Month: December 2017

Dr. Joia Mukherjee is an associate professor in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and she has served as the Chief Medical Officer for Partners in Health since 2000. She recently published an undergraduate textbook titled, “An Introduction to Global Health Delivery.” This 12/21/17 blog post is from the Oxford University Press blog.

Policy makers, organization, and governments have worked side-by-side with people living with AIDS as part of a global social movement for three decades. The success of the movement for HIV treatment access not only garnered billions of dollars of new money for HIV treatment, but also served to shift the public health paradigm from prevention-only to the provision long-term treatment. This paradigm shift ushered in a new era in global health. One that has strengthened health systems and treated a variety of conditions from non-communicable diseases, women’s health, mental illness, and cancer. Stronger and more resilient health systems are the result. Adult, child, and maternal mortality have dropped in many of the world’s poorest countries. UNAIDS recently announced that as of 2017, 21 million people have received antiretroviral therapy—the life-saving medications that have transformed AIDS from a fatal disease to a manageable and treatable one. READ MORE>>

Brittany Stopa is a Clinical Research Regulatory Coordinator in the BWH Department of Neurosurgery, and holds a Masters of Public Health in Global Health. She is a contributor to the BWH Global Health Hub.

Dr. Joia Mukherjee is an associate professor in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and she has served as the Chief Medical Officer for Partners in Health since 2000. She recently published an undergraduate textbook titled, “An Introduction to Global Health Delivery.”

“In stunned silence I watched Lovely die in front of me. Her bloated belly, red hair, and swollen feet screamed the medical diagnosis kwashiorkor, protein calorie malnutrition, starvation. The heartache, anguish, and even shame on her mother’s face pierced my psyche… Children do not die of starvation because of their mothers’ ignorance. Mothers know when their children are hungry from their ceaseless cries. They know when their children are dying of starvation when the crying stops. More than 25 years ago I first witnessed death from starvation. In my youth, my ignorance, and my relative solitude, I delivered only the prescribed guidance to Cynthia, and to other mothers. But I could not make sense of a world where a starving child was not offered food. I felt ashamed then and now at the gross inequity of a world with enormous wealth and starving children. Health disparities are a thermometer of injustice.”

This introduction to Mukherjee’s new textbook from Oxford University Press, An Introduction to Global Health Delivery, sets the tone for a publication that aims to reshape the field of global health and how it is taught. In it, she calls out the established set of practices in global health as failing the people they purport to serve. And Dr. Mukherjee calls for a new approach to global health delivery, one that is built on the premise that everyone has a right to health.
Continue reading “Dr. Mukherjee’s New Textbook Will Reshape How We Teach Global Health Delivery” →