Declaring health a human right is the first step for new students at Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health

For years, new students at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health have kicked off their first year on campus with a recitation of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It’s a nod to what administrators consider the core of the school’s teaching philosophy: that good health is an intrinsic human right.

“We are not satisfied with the status quo. We are not content to continue doing what we’ve always done when the world around us has changed. We are not willing to accept conditions for treatment that fall short of human rights and human dignity,” Gina Lovasi, the school’s interim dean, told 188 incoming students at the school’s latest opening ceremony Friday.

Keynote speaker Melissa Lyon, the director of Delaware County’s new public health department — the county’s first in 30 years — encouraged students to work to build trust with the public. In the county health department, she said she’s worked to publicly share real-time data from a countywide survey on public health in an effort to be transparent: “You give us data. We show that to you,” she said.

Building trust in public health research is especially important coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.

“The pandemic response, and the politicization of the pandemic, have eroded the public’s trust in public health leaders and in science,” she said. “We have a great deal of work ahead of us.”

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Both undergraduates and graduate students, as well as new faculty and staff at the school, attended this year’s ceremony, where they recited the declaration and received pins that read “Public Health” and “Human Rights.” Many said they were drawn to public health because they wanted to help their own communities improve health outcomes.

“Being here is really meaningful, because I get to help the community at large in Philadelphia,” said Patricia Frimpong, who grew up in the city and said she is interested in studying community health, prevention, and epidemiology.

Likewise, Eudes Soussa, who grew up in Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo, hopes to use his graduate degree in epidemiology to improve public health infrastructure at home. “We don’t have a lot of money for health care,” he said. “Sometimes, people’s health is only taken seriously when they’re in the hospital. I want to improve the lives of people before they’re hospitalized.”

After the ceremony, Lovasi said those sentiments aren’t unusual for Dornsife students.

“Coming in and wanting to address inequities is a theme that I hear really strongly from our students,” she said.