Courtesy of the Lancet/AUB Commission on Syria

On March 14, the   Lancet/American University of Beirut (AUB) Commission on Syria, which FXB director Dr. Jennifer Leaning co-chairs, published its first health policy paper, "Health workers and the weaponisation of health care in Syria: a preliminary inquiry." In the paper, Fouad M. Fouad, Annie Sparrow, and other authors describe a "strategy of using people's need for health care as a weapon against them by violently depriving them of it," resulting in the death of over 800 health workers and the injury or imprisonment of many more.

Read FXB's summary of the article and the press response.
Go to the Commission's webpage for direct access.

On March 20 at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard FXB and the Syrian American Medical Society sponsored a panel of testimonies from four doctors who survived the siege of Aleppo. They told of the targeting of the hospitals in which they worked with bombs and chemical weapons and of the injuries and deaths they had seen among children, other civilians, and their coworkers. Their stories made vivid the numbers and trends described in the Lancet paper. One doctor spoke on how she keeps going amid such destruction: "The Koran says, 'who saves one life saves all mankind.' I focus on the life."

Read an article about the panel.

through Technology and Task Shifting

FXB research fellow Dr. Satchit Balsari recently published two co-authored reports, Exchanging Health Information and Task Shifting in Healthcare: Reframing the Ayush Debate. Both published by Harvard's South Asia Institute (SAI) and focused on India, they offer approaches to advancing healthcare equity worth considering for other health systems and for global health in general.

2016 Radcliffe Conference (Balsari on far left,Joaquin Blaya, Ram Sahasranam, Dr. Barbara Bierer)

Exchanging Health Information
grew out of a September 2016 interdisciplinary two-day conference organized by Dr. Balsari and others, with the support of SAI and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, in which India served as a case study for exploring requirements for electronic exchange of health information. India offers an extraordinary opportunity for considering these issues, as currently most health records are paper (which means India lacks the contention among different systems that besets the US) and the government is currently creating a regulatory authority and writing health information laws. As well, the government has recently rolled out a unique biometric digital identification system, Aadhaar. 

As part of a Tata-Trust-funded project "Livelihood Creation in India through Social Entrepreneurship and Skill Development," Dr. Balsari and his team reviewed task shifting in Indian healthcare, considering the potential of practitioners in Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy (Ayush) to alleviate chronic workforce gaps in rural areas. Task Shifting in Healthcare: Reframing the Ayush Debate offers a new angle on the tension between allopathic and non-allopathic medicine. It describes task shifting and training as paths towards healthcare equity in India, forming part of the 3T approach of task shifting, training, and technology.

Read an interview with Dr. Balsari on the health information report.
Read Exchanging Health Information.
Read Task Shifting in Healthcare: Reframing the Ayush Debate.

Whenever the federally-funded discovery is not available on "reasonable terms" from the patent holder, or if a health or safety need arises, the government has the right to "march-in."

Read the blogs:
Will Trump March-In and Bring Down Drug Prices?

Drug Prices and FDA Reform on Trump's Radar
How We Fix This: The Case for a Publicly Financed Medicines Research System 

       

UN apology to Haiti must lead to remedies: In a recent HHR perspective essay, Adam Houston described the six-year battle that advocates fought to receive a UN apology for the introduction of cholera in Haiti. He stresses that it is vital to ensure that the apology is only the first step, and not the last, in responding to the victims.

As well as appearing at a conference in Johannesburg (with FXB visiting scholar Deborah Rose) and at Harvard on a panel about the artist Doris Salcedo, FXB research director Professor Jacqueline Bhabha has been publishing widely:

• "Half a Century of the Right to Health?" for  UN Chronicle (2016, vol 52, 4);
• A chapter,"The Importance of Nationality for Children," in the 2017 World's Stateless Children Report;
• "Displacements: A First Take," the opening article in an issue of ReVista  (the Harvard Review of Latin America) focused on displaced people (Winter 2017);
• As part of the Tata-funded, South-Asia-Institute project on livelihood creation in India, two co-authored reports: Interrogating the Norm: Innovative Interventions to Promote Gender Justice and Safety in India and Triggering Success: Innovative Interventions to Promote Educational Access in India.

Watch the video of Professor Bhabha chairing "Fragments of War/Fragments of History," the panel on Doris Salcedo.

Harvard FXB fellows and faculty have been presenting far and wide, and nearby in our own backyard. Here are a few examples:

In February, FXB fellows Vasileia Digidiki, Kathleen Hamill, and Roger-Claude Liwanga (with HMUN's Ashley Collins in photo) participated in a panel discussion, "The Challenges of Protecting Children's Rights" during the 63rd session of the Harvard National Model United Nations 2017 (HMUN). The three fellows reflected on child protection challenges in Europe, the Middle East and Africa while engaging with faculty advisors and professors who convened for the HMUN with their students from 275 universities around the country and the world.