Global and Public Health Expert to Give Public Lecture in Manchester

A world-leader in global and public health is to give a public lecture at The University of Manchester today (Wednesday, June 1).

Lawrence O Gostin, Professor of Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, will present a public lecture entitled ‘Meeting Basic Survival Needs of the World’s Least Healthy People: Toward a Framework Convention on Global Health.’

Professor Gostin is engaged in three major international initiatives on global health governance:

• A “Framework Convention on Human Services” for the World Bank—a multilateral treaty on the health care professional capacity in poor and middle income countries

• A “Framework Convention on Global Health”—a multilateral treaty ensuring “basic survival needs” for the world’s poor

• A Global Plan for Justice—a global compact to fund essential medicines, basic survival needs, and climate change.

Together with academic and civil society partners from around the world, Professor Gostin founded The Joint Action and Learning Initiative on National and Global Responsibilities for Health (JALI).

JALI is a global campaign for a Framework Convention on Global Health based on the human right to health. JALI was featured in the World Health Report 2010, and the JALI Steering Committee is convening three global stakeholders’ meetings in 2011: Johannesburg, South Africa; Delhi, India; and Bellagio, Italy.

In his lecture, Professor Gostin will discuss the JALI, addressing the following issues:

Despite enormous advances in science and medicine, much of the world’s population continues to suffer and die from preventable disease. Health has become one of the starkest illustrations of global inequality: there are millions of avoidable deaths every year impacting on development, education, and life expectancy. To challenge this inequality and develop strategies to promote and fulfill the unrealized but not unrealizable human right to health, a global coalition of civil society and academia is collaborating on JALI.
  
The JALI’s ultimate goal is to secure, through collaborative research and advocacy, a Framework Convention on Global Health – a global health treaty that would, for the first time, express a shared vision for realizing the human right to the highest attainable standard of health and enabling all people to have their essential health needs met. It envisions a treaty that sets clear priorities, coordinates presently fragmented activities, ensures scalable and sustainable economic and human resources, clarifies national and international responsibilities, and creates accountability at all levels, including through monitoring, performance evaluation, and enforcement.
 
It believes that a campaign to establish a global health agreement with a strong foundation in the international right to health grows out of the last few decades of health activism, particularly the successes of the AIDS advocacy movement. An international global health agreement is the logical next step to follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and should be adopted by 2015.  It would remain rooted in the UN Millennium Declaration that countries have an individual and “collective responsibility to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level”.

Members of the public can register their intention to attend this free event by emailing isei@manchester.ac.uk. The lecture, in University Place, Theatre A, Oxford Road, The University of Manchester, takes place at 6pm and will last approximately 90 minutes.

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Notes for editors

‘Meeting Basic Survival Needs of the World’s Least Healthy People: Toward a Framework Convention on Global Health,’ a public lecture by Professor Lawrence O Gostin, takes place on Wednesday, 1^st June, from 6pm to 7pm in Lecture Theatre A, University Place, Oxford Road, The University of Manchester M13 9PL.

Professor Gostin is available for media interviews on the morning of Wednesday, June 1. Journalists wishing to attend the lecture can do so through the press office.

Lawrence O Gostin is Professor of Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, Professor of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University, Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health law, Director of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, and Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights. A biography is available here: http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/facinfo/tab_faculty.cfm?Status=Faculty&ID=258

For further information contact:

Aeron Haworth
Media Relations
Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences
The University of Manchester

Tel: 0161 275 8383
Email: aeron.haworth@manchester.ac.uk