In the spring of 1995, Paul Farmer, who died last week, was in San Francisco to take part in a weekend conference on resurgent TB. This interview —all too timely today— was conducted for the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
Paul Farmer runs a clinic in rural Haiti, where tuberculosis is the leading cause of death (and has been for centuries). He is 35. With his wire-rimmed glasses and radiant intelligence, he resembles a taller, thinner Elvis Costello. He was born in Massachusetts, grew up in Florida. There were six kids and the family residence was a bus. Farmer went to Harvard Medical School, and is now on the clinical faculty there. He has an arrangement that lets him spend eight months of the year working in Haiti.
The following paragraph is the abstract (summary preceding a scientific paper) of the talk Farmer gave at the conference.
In much of the world, tuberculosis remains the leading killer of young adults, in spite of the fact that effective chemotherapy has existed for 50 years. The epidemiology of TB, with its persistence in poor countries and resurgence in many developed nations, causes consternation among those charged with protecting the public’s health. Two factors, ostensibly biological in nature, are commonly cited to explain this setback: the advent of HIV and the emergence of TB strains resistant to multiple drugs (MDR TB). But these biological developments are best understood as sociomedical phenomena. The strikingly patterned occurence of MDR TB —in the United States afflicting those in homeless shelters and in the inner city, for example– speaks to some of the “large-scale social forces at work in the pandemic, which began before the advent of HIV. These forces (which include poverty, economic inequity, political violence, and racism) are examined through the
— source counterpunch.org | Fred Gardner | Feb 28, 2022