TB finds new advocate: Ralph Nader & company
Good connections and a new image?
A symposium that brought tuberculosis experts from around the globe together with well-heeled and high-powered alums of Princeton University revealed a new champion and advocate for the forces for TB control consumer activist Ralph Nader.
Nader spoke to TB Monitor from his Washing-ton, DC-based offices at the Center for Study of Responsive Law, amid what a staff member described as spartan quarters overflowing with piles of papers and documents, taking a few minutes to rattle off the reasons he’d chosen to take on TB.
Simple, he said. "The facts came to my attention, and I reached three conclusions. One, deadly serious pandemic, worldwide, that’s easily transferable and increasingly drug-resistant. Two, treatments well-known, pretty effective, pretty cheap. And three, very few advocacy efforts to get the decision-makers who allocate budgets and policy moving.
"Enter Project 55, class of Princeton, 1955."
TB experts unite for common cause
Project 55, a public-service organization founded by Nader and fellow classmates in 1987, hosted last month’s symposium. Held on the Princeton University campus, the Feb. 23 event brought together 35 TB experts from around the globe, including Richard Bumgarner, deputy director of the World Health Organization’s Global TB Programme; Lee Reichman, MD, MPH, executive director for the New Jersey Medical School’s National Tuberculosis Center; Gordon Douglas, MD, president of Merck Pharmaceuticals’ Vaccines Division; and Herbert Pigman, the man who spearheaded Rotary International’s Polio Eradication Program. In a day of panel discussions and roundtable talks, the experts struggled to identify what needed to be done, how best to do it, and how Project 55 could be of service.
Nader plans to gain the support of Project 55 members, including heavy hitters from corporate, professional, and public spheres of life, all united in the wish to make a contribution to civic life. Despite their pull, there simply aren’t enough of them to pull off a massive fundraising campaign of the scale launched by Rotary International, when it set out to wipe out polio.
Still, Project 55 members can talk to those who make policy and hold the purse strings, Nader says. "I think the first leverage we can exert is on Capitol Hill, inside the State Department, and at the White House," he says.
In addition, Nader wants to raise TB’s profile maybe even give it a facelift. "There’s a style to a disease, and if it doesn’t have the right style, it’s off the screen," he says. "That’s what we’re going to try to give it. The substance is already there."
Advocating for an illness associated with sanatoriums and poverty-stricken inhabitants of the Third World won’t be easy, he realizes. As he sees it, part of the challenge is to present TB "in a more anthropomorphic manner. "Right now, there aren’t enough visuals on this," he says. "All we have are statistics."
He offers an illustration: "Think about Save the Children,’" the international relief and development-community organization. "Half the appeal is the picture and the name."
Another point to emphasize is how TB potentially can affect everyone’s life, he says. "With global transportation and the increasingly drug-resistant nature of the disease, the argument that it’s restricted to the poor and destitute just won’t play any longer," he says. "We’ve got to stress the contagious nature of this disease the [infection] that occurred on the airplane, the health care workers, the AIDS interface."
Over the years, not just TB but dozens of other consumer-related issues have laid claim to Nader’s attentions, from motor-vehicle safety to tax reform, nuclear energy, food safety, drinking water, workplace safety, federal pensions, government procurement, and interstate commerce. The largest Nader organization is Public Citizen, an umbrella coalition of various watchdog and advocacy agencies with a combined membership of more than 100,000.
Project 55, for its part, has "adopted" middle-schools in the Princeton area; placed hundreds of students in internships and fellowships, where they’ve organized communities, built housing, and cleaned up the environment; worked for sustainable energy policies; and launched programs aimed at advancing the moral education of the nation’s school children.
As early as 1993, Nader was speaking out and writing about the resurgence of TB, chiding the U.S. Agency for International Development for refusing a request from the World Health Organization for $3 million, and noting acidly that the Pentagon spends $100 million "in a morning."
At the symposium, he was struck by how o other agency has stepped forward to offer its help, Nader says. "We’ve been told, especially this past weekend at Princeton, that there’s no major foundation that’s staked this out a top priority," he says. The TB experts "kept emphasizing to me that they’ve been involved in this thing for 20 or 30 years now but that they lack the credibility of a disinterested party." He paused. "We live in a culture where if you’re right too soon, you have no credibility," he added.
He came to understand other frustrations as well, he says, launching into a paraphrase of Reichman’s concept of the U-shaped curve of concern: "When TB starts increasing, a little gets done about it, it decreases, and then it’s off the attention mark of the media again, and so it goes, all over again."
Whether TB experts have anything to learn from the polio campaign was a question that occupied much of the discussion especially since, Douglas says, an effective vaccine may still lie ten years off in the future.
"I’ll admit, I was quite skeptical going into this thing," Douglas says. "But I’ve been persuaded: Even without a vaccine, there is something to be done, right now. It’s time to move ahead." What’s needed most now is leadership, he adds.
Given his connections, his vast organization, and his persistence (a quality he’s called "the essence of the citizen’s movement"), could Nader be the person to fill that role?
"At this point, I’d have to say that nothing’s impossible for Ralph," Douglas says.
To offer assistance with the project, contact Princeton Project 55, the Center for Civic Leadership, 32 Nassau St., Princeton, NJ 08542-4503. Telephone: (609) 921-8808/8588; Fax: (609) 921-2712.
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