title: Prospects for a genuine revival of primary health care--through the visible hand of social justice rather than the invisible hand of the market: part I.
abstract: In a two-part article (the first part in this Journal issue), the author explores the prospects for a genuine revival of the social justice project of "Health for All by the Year 2000", launched by the WHO and UNICEF in 1978 at Alma-Ata in the former Soviet Union, with reference (in Part I) to the World Health Report 2008, Primary Health Care: Now More than Ever, and the report of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, also published in 2008; and (in Part II) to Global Health Watch 2: An Alternative World Health Report and the perspectives of anti-capitalist, real socialist, environmental, and people's movements for economic and social justice. The reports are reviewed in terms of the original values and principles of Alma-Ata (social justice and human rights) and the structural foundations of the primary health care (PHC) project (a new international economic order and emancipatory development of decolonized countries). A genuine revival of the PHC project and of Health for All, which is its implicit objective, will not be possible unless the multiple crises that we are confronting today-in energy, water, food, finance, the environment, science, information, and democracy-are recognized as capitalist crises and addressed in these terms. In short, the invisible hand of the market must be replaced by the visible hand of social justice.
authors.affiliation: Centre Europe Tiers Monde, Geneva. katz.alison@gmail.com
authors.forename: Alison Rosamund
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Katz
mesh_terms: D014943:Global Health; D054624:Health Status Disparities; D006806:Human Rights; D006801:Humans; D011320:Primary Health Care / Q000191:economics*; D012935:Social Justice / Q000191:economics*; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D012962:Sociology, Medical