Patricio V. Marquez

Some Reflections on World AIDS Day 2020 Amidst COVID-19

A lot has been accomplished over the past 20 years in the fight against HIV and AIDS.  According to UNAIDS data, of the 38 million people living with HIV, 25.4 million people are now on treatment. New HIV infections have been reduced by 23% since 2010, largely due to a substantial decrease of 38% in Eastern and Southern Africa.

Health Systems Fit for the Future: How to Promote Better Health, Economic Growth, and Social Cohesion?

I recently had the honor of serving as a panelist in plenary session 5 “Health systems fit for the future: promoting better health, economic growth, and social cohesion”, that was held virtually as part of the 16th World Congress on Public Health: “Public health for the future of humanity: analysis, advocacy and action”, on October 15th, 2020. 

Addressing Alcohol Use Disorders through Taxation: A Public Health and Economic Win-Win in the time of COVID-19

 “Taxes should be levied not with the idea of filling the public treasury at whatever cost to public morality and efficiency, but as method of reducing the consumption of alcohol”    
                                      ---Raymond B. Fosdick and Albert L.

Let’s not forget about Mental Health during COVID-19!

“Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile…….It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile—that sensation of a void within which never left us, the irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.”
Albert Camus (1957 Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature), The Plague