Adjunct Professor of Public Health at the Medical School and global health consultant Barry Levy delivered a lecture at the Fletcher School yesterday on the impact of conflict on health.
Entitled "War and Public Health in the 20th Century," the lecture was the second of six seminars in the Pearson Prentice Hall Seminar Series, which is directed by a consortium of five Boston-area universities including Harvard and MIT.
Levy used both statistics and photographs in his presentation to create a global picture of the relationship between war and public health.
Levy defined public health as "what we, as a society, do collectively to ensure the conditions in which people can be healthy."
With regard to general global health trends, "I think there are some positive signs and some negative signs," Levy said. For instance, there is more global awareness of the damage done by war.
Nevertheless, the world is much more dangerous because of improved technology and broader access to destructive materials, he said.
One of the major byproducts of war on civilians is a scarcity of food and water. Levy showed photographs of women collecting water contaminated by waste out of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers because there was no other source of water during wartime.
He explained that contaminated water can lead to many immune diseases, which affect children more than any other demographic group.
According to Levy, 191 million people died in war in the 20th century. This number includes both civilians and military personnel, but he said an increasing percentage of all war-related deaths are civilian deaths. Many are caught in the crossfire, but civilians are increasingly being targeted in wars, he said.
Another effect of war on public health is that many countries divert funds that could be used for public health purposes toward military spending. For example, he said, South Korea recently purchased 28 missiles. With the money used to purchase these missiles, the government could have immunized 120,000 people against common diseases and provided safe water to 3.5 million people for three years.
Levy also discussed the effects of weapons of mass destruction, which include chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
Landmines belong in this category because they target the public, he said. According to Levy, there are still 100 million landmines in the world that have not been detonated.
"I am concerned about nuclear weapons," Levy said when the question was raised. He said that he thinks it is likely that there will be a nuclear weapon set off in our lifetime.
In his presentation, Levy touched on many of the major consequences of war, not just its direct impacts on health. These include diversion of resources to the war effort from other causes, negative impacts on the environment, possibility for human rights violations, and creation of refugees and displaced peoples.
According to Levy, there are 12 million refugees worldwide, and there are 20 to 25 million internally displaced persons who may face being caught in the crossfire of war in the future because they have nowhere safe to go.
Dr. Barry Levy has been an adjunct professor in the medical school for 14 years. He specializes in public health and family medicine.
His interest in public health began in 1980 when he spent two months working in a refugee camp in Thailand. The camp housed 120,000 people who had fled Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia. Most of them hoped to go elsewhere, but, because they lacked the resources to leave, stayed in camp for 10 years. Many were eventually forced back into Cambodia, where they faced persecution or death.
While in Thailand, Levy saw the effects of war and genocide firsthand. One of his photographs in the presentation displayed an eight-year-old Cambodian boy he met in a refugee camp. According to Levy, when the boy reached the refugee camp, he was carrying his dead two-year-old brother in his arms.
"People have seen more and more the linkages between health and human rights," Levy said.
Levy has co-authored two books with Victor Sidel, Distinguished University Professor of Social Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, titled "War and Public Health" and "Terrorism and Public Health: A Balanced Approach to Strengthening Systems and Protecting People."
The Pearson Prentice Hall seminar series "brings cutting-edge practitioners of Global History to the Tufts campus to share informal reflections about their current and future projects and the development of the subject," according to the program's Web site.
