Question

Consider a disease, other than HIV/AIDS, such as malaria. How might public health efforts with respect to this disease raise human rights concerns?

Answer 1

Malaria currently causes more harm to human beings than any other parasitic disease, and disproportionally affects low-income populations. The ethical issues raised by efforts to control or eliminate malaria have received little explicit analysis, in comparison with other major diseases of poverty.

Malaria was one among the three major diseases. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS was created to greatly expand access to basic services to address the major diseases. From its beginnings, its governance embodied some human rights principles.

The Global Fund’s core strategies recognize that the health services it supports would not be effective or cost-effective without efforts to reduce human rights-related barriers to access and utilization of health services, particularly those faced by socially marginalized and criminalized persons.

A five-year initiative to provide intensive technical and financial support for the scaling up of programs to reduce these barriers in 20 countries is ongoing.

Basic human rights elements were written into Global Fund grant agreements, and various support measures encouraged the inclusion in funding requests of programs to reduce human rights-related barrier.

Current initiative against Malaria :

At the end of the 20th century, effort to control Malaria was revived through the efforts of the World Health Organization.

Developing a human rights strategy

With a unique governance model that brings together diverse public and private constituencies, from its inception, the Global Fund demonstrated a commitment to human rights as part of its internal management principles, which were identified as key to good governance: transparency, accountability and participation by communities infected with and directly affected by the three diseases. This community role in the institution’s leadership was and is critical to the Global Fund’s development and implementation of its human rights strategic objective.

Key aspects of the right to health :

-The right to health is an inclusive right.

-The right to health contains freedoms.

-The right to health contains freedoms.

-The right to health contains entitlements.

-Health services, goods and facilities must be    provided to all without any discrimination.

-All services, goods and facilities must be available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality.

The right to health in international human rights law

The right to the highest attainable standard of health is a human right recognized in international human rights law.

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, widely considered as the central instrument of protection for the right to health, recognizes, the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

It is important to note that the Covenant gives both mental health, which has often been neglected, and physical health equal consideration.

Conclusion

Malaria remains a public health concern, causing so much mortality and morbidity especially among the pediatric population. Tremendous progress has been made over the last decade in reducing morbidity and mortality from malaria.The development of the malaria vaccine has proven to reduce the disease burden in under-five children; however, more evidence is required on its efficacy. The major setback in malaria prevention and control is mainly to do with drug and insecticide resistance. There are economic benefits attributable to malaria control activities as a lot of money can be saved and directed to other development activities. Efforts need to be put in place towards community mobilization in malaria control activities, monitoring programs and development of new control strategies to effectively control malaria.

Combined efforts are required from all the governments, research institutions, and scientists to come up with better strategies to combat malaria. This would result in ending preventable deaths by the Sustainable Development Goals.