Palliative care as a human right: update.

As I sit down to write this update on the global initiative to recognize Palliative Care (including psychosocial cancer care) and Pain Treatment as Human Rights, it is perhaps ironic that I have spent the entire morning watching the television coverage of the 10 Anniversary Memorial Services for the September 11, 2001 victims of the terrorist attacks on the United States. I was most personally affected by the attacks on, and the eventual collapse of, the World Trade Center twin towers that killed some 3,000 of my fellow New Yorkers, as I watched and smelled the acrid smoke that filled the air some 60 city blocks from my offices at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “Human Rights”! What about the “Human Right to Life”? a right that was so heinously violated on that infamous day 10 years ago? Paradoxically, it is this “Human Right to Life” that constitutes a significant basis for the “Human Right to Health Care,” a component of the argument for Palliative Care and Pain Treatment to be viewed as Human Rights. On Monday, August 4, 2008, at the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC), the Worldwide Palliative Care Alliance and many organizations from around the world, including the International Psycho-oncology Society (IPOS) issued a Joint Declaration and Statement of Commitment calling for the recognition of Palliative Care and Pain Treatment as Human Rights. The Declaration and Statement was jointly developed and signed by representatives of numerous international and regional organizations from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia, and North America. What has happened over the last three years? What progress have we made?