AIDS and human rights: where do we go from here?

he continuing challenges of HIV/AIDS have brought public health to the threshold of a new era, based on the inextricable connection between health and human rights. For human rights provides public health with an explicit response to its central dilemma: how to address directly the societal forces which determine, more than anything else, vulnerability to preventable disease, disability, and premature death. Put bluntly, public health has known about the societal dimension of health, but has failed to learn what to do about it. Now, through the insights provided by the health and human rights connection, public health is learning how to respond, by adding explicit efforts to promote and protect human rights to the list of traditional, useful public health approaches to promoting health and preventing disease. As public health considers how best to proceed along this path from insight to concrete action, two major and immediate challenges arise. First, the forms and mechanisms of human rights action may seem uncomfortable, foreign, or even inappropriate to many public health workers. How can this perceptual gap be closed; how can public health professionals promote and protect human rights? Actually, decades of experience by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in the