On October 20th 1987, Director of the World Health Organisation’s Special Programme on AIDS Dr. Jonathan Mann gave an address before the United Nations General Assembly. In the speech, Mann described the course of the epidemic as a play in three acts. Act one occurs as the virus silently enters the community. Act two begins as individuals succumb to sickness, and health systems are put under increasing pressure. The third act he characterised as the epidemic of social, cultural, economic and political reactions, declaring it to be ‘as central to the global AIDS challenge as the disease itself.’ Mann’s remarks were indeed prescient, and public health and social epidemiology scholarship since then has come to recognise the greatest barriers to addressing an epidemic are not solely, or even mostly, biomedical, but rather have to do with social and structural issues such as stigma, inequality and access to power.
Perhaps Mann’s greatest legacy was in shifting the emphasis on health as an issue that was singularly confined to the realm of biomedicine, to an acknowledgement of the inextricable relationship between health and human rights. The International Bill of Human Rights outlines a set of universal, indivisible and inalienable rights that are key to assuring the dignity, health and well-being of all individuals.
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