HesperianBy 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.
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