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A panel discuss strategies to help eliminate the spread of disease and hunger in the developing world. Panelists include Paul Farmer, who for the last 20 years has worked in Haiti with poor communities to combat infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Amartya Sen, a Harvard economist who has won a Noble Prize for his work on world poverty, and Lincoln Chen, director of Harvard's Center for Global Poverty.

Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist and physician has dedicated his life to treating some of the world's poorest populations, in the process helping to raise the standard of health care in underdeveloped areas of the world. A founding director of Partners In Health, an international charity organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty, Dr Farmer and his colleagues have successfully challenged the policy makers and critics who claim that quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor areas.

With colleagues in Haiti and Peru, Farmer has helped lead the international response to mutlidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), later found to be endemic in the former Soviet Union, by establishing pilot MDR-TB treatment programs and organizing effective delivery systems for medications. Working closely with the Open Society Institute, he has participated in evaluations of TB treatment programs in Russia, Peru, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Kazakhstan, with a special interest in TB among prison populations. Dr Farmer was instrumental in establishing the World Health Organization's Working Group on MDR-TB and has been a member of DOTS-Plus Working Group for the Global Tuberculosis Program of the World Health Organization; chief advisor of tuberculosis programs of the Open Society Institute; chief medical consultant for the Tuberculosis Treatment Project in the Prisons of Tomsk (Siberia); and a member of the Scientific Committee of the WHO Working Group on DOTS-Plus for MDR-TB. He has served on the Scientific Review board of ten of the last international conferences on AIDS, and has been a leading voice on behalf of HIV/AIDS and MDR-TB patients across the world.

Listen to a complementary interview with Amartya Sen on Thoughcast.org, a podcast and public radio interview program on authors, academics and intellectuals.