Health Guru Advocates Global Disease Fund

The United States and other wealthy nations should contribute to a global fund to fight infectious diseases, international public health expert Paul E. Farmer told a crowd of about 60 students and others who packed into the Eliot House Senior Common Room Monday night.

A world-reknowned specialist on infectious diseases and professor of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School, Farmer co-founded Partners in Health (PIH) in 1987, an organization that has established health clinics in impoverished areas throughout the Americas and Eastern Europe.

In his informal talk, Farmer complained that developing nations can often not afford the medical supplies they need because of high export costs.

“The poorest country has the highest [drug] prices. This is nuts, this makes no sense, this is crazy,” he said. “We’re living in a time when we have lots of new and effective technologies, but we don’t have an equity strategy for introducing them where they’re needed most. If you don’t…remediate inequality, in the future the situation’s going to get worse.”

Farmer also criticized the United States for its economic embargoes on several countries in need of public health assistance, making the delivery of medical technology difficult.

“Haiti and Cuba are two of the countries under U.S. aid embargoes. This is completely unacceptable,” he said. “The primary problem is still money.”

Farmer, who has spent much of his life working in Haiti, the country with the lowest per capita income in the Western Hemisphere, was accompanied by several Haitian guests and littered his speech with anecdotes and slides to show the human dimensions of fighting infectious disease.

“We need to know the data, but it really doesn’t tell us anything about the Haitian people, or the history of what’s happened between our two countries.,” Farmer said. “Haiti and the U.S.…have the most intertwined histories of any two countries in this hemisphere. HIV came to Haiti from America.”

In Haiti, which has the highest incidence of HIV infection in the Western Hemisphere, PIH was able to introduce medicine to treat the epidemic. Farmer said this effort proved successful in over 86 percent of blood samples sent to Boston for testing.

“We were under so much pressure to show that it was effective,” Farmer said. “The patients on therapy didn’t die. We have to get better and faster at testing those patients who need [medication] immediately.”

Farmer also gave his personal thanks to the Harvard community. Several Haitian patients transported to Boston by PIH have resided in Eliot House while undergoing treatment, where Farmer is a visiting scholar.

“I’m thrilled that the college and the senior class is making this a priority, because you guys are going to be the decision makers,” Farmer said.

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.