Quotes from Paul Farmer

I think we will see better vaccines within the next 15 years, but I'm not a scientist and am focused on the short-term - what will happen in the interim.

The headlong stream is termed violent But the river bed hemming it in is Termed violent by no one. The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers? Bertolt Brecht, On Violence

Anthropologists and others who take these as research questions study both individual experience and the larger social matrix in which it is embedded in order to see how various social processes and events come to be translated into personal distress and disease. By what mechanisms, precisely, do social forces ranging from poverty to racism become *embodied* as individual experience?

The United States granted asylum to exactly eight of 24,559 Haitian refugees applying for political asylum during that period [1981]... only 20 percent of those polled [in the US] said immigration should be easier for Haitians, while 55 percent said it should be more difficult. After a decade during which less than 0.5 percent of Haitian applicants were granted asylum, one wonders how much more difficult it could be.

Since Guantanamo is not technically on U.S. soil, the Bush administration lawyers developed a torturous rationale: 'While conceding that the Haitians are treated differently from other national groups who seek asylum in the U.S., the Government claimed that the U.S. Constitution and other sources of U.S. and international law do not apply to Guantanamo - this despite the fact that the U.S. military base at Guantanamo is under the exclusive jurisdiction and control of the U.S. Government.

It was not until 1986 that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began to draft laws requiring immigrants to be tested for and found free of HIV. This legislation was sponsored in the Senate by Senator Jesse Helms and was approved - unanimously - in June 1987. This Senate action was extraordinary, notes a legal opinion, in that it assumed a responsibility, previously entrusted to the HHS, to determine which communicable diseases would be grounds for excluding aliens.

Medicine becomes pragmatic solidarity when it is delivered with dignity to the destitute sick... By including social and economic rights in the struggle for human rights, we help to protect those most likely to suffer the insults of structural violence.

By 1995, some 7 percent of all African American adult males were interned [in prison]. As Loic Wacquant has remarked, the state of New York counts more men of color in its prisons than in its public universities. It is important to note that these trends reflect changes in policy rather than changes in behavior.

Some of the problems born of structural violence are so large that they have paralyzed many who want to do the right thing. But we can find more resources, and we can find them without sacrificing our independence and discernment.

Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm. If assaults on dignity are anything but random in distribution or course, whose interests are served by the suggestion that they are haphazard?

There is a widespread belief that Ebola and other viral hemorrhagic fevers cause profuse and irreversible bleeding in the humans they afflict. This is only rarely the case. So why has this belief taken hold?

Should the frenzied quest for access to power and wealth be regarded as serving a social good simply because those who were historically underrepresented in the past are now filling roles that involve replicating inequality?

Increasingly, what people with AIDS share are not personal or psychological attributes. They do not share culture or language or a certain racial identity. They do not share sexual preference or an absolute income bracket. What they share, rather, is a social position—the bottom rung of the ladder in inegalitarian societies.

I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.

We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.

The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.

I'm not an austere person.

I mean, everybody should have access to medical care. And, you know, it shouldn't be such a big deal.

It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.

Haiti is always talking about decentralization and nothing has been so obvious, perhaps a weakness, as the centralized nature of Haitian society as being revealed by the earthquake. I mean, they lost all these medical training programs because they didn't have them anywhere else.

The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.

So I can't show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.