Marcos Mandelli Coordinator for the Global Fund Project to Fight TB in Brazil Interview in English Windows Media | MP3

My name is Marcos Mandelli.

The windmill is an instrument, a subjective camera through which we can focus on various issues regarding tuberculosis, using the circular motion of the windmill as a starting point. It’s colourful, but you can only see its colours when it’s out in the light. It only spins when there’s a breeze. In comparison, you can say that you also need a breeze to disperse the virus from a certain environment. To the extent that the windmill spins, you are making movement, and this movement will begin to disperse certain things, and gather together others – you are making movement that will begin to mobilize people. At the same time you are creating a “spinning of information,” circulating information; you are rendering services, raising people’s awareness of a problem they didn’t even think existed.

As a starting point for our campaigns we recognised the need to position stigma and prejudice as key elements, which run through everything we do. We did our utmost to humanize the issue. Not to see the individual from a clinical perspective, not to see a person with tuberculosis as someone we need to force medicine down and say: “now go and get better.” No. We wanted to portray the individual as a whole: someone who is frail, weakened by the disease, and therefore needs to be attended to, receive the proper treatment, and the right medication; it is society that needs to provide him with the right conditions that will allow him to get treatment.