Editorial: Intersections of Health and Human Rights

Abstract

"In an age when discussions of global or national health policy too often devolve into feckless technocratic sidebars or the crass rhetoric of horse-race politics, Dr. Mann’s vision gives us a sense of agency—and urgency. The “p values of biostatistics,” he insisted, are no substitute for values themselves. Just as any narrow epidemiology that identifies ‘risk behaviors’ of individuals in isolation from their social context threatens to distort our knowledge, understanding, and the collective decisions we make on their basis, so too the impulse to imprison health in a biomedical straitjacket does violence to its potential as a nexus of moral, and therefore political, action. There are two dimensions of well-being, and only one is statistical or physical. To Dr. Mann, the human rights framework offered “coherence and clarity required for public health to identify and work with conscious attention to its roles and responsibilities. At that point, an ethics of public health … can emerge.”"(pg 1)