Protecting the Health of the Poor

Nowhere is the injustice of the global distribution of income and wealth more palpable than in health. While the world's affluent spend fortunes on the most trifling treatments, poor people's lives are ruined and often cut short prematurely by challenges that could easily be overcome at low cost: childbirth, diarrhoea, malnutrition, malaria, HIV/AIDS, measles, pneumonia. Millions are avoidably dying from such causes each year and billions of lives avoidably blighted by these diseases of poverty. Drawing on in-depth empirical research spanning Asia, Latin America, and Africa, this path-breaking collection offers fresh perspectives from critically engaged scholars. Protecting the Health of the Poor presents a call and a vision for unified efforts across geographies, levels and sectors to make the right to health truly universal.

Abraar Karan is an MD candidate in the Global Health Pathway at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he serves as the student body president. His writings have been featured in a number of well-known publication venues, including Medscape, The Lancet, Academic Medicine, PLoS Global Health, Global Post, Kevin MD, and the Global Health Hub. Geeta Sodhi, DNB (Paeds), is a qualified paediatrician who veered into public health and the development sector more than two decades ago as a social entrepreneur. Her research has been published in various edited volumes, and she has been an invited speaker at several international conferences and academic institutions.

Introduction - Abraar Karan and Geeta Sodhi Part I: Legal Movements 1. Requesting a Compulsory Licence for Kaletra, aAn HIV/AIDS Antiretroviral Drug, in Colombia - Luz Marina Umbasía Bernal 2. Impact of the World Trade Organization's Agreements on Agriculture and on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights on the Health of Citizens in the Developing World - Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua Part II: Political Movements 3. Managing an A(H1N1) Pandemic: Public Health or healthy Business? - Germán Velásquez 4. Catastrophic Health Expenditure, Health Insurance Coverage, and Poor People in India: New Evidence on Healthcare Costs Leading to Impoverishment - T. V. Sekher, Kaushalendra Kumar, and V. P. Shijith 5. Crisis of the Global Innovation Model for Medicines: A Civil Society Organizations' Perspective - Francisco Rossi Buenaventura and Luis Guillermo Restrepo Vélez Part III: Interventional Approaches 6. Advancing Tobacco Use Prevention and Cessation Among Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Young Persons in India - Monika Arora, Abha Tewari, Shalini Bassi, Gaurang P. Nazar, Neeru S. Juneja, Melissa B. Harrell, Cheryl L. Perry, and K. Srinath Reddy 7. Addressing the Vulnerability of Urban Poor Women to Negative Maternal and Newborn Health Outcomes - Geeta Sodhi and Skylab Sahu Part IV: Multifaceted Movements 8. International Poverty Law and Human Rights From Below: Latin American Affirmation of the Right to Health of Indigenous Peoples, Migrants, and the Displaced - Camilo Pérez-Bustillo 9. Sociopolitics of HIV in Uganda: Proposing a Socio-Behavioural Movement in Response to Donor Politics and the Economic Erisis - Abraar Karan 10. Health Impact Fund: Aligning Incentives - Thomas Pogge