Paul Farmer Kapuscinski Lecture: Failure to collide: Ebola and modern medicine

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Paul Farmer Lecture - 20 April 2015 - 1700 GMT - livestream link

FAILURE TO COLLIDE: EBOLA AND MODERN MEDICINE

When: 20th April 2014 at 6:00pm BST / 7:00pm CET (check time around the world).

Venue: King’s College London, Edmond J. Safra Lecture Theatre, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom

You can join the lecture by:

• coming to the event in London
• following livestreaming from the event at kapuscinskilectures.eu
• asking your questions to Paul Farmer via Twitter using #KAPTalks hashtag

Registration for the event is closed for now (we reached room capacity). You can still send a request to be on the waiting list by sending an email here. 

Please note that the event will be livestreamed at http://kapuscinskilectures.eu.

Paul Farmer

In December 2012, Dr. Paul Farmer was appointed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon as the UN Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti. In this capacity, he is working closely with all key partners and is providing guidance on how to improve health and well-being in resource poor settings based on his experience building models of community-based medicine. He is also helping galvanize support for the elimination of cholera in Haiti, and is using the data gathered from the Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti to advise on lessons learned and how those can be applied in Haiti and other settings. Dr. Farmer served as Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti (2009 -2012). In that capacity, he supported Special Envoy President Clinton and the people of Haiti in implementing the Government of Haiti’s priorities for the recovery effort. Dr Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he is a University Professor, Harvard’s highest distinction for a faculty member. Dr. Farmer is a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH, 1987), an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services, supports the building and strengthening of local health systems, and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty.

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When: 20th April 2014 at 6:00pm BST / 7:00pm CET (check time around the world).

Venue: King’s College London, Edmond J. Safra Lecture Theatre, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom

You can join the lecture by:

• coming to the event in London
• following livestreaming from the event at kapuscinskilectures.eu
• asking your questions to Paul Farmer via Twitter using #KAPTalks hashtag

Registration for the event is closed for now (we reached room capacity). You can still send a request to be on the waiting list by sending an email here. 

Please note that the event will be livestreamed at http://kapuscinskilectures.eu.

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King’s College

European Year for Development 2015

Paul Farmer, Yale Law Lecture “No Health, No Justice: Recent Lessons from West Africa."

Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners In Health, delivered the Gruber Distinguished Lecture in Global Justice on March 2, 2015, at 4:30 pm in Room 127 at Yale Law School. Farmer’s lecture was titled “No Health, No Justice: Recent Lessons from West Africa.” Farmer shared insights from his current work, including battling ebola and growing inequality. He has created innovative models for delivering life-saving medical treatment in under-resourced settings.

Ebola experimental drugs really a sideshow.

As always, the focus on health issues becomes the vaccine or drug treatment rather than figuring out how to prevent the infections and vulnerability of individuals due to physical and social environments. The WHO ethical consultation on experimental drugs has irresponsibly moved the focus of attention to drugs still in the early phases of research. Who and when will we discuss why we are in this current situation where there are no available medical interventions as well as the fact that it is controllable through non-medical interventions.

The ethical consultation also had no representatives from the countries most affected by the Ebola outbreaks.

This piece by the BBC I think does a good job covering some of the issues. Let's be clear that Ebola infections are preventable through non-medical interventions. They require social and behavioural changes.  Governments, health  institutions, and global health organizations need to focus on helping make those changes.  A continued focus on medical interventions, or lack thereof, just shows how narrow the current thinking in global health continues to be.

We also learned how incredibly counter-productive it is to implement the old 'contain and control' approach in the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  It seems we are following the same old plan.   People who are ill or think they are ill will not want to be identified as they will worry about being quarantined or socially shunned.