Health and human rights
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Health and human rights · Jan 2013
Toward a legal framework that promotes and protects sex workers' health and human rights.
Complex combinations of law, policy, and enforcement practices determine sex workers vulnerability to HIV and rights abuses. We identify "lack of recognition as a person before the law" as an important but undocumented barrier to accessing services and conclude that multi-faceted, setting-specific reform is needed-rather than a singular focus on decriminalization-if the health and human rights of sex workers are to be realized.
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Health and human rights · Jan 2013
Leveraging HIV-related human rights achievements through a Framework Convention on Global Health.
Although AIDS remains a leading cause of death, especially in low- and middle-income countries, the movement to address it has greatly contributed to changing the world's response to health challenges. By fusing activism, political leadership, domestic and international investment, and accountability for results, the course of the epidemic has been radically shifted. People living with HIV and others directly affected by the epidemic have exerted immense leadership since the first days of the response: they have fought to end discrimination on the basis of sero-status, gender, sexual orientation, disability, migration status, drug use, or participation in sex work. ⋯ While the FCGH must make civil society support and engagement an indispensable principle, the AIDS movement can contribute substantive content and mobilization for its adoption. A broad international legal framework for health can help address some of the key legal, policy, regulatory, and programmatic challenges that continue to hinder effective responses to HIV. Thus, the AIDS response potentially has much to gain from the normative and institutional framework, and the expanded commitment to realizing the right to health that can be generated under such a Convention.
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Health and human rights · Jan 2013
Identifying the gaps: Armenian health care legislation and human rights in patient care protections.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Armenia has undergone an extensive legislative overhaul. Although a number of developments have aimed to improve the quality and accessibility of Armenia's health care system, a host of factors has prevented the country from fully introducing measures to ensure respect for human rights in patient care. In particular, inadequate health care financing continues to oblige patients to make both formal and informal payments to obtain basic medical care and services. More generally, a lack of oversight and monitoring mechanisms has obstructed the implementation of Armenia's commitments to human rights in several international agreements. ⋯ A number of initiatives must be undertaken in order to promote the full spectrum of human rights in patient care in Armenia. This section highlights certain recommendations flowing from the findings of the gap analysis, including further work needed to make pain relief medication more accessible to patients with chronic or terminal illness. New initiatives are also suggested, such as the establishment of an independent body of medical professionals and ethicists mandated to resolve disputes between patients and providers, and other efforts intended to ensure that the rights of patients and providers alike are upheld and respected.
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Household indoor air pollution from open-fire cookstoves remains a public health and environmental hazard which impacts negatively on people's right to health. Technologically improved cookstoves designed to reduce air pollution have demonstrated their efficacy in laboratory studies. Despite the tremendous need for such stoves, in the field they have often failed to be effective, with low rates of long-term adoption by users, mainly due to poor maintenance of the stoves. ⋯ We suggest that community health workers could play a critical role in creating demand for, implementing facilitation and delivery of, and monitoring these cookstoves and related services. Through this approach, improved cookstoves could become an appealing, available, and sustainable option for the rural poor. In this paper, we adopt a human rights-based approach to overcome the problem of indoor air pollution, and we use Nepal as an example.