January 18, 2008

On BUniverse

Harvard Professor Jim Yong Kim talks about the future of global health

Click here to watch a video of Jim Yong Kim on BUniverse.

Harvard Professor Jim Yong Kim discusses the future of global health, highlighting his experiences treating tuberculosis and AIDS patients in poor communities from Peru to Africa, in Sargent College’s ninth annual Dudley Allen Sargent Lecture. Included in his presentation are before-and-after photos of several patients, whose recoveries inspired funding for treatment from international organizations that had considered such treatment too expensive and complicated.

Kim, former director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, describes his collaboration with WHO to lower the cost of drugs that treat drug-resistant tuberculosis, many of which were generic because their patents had expired and could thus be obtained at a lower cost.

But according to Kim, providing drugs at a lower cost to third world patients is only the beginning. “You can’t just put pills in people’s mouths,” he says. “You must create comprehensive primary care and seek solutions to other problems, such as limited access to education, affordable housing, and food.”

Kim believes that a new health-care field is necessary to increase the number of skilled advocates for funding of global health programs. The field, which he calls health-care delivery science, will train people about implementation modeling in order to eliminate the bottleneck that prevents poor people from gaining access to drugs and treatment.

December 4, 2007, 4 p.m.
Sargent College

Video length is 01:00:35.

About the speaker:

Jim Yong Kim is a former director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department. He cofounded Partners in Health, an international nongovernmental organization that challenged the way health-care providers think about treatment for people with tuberculosis and HIV in developing countries, with Harvard Medical School Professor Paul Farmer.

Kim is the François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights and director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health and was recently named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people.

He received an undergraduate degree from Brown University, a medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and a Ph.D., in anthropology, from Harvard University. A member of the Institute of Medicine, Kim received a MacArthur “Genius” award in 2003.