Global Health is Broken, But Young People Plan to Repair It

Today I wanted to respond to Dr. Madhu Pai’s recent post on Forbes, Global Health is Broken, But Young People Plan to Repair It. In the article, he amplifies the voices of 24 young people from around the world regarding climate change, pandemics, and other global health crises, and the ways leaders are failing us. (For disclosure, I have been an admirer of Dr. Pai for over a decade and he has supported my tuberculosis work).

I am very happy that young people are motivated to reform global health. Throughout history, young people have brought a lot of energy to social change movements. For one recent example, take the civil rights movement. Many of the leaders were young – people like Bob Moses, age 26 when he traveled to Mississippi with SNCC, and others. I would also point out, though, that many of the change agents were older, and experienced – people like Rosa Parks, age 42 when she was arrested in Montgomery, and Fannie Lou Hamer, age 46 when she became a field secretary for SNCC. So I would say that, rather than focusing on young people as the ones who will “save us,” it should be a movement of all people, anyone who is willing to organize and put in hard work. We do need to turn out young people who have hope, vision, and energy, and the desire to organize.

The other thing I wanted to point out is the focus on global health and issues of climate change, pandemics, Black Lives Matter, etc. I am entirely on board with these issues as an advocate. But I did also like in Dr. Pai’s article that war crimes was mentioned, because one gap in his post was about nuclear weapons. Young people could work really hard on climate change and pandemics and it wouldn’t matter if nuclear weapons are intentionally or accidentally used. There is a group of advocates who for decades have been attempting to get rid of these weapons. Within the medical community, the group is International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and its US affiliate is Physicians for Social Responsibility (of which I am a member).

So yes, let’s work on decolonizing global health in our universities and institutions, reforming and funding adequately WHO, and stopping the burning of fossil fuels. But we also need students to get on board with the nuclear weapons abolition movement. And at times they have been, for example in the 1980s, there were lots of young people involved with the nuclear freeze movement.

So thank you to Dr. Pai for a provocative, hopeful essay, sharing the voices of young scholars globally. And let’s get to work.

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