#ObjectHealth: 15 Capsules to Denounce a 30-Year Gap

#ObjectHealth is a three-week campaign to make known some of the major health problems that affect our world todaySpain and Mozambique are separated by 30 years: three decades that you gain if you are born in Spain, three decades robbed from you by fate if you happen to be born in Africa. Because even today, in the 21st century, our birthplace still strongly determines the number of years we can expect to live. The difference in life expectancy at birth between Spain, where it is 82 years, and Mozambique, where it is 50, is equivalent to more than one third of the expected lifespan of a person born in this country.  

In the face of such evidence, it is not difficult to argue that reducing the health inequalities on our planet is an ethical obligation we all share. Why should the purely random accident of being born in one place or another bestow or take away a third of our lifespan?  Why should a thousand women die every day in poor countries due to pregnancy-related complications that are prevented or treated in wealthy countries without great difficulty? There are many of us who believe that this situation is both unjust and unacceptable.

#ObjectHealth consists of 15 short video capsules that will be broadcast from Monday on Para Todos la 2, a daily programme on the Spanish TVE2 channel, complemented by 15 short articles, to be published daily in Planeta Futuro and in this blogBut the issue is not only an ethical one. Recent health crises, such as the Ebola epidemic in Africa and the chikungunya outbreak in Latin America, have highlighted the fact that the reduction of global health inequities is also a question of self-interest.  We live in an interconnected world in which health has also become globalised. Just as people travel and migrate from one place to another, diseases such as tuberculosis, polio, and HIV/AIDs can easily spread from one region to another.  

And it is for all of these reasons that we must act. We can choose whether to act for ethical motives or because of self-interest—or both—but it is no longer possible to tolerate the ever increasing gap in health equity. Therefore, we need to understand the challenges we face. With this in mind, the Barcelona Institute of Global Health, in collaboration with RTVE and Planeta Futuro-El País, is launching #ObjectHealth: a three-week campaign to make known some of the major health problems that affect our world today. We want to make it clear that we live in a global society in which health has no borders and to show that the problems affecting poor countries also affect us all.

#ObjectHealth consists of 15 short video capsules that will be broadcast from Monday to Friday on Para Todos la 2, a daily programme on the Spanish TVE2 channel, complemented by 15 short articles, to be published daily in Planeta Futuro as well as in this blog. In both, international experts in global health will explain, among other topics, what malaria is and what is being done to find an effective vaccine to combat it, how diseases spread and whether it is possible to eliminate them, the consequences of the environmental pollution in our cities, and why antibiotic resistance is an increasingly worrying problem. 

We are launching this campaign to draw attention to the major global health challenges facing the world today.  Only if we are informed, can we demand of our governments and those responsible for designing global health policies that they work towards putting an end to this unjust situation and achieving the goal of #ObjectHealth.