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Civil and political rights are critical, but not often the real problem for the destitute sick. My patients in Haiti can now vote but they can't get medical care or clean water.

Paul Farmer

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Paul Farmer
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 26
Anthropologist
Human Rights Activist
Medical Anthropologist
Physician
North Adams
Massachusetts
Vote
Haiti
Rights
Patients
Water
Civil
Often
Medical
Political
Patient
Care
Critical
Problem
Clean
Real
Sick
Destitute

More quotes by Paul Farmer

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With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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I think, sometimes, that I'm going nuts, and that perhaps there is something good about blocking clean water for those who have none, making sure that illiterate children remain so, and preventing the resuscitation of the public health sector in the country most in need of it. Lunacy is what it is.
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The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.
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You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.
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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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Ebola has not yet come into contact with modern medicine in West Africa. But when protocols for the provision of high quality supportive care are followed, the case fatality rate for Ebola may be lower than 20 percent.
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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
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lean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.
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What I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
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God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that's where He is.
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I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.
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I'm one of six kids, and the eight of us lived for over a decade in either a bus or a boat.
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For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.
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In fact, it seems to me that making strategic alliances across national borders in order to treat HIV among the world's poor is one of the last great hopes of solidarity across a widening divide.
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If I am hungry, that is a material problem if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.
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You can't have public health without a public health system. We just don't want to be part of a mindless competition for resources. We want to build back capacity in the system.
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I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.
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The essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.
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At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease.
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