Wendy Johnson is a health activist in the broadest sense. She believes that achieving sustainable global health advances requires replacing colonialist notions of aid as charity with solidarity. One of the worst global health problems she sees is the “brain drain” of health professionals from developing countries. “Imagine having only 17 doctors in all of Seattle,” she says, “that’s the ratio in many poor countries.”
Through her national and international health advocacy work, Johnson believes that the key to overcoming disease burdens in both developed and developing countries is to strengthen and rebuild public health care systems. And that is exactly what she is doing. As clinical faculty in University of Washington’s School of Public Health and Director of New Initiatives for Health Alliance International (HAI), Johnson develops projects to strengthen public primary health services and advocates for universal health care access in low-income countries.
Johnson began her global health career in 1998, working alongside traditional midwives in Guatemala. Throughout her professional life, she has served marginalized populations in the US and internationally – serving as Medical Director of the Cleveland Public Health Department, one of the nation’s poorest cities; managing Mozambique programs supporting expansion of public-sector HIV services; and providing medical care to immigrant and indigenous communities from Chiapas, Mexico to Northern New Mexico.
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“I've never been able to adequately describe the intense mixture of grief and joy that runs though life in Mozambique. Our media-filtered version of Africa tempts us to interpret it as tragic, and somehow that diminishes the suffering by making it seem either commonplace and ordinary or exotic and foreign. The effect is anti-empathic.”