Canadian Conference on International Health: Keynote Paul Farmer

In my list of global health and development rock stars (which I should publish here one day), Paul Farmer is pretty close to the top.  Friends and I joke about the celebrity-style worship we direct towards people like him and Stephen Lewis or Alex De Waal, for example.  For some background, Farmer is a maverick health provider, challenging the establishment by providing health care to people in marginalized areas assumed to be impossible or ineffective to treat.

In today’s keynote address to the Canadian Conference on International Health here in Ottawa, he injected a healthy dose sarcasm into a topic (public health) that he acknowledges “is not a riot.”  His point was to show that quality care in developing contexts is possible and effective, and that the obstacles to its implementation are usually internal to the public health establishment rather than the communities where it is needed.

At one point, he got very serious and began to talk about a research project that he had been conducting over the past 15 years.  “I think that I’ll be able to announce the results later this year: we are starting to find that the best treatment for malnutrition…is food,” he joked.  “But I’ll have to check my P-values.”

Farmer finished by showing a photo of a baby suffering from AIDS, malaria, TB and malnutirition (”but other than that, she’s fine”).  Rather than an accompanying description of “what a poor, poverty stricken child,” his point was pragmatic: this child has four ailments that we can cure.  And that’s exactly what his organization, Partners in Health, did.  He left us with the strong but simple message: “Insist on quality primary health care in Canada, in the US and in Africa.”

Though slightly less of a global health heartthrob, the final keynote of the session, Ron Labonte (of the Global Research Project on Primary Health Care) left us with an important point of action as well: “Embrace optimism as a carefully disciplined act of political resistance.”