Paul Farmer is a genius and is worthy of reading by anyone interested in his field of medical anthropology. An MD/PhD professor of Harvard and founder of Partners in Health, Farmer, perhaps better than anyone else alive, embodies the ethic that health care is a human right.
In this book, he writes on his experiences in Haiti. He writes of fighting AIDS and Tuberculosis. He points out that poverty is not only correlated with these diseases but is perhaps a cause. By his broad training, he spans two schools of thought about how to fight these diseases. Poverty must be fought, but so too must the diseases. That is, the diseases synergistically amplify the poverty, and poverty, in turn, amplifies the diseases.
Unfortunately, AIDS (sida in Haiti’s Creole language) and TB form a synergy amongst each other that haunts the public health of this island-nation. Farmer’s work is laudable as always, and the needless expense of human capital in Haiti at the hands of disease and poverty – yes, infections and inequalities – is an immense tragedy. One wonders how Haiti can prosper. Certainly more Paul Farmers would help.