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Harvard Professor Jim Yong Kim talks about the future of global health
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Harvard Professor Jim Yong Kimdiscusses the future of global health, highlighting his experiencestreating tuberculosis and AIDS patients in poor communities from Peruto Africa, in Sargent College’sninth annual Dudley Allen Sargent Lecture. Included in his presentationare before-and-after photos of several patients, whose recoveriesinspired funding for treatment from international organizations thathad 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 thattreat drug-resistant tuberculosis, many of which were generic becausetheir patents had expired and could thus be obtained at a lower cost.
But according to Kim, providing drugs at a lower cost to third worldpatients is only the beginning. “You can’t just put pills in people’smouths,” he says. “You must create comprehensive primary care and seeksolutions to other problems, such as limited access to education,affordable housing, and food.”
Kim believes that a newhealth-care field is necessary to increase the number of skilledadvocates for funding of global health programs. The field, which hecalls health-care delivery science, will train people aboutimplementation modeling in order to eliminate the bottleneck thatprevents poor people from gaining access to drugs and treatment.
December 4, 2007, 4 p.m.
Sargent College
Video length is 01:00:35.
Jim Yong Kim is a former director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department. He cofounded Partners in Health, aninternational nongovernmental organization that challenged the wayhealth-care providers think about treatment for people withtuberculosis 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.
Hereceived an undergraduate degree from Brown University, a medicaldegree from Harvard Medical School, and a Ph.D., in anthropology, fromHarvard University. A member of the Institute of Medicine, Kim receiveda MacArthur “Genius” award in 2003.
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