Doctors Push Support For World Medicine

Nobel Prize winner Dr. James Orbinski urged students to recognize the dignity of their fellow humans and to work toward change in world health care systems in the closing keynote speech of this weekend's Harvard-MIT conference on international health.

Orbinski, the director of Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), painted a dire picture of the state of health around the world in his address.

The speech focused on what Orbinski called "structural forces that drive inequality in health care," and on MSF's mission to remove these barriers.

"MSF refuses to remain silent and morally neutral in the face of inhumanity," Orbinski said.

MSF, the world's largest independent international relief agency, works in developing countries to provide aid to victims of natural disasters, epidemics and armed conflict, as well as to many without sufficient health care.

Orbinski described the four-pronged goal of his organization--whose name means "Doctors without Borders" in French--as being "firstly, to relieve suffering; secondly, to restore the autonomy of the individual; thirdly, to relieve injustice; and fourthly, to seek and locate political responsibility."

He predicted that a quarter of the world's population will live in abject poverty by 2012, a condition he said will be precipitated by urban migration, environmental destruction, infectious disease outbreaks and concentration of wealth in fewer hands.

He then focused his speech on the cost of health care in foreign nations, citing disparities in the prices of HIV drugs as an example.

A patient in South Africa will pay $15.87 a day for a particular medication produced by Pfizer, a price that represents twice the person's average daily income. But residents in Thailand will pay less than a dollar for the same dose because Pfizer holds no patent protection there.

Orbinski called this disparity, as well as the general preventive cost of medication, "a moral failure, a political failure and a market failure."

He called for change in the current economic system's structure and a need to recognize the dignity of the individual.

"Remember, the other has a fundamental and irreducible human dignity," Orbinski said. "That is the beginning and it must also be the end."

His speech ended a two-day conference sponsored by the Hippocratic Societies at Harvard and MIT.

The conference also featured an opening keynote speech by Dr. David Ho, scientific director and chief executive officer of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and TIME Magazine's Man of the Year in 1996, as well as panels and breakout sessions with other experts in the field of international health.

"It went exceptionally well; everything went very smoothly," said Co-director Joanna L. Chan '02.

The conference "provides [students] with an opportunity to get involved and help improve the lives of others," Chan said. "It's important to realize the disparity between our world and the world outside."

This is the fourth conference the Hippocratic Society has held, and this year's conference attracted over 700 participants.

The conference was free to undergraduates enrolled at any institution, and Chan said students had traveled from as far as Brown University and the University of Michigan to attend the weekend.