The Martin Luther King JR Freedom Center presents the Barbara Lee and Elihu Harris Lecture Series featuring Dr. Helene Gayle, President and CEO of CARE USA, an expert on the struggle for fighting poverty with years of direct experience in more than 50 countries working to help communities organize for their basic human right to good health.
Join US Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Dr. Helene Gayle, Saturday, April 20, 2013, 7:00 p.m., at Parks Chapel A.M.E. Church, 476 – 34th Street in Oakland, CA, as they discuss the critical need to improve our health. The lecture’s topic is “The State of Health in America and Beyond.” Good health has become an important Civil Rights issue. Good health is a human right!
Congresswoman Lee and Dr. Gayle will be in discourse about the role poverty plays on the deterioration of health for hundreds of millions in the United States and other nations. They will discuss how we can organize to get our nation’s priorities directed toward good health. They will also discuss what we, the people, can and must do to get and keep ourselves healthy, and illuminate amazing success stories from other nations. This lecture is open to the public. RSVP required. Call 510-434-3988.
I spoke to Dr. Gayle about her upcoming address --
Sandra Varner/Talk2SV: You are among very few people in this world with the unique perspective on global health matters that you have. That perspective posits you as a world health leader, clearly. What critical health factors do you think local communities should be focused on and how can we help in the fight against global health challenges?
Dr. Helene Gayle: I would say in some ways the challenges are different, in some ways they are the same. Clearly, issues linked to extreme poverty have a much bigger impact on the population that we work with from the vantage point of an organization like CARE. Our focus is on poverty in the least developed countries and in emerging economies. Their priorities include access to clean and safe drinking water, inadequate nutrition. While we (the US) have a big problem with obesity, in many countries that we work in, there is an absolute lack of access to food.
Illiteracy and poor sanitation and factors such as these are huge drivers that are generally linked to conditions of extreme poverty. These circumstances help to inform what we do in health. The biggest killers of people in poor countries are more linked to those factors whether it’s the number of children who die from diaherreal diseases and pneumonia every year and women who die of childbirth because of lack of access to health services. Also, critical factors due to poor nutrition and lack of access to contraception or unsafe practices. Inadequate nutrition and malnutrition: death due to those causes but I think in some ways the drivers are the same even though the manifestations may be different. In poor communities in the United States while it may not be lack of nutrition versus and obesity because of lack of access to most nutritious food or even lack of access on best nutrition practices the fact that in many poor communities in the United States supermarkets that are in poor neighborhood may not have the access to the range of vegetables and nutritional options.
Read more at www.Talk2SV.com.
