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Drs. Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim and David Walton were featured in a 60 Minutes piece on the work of Partners In Health in Haiti and around the globe. Click here to watch the video.
DSMHI Faculty Members Dr. Joia Mukherjee and Donna Barry wrote an OpEd article for the Boston Globe about the food crisis in Haiti. Click here to read the article.
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Poverty, racism, gender inequality and violence are at the root of the profoundly unequal impact of disease worldwide. Although laboratory research has produced huge advances in modern medicine, these advances have benefited just a small percentage of the world's population---and almost exclusively in wealthier settings.
In the United States, racial and economic disparities result in significant public health problems. In poor countries, where infectious disease remains a leading cause of premature death, health disparities are even greater. Diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, which are treated with overwhelming success in affluent settings, are too often a death sentence for the poor.
The ramifications of inadequate health care are significant. First and foremost, the human cost is staggering. The burden of illness on the poor and disenfranchised exacerbates poverty, in turn condemning many to a future of poor health and suffering. Countries with a high disease burden face lost productivity, missed educational opportunities, and high health care costs.
In September of 2001, the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) created a new division dedicated to addressing health disparities through training, education, research and service. The Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities (DSMHI), in close collaboration with Partners In Health (PIH), a non-profit organization, the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Department of Social Medicine of Harvard Medical School (DSM), uses insights from anthropology, history, sociology, epidemiology, statistics, economics, and other social sciences to improve medical care in the world's poorest areas.
The DSMHI fosters the support and coordination of training, research, and service to reduce disparities in disease burden and to improve treatment outcomes both at home and abroad. The Division focuses on infectious diseases (e.g., HIV and tuberculosis) as well as non-infectious diseases (e.g., coronary artery disease, diabetes, addiction) and other health problems of major importance to society.
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