World Health Experts at the University of Harvard and around the world have gathered at 2025 World Health Symposium April 10 to solve some of the most critical problems in global health. Organized by the Harvard Global Health InstituteThe day’s symposium included an opening speech by Rhonda Sealy-Thomas, deputy director, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), United Nations, and group discussions on the theme of the promise of health equity. Throughout the day, more than 2,600 people from 115 countries joined the event via Livestream.
Sealy-Thomas said that public health professionals should consider equity in terms of health not as an aspiration, but as an obligation to ensure that each person, whatever their place of residence, their socio-economic status, their age, their race, their ethnicity, their sex or their disability, has an equal opportunity to reach its highest level of health.
Unfortunately, the reality is that despite the remarkable progress in health policy, medical breakthroughs and technological innovations in recent decades, vast disparities in health have persisted.
“For example, a child born in the Americas region – especially in Latin America and the Caribbean – is even more likely to die before his fifth anniversary than a child born in Norway.
Other symposium experts have agreed.
In the panel “displacement and disparities: navigate in health challenges in the midst of conflicts”, Petra Khoury, World Director of Health and Care at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Federation, suggested that the evolution of attitude towards global health and foreign aid had made it difficult to fulfill the gap of health equity.
“There is a general attitude to” Why should we support people outside our borders? ” We have to keep money internally, ”Khoury said.
But it is not all the misfortune and sadness. Salmaan Keshavjee, director of the Center for Global Health Delivery of the Harvard Medical School, said that he had seen “a glimmer of hope” and that people see that they must get up on the occasion. He said that when people appreciate the sacredness of life, this opens up new opportunities.
In another panel, “Impact and influence: examining the American role in global health”, Sheila Tlou, co -president of the Global HIV Prevention Coalition and Special Ambassador of African Leaders Paluda Alliance, reminded the public that “equitable access to health care is a political choice”.
She thought that the global equity of health is intended for the future of humanity. A new approach to humanitarian aid is one of the new opportunities that have opened in the current political climate.
“No country is safe until all countries are safe. We (African countries) need this global solidarity and this shared responsibility to continue, but we must put our pieces so that we continue as partners, not as a recipient. ”
In a conversation with Carole Mitnick, a world health professor and social medicine at the Harvard Medical School, a successful author and philanthropist of the New York Times, John Green, said that tuberculosis is an exemplary case of health injustice, although this is not the only one.
“If you map poverty in my hometown of Indianapolis and get the cancer levels in my birthplace in Indianapolis, it’s the same card.” Said Green.
In the case of tuberculosis, Green said that the fact that a disease that has been healed since 1956 still kills someone in 2025 is not a failure of science, but a failure of human systems.