What's New in Health and Human Rights?

I am giving one of two keynote speeches at the 2009 GlobeMed Global Health Summit in Chicago April 2-4. The theme for the gathering is "From Idea to Implementation: Securing Health as a Human Right," so I chose as the working title for my talk "Health and Human Rights: A Journalist's Perspective."

Kind of as a lark, I threw that phrase "Health and Human Rights: A Journalist's Perspective" into a Google search and much to my surprise got an exact hit. Television producer Rory O'Conner chose that as the title for a blog post that has some vintage video of the late Jonathan Mann talking about health and human rights.

So I changed my working title to "Health and Human Rights: One Journalist's Perspective," which isn't much of a distinction I admit. I also watched the interviews with Mann and others. They have held up quite well--even after ten years.

And they remind me how much AIDS, like the Holocaust before it, has taught us about human rights.