An enthusiastic young doctor committed to public health seeks to combat poverty in the Philippines by conducting research on tropical diseases.
Transcript
Title: Tackling Preventable Disease at Community Level
Description: An enthusiastic young doctor committed to public health seeks to combat poverty in the Philippines by conducting research on tropical diseases.
29-year old, Dr. Harvy Joy Liwanag seeks to defeat poverty through medical research, particularly on neglected tropical diseases. In January 2015, he represented youth leaders during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Switzerland.
Harvy Joy Liwanag
Doctor on Public Health
In medicine we talk about treating individuals, in public health the emphasis is on treating populations, communities at large. There are many ways at addressing poverty, you can look at education, you can look at health care, you can look at the environment but to me public health is unique. Public health or health, you know, is both a determinant and an outcome of development that’s what’s unique about health.
My vision for public health in the Philippines, a public health system where anyone who’s sick can simply go to the hospital get the treatment that he or she deserves regardless of his or her capacity to pay simply because he or she needs the service.
I’m very young, even if I age I think I will keep my young perspective, I hope. There’s still a lot of work to do, I would not want to say that I’ve done enough already. What I would like to say, is that perhaps, in my small little ways I have contributed to certain efforts specifically for example prevention and control of tropical diseases and the efforts towards universal health care, the efforts towards getting up health research activity. We still have a lot of work to do and I would like to be part of that work in the future.
