Sir, - A few words about Dr Jonathan Mann who, along with his wife, was killed in the recent Swissair disaster off Newfoundland. Very much in keeping with his work in the HIV/Aids world, John Mann was also, until recently, director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, a part of the Harvard School of Public Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ironically, the F-XB Center was named in honour of a young development worker killed in a plane crash some years previously.
John was instrumental in cementing the link between health and human rights and in persuading the world community to link the subjects in the one breath, and not as separate entities requiring separate approaches and study. The concept of "health and human rights" and the human right to appropriate health provision was put forward at the First International Conference on Health and Human Rights in 1994. By the time the Second International Conference was held at Harvard in 1996, where, as director of Rescue Trust, I had the privilege of being asked to give a paper, the transformation from a concept into global action took place.
It was Jonathan Mann's vision and energy which brought together over 500 participants from 44 countries that year. Typical of the man, in a preface to the conference report, he paid tribute to everyone who had taken part by telling them that they "represented the vanguard of a new kind of movement. Instinctively, we know that we are setting out into new territory, which requires leaving behind many familiar ways of organising, thinking and acting".
Some time in the next decade, Ireland will undoubtedly catch up with the thinking that Mann and others have sent out into the world. In the meantime, we must mourn the very significant loss of a passionate academic and activist in the very much wider world of health care and human rights. It was my pleasure and my privilege to have known him, however briefly, and I am indebted to him for the new ideas and opportunities which he inspired. Ar dheis De go raibh a h-anam. -Yours, etc., Declan Hughes, (former Director, Rescue Trust),
Capel Street, Dublin 1.