Health and Human Rights最新文献

This paper proposes that US human rights experts and abortion rights advocates challenge the striking down of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 by the majority of US Supreme Court justices because of the multiple human rights violations it has engendered. The paper has three parts. The first part summarizes the compelling response of the three dissenting Supreme Court justices to the majority ruling, which spells out those violations in detail. The second part offers a history of cases of violations of human rights related to abortion in other countries that have been heard and adjudicated by a range of human rights bodies in the last 20 years, and their outcomes. It shows that working on these cases has created working relationships between national and international human rights experts and advocates. Based on this information, the third part proposes that US human rights and abortion rights advocates take a case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the US Supreme Court ruling, asking the commission to direct the US government to void the majority ruling on Roe v. Wade-on the grounds that it violates the human rights of anyone who seeks an abortion and potentially also of those whose wanted pregnancies become a risk to their health and life and need to be terminated. And if the United States does not agree, the commission should refer the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

In 2014, the Indian state revised a key program providing aids and appliances to disabled people to also include cochlear implants for children living below the poverty line. The program is remarkable in its targeting of the poorest of the poor to provide them with expensive technology made by multinational corporations and its development of new surgery and rehabilitation infrastructures throughout India. Based on interviews and participant observation with key stakeholders, this paper argues that in focusing only on "a right to hearing" and on cochlear implants as a solution for deafness, health care practitioners ignore the complex work required to maintain cochlear implant infrastructures, as well as the advocacy work done by disability activists in India and internationally to transform existing political, economic, educational, and social structures. Since cochlear implants are the "gold standard" in intervening on hearing loss and increasing numbers of countries in the Global South have started state-funded cochlear implant programs, an exploration of India's program provides an opportunity to analyze both the importance of infrastructure and the need to combat ableism within structural competency frameworks. Disability justice is part of structural competency. Ultimately what is at stake is expanding health practitioners' ideas of what it means to maximize potential, particularly in the face of new technological interventions around disability.

Global health equity is at a historically tenuous nexus complicated by economic inequality, climate change, mass migration, racialized violence, and global pandemics. Social medicine, collective health, and structural competency are interdisciplinary fields with their own histories and fragmentary implementation in health equity movements situated both locally and globally. In this paper, we review these three fields' historical backgrounds, theoretical underpinnings, and contemporary contributions to global health equity. We believe that intentional dialogue between these fields could promote a generative discourse rooted in a shared understanding of their historical antecedents and theoretical frameworks. We also propose pedagogical tools grounded within our own critical and transformative pedagogies that offer the prospect of bringing these traditions into greater dialogue for the purpose of actualizing the human right to health.

Since 2011, the nongovernmental organization Compañeros En Salud, as Partners In Health is known in Mexico, has worked in collaboration with the Mexican Ministry of Health to strengthen the health care system in the Fraylesca and Sierra Mariscal regions of Chiapas, Mexico. In response to the high proportion of abandoned and understaffed clinics in the area, Compañeros En Salud has developed a program to entice medical students from some of the top medical schools in Mexico to spend their "social service year" in these facilities, where they receive financial support, on-site clinical mentoring, supplies, clinical support tools, and training in global health and social medicine using a structural competency framework. The idea is to provide high-quality health care to a historically underserved population through a lens of health as a human right. Although other structurally competent global health curricula have been implemented worldwide, primarily in the Global North, the Compañeros En Salud model is unique in that it combines (1) the facilitation of theoretical lectures based on the Social Medicine Consortium's definition of social medicine, (2) global health case discussion and context-reflective experiential simulations, and (3) exposure to patients who suffer the burden of structural injustice. In this paper, we describe the motivations behind the training model, its holistic approach, and the impact of this initiative after a decade of implementation.

Many individuals with disabilities utilize adult-sized changing tables to take care of their toileting needs with the help of a caregiver.¹ These tables are not explicitly required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and no legal case in the United States has yet addressed whether the ADA requires public restrooms to have adult changing tables.² This paper draws on an analysis of op-eds and news articles published in the United States to explore how individuals with disabilities and their caregivers access public restrooms that do not provide adult-sized changing tables. These experiences demonstrate violations of the human rights to accessibility, integrity, and health as outlined in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Utilizing a human rights analysis, I argue that adult-sized changing tables are inherently the same as toilets and that providing one but not the other in public facilities may constitute discrimination under the ADA. Finally, I briefly explore promising initiatives that would increase access to adult-sized changing tables in the United States.

Experience has shown the need to explicitly address human rights and gender-related barriers in the rollout of HIV-related biomedical innovations, including "undetectable equals untransmittable" (U=U). This paper brings to light rights and gender considerations relevant to supporting U=U, recognizing a range of barriers that remain to be addressed for all people to benefit equally from U=U. We conducted a literature review to ascertain how human rights and gender were addressed in relevant publications, including peer-reviewed articles published between 2006 and 2020, relevant nongovernmental and global organizations' publications, and abstracts presented at the 2019 International AIDS Conference, that explicitly addressed U=U or "treatment as prevention." Despite evidence to illustrate the importance of attention to human rights and gender within U=U policies and interventions, there remains a lack of explicit attention to human rights and gender considerations in research and programming, particularly with regard to the rights principles of participation and accountability. Explicitly engaging all of these dimensions is key to informing interventions and improving people's lives, health, and well-being.

This essay examines the extent to which COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) has been a successful mechanism for global COVID-19 vaccine equity as a component of the human right to health. First, I provide background on COVID-19 vaccine equity and COVAX as part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools ACT-Accelerator. Second, I situate access to COVID-19 vaccines within the context of human rights to exemplify how the international community intended COVAX to advance both health equity and the human right to health. Third, I assess how those intentions have played out in practice due to challenges of vaccine nationalism, lack of transparency, funding shortfalls, unreliable donations, inadequate civil society participation, and inequitable resource allocation. Fourth, I suggest how COVAX might function differently if human rights were centered within its purpose, strategy, and operations. Ultimately, I argue that COVAX is upholding a largely market-oriented approach to making essential medicines accessible and that COVAX would be a more effective mechanism for vaccine equity and global health if it were grounded in human rights.