HARVARD COLLEGE GLOBAL HEALTH & AIDS COALITION

Ongoing Initiatives

Say Yes to Drugs 2

Check out the “Say Yes to Drugs 2″ tab for the most updated information about our current campaign.

Like all of our initiatives, we’re looking for manpower.  Please feel free to contact us at hcghac@gmail.com or show up to our weekly general meetings every Wednesday, 8:30 PM, in Lamont Forum Room.

Boston Living Center Initiative

The Boston Living Center (BLC) is a holistic care center for people with HIV/AIDS in Boston.  It began informally in 1989 as small-scale get-togethers in the homes of people with HIV/AIDS in the Boston area.  Today, it has grown into an organization serving over 2,400 people with HIV/AIDS, 75% of whom are low income.  It offers a range of services from art classes, support groups, computer classes, a pharmacy, yoga, massages, hair cuts, and meals for its members, all of which are free.

During the 2010-2011 school year we have many opportunities to become involved with the BLC.  In past years, the BLC has mainly served lunch to its members, such that volunteers were primarily needed from 10am-2:30pm.  However, starting this year, the BLC will also be offering dinners on Wednesday and Thursday nights, allowing for even more times during which students can volunteer.  Students have consistently found the BLC as a warm and welcoming place with a compelling mission in Boston.  Thus, serving the BLC has been a rewarding experience for many HAC members over the years.  For more information or to get involved, please visit the BLC’s website at www.bostonlivingcenter.org and/or come to our meetings to find out about how to get involved through HCGHAC.

Past Initiatives

(1) National Advocacy - US Global AIDS Funding

Despite big commitments from US politicians, funding for global AIDS treatment and prevention programs has failed to live up to expectations - in fact, it has been essentially flat-lined, and even decreased in some areas as inflation outpaces funding.  What does this mean on the ground?  Clinics throughout the developing world are turning away sick patients, and making them wait for treatment until another patient dies.  All this is happening at a time when the US can find enough money to bail out banks and car companies, but they refuse to live up to their promises to the developing world.

Last year, HCGHAC collabored with national AIDS activist group Health GAP to demand that our policymakers live up to their promises.  This is what we did:

• Birddogging - with senate elections in almost every state that borders Massachusetts, we’ll be traveling to campaign events to confront politicians (both current and future) about their position and record on global AIDS funding
• Meeting with policymakers - we plan to meet with the offices of Massachusetts representatives, in particular Senator John Kerry, to demand leadership in Congress
• Campus campaign events - we plan to host both activists and professionals with on-the-ground experience to raise campus awareness and enthusiasm
• And so, so much more….

(2) Say Yes to Drugs

(3) Medical Information Equity Initiative (MIE) (Formerly known as “Textbooks”)

While providing high quality care certainly necessitates access to medicines, an also integral aspect to health care is accessibility to information.  Sadly, the demand for equitable access to information has yet to become a popularized response to health care deficiencies around the world.

Apart from inadequate supplies of medical equipment, doctors in developing countries face tremendous barriers to learning about the best quality medical practices.  With copyrighted journal articles, expensive textbooks, increased shipping costs, and inadequate infrastructure for universal access to the internet, the ever expanding process of globalization has yet to ensure access to the fruits of academic research.

Given the vast amount of resources at Harvard and the drought of resources in many clinics within developing countries, we are well positioned to effect change on an educational level, which will hopefully translate into improved health outcomes.  Our goal is to encourage and foster collaboration among NGOs, governments, and donors to ship medical reference textbooks to resource-poor clinics

(4) Missing Medicines Initiative

The “Missing Medicines” initiative seeks to pressure Harvard to play a bigger role in global health by expanding research on the most urgent or neglected health topics and by increasing funding and commitment to interdisciplinary and cross-university global health collaboration. This initiative focuses on two neglected areas of research: “neglected diseases” and health delivery. Because we live in a world where R&D is demand-based instead of needs-based, the destitute sick who lack “purchasing power” don’t get the drugs they need. The World Health Organization estimates that only 10% of health related research today goes to 90% of the disease burden. Instead of using R&D dollars to target diseases that cause millions of deaths around the world, the global research community focuses on products like Rogaine and Viagra because they represent a sizeable “first world” market. So-called “neglected diseases” are those which slip between these cracks in the world market, yet cause over 2 million deaths each year, including shistosomiasis, chagas disease, human African trypanosomiasis, hookworm, buruli ulcer, leprosy, and even headline killers like malaria and TB. In addition to the neglected disease issue, global health experts around the world are increasingly recognizing the need to study the delivery or implementation of health services as a science. Even when a life-saving medicine exists and is available in country, there are still enormous challenges before sick patients in developing countries are able to receive the treatment and care they need, especially in rural areas. For example, many medications must be refrigerated, which poses a major challenge to countries that lack modern health infrastructure, as refrigerators and even electricity can be in short supply.

Because of their cutting-edge science facilities, universities like Harvard conduct the basic research for close to 50% of the 100 most important medicines and health technologies available today. Furthermore, since global health challenges involve diverse research areas ranging from molecular biology to economics to anthropology, universities are perhaps the only institutions which simultaneously harbor research capacity in all relevant fields. Harvard is therefore ideally positioned to better leverage its research capacity and international influence to fill the research gap toward neglected diseases and delivery science and in doing so drastically improve health outcomes in the developing world.

(5) Political Advocacy

Earlier this year, Congress passed a landmark bill regarding AIDS in particular and global health in general, called PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief).  The original version of this bill was put into affect in 2003, and it allocated $15 billion over five years for US-funded programs around the world to combat AIDS; the new incarnation was over three times that, specifying almost $50 billion over the next five years.  This momentous occasion obviously took the support of many senators and representatives, and the president himself, but it really started somewhere else - in the minds of activists, people without elected offices but with a belief in the United State’s ability to fight global health inequity.  The process in between - bringing the ideas from the imaginations of activists to the bill on the senate floor - was a tough but surprisingly simple process.  It involved tirelessly pursuing senators and representatives to make sure they were on board - this meant phone calls, emails, random favors from the nephews of second cousins of neighbors, protests, rallies, sit-ins, and bird-dogging (essentially hassling policy-makers at their respective public events, especially during the primary races between April 2007 and June 2008).

Though PEPFAR is now passed, there is still much work to do.  Several issues with the bill specifically stand out; first, the language of the bill calls for over $60 billion-worth of programming, and in doing so, blatantly under-funds several programs.  Second, the bill restricts programs that want to go beyond abstinence-only education, though there is plenty of solid data supporting programs that aim to educate using alternative methods.  Additionally, PEPFAR cannot be the end-all, be-all of US global health funding; never before has a US president made combating AIDS a top priority, but with the crisis growing and a solution available in the form of widespread ARV access, the time is now.  Luckily, the election this fall presents a terrific opportunity to us as students and activists around the country - we can use our unique access to the candidates to get them to make big commitments.  Candidates are much more vulnerable and accessible now than they will be once they are in office, where they will be very difficult to contact.  All this means that we have to act soon.

Poli Advo doesn’t end after inauguration, though - email and phone call campaigns help inform the senators that these issues are hugely important and incredibly urgent.  Manpower alone makes these campaigns successful, but again, good coordination and planning will maximize the effect.

(6) Promoting Access to West African Healthcare - Mali Health Organizing Project (MHOP) Initiative

In Africa’s fastest growing city (UN-IRIN) of Bamako, Mali, one in four children dies before the age of five due to poverty and lack of health care infrastructure (Demographic and Health Surveys).  Residents of Sikoroni, one of Bamako’s poorest slums, have identified the construction of a new clinic as a critical component to increasing access to primary health care services. Slum residents have few rights.  Most are squatters who receive little help from their governments. Communities refuse to pay taxes until the government provides services, and the government refuses to provide services until the communities pay taxes. This deadlock continues indefinitely, leading to terrible infrastructure, crippling poverty, and poor health. People die of preventable diseases because of crowding and a lack of sanitation and health care.

Mali Health Organizing Project (MHOP) acts as a catalyst to bring slum residents and their governments together. The Mali Health Organizing Project (MHOP), in partnership with the community of Sikoroni and the Malian government, has committed to construct a 10-room health clinic to provide essential preventative and primary care for 30,000 slum residents in Mali, West Africa by 2009.   The clinic will open in May 2009 and will require equipment ranging from mosquito nets to autoclaves.  This is an opportunity for students working in the US to recruit medical supplies from donors like the Seeding Labs and Medisend International. For more information visit http://www.malihealth.org/.

MHOP is a pilot initiative of HCGHAC that seeks to increase access to primary health care by assisting in medical equipment recruitment for MHOP to serve 30,000 underserved slum residents. Recruiting medical supplies is critical to the success of the clinic and is a rare opportunity to immediately begin working for a small organization based on the Partners in Health model.  Student support could expand to fundraising for MHOP or creating a speaker series focusing on issues of slum deadlock in sub-Saharan Africa.  For students interested in becoming more involved and working with a community health action group over the summer, there are opportunities for four interns to travel to Mali to work as a Health Programs Coordinator or a Microfinance Coordinator. Other action steps include collaborating with the student group Seeding Labs, and creating a mechanism to identify unused medical equipment and send it to Mali.

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