Blog Hiatus

Do check in after a while for any further updates.

2009 World AIDS Day- Universal Access and Human Rights

Today, 1st December 2009 marks World AIDS day. Browsing through the 2009 AIDS Epidemic Update , one can see that despite significant efforts towards combating the epidemic, the global HIV/AIDS statics are alarming.

According to the report, an estimated:

• 33.4 million people are living with HIV worldwide               
• 2.7 million people were newly infected in 2008
• 2 million people died of AIDS related illness in 2008

This year’s World AIDS Day theme is “Universal Access and Human Rights”. The challenge therefore for governments and donors, is to translate into real action and results, the knowledge of the interplay of HIV/AIDS and human rights. Notably:

• The right to share in scientific advancement and its benefits;
• The right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health;
• The right to non-discrimination, equal protection and equality before the law;
• The right to life;
• The right to privacy;
• The right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;
• The right to work;
• The right to freedom of movement;
• The right to seek and enjoy asylum;
• The right to an adequate standard of living;
• The right to social security, assistance and welfare;
• The right to equal access to education;
• The right to participate in public and cultural life;
• The right to freedom of association;
• The right to marry and to found a family;
• The right to freedom of opinion and expression and the right to freely receive and impart information.

Our new forum!

Come comment on global health law issues in our new forum.

We welcome any and all comments.

Global Health Law Essay Competition

Ladies and Gentlemen, get your pencils ready!

The Global Health division of the Center for Strategic and International Studies is holding a contest for creative ideas in the field of global health.

Contest detail after the jump… Feel free to post creative global health suggestions in the comments.

The House Health Care Reform Bill Less Expensive than Bush’s Tax Cuts

According to a new report by the Citizens for Tax Justice, current health reform efforts–which have an expected price tag of around $1 trillion for ten years–will cost significantly less than Bush’s tax cuts, which cost an estimated $2.5 trillion over the same period.

As the report notes:

“[M]any of the lawmakers who argue that the health care reform legislation is “too costly” are the same lawmakers who supported the Bush tax cuts. Their own voting record demonstrates that health care reform is not a matter of costs, but a matter of priorities.

“It’s difficult to see how the Bush tax cuts could provide us with two and a half times the benefits of health care reform. In 2010, when all the Bush tax cuts are finally phased in, a staggering 52.5 percent of the benefits will go to the richest 5 percent of taxpayers. President Bush and his supporters argued that these high-income tax cuts would benefit everybody because they would unleash investment that would spark widespread economic prosperity. There seems to be no evidence of this, particularly given the collapse of the economy at the end of the Bush years.”

We’re back from our summer sabbatical!

Hi readers,

We have taken a bit of a summer sabbatical in updating this blog, but it’s time to get back in the thick of things.  There is so much to report with health care reform making front page news and other health law issues exerting a quieter influence.  We are back from our break and more excited than ever to report on all the news that’s fit to print.

Thanks for sticking with us!  Now let’s get to it…

Event at Georgetown: Global Health in the 21st Century: A Perspective from the Fogarty International Center, NIH”

Georgetown University is hosting a seminar on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 by Dr. Roger Glass, Director of the Fogarty International Center (FIC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD.  

Dr. Glass will deliver a  talk entitled “Global Health in the 21st Century: A Perspective from the Fogarty International Center, NIH” at 10:00am in Warwick Evans Conference Room, Bldg D, Medical Center, Georgetown University.

Bio:

Dr. Glass graduated from Harvard College in 1967, received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the University of Buenos Aires in 1967, and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1972. He joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1977 as a medical officer assigned to the Environmental Hazards Branch. He received his doctorate from the University of Goteborg, Sweden in 1984, and joined the National Institutes of Health Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, where he worked on the molecular biology of rotavirus. In 1986, Dr. Glass returned to the CDC to become Chief of the Viral Gastroenteritis Unit at the National Center for Infectious Diseases. Dr. Glass became the Director of the Fogarty International Center and Associate Director for International Research, NIH on June 11, 2006.

Dr. Glass’s research interests are in the prevention of gastroenteritis from rotaviruses and noroviruses through the application of novel scientific research. He has maintained field studies in India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, Israel, Russia, Vietnam, China and elsewhere. His research has been targeted toward epidemiologic studies to anticipate the introduction of rotavirus vaccines. He is fluent and often lectures in 5 languages. He has co-authored more than 400 research papers and chapters.

Dr. Glass has received numerous awards including the prestigious Charles C. Shepard Lifetime Scientific Achievement Award presented by the CDC in recognition of his 30-year career of scientific research application and leadership, and the Dr. Charles Merieux Award from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases for his work on rotavirus vaccines in the developing world.

A word from Howard J. Federoff, MD, PhD -Executive Vice President for Health Sciences, Executive Dean, School of Medicine, Georgetown University Medical Center:

Global health is a major challenge of our time, and a mission focus for Georgetown University.  Our mutual interest in this area and opportunities that FIC provides are vitally important to our faculty, staff and students. I encourage you to join us for Dr. Glass’s seminar and learn more about his vision and priorities at FIC

Obama’s Plan to Contain Health Care Costs for Health Care Reform May Hit a Snag

Obama has pledged to reduce health care costs by $2 trillion over the next decade as part of his proposal to reform the United States health care system.

Obama’s pledge may have hit a snag in the form of U.S. antitrust laws, which prohibit unfair business practices (including collusion to set prices).  To read more about it, click here.

US Court of Appeals Affirms 2006 ruling that found Big Tobacco guilty of fraud

False descriptors-"light", "mild" and "low tar"

The verdict is in on the landmark “Racketeering” Appeals Court case- US v Philip Morris. The US Appeals Court has unanimously upheld a 2006 landmark federal court ruling that found tobacco companies  including Philip Morris USA (Altria) guilty of  fraud, deceit  and violated civil racketeering laws by falsely denying the dangers and addictiveness of cigarette smoking, falsely denying that they marketed their deadly products to children and misrepresenting that “low tar” and “light” cigarettes had fewer health risks.

According to the Appeals court ruling: “Defendants knew of their falsity at the time and made the statements with the intent to deceive.”

The tobacco companies implicated were Philip Morris USA (and Altria), British American Tobacco, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp and Lorillard Tobacco.

Liggett was excluded from the ruling after admitting in the 1990’s that smoking causes disease and is addictive and cooperating with investigative authorities. Also excluded from the judgement were the Council for Tobacco Research-USA and Tobacco Institute  as they had not made or sold tobacco products.

The 2006 ruling banned deceptive labels such as “mild”, “low tar,”  and “light” and required the companies to publish “corrective statements”, however, this was not put into effect due to the appeals process.

 

“Fighting the Flu with One Hand Tied” – op-ed by Prof. Gostin in the Washington Post

The excellent op-ed by Prof Lawrence Gostin*, “Fighting the Flu With One Hand Tied” in the May 1, 2009 edition of the Washington Post highlights the legal and financial limitations of two of the world’s key public health agencies- the World Health Organisation (WHO) and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In reference to the revised 2005 International Health Regulations and the experience with SARS, Prof Gostin points out:

…the frightening truth is that the WHO has no real power. It lacks an effective mechanism for monitoring and enforcing national reporting. Its recommendations to countries are expressly “non-binding.” Countries do not even have to share virus samples with it. Indeed, despite painful negotiations over the past two years, the agency has not been able to persuade Indonesia to share samples of avian influenza, threatening vaccine production and public health preparedness.

Professor Gostin also highlights the grim reality of how the world’s poor are also the most vulnerable to, and the least capable of coping with public health emergencies of international concern.

Perhaps more worrying is the lack of capacity in poor countries to detect and respond to emerging threats. This is of particular concern because influenza often emerges in Asia, where crowded cities and close proximity between animals and humans can breed infectious disease. Although Mexico is the likely center of the current outbreak, the genetic material in the swine flu virus is of Eurasian origin. Many poor countries lack adequate surveillance, early warning systems and modern laboratories; they also have negligible public health infrastructures. Although the revised International Health Regulations urge capacity building, Western governments have donated precious little funding, and the WHO has no mechanism or resources for expanding public health capacities within individual countries.

After shedding some light on CDC’s limited legal authority and resources to effectively respond to swine flu -influenza A (H1N1), Prof. Gostin concludes:

The WHO and the CDC are our frontline defense against infectious diseases that can rapidly mutate and travel across continents. It is easy to criticize these agencies and deprive them of resources. It is much harder, but necessary, to build strong public health agencies to do the vital work that we all rely on, especially in the face of an international public health emergency.

*Professor Gostin is a professor of global health law and faculty director at Georgetown University Law Center’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, as well as a member of the World Health Organization International Health Regulations Roster of Experts and director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Health Law.