Dr. Binayak Sen Released on Bail

By Kate Dube, volunteer researcher for A Worker's Guide to Health and Safety.

On May 25, the Indian Supreme Court allowed Dr. Binayak Sen to post bail and go home for the first time since his imprisonment on trumped up charges in Chhattisgarh state over 2 years ago. Dr. Sen is internationally respected for his work in poor communities for health and social justice. He is vice president of People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), co-founder of the rural community health organization RUPANTAR, and winner of the 2008 Jonathan Mann award for Global Health and Human Rights. Read more about his unjustified arrest and the international campaign to free him here. 

While the release of Dr. Sen from jail is an important advance, the very serious charges against him have not been dropped. The shadow of a prolonged legal battle and trial still looms over Dr. Sen, his family and friends.

In an emotional interview 4 days after his release, Sen expressed his amazement regarding the activity of the broad international solidarity movements working on his behalf. “I cannot believe so many people beyond borders have supported me” he said with tears of joy in his eyes, referring to the 22 Nobel laureates who petitioned for his release as well as the “Free Dr. Binayak Sen” Facebook group of over 2000 members.

However, in the same interview he emphasized that his release on bail is a small event in comparison with the widespread violations of liberty and human rights which persist both within and beyond Chhattisgarh. “I consider myself lucky to generate so much worldwide support for my case, but what about others? There are hundreds more languishing in jails who are in a similar situation who do not have even have legal aid let alone the support. There are thousands who are being displaced from their land and their access to natural resources across India.”

In recognition of this, even though Dr. Sen’s case is not closed, the “Release Dr. Binayak Sen Committee” has officially changed its name to “The Committee For The Defense Of Democratic Rights In Chhattisgarh”  to address the broader issue of social injustices in Chhattisgarh state such as the recent state-sanctioned demolition of the Vanvasi Chetna Ashram.

“As human rights workers,” Sen has declared, “we do not condone any form of violence. We feel this whole cycle of violence — either by the government or by the Maoists — is counter-productive, and political engagement is needed to delegitimise violence-based solutions.”

Please go to http://www.freebinayaksen.org for information about the human rights of health workers in South Asia. Visit http://www.binayaksen.net to follow his case and the cases of his co-accused, who have yet to be granted bail.

Update: Sweatfree Ordinance Passes in Berkeley

Hesperian is excited to announce that our city government in Berkeley has signed the Sweatfree Procurement Ordinance. This requires that the companies the city contracts with to provide clothing and uniform items for Berkeley workers must treat their workers fairly. Several Hesperian staff have been active in this campaign. Read more about the campaign here.

The City of Berkeley Commission on Labor, The Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission, and Sweatfree Communities released this press release about the Ordinance:

Berkeley, California, June 24, 2009
 
The Berkeley City Council voted on the Sweatfree Procurement Ordinance on June 23. 
After over three years of work, the Berkeley City Council passed a Sweatfree Purchasing Ordinance, becoming the 39th city in the United States to do so.
The City of Berkeley joined the national Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium in July 2007 and has been in the process of coming to agreement on the details of an ordinance.
 
Representatives from the Berkeley Commission on Labor, the Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission, and various organizations came together with Berkeley's City Staff to create the consensus document going before the Berkeley City Council tonight. The ordinance will affect garments purchased by the City of Berkeley at the $25,000 level or above, and includes a provision to lower that threshold and expand to incorporate other goods and services over time. The language requires that vendors disclose manufacturing locations of their suppliers and ensure that the workers who actually produce the goods enjoy freedom of association and a non-poverty wage.

Update: Court Stops Chevron Expansion in Richmond !!

In May, Hesperian and the Peoples Health Movement pulled together a meeting among people from Bhopal, India touring the US as part of the Bhopal Survivors Tour and anti-toxics organizers in Richmond, California, where Chevron runs the largest refinery on the west coast of the US (see our earlier blog). The organizers shared stories of trying to hold large corporations responsible for their destruction of peoples health through toxic pollution. One of the situations discussed was the campaign to stop Chevron from sneaking an expansion of its Richmond facility (refining very “dirty” oil) past an environmental hurdle by calling it a minor change in sourcing. The courts recently ruled in favor of the activists and we congratulate our colleagues at the Asia Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), the Laotian Organizing Project,  Communities for a Better Environment, and West County Toxics Coalition on this victory!

Here’s the story of the ruling sent out by APEN:

Great news! On June 5, Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Barbara Zuniga tossed out the flawed Environmental Impact Report for the planned Richmond Chevron Refinery expansion. APEN community leaders are celebrating the judge’s ruling as another win towards environmental justice for Richmond communities.

“The decision is a victory for the community,” said Koy Seng Saechao, leader with APEN’s Laotian Organizing Project. “We need green and healthy solutions from Chevron and our City, not more pollution. The decision protects my family and neighbors from even more pollution and allows us to plan for a healthier future.”

APEN, Earthjustice, Communities for a Better Environment and West County Toxics Coaltion joined forces to sue the City of Richmond for accepting the faulty environmental review that failed to disclose that the proposed expansion would allow Chevron to process a heavier crude oil, exposing the community to increased health and environmental impacts.

In her decision, Judge Zuniga said: “The [Final Environmental Impact Report] project description is unclear and inconsistent as to whether [the] project will or will not enable Chevron to process a heavier crude slate than it is currently processing.”

The court also agrees that the City of Richmond improperly allowed Chevron to wait a year after the EIR process was completed before developing a plan to mitigate its greenhouse gases, a move that would have shut our communities out of a public process to stop additional greenhouse gas pollution. This is one of the first decisions addressing the deferral of greenhouse gas mitigations under the California Environmental Quality Act.

”We are fighting to shift Richmond from a hub for pollution to a hub for solutions. Climate change will already impact our communities first and worst,” said Torm Nompraseurt, APEN community organizer and 33-year Richmond resident. This is a chance to turn the fossil fuel tide around, to put our community’s health before oil profits, and create a new vision for Richmond.”

Dr. Alan Berkman: September 3, 1945 - June 5, 2009

By Pam Fadem

Alan Berkman died on June 5, 2009 of complications from cancer. Alan left behind his life partner, Dr. Barbara Zeller, daughters Sarah and Harriet, grandson Gabriel, and thousands of people whose lives he has profoundly changed.

A human rights activist, founder of Health GAP (Global Access Project), and a former US political prisoner, Alan was a true peoples’ doctor. Wherever he was and whatever community he was living and working in (including prison), Alan was committed to empowering people with the information and resources they needed to best care for their own health and the health of their community. While at college in 1967, Alan had the opportunity to hear Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael). It profoundly changed his consciousness about racism, Black civil rights, and the meaning of solidarity.  As Alan later said, “By the time I got to New York and Columbia Medical School, I was primed for putting politics and medicine together.”

Alan practiced medicine in the South Bronx and helped set up and staff a community health clinic in one of the poorest counties in the US, Lowndes County, Alabama. In 1971 he provided health care to prisoners during the NY State Attica Prison rebellion. And in 1973, he and his partner Barbara provided medical care to Native Americans during their occupation of Wounded Knee, SD, on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation.

Alan was arrested in 1985 and convicted of charges arising from his political activities and for failing to report his treatment of a gunshot wound sustained by another activist. He spent over 7 years in some of the worst prisons in the US, 4 of those years in solitary confinement. During his imprisonment, Alan survived two rounds of Hodgkin’s disease.  Acutely aware that if he hadn’t been a doctor, he would have died, given the inadequate and inhumane prison medical care, Alan later provided testimony to a Congressional subcommittee working to change the policies and practices of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Noting the presence in prison of illnesses coming to be understood as AIDS, in 1986 he also helped set up a prisoners council that provided peer education about HIV and AIDS.

After he was released from prison in 1992, Alan worked to improve health conditions for NY State prisoners and for ex-prisoners living with dual and triple diagnoses (HIV/AIDS, mental illness and drug addiction). He also spent time in mental hospitals in South Africa, where both patients and staff were dying from AIDS. In 1998, at an international conference in Geneva with the theme of “bridging the gap” in resources between poor and wealthy countries, Alan became increasingly frustrated by the lack of action to extend AIDS treatment to poor countries—causing “mass death.” 

Alan began Health GAP to shake up the international AIDS treatment community, challenging the prevailing sense that treatment of AIDS in Africa was impossible because the drugs were too expensive.  Health GAP took a stand against the US trade policies that protect pharmaceutical companies’ patents at the expense of millions of peoples’ lives.  As Alan said in a 2002 interview, Health GAP “posed the moral issue of the fact that… abstract property rights were more important than confronting this enormous epidemic.”  Rooted in grassroots activism, Health GAP continues to campaign for pharmaceutical companies to cooperate with governments and NGOs to expand access to life-sustaining medications to HIV-infected people around the world.

At the time of his death, Alan was Vice Chair of the Department of Epidemiology, Associate Clinical Professor of Epidemiology, and Associate Clinical Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Defiant, resilient, determined, and motivated by love, Alan Berkman will be sorely missed.

NYU Capstone Program Studies Hesperian’s Women’s Health Books

Hesperian was fortunate this year to again be the subject of a New York University Capstone study assessing the impact and value of two of our books, Where Women Have No Doctor and A Book for Midwives , as they are used in the field by people around the world.

The Capstone Program in International Public Policy and Management is a program at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Policy, which focuses students’ attention on real-world situations and issues. Under the direction of Lucille Pilling, Clinical Associate Professor of Public Administration at Wagner, the Capstone team members this year included Eleanor Hartzell, Joanna Hoffman, Dina Mikdadi and Carrie Wood.

Through a world-wide on-line survey of people who either purchased or received a free copy of Where Women Have No Doctor or A Book for Midwives through our Gratis program, the team learned about the book users, looking at where and under what circumstances they live and work, and also evaluated how the books contribute to community knowledge about health.

Team members also traveled to Guatemala, where they visited Hesperian partner organizations ACOTCHI, an association of traditional midwives in the town of Comalapa and CODECOT, a coordinating group of traditional midwives in Xela.  There they observed training sessions, and met in small groups with midwives and students to discuss our books and how they are used.

In general, the team found that our books are well-used as training materials in a variety of circumstances, that they do a good job of reaching out across cultures, and that the simple language and profuse illustrations assist in learning.  Survey respondents described using the books to discuss difficult health issues in their communities—sharing information through health promotion fairs in Cambodia; increasing the comfort level when talking about sex and sexual health with migrant women in Mexico; and starting conversations among Amish women in the US.

In one story from Honduras, an OB/GYN described giving copies of Un libro para parteras (A Book for Midwives in Spanish) to local midwives:

The midwives loved the books. One was illiterate but quickly told me her granddaughter could read and would be the one to read it to her. About a year later, we initiated a project on folic acid. As part of the presentation, the medical student working on the project asked them what they knew about folic acid. The group of midwives, all uneducated in a formal sense, and living in an area lacking in educational resources, proceeded to tell us all about neural tube defects and how folic acid prevents it! I asked them where they got the information. They proudly told me they read it in the midwife book!

At the same time, the Capstone team found that circumstances such as low literacy, a lack of materials translated into local indigenous languages, the villagers’ mistrust of hospitals and a lack of access to prescription medicines impair midwives’ ability to treat people as effectively as they’d like. “Given these impediments to receiving effective health services,” the team concluded, “it is especially significant that publications such as Hesperian’s Where Women Have No Doctor and A Book for Midwives be available and accessible, in the hopes that women will be able not only to survive, but thrive.”

Capstone provided us with a Powerpoint presentation of their project, which you’re welcome to read. The full report will be available shortly.

This survey, and the one before it that studied our book Where There Is No Doctor, provide Hesperian with valuable feedback and information, which not only encourages us in our work, but gives us suggestions and ideas on how to improve future editions for even greater effectiveness.

 

Binational Promotoras/es Conference

By Miriam Lara-Meloy, Writer/Researcher for A Worker's Guide to Health and Safety

The importance of community health care workers, particularly in the context of workers who migrate from Mexico to the US, was the focus of the IX Annual Binational Promotoras/es Conference held on May 28 in Oakland, California. Organized by the Health Initiative of the Americas from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, this conference brings together community health workers from Mexico and the US so they can learn from one another and discuss best practices while attempting to create policy changes in the area of health and heath care in both countries.

“Ninety percent of primary health problems can be treated by a community health worker,” said Dr. Gisela Lara, representing the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS). In Mexico, community health workers are an integral part of the health system, particularly in remote parts of the county, and increasingly so in the urban and periurban areas.  As Dr. Lara explained, more than 50% of the population in Mexico—upwards of 50 million people—have no health insurance. To reach them, the Mexican Social Security Institute created the program “Oportunidades” (Opportunities) to train and support more than 160,000 volunteer community health workers around the country to give free care and dispense basic medicines.

Hesperian supports the work of these and many other community health workers in Mexico by publishing primary health care manuals in Spanish, such as Donde no hay doctor (Where There Is No Doctor), Donde no hay doctor para mujeres (Where Women Have No Doctor), and Donde no hay dentista (Where There Is No Dentist). Simply written, with lots of illustrations, these primary health care manuals have been powerful tools in the hands of community health promoters, who use them to learn how to treat and prevent common health problems while encouraging people to become active agents in their own health. 

Health promoters are important not only in Mexico and other developing countries, but in the the US as well.  Like Mexico, the US has about 50 million people who lack health insurance. Community health workers in the US are also the first, and sometimes only, health providers for the millions of people who migrate to the US for work every year.

The Binational Promoteras/es Conference focuses a lot of attention on issues of concern to migrant workers, particularly in the areas of occupational health and safety, reproductive and sexual health of migrant women, and mental health. Community health workers can help workers who migrate overcome  language and cultural barriers as well as other obstacles they face in getting needed care, such as not being insured, not being able to pay out of pocket, not having time off to seek help,  and being scared of immigration officials. 

By making their efforts binational, the Health Initiative of the Americas hopes to help migrant workers even before they leave their homes by making concerted efforts to work collaboratively with health workers in Mexico. As one of the Mexican health workers said, “We need to work with health promoters in the US, to make sure that our men, the Mexican men who go to work there, are getting the help they need. And they need us to help them understand our men better.”

The issues confronting workers like these are a key focus of Hesperian’s upcoming title, A Worker’s Guide to Health and Safety.  In addition to addressing the occupational health hazards common to jobs in most low-wage manufacturing industries—those which workers who migrate do most often—the manual will devote significant attention to social hazards such as sexual harassment and other gender-related abuses, child labor, poverty wages, and violations of human and labor rights. Workers, community health workers, and organizers can start now to use this resource to improve workplace conditions and secure greater rights and benefits. You can download parts of the book from our free downloads page in English and Spanish.