Social practices--such as alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, reckless driving and lack of seatbelt use--are the "things that account for the major problems of health in this country," Mann said.
A New Approach
Mann says the profound relationship between health and human rights is "revolutionary;" the beginning of a new approach to public health.
"The current approach to public health tends to limit itself to medical type applications--health education, clinics, distributing condoms, immunizations," Mann said. "But if we really want to get to the root problem, we have go beyond that to the central question of rights and dignity."
Four years ago, the School of Public Health became the first institution in the nation to give a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to their graduates in addition to their diplomas.
Participants' Thoughts
Most of the conference participants said they enjoyed interacting with members of many different professions--lawyers, demographers, social workers and physicians.
"It's different than any other conference I've ever attended," said Dr. Eva E. Metalios, a primary care physician from New York who works in a clinic for immigrants seeking political asylum.
"Most of the conferences that I've been to in my training have been much more medically oriented," she said, during a break between sessions. "This is far more conceptual, far more theoretical, a bit less concrete perhaps than I expected, but I'm really enjoying it and learning a lot."
"I'm very pleased. It has demystified the conservative image of Harvard," said Dr. Cheka Cosmas, a representative of the German Corporation of Technical Assistance in Cameroon.
"This conference has facilitated the coming together of several different disciplines that contribute to making public health what it ought to be," Cosmas said. "Our hope is that in the long run this can be transformed into fact, not only here in the advanced world, but in developing countries."
But Cosmas did have one criticism of the conference.
"The only weakness is that perhaps enough thought was not put into seeing the institutional aspects of real life that make it impossible for certain people to accede to human rights the way they are conceived and understood in the West," he said.
Cosmas feels that dictatorial governments in developing countries have institutionalized poverty, so an "enabling environment" for the enforcement of human rights does not exist.
Mann said that the "sense that you're not alone" in thinking there's an important relationship between health and human rights is probably the most important outcome for the participants.
The next conference is tentatively slated for 1996, Mann said.
"The basic challenge is to see that enough activity is carried out until then, so that the meeting really moves us forward. We're not interested in meeting for meeting's sake," he said.
But for the people out there whose health is affected by human rights violations, the awareness raised by meetings like this may provide valuable support.
Consider the case of an American on vacation in Greece, who fell ill and was diagnosed with AIDS. The major hospitals in Athens refused to accept him into their main wards, and instead shut him in an abandoned old hospital that hadn't been cleaned or used in twenty years. He was quarantined in a single room with just a hole in the floor as a toilet, as doctors waited for him to die, it took the powerful connections of a U.S. senator to convince Greece to allow him to fly back home for proper treatment.
The Bagnoud center may be academic in its approach, but the issue it focuses on is anything but academic.