BlackPerspective.net
Discussing the Diaspora as seen through an internal Black lens
Jonathan Mann A Hero In the AIDS Fight
November 5th, 2007
I’m going to go a little bit out side of the platform for today’s Week of Positive Blogging Post. I’m going to talk about someone who didn’t directly inspire me to excel in life or who directly actually saved my life; but who’s efforts certainly saved the lives of many, and can serve as an inspiration to us all - Dr. Jonathan Mann.
It might seem odd that I’d be giving honor to a white man here at a place dedicated to the African Diaspora. While I’m absolutely a Black Nationalist, I’m also a humanitarian and I give credit where credit is due. Not only because, but since Jonathan Mann’s effort so profoundly touched (well, actually launched) the AIDs fight in Africa, he’s the hero I want to highlight.
As documented in PBS/Frontline’s ground breaking Age of AIDs, Mann launched an extrodinary global fight against AIDs in 1986 when he became head of the World Health Organization’s global program on AIDs.
Mann would say of the global fight against AIDs: “I think it’s when we enter into the human reality of this disease that we understand, and that we understand why it’s important not to discriminate and stigmatize, why it’s important to prevent this from spreading further…We have to do better than we’ve ever done before. It’s a matter of simple equity; of justice…It’s a worldwide epidemic. There are now 148 countries that report cases of AIDS. There are problems virtually all over the world, the same kinds of deep problems that the United States is facing.”
Dr. James Curran of the Centers for Disease Control, who also appears prominently in the Age of AIDs documentary, is quoted in this article as saying of Mann, “It was always safe for scientists and institutions to think of AIDS as a virus, a transmissible infection… but Dr. Mann structured it as a human rights issue, and a global rights issue. He really was a spiritual leader as well as scientific leader.”
As I posted about previously, when Ugandan Noerine Kaleeba’s husband was dying of AIDs in the late ‘80s she went to see Dr. Mann in Geneva, hoping he’d have a cure for her. He didn’t, but she states “He told me that my husband was probably going to die because at the time, there was no cure. But he also said, “There is prejudice that is attached to this disease that we have to fight. And will you help me fight it?”
As you can read in the link above, with Mann’s help Kaleeba initiated an anti-AIDS and AIDs victim support program in her country of Uganda. Unganda then became one of the first countries in the world to show that prevention could work, and one of the first to reverse it’s AIDs rates.
Dr. Mann’s global aids program became the largest initiative in the history of the WHO, largely funded by money he raised for the cause.
Then in 1990, Dr. Jonathan Mann abruptly resigned “as head of WHO’s Global Program on AIDS after clashing with new WHO Director-General Hiroshi Nakajima, who reportedly resents Mann’s high profile and limits his budget and travel. In the years after Mann’s resignation, the GPA’s staff drops to four people from a high of more than 250, essentially leaving a vacuum on the international stage until UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS) is formed in 1996.” www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/cron/?getid=517
Then on Sepetember 2, 1998, on a flight from New York to Geneva Dr. Mann’s flight crashed killing him and his wife.
His legacy lives on though, and his efforts are being attempted to be replicated by Dr. Peter Piot, who treated some of the earliest cases of AIDS and is now head of UN-AIDS.
There’s even a Jonathan Mann Lecture on Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health. There’s also the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights.
Jonathan Mann: medical researcher, public health advocate, human rights leader, and as Noreen Kaleeba called him, a “scientist…with a heart of gold”.
You can watch the Age of AIDS online for free; which I implore you to do. Click the link, and if you want go to the part on Dr. Mann, go to Part 1, chapter 6: The Power of Leadership. Just click on the picture of the Black man in the suit.
If your computer doesn’t have the capacity for you to watch online, you can read the interviews of the people who have been on the frontline of the AIDS fight from early on, including Noreen Kaleeba’s: www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/interviews/
His history:
Dr Mann received his B.A. from Harvard College, his M.D. from Washington University at St. Louis in 1974 and his M.P.H. from Harvard School of Public Health in 1980. He headed WHO’s AIDS programme from 1986 to 1990 and was the first director of its Global Programme on AIDS. Before joining WHO, he was director of Projet SIDA in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, from 1984 to 1986. Before that, he was state epidemiologist and assistant director of the health department in New Mexico. From 1975 to 1977, he was an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the US Centers for Disease Control. Dr Mann left WHO in 1990 to become Professor of Epidemiology and International Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1993, he was appointed the first Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights and the first Director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. On 1 January 1998, he became Dean of the School of Public Health of the Allegheny University of Health Sciences in Philadelphia. He was affiliated with many institutions and had a number of articles to his credit. www.emro.who.int/aidsnews/September1998/News.htm
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Yobachi Boswell is creator and publisher of BlackPerspecitve.net. I’m a writer, activist and political watcher based in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve also been know to do some spoken word and MCing in my day.
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Interesting, I’ve never heard of the man I will have to do some reading.
Cooper, I never heard of him before watching Age of AIDS two years ago. You really should check that out if you’ve never seen it before, its facinating.
This is an interesting post. I had never heard of Dr. Mann. Often we don’t hear about the battles that are being won in the fight against AIDS. Thanks so much for putting this up and taking part in A Week of Positive Blogging.
“Often we don’t hear about the battles that are being won in the fight against AIDS.”
Exactly, I’ve made a point of highlighting those positives. We can’t believe it’s all hopeless when it’s not; if we do then we won’t fight.