Keynote: Healthcare in low-resources settings and medicine of poverty

This keynote will argue that the real challenge for health care in low-resource settings in the 21st century is the same wherever health care is provided, i.e. maintaining the basic infrastructures necessary for the scientific practice of clinical medicine and public health, defining the most appropriate services and providing them to those who really need it. Moreover, it is increasingly apparent that (a) those interested in health should also be interested in wealth and poverty, as social determinants of health are more important than, say, cholesterol; (b) that a considerable amount of research currently underway are demonstrating the influence that inequalities have on human health; (c) that the situation is getting worse: the gap between rich and poor, both between countries and inside them, is growing with inevitable effects on health. This requires the mobilization of a multi-sectorial array of actors from both the professions and civil society experimenting in the possibility of playing a role not as spectators, but as actors.