Category: Human Rights

A Drug Epidemic’s Silver Lining

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By Katherine L. Record

Can there be a silver lining to a drug epidemic that is so extreme it is deemed a public health emergency? As prescription opioid (painkiller) addictions drive individuals to heroin, there just might be.

Heroin use has surged recently – seizures of supply increased by nearly 70% over the last few years in New York (the epicenter for imports into the United States). In Boston, overdoses increased by nearly 80% between 2010 and 2012. This has followed a rising trend in prescription opioid addictions – 4 out of 5 users are addicted to prescription painkillers when they first try heroin. Turning to the street opioid is often a move of desperation; prescription opioids are now harder to abuse, more expensive, and harder to obtain than heroin. In other words, heroin provides a cheaper, easier to score, and stronger high.

This surge in use is changing the face of heroin; the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s director recently described the drug as a former “inner city problem” that has become classless, affecting “all populations and all ages.” To be blunt, white people – many with high paying jobs and fancy apartments – are now doing 8 to 10 bags a day.

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Chip and Fish: Inadvertent Spies

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Art Caplan has authored a new opinion piece on Bioethics.net on the issue of “chipping” human beings. From the piece:

There has been a great deal of fingerpointing, second-guessing and recrimination over the decision by the President to exchange five former Taliban leaders for the American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl.  “You’ve just released five extremely dangerous people, who in my opinion … will rejoin the battlefield,” Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and likely Presidential candidate told Fox News.  Senator John McCain, R-AZ, told ABC news and many other outlets that he would never have supported the swap if he’d known exactly which prisoners would be exchanged given their former high roles in battling the U.S. in Afghanistan.

Put aside for a second whether the five Taliban leaders that were flown to Qatar for Bergdahl are now too old and too long removed from Taliban affairs to resume anything close to their old roles.  Presume, instead, they will eagerly resume where they left off prior to their capture, attacking Americans and others they see as hindering Taliban goals for Afghanistan.  Is it possible that the U.S. did something to these men before letting them go in the swap—surreptitiously implanting them with microchips so that they could be tracked or traced?

Read the full article.

The Right to Health at the Public/Private Divide: A Global Comparative Study

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By Allison K. Hoffman

In the U.S., the right to health is often held up as a utopian legal principle that other countries manage to embrace and that we shortsightedly spurn.  What I learned working on a new project is that the right to health does not always lend itself to admirable ends.  In some countries, a formal right to health is not used to advance equity but rather for the opposite.  In other words, having a right to health can lead to a less equitable distribution of health care resources because, for example, people who are better able to navigate the legal system can claim more resources for themselves.

This insight and others are featured in an excellent book that just came out from Cambridge Press, The Right to Health at the Public/Private Divide: A Global Comparative Study, edited by Colleen M. Flood, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law and Aeyal Gross, Tel-Aviv University, Faculty of Law.  This book is worth reading, in part, because it features chapters on countries that are not the usual suspects, including Hungary, Venezuela, Nigeria, New Zealand, and Taiwan.  Two of the chapters are by U.S. health care scholars: one I wrote on the U.S. system and the Affordable Care Act (A Vision of an Emerging Right to Health Care in the United States: Expanding Health Care Equity through Legislative Reform) and one Christina Ho wrote on China (Health Rights at the Juncture between State and Market: the People’s Republic of China).

In my chapter, I argue that while the U.S. does not have a formal right to health, the ACA could provide the vision and foundation for an evolving American conception of a right to health care.

Boko Haram Kidnappings and the Victims’ Mental Health

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By Michele Goodwin

In mid-April, Boko Haram, an extremist organization operating in the northern region of Nigeria, kidnapped nearly 300 girls from their boarding school in Borno.  Kidnappers threatened thatNigeria_Boko_Haram_Kidnapping the girls would be sold to sex trafficking rings in neighboring countries, causing international alarm.   In the weeks since that mass kidnapping, world leaders have issued collective demands for the return of the girls–and placed pressure on Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan to take aggressive action to achieve the girls’ return.  Some pundits believe hope may be around the corner, because in the last two days, Boko Haram leaders claimed that they will release some of the girls to safe houses.  Yet, it remains unclear whether this will happen. Read More

What Should Customers Do About Dirty Practices of Big Companies?

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By Cansu Canca

The video “Who Pays the Price? The Human Cost of Electronics” recently went viral on social media. It purports to document the suffering of former workers of Chinese electronics factories that supply smartphones to big brands. According to the video, these workers contracted serious occupational illnesses such as cancer and severe nerve damage as a result of exposure to the toxic chemicals benzene and n-hexane. The workers are said to be unaware of the fatal risks; and in any event, many would be too young to consent. The film calls for elimination of toxic chemicals in electronics factories, which it claims can be done at a negligible cost.

Watching this video and learning about this problem, are we, the customers, now under a duty to act?

For instance, in an effort to convince Apple to remove toxic chemicals from their factories, the “Bad Apple” campaign asks customers to sign a petition, call the brand, and maybe re-consider upgrading their phone less often. The campaign targets Apple because of its powerful position in the public eye as well as in the industry, which currently lacks any toxin-free option.

The question is: What is the morally right response of a customer? To put it in more detail, are you morally required to take action? If so, is signing the petition or calling the brand sufficient or should you, for example, boycott the brand?

Here is the answer: You are probably right to do anything, including nothing. Read More

Art Caplan: Condoms Should Be Encouraged, Not Used as Evidence

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Art Caplan has a new opinion piece up at NBC News on the increasing use of condoms as evidence of a crime by police in the United States. From the article:

Why do we shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to public health? The latest example of what not to do in the war against disease comes from the world of sex: All over the United States, police and prosecutors are discouraging safer sex by using the possession of condoms as evidence of a crime.

For decades, police officers have been regularly confiscating condoms from people they believe are engaged in prostitution to either justify an arrest or to use as evidence at trial. District Attorneys routinely mention the number of condoms a person had on them when arrested to help cinch prostitution charges.

Prostitutes are far more likely to be infected with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases than are the general population. That is why health departments spend a lot of money distributing condoms and trying to convince sex workers to use them.

Read the full article.

TOMORROW: “The Right to Life and the Inter American Court of Human Rights”

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“The Right to Life and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights”

When: March 5, 2014, 12:00-1:00 p.m.

Where: Wasserstein Hall 3007, Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave.

Please join us for a brown bag talk with Professor Paola Bergallo, Faculty of Law, Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires, and HRP Visiting Fellow. Bergallo served as an expert witness in the landmark case Artavia Murillo et al. (“In Vitro Fertilization”) v. Costa Rica, which discusses human rights definitions regarding the right to life, among other health and human rights matters. Professor Gerald Neuman of Harvard Law School will moderate.

This event is being co-sponsored by Harvard Law Students for Reproductive Justice and HLS Advocates for Human Rights.

Trials of HIV Treatment-as-Prevention: Ethics and Science. Friday, March 7

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High hopes for overcoming the HIV epidemic rest to a large extent on HIV Treatment-as-Prevention (TasP). Large cluster-randomized controlled trials are currently under way to test the effectiveness of different TasP strategies in general populations in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, however, international antiretroviral treatment (ART) guidelines have already moved to definitions of ART eligibility including all – in the US guidelines – or nearly all – in the WHO guidelines – HIV-infected people. In this panel, we are bringing together the leaders of three TasP trials in sub-Saharan Africa, bioethicists, and public health researchers to debate the tension between the policy intentions expressed in these guidelines and the historic opportunity to learn whether TasP works or not. Please join us in considering different options to resolving this tension.

  • Till Bärnighausen, Harvard School of Public Health, and Wellcome Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Science
  • Max Essex, Harvard School of Public Health
  • Deenan Pillay, Wellcome Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Science, and University College London
  • Velephi Okello, Swaziland National AIDS Programme, Ministry of Health
  • Dan Wikler, Harvard School of Public Health
  • Nir Eyal, Harvard Medical School

 

Moderator: Megan Murray, Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School

 

Friday, March 7th, 10am-12pm

Kresge G3, Harvard School of Public Health

TOMORROW: “Transgender Identity, Mental Health, and Human Rights: The DSM-5 and Beyond”

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“Transgender Identity, Mental Health, and Human Rights: The DSM-5 and Beyond”

When: 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

Where: Hauser 102

Please join us for a discussion with panelists: Sara Kimmel, staff psychologist at Harvard University Student Mental Health Services; Eszter Kismödi, international human rights lawyer on sexual and reproductive health law, policy, and research; Zack Paakkonen, staff attorney with GLAD’s Transgender Rights Project; and moderator Mindy Roseman, Academic Director of the Human Rights Program and Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School.

Cosponsored by the Human Rights Program, the Radcliffe Institute, HLS Lambda, and the Petrie-Flom Center. Light lunch will be served.

Global Health Governance: Call for Submissions

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Global Health Governance will be publishing a special issue on a proposed Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) in December 2014. The proposal for an FCGH would create a new international framework, grounded in the international human right to health, that would support health at the national and global levels.

For this FCGH special issue, Global Health Governance invites submission of theoretical and empirical policy research articles that examine and analyze how the FCGH could improve health through improved governance and realization of the right to health. We have particular interest in articles on: Read More