Brand Loyalty and Global Health

I have long been a fan of The Pump Handle, a self-described "water cooler for the public health crowd," with special expertise in mining and occupational safety. They also post on plenty of other public health topics, of course.

Many of the contributers have some tie to the George Washington University School of Public Health--although from the beginning that has seemed more incidental than anything else. They certainly do not act or blog like traditional institution boosters. And, in fact, lately, I have noticed that they are expanding their list of contributors well beyond Georgetown to academics at Boston and Tufts Universities, as well as a few well-chosen advocates and even one anonymous blogger.

I think that move to reach beyond institutional borders is particularly innovative--or should I say counter-cultural? Even if it seems like an obviously good idea, it does not happen that enough. Usually, the conventional wisdom is that in order to "get your message out," you need to focus on branding in general, and institutional branding in particular. Everyone is so worried about sharing credit that they don't realize how little credibility single-institution venues actually have.

Gorman Talk on Health and Human Rights

As promised, here is my talk on health and human rights, which I gave this past Friday at the GlobeMed Global Health Summit at Northwestern University in Evanston, Il. I met a lot of bright, enthusiastic students at the event and learned a thing or two myself. Thanks to Jon, Divya, Hannah, Victor and others for inviting me and organizing everything.

"Health and Human Rights: One Journalist’s Perspective"
By Christine Gorman

GlobeMed Global Health Summit
Keynote Address

Friday, April 3, 2009
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois


I would like to thank GlobeMed and the other sponsors at Northwestern University for inviting me to this Summit today. In keeping with the theme of the conference, I have taken as the title to my talk “Health and Human Rights: One Journalist’s Perspective.”

My talk today has three parts. I want to tell you a story, share some observations and finally issue a warning. The story comes from the 1980s, from the first few years of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. The observations are my own and the warning, yes, about the warning. Well, I’ll leave that to the end.

The story takes place in 1987. The two main characters are Archie Harrison, a 32-year-old gay man, and myself, a still fairly new, young health reporter for TIME Magazine.

First, I need to set the stage for you a bit.

In 1987, the AIDS epidemic was officially six years old. That summer, the government reported that 40,000 people in the U.S. had so far developed AIDS. And of those 40,000 people with AIDS, more than 23,000—or nearly 60%—had died.

We didn’t know it at the time but 1987 was the beginning of a turning point. The amount of stigma and panic that permeated the earliest days was beginning, just beginning, after extraordinary effort and struggle, to subside. President Reagan spoke publicly about AIDS for the first time, in a speech at a fund-raising dinner. The Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug—called AZT—that prolonged life for a while. But the price was incredibly high—about $8000 for a year’s supply of capsules.

Many people did not have insurance and could not otherwise afford the medication.

Here was hope—after so few years packed with far too many funerals. But it was hope that came at a price tag that put it well out of reach.

The rage was palpable. I attended the legendary meeting in Greenwich Village in which playwright Larry Kramer told the assembled room that two-thirds of them would be dead in five years if they didn’t “Act Up.” They quickly organized a die-in on Wall Street to protest the high prices. That was just the beginning. I sometimes wonder how much more they might have done with Twitter or SMS messages or even cell phones.

As part of TIME’s ongoing coverage of the news, I made contact with Archie Harrison, who was 32, and had just finished a clinical trial with AZT. Archie had responded well to the drug. Our first contact was on the telephone. I got the quote I needed for the article, but there was this extraordinary quality, this sense of connection that came through in our conversation.

I decided that I wanted to meet Archie in person and so I set up a follow-up interview.

We met in the home that Archie shared with his partner in the West 50s of Manhattan. There are some interviews, some conversations you have as a journalist that just stand out—and that you know you will take with you the rest of your life. My conversation that afternoon with Archie was one of them.

For a short while, the masks of politeness and self-protection and the pressure of everyday busyness that keep us separated from each other fell away, at least a little.

I had recently lost both my grandmothers, with whom I had been particularly close. People my own age were dying in unprecedented numbers around me in New York City. Having grown up in the Antibiotic Age, that wasn’t something that I had ever expected to happen.

Before I knew it, I was asking Archie an incredibly direct and admittedly naïve question. “What’s it like to know that you are going to die?” I asked.

He paused a second and must have decided that I was sincere. “I know I’m going to die,” he said. “Just as I know that you’re going to die.”

In truth, I don’t remember what he said right after that because I was so surprised.

“What? I’m going to die? But I don’t have AIDS. How can you say that I am going to die?” Honest to goodness, although it embarrasses me to admit it, those were the first thoughts racing through my head.

Did I mention that I was very young?

But you see what Archie did—don’t you? He drew a circle that included me. He didn’t let me forget that we share the same human condition—a condition that includes illness and death.

I had asked Archie a very specific question—about his own mortality—and he answered with a deeper truth, one that was universal.

I had asked a question that assumed—without my even being aware of it—that we lived in two different circles. And he gave me an answer that showed me where the boundaries really stood.

That is where I believe we must look for the connection between health and human rights. In that bedrock of our common humanity.

And yet, so often, the language and the arguments that I hear about health as a human right sound to my ear as if they are not about the common human condition at all. Too often the arguments smack of noblesse oblige. That the human right to basic health care is something that one group with an abundance of rights is willing to bestow on the poor and the lame. Not because they are equal but precisely because they are different.

This may seem like a subtle point but we ignore it at our own peril.

A hundred years ago, Christian missionaries spread across the globe to bring the “Good News” to the heathen masses. They knew that what they were doing was right—just as those who believe in health as a human right are convinced that their cause is just.

You have got to admit, something in us—at least some of us—needs to save the world.

But until we get it, until we get that it is we ourselves who are the ones who need those rights, I think we are likely to miss the boat and compromise the dream.

Have you ever noticed how often the talk of human rights sounds like preaching to the converted? Even the language, the phrase—“human rights”—depends on an international legal framework that may resonate in the groves of academia or NGO-land but that, quite frankly, doesn’t motivate most of the world.

I say this not to stop the conversation but to broaden it.

How do you translate the goals of universal access to health care in language that resonates with everyone from the ordinary Muslim laborer to the anti-abortion activist to the libertarian atheist?

Doesn’t this demand many phrases and many languages and many partners in conversation—particularly among those who are not yet convinced?

When I was looking over the list of participants at the GlobeMed Summit, I was glad to see a few representatives from the religious world—namely the Reverend Dan Dale of Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ and John Neafsey, a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer in the department of theology at Loyola. It is probably not that hard for most human rights activists to find common points of understanding with Dale’s and Neafsy’s social justice theology.

But I challenge you to find and make contact as well with those thinkers and believers of a more conservative brand of religion—such as those Christians whose focus on sin and opposition to condoms so often drive the rest of us to distraction.

Make sure you use language and engage in conversations that allow you to cast a wide net. Reach out to folks who are more genuinely motivated by an appeal to the Bible, the Koran or the Hindu examples of Rama and Sita than to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yes, there is a risk of unsatisfactory compromises and visions diluted by weak coalitions. Yes, you will find people who are not at all interested in engaging in conversation, only in shutting you down.

But if you don’t discover that circle in which you and the other both exist, then health as a human right becomes just another pretty ideal that you can feel really good about holding but that doesn’t make a difference in the lives of real people.

Finally, don’t be so GLOBAL in your focus on GLOBAL HEALTH that you lose sight of what is going on here in the U.S.

For decades, access to health care in the U.S. has been a group privilege—won by right of hard work and a prosperous employer. Follow the rules and you will reap the benefits. And, after all, don’t we deserve those rewards?

But the bargain is changing—isn’t it? Hard work and a college degree are no longer guarantees.

That has opened a few more eyes. It has taken the incredible cataclysmic forces of our current financial crisis to draw the circle wider, to see that we can no longer maintain our distance. Much to our surprise, we’re there, too, inside a desperate circle.

The upheaval has not yet been great enough for the majority of the middle class to throw in its lot with the poor, but, who knows, that may yet occur. People in a position to change the system don’t really think about doing so until the system stops working for them.

So much for the story and for my observations.

Now for the warning. For years, global health visionaries like Jim Kim and Paul Farmer have talked about AIDS as the wedge issue—the tool for mobilizing people from all walks of life around access to healthcare.

As a wedge issue, AIDS works better than some others—like malaria—because it crosses so many economic lines. You don’t have to work so hard at drawing the circle—at getting people to see themselves in the circle.

But I fear that window of opportunity is drawing to a close. As AIDS increasingly becomes a disease of the poor, its power to rally people from all walks of life around access to health care diminishes.

It’s human nature. Once I get my treatment, then I’m not in the same boat as you are. Once my husband, brother, lover, wife, sister, mother, father, son, daughter, best friend gets treatment, the lines of the circle begin to disappear.

If you don’t believe me, just think for a bit about tuberculosis. For centuries it afflicted rich and poor alike—okay maybe more poor people than rich ones. But still it afflicted enough folks in the corridors of power to finance the many sanitoria of Switzerland.

And then along comes streptomycin, which--along with better food and living conditions--does such a wonderful job that the sanitoria have to convert themselves into ski resorts or risk going out of business altogether.

In just a few decades tuberculosis becomes so completely identified with the poor that there is no market pressure to develop new medications beyond the first handful that scored the greatest success—albeit over a treatment course of many months.

No one now would ever think of using TB—or the fear of TB or sympathy about TB—as the wedge issue for folks from all walks of life to rally around access to effective health care.

How much longer until our perceptions of AIDS fall into the same pattern? It was recently reported that 3% of the residents of Washington, D.C. have HIV--a rate that is now higher than New York City's or San Francisco's. Yes, there was news coverage of the study but not to the extent there would have been 20 years ago.

So, that’s my warning: as wedge issues go, AIDS may have opened the door, but it cannot keep the door open forever.

The struggle to recognize health as a human right is about what is fair in a world that is demonstrably unfair, in which progress is never guaranteed and even the best of intentions can, and far too regularly actually do, prove harmful.

And yet . . . and yet . . . the words of the late Jonathan Mann, which you have quoted in the conference schedule, still ring true. Mann said, and I quote, “People say there is no use trying to change the world. But if we don’t try, will it change?”

Thank you very much.

GlobeMed Summit in Chicago

On my way to the 2009 GlobeMed Global Health Summit in Chicago, where I will be giving one of two keynote speeches. (The other one is being given by Stephen Lewis, the former UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.)

The title for my talk is "Health and Human Rights: One Journalist's Perspective" and I will post it on the blog after I give it on Friday evening.

Wanted: A Social Network for Global Health News

Towards building a social network for real global health news on the cheap.

The promise: the Web allows anyone to have a voice.

The reality: the Web is actually narrowing the bounds of conversation. We’re recreating in the digital world the same categories and divisions that exist in the real world—only stronger. (See James Evans' recent analysis in Science for supporting evidence in scientific publishing online. On a related note, check out this study about "the winner's curse.")

Case in point: global health news coverage. This topic always falls between the cracks in the mainstream press—somewhere between “world news” and “health news.” Those offline categories are simply getting stronger in the online world. News categories are not yet miscellaneous enough, as David Weinberger describes.

In my experience, most global health news is actually promotional, not journalistic in nature.

A possible solution and the reason for this message: organizing the folks who are already writing about global health news online for free. Note: this is not going to pay anybody’s bills but since we are doing it anyway (as a way of keeping online notes for a book, learning, self-promotion, etc.), why not make it as powerful as it can be?

Some background: the fact that we were able to cover global health news at all was a happy result of the inefficiencies in the advertising model that financed most of the news business until very recently. Yes, most of the health advertising in TIME Magazine, for example, came from pharmaceutical companies but the firewall between edit and the publishing side, my own interests and those of several colleagues plus the fact that drug companies were okay with the fact that their ads reached both people who wanted their medications as well as those who did not, allowed us to write about global health and other less obviously remunerative articles. Keyword-based advertising has changed all that but that’s a topic for another post. (See Ethan Zuckerman for a really clear introduction to the value of advertising inefficiency, especially the part about how Bloomingdales underwrites the New York Time's Africa coverage)

After spending a lot of time thinking about this and talking to lots of people, I’m starting to accept that foundations are NOT going to pay for global health news coverage. And there probably is not a very good business model for it either. Oh yes, certain sections will get peeled off—anything having to do with mobile phones, pharmaceuticals or risk management. Plenty of opportunities for targeted advertising, subscriptions or commercial contracts there.

But the same market failures that have hobbled the development of new TB drugs over the past 50 years also affect the production and coverage of in-depth global health news.

Note, I am not talking about creating an educational service—like Kaiser’s globalhealthreporting.org. Nor am I envisioning a PR newswire for global health—like globalhealthtv.com (which was developed by a PR company for the Global Health Council).

Both are necessary but not sufficient to what I would like to see, which is an independent editorial voice in global health news.

The news industry as we know it is undergoing radical transformation. It is too busy focusing on survival to care what happens to global health news. The Knight Foundation and others are focusing on local community news and investigative journalism. The foundations that fund global health are taking some baby steps—like the Gates Foundation funding NPR, PRI and the Jim Lehrer show—but they won’t do something bigger, I think, because they don’t want to give up control of the message.

So that leaves the people who are doing it for little or no money, out of passion or as an adjunct to other paying projects. (Heaven help us.)

Meanwhile, how do we get the values, the best of what we aspire to as journalists, as global citizens, baked into whatever the new systems are? I'm going to try buttonholing as many of my fellow participants at the meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists in Seattle April 16-19 about this as I can. This is not something anyone can do on their own. But is there a critical mass willing to try? That's what I would like to know.

I welcome your thoughts.

Related posts:
Sharing and Global Health Blogging
Update on the Global Health Blogging Experiment
Community Organizing Meets Global Health Blogging
Looking for Context in Global Health Reporting

Can You Improve Wikipedia's Entry on Global Health?

After 27 months, Wikipedia's entry on "global health" is finally starting to take shape. I look at this as yet another lesson on the need to wait for (or build) a critical mass.

Not all conversations on the Web happen so fast and include so many partners that it makes your head spin. Some are so long and laborious that you might think the participants were Treebeard and the rest of Tolkien's Ents. Case in point: the 27-month long conversation behind Wikipedia's entry on "global health."

Back in June of 2005, a volunteer Wikipedia editor who went by the name "Drgregmartin" wrote a short entry on Wikipedia about "global health." A few months later, I came along and did a little copy-editing, added some historical context and a few external links.

By the fall of 2006, this short, not-great entry had morphed into something completely overgrown and unreadable. A number of anonymous users from several universities clearly decided to do a little self-promotion while others added several giant tangents or pet peeves. Eventually, the entry got flagged as "needing clean up."

So far, I have described the natural history of countless Wikipedia entries. An earnest soul writes a short piece, others discover it and soon so many editors have a hand in it that it morphs into something that is far worse than whatever it started off as. In the best circumstances, this chaotic phase settles down and editing becomes much more stable--and the writing and the rigor improve.

Trying to be a good Wikipedian, I started a conversation on the global_health talk page about how to fix the entry and get to the next, more stable phase of Wiki writing. My proposal was met with deafening silence.

Meanwhile, the entry was getting longer and less readable. I contemplated fixing things myself but figured I would be out-revised by the self-promoters. Every once in a while I would come back to check on things. The entry kept getting woolier and woolier. I chalked it up as a reality-check on how Wikipedia works: popular articles are more likely to be better.

But, every now and then, someone would add a comment on the talk page. In more than two years, there have in fact been seven responses--all fairly substantial. And here's the most intriguing thing: they actually can be read as a conversation with genuine give and take.

Gradually, a Wikipedian by the name of Useknowledge came along and edited the entry back to a form that is more manageable.

It is still not perfect, but it is an improvement over the original post. The next step, as someone who may be Evelyne de Leeuw from Australia wrote, is to try to make the focus more health-oriented and less disease-oriented.

So, what do you think? Will a community arise organically to do this or is going to take concerted effort by a few people to create that community?

Some of the more utopian aspects of the web have enchanted many of us into giving credence to an "if you build it, they will come" mindset.

For me, the history of the "global health" entry on Wikipedia so far shows the limitations of that ideal (especially since already there is a new, more sophisticated round of self-promotion happening with external links to a number of academic centers). But I was heartened by the improvements that did happen. I suspect, however, that I may need the lifespan of an Ent to see the full flowering of the global health entry.

Or you could prove me wrong by taking a crack at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_health.

Links: Hidden Good News, Plumpy'Nut, Malaria

Nigerian sisters tell of African good news odyssey
The BBC reports that "Nigerian sisters, Chioma and Oluchi Ogwuegbu, have got fed up with all the bad news out of Africa. So much so that they've embarked on a journey right across Africa to try to draw attention to the good news which doesn't get reported." Go to the Ogwuegbu sisters' website at celebrateafrica.net

Paul Farmer mocks Nutriset patent on Plumpy'Nut
Ha! Farmer told me the same story a year and a half ago. It's the anecdote that got me looking into intellectual property rights and ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTFs). According to the Charlotte Observer's account of a recent Farmer talk, "when Partners in Health built a factory and began making its own peanut butter product, Farmer said he got "cease and desist” letters from the makers of Plumpy'nut. “It sounds crazy to argue over peanut butter,” he said. “But patenting some things goes a little too far.” " See my previous Plumpy'Nut posts for more background.

WHO cracks down on new malaria resistance
Scidev.net reports that the World Health Organization "has confirmed resistance to the malaria drug artemisinin at the Thai-Cambodia border, prompting urgent action."

Jim Kim Goes to Dartmouth

Like others in the global health community, I was surprised to learn Jim Kim is going to be the new president of Dartmouth College. But now an email exchange Jim and I had back in January makes more sense. I was reading it as his thinking through the pros and cons of taking a position in the Obama Administration, if asked. I should have read it as an indication that he was even considering leaving Harvard at all.

Kim clearly sees this as a chance to broaden the reach and influence of the global health movement. He told Tamar Lewin of the New York Times, ". . . what I want to do is train an army of leaders to engage with the problems of the world, who will believe the possibilities are limitless, that there’s nothing they can’t do. Being the president of an Ivy League university is an amazing opportunity.” Kim reiterated that view in his first address to Dartmouth.

But as Alanna Shaikh points out, there is a lot about being a college president that has nothing to do with energizing global movements--especially in an era of global financial turmoil and falling endowments.

Speculation alert: You also have to wonder if the Harvard School of Public Health had become too crowded for Kim--now that it has a new dean, Julio Frenck, the very impressive former health minister of Mexico and a onetime candidate to head the World Health Organization. Was the deanship a position Kim had wanted for himself?

Wonder now what will become of Kim's partnership with Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School. Kim was very enthusiastic about applying some of the tools that business has developed to the challenges of implementation in global health.

Nothing yet about the new appointment on the Partners in Health website. Had to smile at the way Lewin described Kim's career as having been "entwined" with that of Paul Farmer. It has been an incredibly productive partnership with twinges of sibling rivalry at times.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether Jim Kim turns the presidency of Dartmouth into a bully pulpit for global health.

Don’t Bury Failures. Share Them

Computer science students from the U.S. and Senegal designed a mobile phone application especially for fisherwomen in Senegal and yet, the Senegalese women could not use it because of a single flawed assumption.

I promised myself I would share at least one story from the MobileTech for Social Change Barcamp I attended at Hunter College in New York City on Saturday (Feb. 21, 2008). Barcamp, for those who may not know, is an approach to organizing and running conferences that tries to capture the hidden value of most meetings—the conversations that happen between sessions in the hallways—and bring it front and center. Barcamps are also supposed to be free, or nearly so, for participants to attend.

A computer science group from the State University of New York at Stonybrook presented three applications or “apps,” that is to say mini-computer programs, that they had designed for use on no-frills mobile phones owned by women working in the informal Senegalese economy. The pilot tests for two of the apps—a dictionary and a book-keeping calculator—were deemed successes. The third app—for measuring profit and loss—was judged a failure.

Since most people—myself included—don’t like to publish their failures, I was impressed by the Stonybrook group’s willingness to do so. Indeed, they were almost as enthusiastic about the failure as the two successes. “You often learn more from failure than success,” says Jennifer Wong, one of the two Stonybrook professors who, along with two students, came to present their findings. Sure, we all say it. But who really embraces the idea? Brava!

The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance is giving the Stonybrook group and its co-investigators at Pace University and Thies Univeristy nearly $50,000 over two years to design mobile phone apps for use in the informal Senegalese economy.

What the mobile app group did right: they built local capacity. They recruited 20 Senegalese computer science students and taught a one-week crash course in Senegal on how to write and load mobile phone applications. These students in turn interviewed the local fisherwomen in Wolof (one of Senegal’s most common local languages) to customize the profit-and-loss application for their phones.

The fisherwomen are actually fish sellers. They buy fresh fish and then dry it to sell on the market. The women often sell the dried fish at a loss, which is why a simple profit-and-loss calculator on their mobile phones might help them decide when and at what price to buy the fresh fish so they could come out ahead.

The pilot was a failure because the fish sellers found the mobile phone profit-and-loss calculator useless. The computer science group did not learn why the app was useless, however, until a second round of testing in which one of the Senegalese computer science students happened to have a grandmother who was a fish seller. After talking with the fish sellers, he discovered that all the prices for both fresh fish and dried fish are fixed. Since everyone charges the same price for fish (one for dried, the other for fresh) on any given day, there is no way for the women to wait until the price is right.

One wonders why anyone would sell dried fish at all under these conditions? There is bound to be more to this story. Please enlighten us if you can, using the comments section.

Lesson learned: you have to be very specific when seeking local expertise.

Another way of looking at it: just because something looks to you like irrational economic behavior doesn't necessarily mean that it is, or that you know why it is irrational.

To find out more about applications for mobile phones in the informal economy, contact Anita Wasilewska or Jennifer Wong at SUNY Stonybrook or Christelle Scharff at Pace University in New York City or Prof. Ibrahima Ndiaye, Director of the Economic and Social Sciences Education and Research Unit, Thiès University, Senegal. See also their wiki about mobile apps in Senegal.

To learn more about what else went on at MobileTech For Social Change (New York):

• Search for #m4change on Twitter from 2/21/09 to about 2/23/09
• Read the Morningside Post stories once they come online
• Read Patrick Meier’s summary post on iRevolution
• Check out some #m4change photos on Flickr (cool search for events after 20090201)
• Read Persephone Miel at Media Re:public on why mobiles are not the future; they are right now.

(updated on 2/24/2009 to add Christelle Scharf and Ibrahima Ndiaye and Pace and Thies Universities.)

Looking for Context in Global Health Reporting

To me, the most satisfying news stories are the ones that provide a context that continues to inform long after the news has turned old. That kind of deeper context is often what I look for in global health stories but do not usually find. Something to think about if you are hoping to improve the routine coverage of global health news.

I am thinking about this now for several reasons. Sharon Schmickle’s amazing article today in the Washington Post on the growing global threat of wheat rust—she provides plenty of context—finally got me to write these thoughts down.

When Josh Benton of the Nieman Foundation was in New York a couple weeks ago, we had a long chat about what constitutes context in news stories. (That's the kind of stuff we enjoy talking about.) He told me about Matt Johnson’s project at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute.

As I understand it, Matt’s key insight came when he read decades worth of stories about commercial development in and around Columbia, Missouri. He realized he didn’t feel any better informed about the major factors, developers and politicians involved after reading one or 100 stories. Each story had to be taken on its own—separate from the others. The long-term context did not emerge from reading all those stories. It was all information overload with no meaning.

Johnson’s project is to see if there is a way to make that context more explicit, so that each news item about development either contributes to the context or benefits from it. What Matt Johnson says about the search for more context in the news makes a lot of sense to me.

In January, Jeb Sharp of PRI’s The World launched a new history podcast called “How We Got Here.” It looks at the history that continues to shape current events. Her inaugural piece was about Iran—because of all the talk about the incoming Obama Administration’s possible diplomatic outreach to that country.

But Sharp’s reporting on the three weeks in 1953 in which CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt nearly single-handedly engineered a coup in Iran provided some of the missing context that I was looking for in an entirely different story. Namely, it helped me understand a little better why the Iranian government recently tried and convicted a pair of Iranian AIDS doctors for conspiring to foment a “velvet revolution” by attending international medical conferences.

Earlier this month, Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, wrote a very good piece that provides the missing context around the recent unrest in Madagascar. I have actually been following this in the news—in the New York Times and on the web. But nothing explained WHY this was happening NOW in the way that Ethan’s blog post did.

It makes me think of David Pogue’s Missing Manuals enterprise. You know, computer software doesn’t ship with printed instructional material any more. You have to either go online or screen through an electronic manual. But a lot of us still find a book a useful way to organize information—to get the broader view. So when software companies stopped supplying physical manuals, Pogue stepped into the gap with his Missing Manual series.

Supplying the missing context turned out to be a good business model for Pogue. Makes me wonder if that case is transferable to reporting about global health?

What's New in Health and Human Rights?

I am giving one of two keynote speeches at the 2009 GlobeMed Global Health Summit in Chicago April 2-4. The theme for the gathering is "From Idea to Implementation: Securing Health as a Human Right," so I chose as the working title for my talk "Health and Human Rights: A Journalist's Perspective."

Kind of as a lark, I threw that phrase "Health and Human Rights: A Journalist's Perspective" into a Google search and much to my surprise got an exact hit. Television producer Rory O'Conner chose that as the title for a blog post that has some vintage video of the late Jonathan Mann talking about health and human rights.

So I changed my working title to "Health and Human Rights: One Journalist's Perspective," which isn't much of a distinction I admit. I also watched the interviews with Mann and others. They have held up quite well--even after ten years.

And they remind me how much AIDS, like the Holocaust before it, has taught us about human rights.