HealthRight International is a global health and human rights organization working to build lasting access to health for excluded communities.
They work closely with communities and establish local partnerships to deliver health services. At the same time, they provide training and equipment and improve systems to enable their partners to deliver services on their own. Their goal is to create lasting change that supports access to health while strengthening human rights.
Their projects address health and social crises made worse by human rights violations, with a particular focus and expertise on:
-HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria, including the rights of people living with these diseases to care, and protection from stigma and discrimination
-Women’s health, including women’s right to information and equal access to protection and quality care, including safe and effective maternal and neonatal care
-The health and welfare of orphans and other at-risk children and youth, whose wellbeing may be endangered when they lack supportive families or social networks
-Care and support for survivors of human rights violations such as torture, trafficking, and domestic and gender-based violence
Since its founding in 1990 by the late Dr. Jonathan Mann, HealthRight has worked in over 30 countries, with current projects in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and the United States.
History
HealthRight International founder Jonathan Mann died on Wednesday, September 2, 1998, in the crash of an airplane bound from New York to Geneva, where he was to attend a World Health Organization conference. He was 51. His wife, Mary Lou Clements-Mann, whom he married in 1996, also perished. Clements-Mann was a world-renowned expert on vaccines and founded the Center for Immunization Research at Johns Hopkins University. Early in her career, she worked in the worldwide effort to eradicate smallpox and conducted more than 100 clinical trials on vaccines from influenza to hepatitis. She also worked on the recently approved immunization for rotavirus, which causes often fatal diarrhea in children in poor countries. Recently she was working on several HIV vaccines, as well as the first trial of one for hepatitis C.
Dr. Mann founded HealthRight in 1990 as he felt there was void amongst the health and human rights organizations in the United States and he desired to create a unique organization whose mission was to create sustainable programs that promote and protect health and human rights in the United States and abroad.
A world-renowned researcher and champion of human rights, Mann flourished on the faculty of Havard’s School of Public Health as professor in epidemiology and international health. In 1993, he was appointed the first François-Xavier Bagnoud professor of health and human rights and founding director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. In 1998, Mann left HSPH to assume the deanship of the school of public health of the Allegheny University of Health Sciences in Philadelphia.
Mann received his undergraduate education at Harvard College, graduating in 1969, before earning his MD at Washington University School of Medicine in 1974. Following medical school, he worked as an epidemiologist in New Mexico for the US Public Health Service and the New Mexico Health Services Division.
Following a return to HSPH to earn his MPH degree in 1980, Mann began to apply his intellect and skills to forming international strategies for reducing and preventing the spread of AIDS. He founded and directed Project SIDA, an AIDS research project based in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire), that incorporated epidemiologic, clinical, and laboratory components in a collaborative effort of Zairian, US (Centers for Disease Control), and Belgian AIDS researchers.
How great a loss was the death of AIDS researcher Jonathan Mann, killed in the crash of Swissair Flight 111? “I’m convinced that if someone other than Jonathan had been the first director of Global Programme on AIDS, the whole response to the epidemic would have been different,” says Peter Piot, one of the earliest HIV researchers and now director of the United Nations AIDS program. “For example,” he continues, “we may have gotten into a repressive approach, perhaps using quarantine. Because let’s not forget that in the early days there were many calls for that.”
Indeed, notes Newsday reporter Laurie Garrett in her definitive book The Coming Plague, by 1987, 81 countries had passed laws against people with HIV or risk groups, usually homosexuals and prostitutes. In Germany, a federal judge declared it might be necessary to tattoo and quarantine people with the virus. Cuba was already quarantining AIDS patients. Some Muslim states were jailing “promiscuous” people, and Chinese officials denied the existence of homosexuals, drug users, or prostitutes in the People’s Republic. In the U.S., President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William Bennett, fought Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s plans for frank education about HIV prevention, favoring instead compulsory testing of all hospital patients, marriage license applicants, and immigrants. Quarantine loomed as a very real threat.
Amid this gathering storm, Jonathan Mann led public health authorities to perhaps their finest hour. Impeccably dressed in bow ties, yet with the gritty experience of running the first major African HIV research program (which, among many accomplishments, showed that HIV could be spread through heterosexual sex but not through mosquito bites), Mann managed to convene more than 100 national ministers of health together in London. There, as Garrett writes, almost 150 nations signed on to a condom-based, compassionate strategy to slow the spread of AIDS. A few months later, he convinced the World Health Organization to make human rights the core of its anti-HIV strategy. These coups played a crucial role in preventing the wholesale repression of people with the virus.
Mann orchestrated this historic consensus from his new position as director of the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS. At first, recalls Daniel Tarantola, who joined the fledgling endeavor at the beginning, “the program was himself, a secretary, and one typewriter.” Two years later, Mann had rocketed the budget to almost $100 million. His m.o.: hard work, personal modesty, and an eloquence that was at once fiery and logical. “Back at a time when only a few people were screaming” for a humane and effective response, says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “Jonathan was an unbelievably articulate and passionate voice.” Mathilde Krim, founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, adds that Mann persuaded people with “the force of the argument, the morality of behaving a certain way, and the practical usefulness of being ethical and respectful of others. He convinced people.”
Mann’s message: AIDS is a global crisis, in which no person or nation is an island. More important, human rights and public health go hand in hand: “In each society, those people who before HIV/AIDS arrived were marginalized, stigmatized, and discriminated against become those at highest risk of HIV infection…. The French have a simple term which says it all: HIV is now becoming a problem mainly for les exclus, the ‘excluded ones’ living at the margin of society.”
Mann, who moved to Harvard after leaving WHO, gave a shattering talk at the world AIDS conference in 1996 in Vancouver. That was when protease inhibitors arrived, creating a sense of euphoria in the First World, where the expensive drugs were able to prolong life. But Mann warned that this breakthrough threatened the very solidarity among AIDS advocates that had allowed them to hold back repressive policies. In AIDS, he said, “we all started in the same place: with the same lack of treatment and with the same hopes… The industrialized world, shorn of its technologic armor, was forced into developing prevention and care strategies, to listen and learn from the universally available wealth of human experience and wisdom.” He called for individual efforts, including for people with HIV in wealthy countries to “give the equivalent cost of a week of treatment” to give patients in developing countries basic treatment “or relief of pain.”
His international experiences with AIDS policy brought to his attention the link between human rights and health. He was particularly interested in the effects of health policies on human rights, the health effects of human rights violations, and the inextricable connection between promoting and protecting health and rights.
