History and Future of the Global HIV Response: A Conversation with Dr Michael Merson

About the lecture
Join us for an informal conversation between DGHI founding director Michael Merson and David Boyd, Hymowitz Professor of the Practice of Global Health, to discuss Dr. Merson’s new book, The AIDS Pandemic: Searching for a Global Response, which Richard Horton of The Lancet has said should be “on the bedside table of every President and Prime Minister.”

This ambitious book provides a comprehensive history of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Program on AIDS (GPA), which Dr. Merson directed from 1990 to 1995, using it as a unique lens to trace the global response to the AIDS pandemic. The authors describe how WHO came initially to assume leadership of the global response, relate the strategies and approaches WHO employed over the years, and expound on the factors that led to the Program’s demise and subsequent formation of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The authors examine the global impact of this momentous transition, portray the current status of the global response to AIDS, and explore the precarious situation that WHO finds itself in today as a lead United Nations agency in global health.

Several aspects of the global response--the strategies adopted, the roads taken and not taken, and the lessons learned--can provide helpful guidance to the global health community as it continues tackling the AIDS pandemic and confronts future global pandemics.

The book was co-authored by Stephen Inrig, director of the graduate program in Healthcare Policy and Management and director of interdisciplinary healthcare research at Mount Saint Mary's University.

This event is co-sponsored by DGHI and the Duke University Center for AIDS Research (CFAR).

About the speaker
Michael Merson is the Wolfgang Joklik Professor of Global Health and Vice President and Vice Provost for Global Affairs at Duke University. Merson, who joined the Duke faculty in November 2006, was the founding director of the Duke Global Health Institute and served in that role from 2006 to 2017. In addition, he served as Vice Chancellor for Duke-National University of Singapore (NUS) Affairs from 2010 to 2016.

Merson worked in various capacities at the World Health Organization (WHO) from 1978 to 1995, including director of the WHO Global Program on AIDS from 1990 to 1995. In 1995, he joined the Yale University School of Medicine as its first Dean of Public Health and as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. From 1999-2006, he also served as Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale.

Merson has authored more than 175 articles, primarily in the area of disease prevention, and has served in advisory capacities for a number of global health-related organizations.