FW: World Bank Nominee
[{"sender": "Boris Nikolic", "recipients": ["Jeffrey Epstein (jeevacation@gmail.com) [jeevacation@gmail.com]"], "timestamp": "3/23/2012 7:10:58 PM", "subject": "FW: World Bank Nominee", "body": "The Atlantic Home  \nFriday, March 23, 2012 \n• Politics \nMassoud Hayoun - Massoud Hayoun writes for and produces The Atlantic's International channel. \nHow Jim Yong Kim, Obama's World Bank Pick, \nChanged Global Health Aid \nBy Massoud Hayoun \nMar 23 2012, 2:04 PM ET \nThe international public health work that made Kim, now the president's nominee for World Bank head, such a \nrespected figure. \nPresident Obama introduces Jim Yong Kim as his nominee to be the next president of the World Bank /Reuters \nPresident Obama announced today that he will nominate Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head \nthe World Bank. Although Kim is a physician by training, officials have observed that Kim's role as a key \nplayer in global health and development, notably with his role in the organization Partners in Health (PIH), \nmakes him a key candidate to change the attitudes of developing-world nations. \nThe following excerpts from Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, a biography of anthropologist and \nphysician Paul Farmer, detail Kim's bold efforts to combat international HIV and tuberculosis epidemics with \nPIH: \nSome months after the official founding of PIH, [co-founder] Paul Farmer expanded the group, adding a fellow \nHarvard anthropology and medical student, a Korean American named Jim Yong Kim... Farmer offered what \nfor Jim Kim was a convincing vision of the new organization. The reality was less impressive -- a charity with a \nboard of advisers and no hired staff... \nThey talked about issues such as political correctness, which Jim Kim defined as follows: \"It's a very well-\ncrafted tool to distract us. A very self-centered activity. Clean up your own vocabulary so you can show \neverybody you have the social capital of having been in circles where these things are talked about on a regular \nbasis.\" (What was an example of political correctness? Some academic types would say to Jim and Paul, \"Why \ndo you call your patients poor people? They don't call themselves poor people.\" Jim would reply: \"Okay, how \nabout soon-dead people?\") \nThey talked about the insignificance of \"cultural barriers\" when it came to the Haitian peasant's acceptance of \nmodern Western medicine: \"There's nothing like a cure for a disease to change people's cultural values\"... \nBy now Peru was taxing PIH's resources severely. On average, the drugs to treat just one patient cost between \nfifteen and twenty thousand dollars. And the number of patients kept growing. Already there were about fifty \nCarabayllanos in treatment. Their average age was twenty-nine. They were students, unemployed youths, \nhousewives, street vendors, bus drivers, health workers. The actual numbers seemed small, but those fifty MDR \n[a form of tuberculosis that does not respond to standard treatment] cases represented about 10 percent of all \nactive cases of TB in the slum, about ten times more than might have been expected. No telling how many \nothers they had been infecting as they'd traveled around Lima, coughing. No telling either how many people in \nother parts of the city already had MDR, but [there were] reports of hundreds in other neighborhoods. In \nCarabayllo itself, the Socios workers found entire families sick and dying with what turned out to be genetically \nrelated strains of the disease--a phenomenon common enough that the health workers gave it a name, familias \ntebeceanas, tuberculosis families. \nKim's organization confronted Peru's MDR-form tuberculosis epidemic with what some have called unorthodox \npractices -- borrowing and cajoling its way into medicine for its patients. \nHoward Hiatt, a friend of Jim Yong Kim's and a former dean at the Harvard School of Public Health, said he \nwas concerned about how PIH was getting medicine to combat the epidemic: \n\"Sure enough. Paul and Jim would stop at the [Harvard-affiliated] Brigham pharmacy before they left for Peru \nand fill their briefcases with drugs. They had sweet-talked various people into letting them walk away with the \ndrugs.\" [Hiatt] was amused, all in all. \"That's their Robin Hood attitude.\" In fact, they'd only borrowed the \ndrugs... \nThen one day the president of the Brigham stopped Hiatt in a corridor. \"Your friends Farmer and Kim are in \ntrouble with me. They owe this hospital ninety-two thousand dollars.\" Hiatt looked into the matter. \"Sure \nenough. Paul and Jim would stop at the Brigham pharmacy before they left for Peru and fill their briefcases with \ndrugs. They had sweet-talked various people into letting them walk away with the drugs.\" He was amused, all \nin all. \"That's their Robin Hood attitude.\" \nTo many seasoned managers of public health projects, what Farmer and Kim were doing would have looked \nquite reckless--like a stunt, as some would later insinuate. They didn't have a guaranteed supply of drugs, only \nthe determination to obtain the drugs and the charm to get away with borrowing. They were borrowing their \nlaboratory services, too, from Massachusetts. They lacked proper institutional support. The weight of expert \nopinion stood against them. Their organization was small and it had other projects, in Haiti and Boston and \nelsewhere, and Peru put a strain on everyone. Jim had to travel to Carabayllo at least once a month. Farmer had \nto go there slightly more often. \nKim's audacious 'Robin Hood attitude' won him and PIH acclaim for their role in changing global health and \ndevelopment. \nIn June 2002 ... the WHO adopted new prescriptions for dealing with MDR-TB, virtually the same as PIH had \nused in Carabayllo. For Jim Kim this marked the end of a long campaign. \"The world changed yesterday,\" he \nwrote from Geneva to all of PIH. The prices of second-line antibiotics continued to decline, and the drugs now \nflowed fairly smoothly through the Green Light Committee to, among other places, Peru, where about 1,000 \nchronic patients were either cured or in treatment. About 250 were receiving the drugs in Tomsk, and, largely \nbecause of the efforts of WHO, the Russian Ministry of Health had finally agreed to the terms of the World \nBank's TB loan--150 million dollars to begin to fight the epidemic throughout the country. \nThe twin pandemics of AIDS and tuberculosis raged on, of course, magnifying each other, in Africa and Asia, \nEastern Europe and Latin America. Mathematical models predicted widening global catastrophe--100 million \nHIV infections in the world by the year 2010. Some prominent voices, some in the U.S. government, still \nargued that AIDS could not be treated in desperately impoverished places. But this view seemed to be fading. \nThe prices of antiretrovirals were falling, even more dramatically than the prices of second-line TB drugs. \nThis was thanks to a growing worldwide campaign for treating AIDS wherever it occurred. Jim Kim had often \nsaid that the world's response to AIDS and TB would define the moral standing of his generation. In 2003, a \nnew director general took over at WHO, and he asked Jim to serve as his senior adviser. Meanwhile, the \nexample of Zanmi Lasante [PIH's Haiti-based project] was growing, and Cange had become a favorite \ndestination for global health policy makers and American politicians."}]