Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
97
result(s) for
"Meier, Benjamin Mason"
Sort by:
Human rights as a framework for eliminating female genital schistosomiasis
Female genital schistosomiasis (FGS) affects tens of millions of women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa, yet this inequitable threat is often overlooked by advocates in both the neglected tropical disease (NTD) and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) communities. FGS causes both acute infection and long-term sexual and reproductive health harm to marginalized women and girls, with gender, poverty, and rurality combining to invisibilize the disease. Human rights and gender imperatives can help to galvanize efforts to control and eliminate FGS, as they have for other NTDs. Specifically, international human rights obligations can frame state efforts to address FGS across healthcare settings, upstream social determinants of health, scientific research, and policy implementation. This article analyzes human rights–based approaches to FGS control and elimination efforts, outlining several areas for forward-looking reforms to health policy, programing, and practice. Building from the lessons learned in applying human rights–based approaches to advance progress on other NTDs, this analysis seeks to provide the NTD community with shared understanding around international legal obligations to engage SRHR advocates and draw heightened attention to FGS. Such human rights–based approaches to FGS control and elimination can help to reduce stigma and improve care for the millions of women and girls currently affected by this preventable disease.
Journal Article
Travel restrictions and variants of concern: global health laws need to reflect evidence
As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread in the early days of the pandemic, governments neglected World Health Organization (WHO) guidance and imposed travel restrictions. These public health measures employed varied levels of restrictiveness at national borders, in some cases banning all travel between countries. Where these border control measures were undertaken for domestic political reasons, enacted without consideration of public health evidence, they divided the world when solidarity was needed most.1 Such measures undermined global health law that countries have established as a foundation for preventing and responding to public health emergencies of international concern. With the emergence of the Omicron variant, national governments once again returned to international travel restrictions, posing challenges for the rule of law in global health governance. Future reforms of global health law must account for this continuing impulse to enact travel restrictions, ensuring that international legal obligations reflect evolving public health evidence. The International Health Regulations, 2005 revision; IHR (2005) govern how countries address collective threats in global solidarity; yet international travel bans can drive countries apart through economic isolation, trade disruptions, discriminatory restrictions and rights violations.2 Fearing that government actions would undermine the IHR at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Global Health Law Consortium in February 2020 examined the legality of targeted travel restrictions.3
Journal Article
The human right to a healthy environment—time for the public health community to take urgent action
The public health community should urgently leverage the human right to a healthy environment to protect planetary health, argue Kent Buse and colleagues
Journal Article
A human rights approach to the health implications of food and nutrition insecurity
Food and nutrition insecurity continues to pose a serious global challenge, reflecting government shortcomings in meeting international obligations to ensure the availability, accessibility, and quality of food and to ensure the highest attainable standard of health of their peoples. With global drivers like climate change, urbanization, greater armed conflict, and the globalization of unhealthy diet, particularly in under-resourced countries, food insecurity is rapidly becoming an even greater challenge for those living in poverty. International human rights law can serve a critical role in guiding governments that are struggling to protect the health of their populations, particularly among the most susceptible groups, in responding to food and nutrition insecurity. This article explores and advocates for a human rights approach to food and nutrition security, specifically identifying legal mechanisms to “domesticate” relevant international human rights standards through national policy. Recognizing nutrition security as a determinant of public health, this article recognizes the important links between the four main elements of food security (i.e., availability, stability, utilization, and access) and the normative attributes of the right to health and the right to food (i.e., availability, accessibility, affordability, and quality). In drawing from the evolution of international human rights instruments, official documents issued by international human rights treaty bodies, as well as past scholarship at the intersection of the right to health and right to food, this article interprets and articulates the intersectional rights-based obligations of national governments in the face of food and nutrition insecurity.
Journal Article
Global Health Law: Between Hard and Soft Law
The field of global health law encompasses both “hard” law treaties and “soft” law policies that shape global health norms. Transitioning from “international health law” to “global health law and policy,” global health policymakers have increasingly looked to soft law instruments to address public health needs in a rapidly globalizing world – within the World Health Organization and across global health governance. Yet, as policymakers have expanded the landscape of soft law policy instruments to advance global health across state and non-state actors, the COVID-19 response revealed the limitations of this soft law approach to global health threats, with states now seeking hard law reforms to strengthen global health governance. As hard and soft law can provide complementary approaches to preventing disease and promoting health, future research must conceptualize how these normative frameworks interact in advancing global health.
Journal Article
Do not violate the International Health Regulations during the COVID-19 outbreak
Article 43 of this legally binding instrument restricts the measures countries can implement when addressing public health risks to those measures that are supported by science, commensurate with the risks involved, and anchored in human rights.1 The intention of the IHR is that countries should not take needless measures that harm people or that disincentivise countries from reporting new risks to international public health authorities.2 In imposing travel restrictions against China during the current outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), many countries are violating the IHR. WHO has issued COVID-19 technical guidance on several such measures, including risk communication, surveillance, patient management, and screening at ports of entry and exit.9 Third, and most importantly, Article 3.1 strictly requires all additional health measures to be implemented “with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons”,1 which in turn must reflect the international law principles of necessity, legitimacy, and proportionality that govern limitations to and derogations from rights and freedoms.10 Under no circumstances should public health or foreign policy decisions be based on the racism and xenophobia that are now being directed at Chinese people and those of Asian descent.11 Many of the travel restrictions implemented by dozens of countries during the COVID-19 outbreak are therefore violations of the IHR.12 Yet, perhaps even more troubling, is that at least two-thirds of these countries have not reported their additional health measures to WHO,12 which is a further violation of IHR Articles 43.3 and 43.5. [...]the IHR only governs countries, not corporations and other non-governmental actors. [...]some countries are finding themselves with de-facto travel restrictions when airlines stop flying to places affected by COVID-19.
Journal Article
Facilitating Access to a COVID-19 Vaccine through Global Health Law
Threatening the entire world, the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to grow, with devastating effects on human health, social connections, and economic livelihoods. These crushing burdens are likely to increase dramatically as the pandemic continues its relentless march across the globe. Some governments have taken steps to mitigate the worst impacts of this threat through aggressive public health interventions — including diagnostic testing, contact tracing, widespread masking, and physical distancing — but with the pandemic expected to inflict unprecedented human suffering in the months ahead, it has become clear that only a vaccine will be able to contain the COVID-19 threat.There has not been a more soughtafter medical resource in our lifetimes than a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine, and given this existential threat, vaccine candidates will move swiftly into clinical trials in the coming months. While vaccine development holds great promise, the discovery phase is only the first step. Clinical trials may well demonstrate that one or more vaccine candidates is safe and effective, yet those vaccines must still be approved by regulatory authorities, manufactured and distributed to scale, and made affordable for all. Depending on how these issues are resolved, a prospective vaccine could heal the rifts of a bitterly divided world, or it could exacerbate them if countries hoard a necessary vaccines and undermine equitable access.This column explores the global health law reforms necessary to progressively realize universal access to a future COVID-19 vaccine. We begin by explaining the importance of global health law in the distribution of essential vaccines as a determinant of public health. The column then turns to examine the human rights foundations of global health law, conceptualizing vaccination access as a universal human right. We find that it will be crucial to develop legal commitments to ensure vaccine access prior to a scientific breakthrough, analyzing the legal barriers that impede global access and the global health law reforms necessary to facilitate global solidarity.
Journal Article