Health should be a priority

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Health is now a major priority on the international agenda and is an imperative for development. The relationship between poverty and disease had long been acknowledged by public health reformers who suggest many inputs -- political, financial, social, cultural, engineering, science, educational, religious, and legal in addition to medical -- to improve the health of populations. The convergence of these disciplines is necessary for improvements in the health of populations.
Poor public health standards are a result of major problems related to ownership of the public health goal. The poor health status of populations is related to chronic poverty working through hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, unsafe drinking water, social discrimination, physical insecurity and political exclusion. The promotion of health, and consequently of social and economic rights of the poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. However, governments and international agencies often prefer to confine the debate to the issue of resources for medical treatment, as a means of deflecting the debate from the true social and economic causes of ill-health. The public health vision for the 21st century needs new policies based on a human rights perspective to address the challenges of health needs of populations.
There is a need for a people's movement which champions public health issues as basic rights. The current supply-side and top-down approach to public health needs to be replaced by a bottom-up approach with community mobilisation for meaningful changes to occur. The challenge is to integrate public health goals into the diverse disciplinary frameworks and models. In Bangladesh, the varied disciplines involved with public health and their divergent frameworks result in different agendas. Public-private partnerships for example are suggestive of collusion between the stakeholders and actors, with the public health agenda hijacked by powerful private players.

Gopal Sengupta
Canada
gopalsengupta@aol.com