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| From left to right: Timothy Holtz, Lanny Smith, Jonathan Mann and John MacArthur, at the 1996 FXB Conference on Health and Human Rights. |
As the leader of a world-wide movement to recognize and promote the inter-relation between Health and Human Rights, he was one of the inspirations for the formation and direction of DGH. He also served on the DGH Advisory Council until he and his wife, Mary Lou Clements-Mann, died in the crash of Swissair Flight 111 on September 2, 1998. They were on their way to Geneva for meetings at the UN AIDS program headquarters.
Last night, I was at the wake of a Salvadoran colleague's brother, who died at the age of 36 of a disease that in a first-world tertiary care center would not have killed him so quickly–possibly not at all. The man is survived by his wife and eight-year-old daughter, who will have a difficult time of it.
| “ In El Salvador, as in communities in Africa, Europe and throughout the world, the memory of Jonathan continues to work for human dignity and social justice.” |
Jonathan is perhaps best known as the founder and first director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Special Programme on AIDS. From the beginning of the pandemic, he insisted on respecting the Human Rights of persons with HIV/AIDS, and recognized poverty and being a member of a marginalized population as major risk factors. A former EIS officer with the Centers for Disease Control, he was with the New Mexico Department of Public Health and later worked with AIDS in Zaire, before joining the WHO in Geneva. He started the Programme with a staff of two. That figure rose to more than 250 by the time he resigned, when the then new, now departed, director of WHO, opposed his grass-roots, Human-Rights-based approach. After leaving WHO, Jonathan went on to inspire students at the HSPH, where he founded the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights, which explores the social roots of disease. When he died he was Dean of the Allegheny School of Public Health at Alleghany University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Never afraid of controversy, Jonathan knew how to challenge the status quo when he felt that it was unjust. I recall his last minute moving of an entire World Conference on AIDS from the US to Holland in protest of an ignorant and unfair new US Immigration policy toward persons with HIV/AIDS, and how he made it a point to include those persons in the conference. He had a knack for remembering those often forgotten. At the last FXB Conference on Health and Human Rights, I remember him publicly thanking the custodial staff, among others. And as a teacher, he was superb, always accessible to his students.
The last DGH members to see Jonathan were Audrey Lenhart and Clyde Smith, who took part in the 1998 Health and Human Rights Workshop in Atlanta, which Jonathan taught and DGH co-sponsored (as part of the Atlanta Coalition for Health and Human Rights). He said then that he was planning to visit El Salvador (he had nearly come in 1995). Although he never made it here physically, his counsel and example has been with us all along.
A Health Promoter looks over my shoulder at the incomprehensible English words I am scribbling and immediately recognizes Jonathan's name among them. Yes, he is still with us here. His work goes on.
