Global health experts from around the world gathered Monday for the First Annual Dartmouth Global Ethics Conference at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center to present on issues ranging from global hunger to medical professionals' moral and political responsibilities. Keynote speaker Solomon Benatar, professor emeritus of medicine and founding director of the University of Cape Town's Bioethics Centre, emphasized that such problems transcend both geographic and social boundaries.
"The crisis of global health and disease is the crisis of basic human needs," Benatar said in his lecture.
The conference aimed to highlight some of the major issues that medical professionals face throughout the world, according to Dartmouth Medical School medicine and micro-immunology professor Tim Lahey, who organized the conference. The day-long meeting served as the first session in an "ongoing conversation" regarding global health ethics, Lahey said, adding that he hopes the conference will become an annual event.
"By working together on this we can really make some progress," Lahey said. "This is not about Dartmouth, this is about global health."
While displaying an image of starving Tanzanian children eating lunch, Lahey explained that witnessing children's stunted growth due to malnutrition initially compelled him to become more involved in global health promotion.
Benatar highlighted the disparities in global wealth and health care distribution in order to draw attention to "the total lack of leadership in global health care."
Benatar, who also serves as director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health and is a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto, also illustrated his message with a photo of emaciated African children.
"Those could be our children, and there are thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands like that," Benatar said.
Developed society's "hyper-individuality" encourages a preoccupation with our own uninhibited "freedom to" act while ignoring the rights of individuals who need "freedom from" inequity, Benatar said.
Developed nations need a stronger moral conscience and should focus on providing support that is difficult to measure including love, warmth and kindness in addition to protecting basic human rights, Benatar said.
"We have a poverty of moral imagination," he said. "Can we not think of what this means? Can we not put ourselves into the shoes of other people?"
Increased dialogue is essential to combating society's denial regarding the state of world health, according to Benatar.
"Academic discourse is a bridge to progress," Benatar said. "The argument for expanded discourses? Our professional duty."
Benatar's experience on the international stage made him an obvious choice for keynote speaker, Lahey said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"He's a provocateur," Lahey said, later adding, "He says it like he sees it."
DHMC executive medical director John Butterly presented a lecture on international hunger and provoked gasps from the audience when he showed a famous photograph of a small African girl lying exhausted in the dust with a vulture waiting patiently nearby.
Malnutrition results from an inability to access food rather than a lack of food itself, according to Butterly. Society must break through the "them and us" dichotomy that allows individuals to ignore problems that do not directly affect them, he said.
Malnutrition is not only a problem for developing countries but remains an issue in the United States as well, Butterly said. Approximately 17 million households suffered from "chronic food insecurity" in 2008, he said.
Butterly noted medical professionals' tendency to focus on HIV/AIDS, malaria and multi-drug-resistance research rather than devoting resources to address diarrhea and pneumonia crises, which represent the two main killers of young children across the world.
The second half of the conference focused on global health research and included panel discussions and presentations by speakers from Yale University, Johns Hopkins University and the College. Nancy Kass, professor of bioethics and public health at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Mark Barnes, senior associate provost for research at Harvard University and Jaime Bayona, director of global health programs and practice for the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, spoke in the afternoon, while several panel discussions also took place.
DMS conference coordinator Michele Nilsson said that the turnout was "great," as 110 out of the 150 individuals who had registered for the event had signed in by 11 a.m.
Lahey said he "couldn't be happier" with how the conference proceeded and that he was pleased that attendees which included students, DMS and College faculty, and ethicists from various New England hospitals came from such diverse backgrounds.
Planning for the conference began six months ago when the 11 committee members charged with overseeing the event began choosing speakers and discussion topics, Lahey said. The committee worked in cooperation with DHMC's Center for Continuing Education in the Health Sciences, he said.
The conference's budget totaled approximately $15,000 and was funded by donations from the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy, the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Ethics Institute, the clinical ethics program at DHMC and the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Charitable Foundation, and was supported in part by Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health, Lahey said.
