Global Health Institute

Mauricio Maza presented a program implemented in El Salvador by Basic Health International that consists in providing HPV screening, follow-up, and treatment to prevent cervical cancer. He emphasized the positive results of the program and mentioned the main challenges for its continuity. Dr. Maza spoke about the importance of political will to get resources and an adequate legal framework that favors the use of scientific evidence in the design of effective policy measures. On the other hand, Ophira Ginsburg, associate professor at New York University and the Langone School of Medicine, presented her research on breast cancer, stressing the disparate rates of timely diagnosis between developed and developing countries. Form her perspective, the resources dedicated to breast cancer detection and treatment are not insufficient; a lot can be done by reorganizing the resources we have more efficiently. Both speakers highlighted that social stigma is an important challenge. They expressed that increasing access to health care services must go along with education in order to get patients to seek services.

Stigma as a barrier to access healthcare services was a recurrent topic throughout the conference. During the plenary panel titled "How Can NIH Help Advance Global Health Research in a Changing World?," Pamela Y. Collins, director of the Office for Research on Disparities & Global Mental Health of the National Institute of Mental Health, spoke about social stigma for people with mental disorders as a global challenge. Listening about stigma in such different contexts, she called audience members to reflect on why this problem is prevalent all over the world and why its characterization as a barrier is applicable to very different kinds of health problems. Collins explained that stigma is a phenomenon that depends on the information that society receives and the way it processes that information. She expressed that, as a part of society, the scientific community plays a key role in producing information, and it needs to establish effective communication strategies to combat myths that stigmatize those who suffer from a certain health condition.

In one of the closing sessions, on the role of law in global health, Professor Lawrence Gostin (faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University), expressed that given the current political climate, the role of science in society is likely to be redefined. He called for a defense of science not only by the scientific community, but by society as a whole. Professor Gostin and his co-panelists agreed that the scientific community must communicate better with society. After attending the conference, I can conclude that the democratization of access to scientific information could help defend the role of science not only in defining public policy goals and strategies, it could also contribute to combat the social stigma linked to certain health conditions.

Laura Torres is a Global Health Law LL.M. candidate at Georgetown Law Center.