Health and human rights inextricably linked: The Lancet
Contacts:
-
Ed Mills, Faculty of Health Sciences, BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, emills@sfu.ca; 778.782.7630
-
Susann Camus, Faculty of Health Sciences, 778.782.7017, 778.232.0297
Ed Mills of SFU's health sciences faculty and his colleagues say government responsibilities for delivering health care are being delegated to health insurance providers, the pharmaceutical industry and others whose accountability is “poorly defined and inadequately monitored.”
The reseachers make their case in the British medical journal The Lancet. They point to a debate over compulsory AIDS testing as an example of the need to couple human rights and health delivery.
“The present argument is that people knowing their HIV status is more important than whether they voluntarily seek testing, because knowing they have AIDS means they will be able to accurately inform their partners of their HIV status, modify their behaviours, and seek treatment if available,” say Mills and his colleagues.
“This approach, known as ‘routine provider-initiated HIV testing’, is becoming more common. This practice needs to be monitored to see if such a service will help people access and maintain contact with HIV care services.”
Mills, an assistant professor at SFU, is also a scientist at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. He co-authored the Lancet article with Sofia Gruskin of the Harvard School of Public Health and Daniel Tarantola of the University of New South Wales.
The authors cite evidence that government roles and responsibilities for delivering health care are being delegated to health insurance providers, the pharmaceutical industry and others whose accountability is “poorly defined and inadequately monitored.”
According to Mills, three areas in the fields of health and human rights urgently need further work: adequate monitoring instruments to measure both health and human rights, building evidence of the effects of applying health and human rights frameworks to human practice, and creating a research agenda to advance understanding of the associations between health and human rights.
-30-
Background Information on Ed Mills
Ed Mills has a master's degree in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University, a master's degree in evidence-based health care from Oxford University, and a PhD in Health Research Methodology from McMaster University.
He teaches global health and human rights in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, has conducted HIV/AIDS and human rights research in Nepal, Cambodia, India and throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. His research has influenced international policy on issues related to access to antiretroviral treatment in developing settings. He is widely published on research methodology and human rights and is the co-editor of the journal Conflict & Health.