Internationally respected global health and pandemics scholar
Professor Lawrence Gostin will deliver the 2009 Miegunyah Public
Lecture at the University of Melbourne on Wednesday, September 16.

Professor Gostin, the Melbourne Law School’s Miegunyah Distinguished
Visiting Fellow, will discuss the use of international law to advance
world health in the lecture, Meeting the Basic Survival Needs of the
World’s Least Healthy People: Towards a Framework Convention on Global
Health. 

“The health of the world’s population is fundamentally important,
yet the international health landscape is fragmented,” says Professor
Gostin.  “Activities do not align with country priorities and the
health gap between the world’s rich and poor is unconscionable.

“No state, acting alone, can insulate itself from major health
hazards. The determinants of health – for example pathogens, air, food,
water or even lifestyle choices - do not originate solely within
national borders.  Health threats inexorably spread to neighboring
countries, regions, and even continents.

“It is for this reason that safeguarding the world’s population
requires cooperation and global governance, and as a result, it is
vital to explore new strategies for meeting the basic survival needs of
the world’s least healthy people.”

Professor Gostin is a leading authority on pandemics (including swine flu), public health and global health.

He is the Linda D. and Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Global Health
Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, Director of the O’Neill
Institute for National and Global Health Law and the chair of a
National Commission advising the US Government about ‘Preparation for a
Mass Disaster’.

He is also Professor of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins
University and Director of the Center for Law & the Public’s Health
at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities - a Collaborating Center
of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. 

While in Australia, he will complete a report with the University of
Melbourne’s Nossal Institute into what the Australian Government needs
to do to advance its work on international development assistance for
health.