public health

is inseparable from human rights and is thus a moral obligation of governments and individuals in that people could not function with dignity without their health, and public health systems are the best means of producing and protecting health.

The relationship between universal human rights and public health was made forcefully by Jonathan Mann who argued that people could not function with dignity without their health and that public health systems were the best means of producing and protecting health.49 This connection is now recognized as a movement of its own with the journal Health arid Human Rights, founded by Mann, expressing the central arguments that promoting the public's health promotes justice and prosperity and is a moral obligation of governments and individuals. so Mann's belief was that in the modern world, public health officials have, for the first time, two fundamental responsibilities to the public: to protect and promote public health and to protect and promote human rights.'51

Jonathan MannThinkers

Jonathan Mann