must be confronted, from sanitation, adequate nutrition and income to the emerging global threats of pandemics and climate-change driven weather extremes, water shortages and diseases.
"Every single one of these challenges is important, but if we address each separately we cannot achieve the elimination of maternal mortality, or sufficient progress in other major areas of ill health and premature death," said conference Co-Chair, Daniel Tarantola, Professor of Health and Human Rights at the University of NSW.
The conference heard the unprecedented resources mobilised against HIV/AIDS worldwide had made steady, but insufficient, inroads into controlling the epidemic, with 2.7 million new cases every year. At the same time, low and middle income nations are now at considerable risk from pandemics, such as H1N1 and avian flu, because vaccines and medicines are largely stockpiled by wealthy nations. Climate change, mass people movements and environmental degradation due to rapid industrialisation are compounding existing health problems.
"If we re-frame the global health agenda and emphasise the right to both health and development we have the best chance of successfully confronting multiple health challenges," said conference Co-Chair, Dr Cao Duc Thai, former Director of the Vietnamese Institute of Human Rights.
Professor Tarantola said the resilience and creativity of local communities — not more global health policies and funds - was the key to new health and development models.
The International Conference on Realising the Rights to Health Development was co-organised by the University of NSW and the Central Commission on Popularisation and Education of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam. The United Nations, Atlantic Philanthropies, USAID/PEPFAR,
AusAID, Levi Strauss Foundation and Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations provided additional support.
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SOURCE: UNSW’s Initiative for Health and Human Rights
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