Local Maladies, Global Remedies

Reclaiming the Right to Health in Latin America

Everaldo Lamprea-Montealegre, Professor of Law, Law School, National University of Colombia

This forward-looking book provides an in-depth analysis of the major transformations of the right to health in Latin America over the past decades, marked by the turn towards the pharmaceuticalisation of health care. Everaldo Lamprea-Montealegre investigates how health-based litigation has deepened inequalities in the global South, exploring the practices of key actors that are reclaiming the right to health in the region.

‘Everaldo Lamprea’s book Local Maladies, Global Remedies: Reclaiming the Right to Health in Latin America is an important and insightful contribution to the literature on the right to health. The book documents the background to the crisis caused by the pharmaceutization of the right to health in Colombia and Brazil and the resulting litigation epidemics in those countries. Significantly the book shows the limitations of an individualized approach to the right to health and to make the right to health more appropriate in the pandemic context calls for supplementing the conceptualization of the right to health with a polycentric regime or responsibilities incorporating a wide array of interconnected stakeholders and mediating institutions.’
– Audrey R. Chapman, University of Connecticut, US

‘The book Local Maladies, Global Remedies: Reclaiming the Right to Health in Latin America by Everaldo Lamprea-Montealegre presents a fascinating analysis of the current problems and paradoxes regarding right to health access in the global South. The sophisticated framework proposed to interpret these problems and paradoxes (what the author calls the political economy of the right to health) meticulously unpacks an array of actors and interests present in right to health cases, particularly in the cases of Colombia and Brazil. As such, it provides a crucial contribution for policy makers, researchers, and public health academics.’
——海伦娜Alviar加西亚,合作伙伴nces Po École de droit, France