A new Center for Public Health and Human Rights has
been established by the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public
Health to examine the impact of human rights violations
on the general health of populations. Researchers at the
center, which is funded by a grant from the Development
Fund for the Open Society, will apply epidemiologic
practices and public health tools as a new approach to
understanding and measuring the scope of human rights
violations.
"Social injustice is a primary cause of many health
problems in the world," said Chris Beyrer, director of the
Center for Public Health and Human Rights and director of
the Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research
Program at the School of Public Health. "The Center for
Public Health and Human Rights will use critical
evidence-based assessments of the role that repressive laws
and social discord play in the health of populations. With
this knowledge we can develop public health interventions
that take the harms and realities of rights violations into
account."
Last week, the school hosted a three-day international
seminar, "Public Health and Human Rights in the Era of
AIDS," that featured presentations and discussions on human
rights abuses, such as the trafficking of women for sale in
the sex industry and the rights violations and health
threats they face.
According to Beyrer, many human rights organizations
are limited in their analyses because they rely on
traditional means of documenting abuses, such as monitoring
the arrests of journalists, clergy and union leaders along
with the closings of newspapers and churches. As an
example, he cited the work of Amnesty International during
the decades-long civil war in Guatemala; an internal review
found that its methods had failed to document an estimated
400,000 deaths of Mayan peasants.
Currently, researchers from the School of Public
Health are investigating the role of rights violations in
spreading HIV and hepatitis C virus in Russia's sex
industry, the health impacts of ethnic cleansing campaigns
against minorities in Burma and the health threats among
trafficked women and girls in Southeast Asia and among
rural blood donors exposed to HIV in China.
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