Investor’s Business Daily Profiles Partners In Health Founder, AIDS Treatment Advocate Paul Farmer
Investor's Business Daily on Wednesday profiled Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of the nongovernmental health care organization Partners in Health, which helps fund a clinic in Cange, Haiti, that Farmer established in 1987 (Schleier, Investor's Business Daily, 10/15). Farmer, a Harvard Medical School professor, has been an advocate for providing complex treatments -- including treatments for HIV/AIDS -- to the world's most impoverished people. For 20 years, Farmer has lived and worked in Haiti and has been critical of human rights groups that concentrate more on political rights than basic health care needs (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 3/31). Farmer is the subject of a new biography, "Mountains Beyond Mountains," written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Kidder. The biography details Farmer's travels throughout Haiti in the early 1980s, where he said he saw "horrible things happen to people." Farmer said that he saw "[y]oung people with treatable illnesses or pregnancies (who) died." He added, "And everyone witnessing this knew that they died because they were sick and poor." Farmer said that the purpose of the Cange clinic is to provide "a hospital, a community health system ... (that) provided services to the destitute for free." Farmer's work in Haiti has gone beyond providing medical care that can cure diseases to improving the water supply and raising nutrition to levels that help prevent diseases, according to Investor's Business Daily. In addition, Farmer has worked to assure that patients adhere to drug regimens, including HIV and tuberculosis treatments. In his work, Farmer has "put his money where his beliefs are," donating to PIH his entire Harvard salary and the money from a 1993 MacArthur Genius Award, according to Investor's Business Daily (Investor's Business Daily, 10/15).
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