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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.

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
Record
Comments
Records
Somewhat
Lasts
Proven
Last
Impressed
Often
Carefully
Conspiratorial
Years
Comment
Probed
Correct
Villagers
Historical
Haitian

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We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.
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That's when I feel most alive, when I'm helping people.
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The idea that because you're born in Haiti you could die having a child. The idea that because you're born in you know Malawi your children may go to bed hungry. We want to take some of the chance out of that.
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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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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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Everybody should be interested in access to primary and secondary education for everybody.
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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 essence of global health equity is the idea that something so precious as health might be viewed as a right.
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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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The thing about rights is that in the end you can't prove what should be considered a right.
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The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
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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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It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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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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People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.
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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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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.
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