Dealing With Difference

The tutorial for the GFC topic was the playing ground for the first instance of differing disciplines/personalities being at loggerheads with each other. A discussion on the sub-prime mortgage crisis became quite emotional and heated and was split between an economists/lawyers point of view that 'people should have been more careful with the contracts that they were signing' and my touchy-feely humanities point of view that the people were victims of the greater machinations of a complex system. At the end of the discussion I don't believe that we had reached any compromise and were perhaps even more convinced of our own opinions. It possibly only highlights our personal stubbornness that may be worn down across the course but also one of the problems of interdisciplinary studies with high-achieving students: That they're all very used to getting their own way and being right.

The second tutorial didn't develop much past the first in respect to dealing with differences we ended up discussing the initial posts from the wattle exercise and then ended up choosing one to talk about in depth. It happened to be the article that I posted on the criminalisation of HIV. We split into small groups to discuss the problem. I felt that we spent so much time dancing around semantics that we didn't end up discussing any problems of politics, education, culture, history, corporate interests, research and development that contribute to the complexity of the problem.

One group declared that as we know what the answer is (find a cure for the disease) then the problem just isn't that complex. This makes me wonder about the frequency of this attitude on a wider scale. Clearly the parameters of the problem need to be defined but often it seems to happen that stakeholders define the parameters in such a way as to negate their responsibility.

Public Health

Public health is an area that I find very interesting. I have been doing self directed study in the area for my current affairs in the spanish speaking world course into forgotten diseases. I did a presentation on Chagas disease and Medecins Sans Frontiers' campaign to 'break the silence' on the disease.

The issue of equitable access to medicines seems to qualify as a complex problem in as much that there are so many parties with seriously conflicting interests. I understand the need for intellectual property but really can't get past an emotional point of view that there needs to be access for everyone to medicines to treat communicable diseases. Without really understanding the practical implications, I think that the idea that was raised in the tutorial about having a tiered system for TRIPS where drugs that relate to contagious disease that are a serious threat to global public health have different licensing laws. However, due to the seriousness and contagious nature of these diseases there is also a lot of money to be made from them and therefore, I imagine, not a lot of interest from companies such as Roche and GlaxoSmithKline in opening up the licensing.

Before even getting to this point though there is the massive complexity of the nature of diseases themselves as well as the unpredictable human reaction. The inconsistency of education and development in this areas was really confirmed by Kamalini Lokuge's story about traveling on the plane with a group of sick American students who didn't understand the reality of bringing H1N1 into an under resourced country.

In terms of looking at effective systems I think the take home message was that adapibility and effective communication (as well as financial resources) are key to having effective public health systems.

I had to go to an honours prep meeting and was disappointed to miss the first half of the public health tutorial. I think that Harriet and John really achieved excellent communication and reflection through modeling different ideas. Putting people in role plays really introduced empathy into the situation, which is something very necessary in public health.

Question: At what point do governments have an ethical responsibility to contravene trade laws and condone the manufacture of generic drugs?