By Rhea Becker

Gazette Staff

Hnin Hnin Pyne is a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University who has worked on the problem of forced prostitution in Thailand and Burma, and violence against women in general. She combines two approaches -- a public health perspective with a human rights response -- which she believes are most effective in combating these epidemics.

"Public health brings scientific rigor, a focus on prevention, and an interdisciplinary approach," while the human rights approach makes use of the "existing human rights machinery and a sense of international consensus," she says.

Pyne was one of approximately 500 academics, advocates, and activists from 44 countries who traveled to Cambridge last weekend for the Second International Conference on Health & Human Rights, organized by the School of Public Health's François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The Bagnoud Center, created in 1993, is the first academic center to focus exclusively on the connection between health and human rights.

The three-day conference heralded the opening of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Building at the School of Public Health and helped kick off the School's 75th anniversary celebration.

Jonathan Mann, the François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights, chaired the conference. Organizers aimed to advance interdisciplinary cooperation and understanding of the newly evolving field of health and human rights, and to promote communication among people working in health and human rights -- themes that were voiced repeatedly throughout the conference.

Participants examined an array of issues, including AIDS care and prevention; sexual exploitation of children; the intersections of class, race, and health; the prevention of genocide; the right to medical care; and documenting human rights violations such as torture.

Among those in attendance were the director of a children's rights group in New York City, a public policy doctoral student from Delaware, a worker from a women's shelter in Connecticut, and leaders of nongovernmental organizations from around the world, including Sri Lanka, Uganda, France, and India.

In the opening plenary session, Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, called for a new approach to AIDS. "We are living in a world that has lived with HIV for 15 years. We have passed out of this early adolescence and settled in for the long haul, and an international human rights response is necessary now."

Violence was the subject of a plenary session at which Jacqueline Pitanguy, director of Citizenship, Studies, Information and Action in Brazil, spoke on the foundations of gender violence. "Order and disorder in Brazilian society, and other societies, has been defined basically in relation to what the white, middle-class male has believed it to be. Some persons are seen as more human than others. Women have always been seen as less human.

"Each country has a map of exclusion," she continued, "with zones of gender apartheid and zones of race apartheid. But maps change, and they have changed as a result of political struggle."

In the same session, Morton Winston, chair of the board of Amnesty International USA, described his use of an epidemiological model in an approach to "institutionalized intergroup violence (IIV)" such as the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda, because it provides "an early warning system."

In another session, Gary Slutkin, director of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention, said that violence is an epidemic that "needs an epidemic-type response." He suggested a standard, four-pronged public health response -- strategy, management, commitment, a stable financial base -- as an approach to "TB, cholera, refugee emergencies, AIDS," and other crises.

Electronic communications and its growing role in health and human rights work was another theme of the conference. Jelica Todosijeric of Network East/West Women in Belgrade has trained people working in women's organizations how to connect with each other via e-mail. "Internet access is extremely expensive in Eastern Europe. Many people there have not even seen a Web page. It's more affordable to use electronic mailing lists to share and collect information." Before Todosijeric helped hook up certain groups, those who wanted to electronically communicate within Croatia "had to go through a third party, maybe even one in New York."

Harvard Law School's Annual Review of Population Law is creating a Web site that will contain the full text of important human rights legislation from around the world, said its editor-in-chief, Reed Boland. "You will be able to look up Poland's abortion law or Belize's domestic violence law, and download them."

Also represented on a panel was SatelLife (www.healthnet.org), a nonprofit, Boston-based organization that provides low-cost access to the Internet for health professionals around the world and allows them to get in touch with colleagues to learn about the latest medical innovations.

Based on an idea developed by Bernard Lown, 1985 Nobel Peace Prize winner and professor of cardiology emeritus at the School of Public Health, the system is used, for example, by health care workers who confront unusual ailments in isolated locales. Workers can send e-mail via SatelLife to leading teaching hospitals or other health care professionals, and recommended treatments are relayed back.