Four aboriginal boys, two aged 8 and two aged 9, bolted midday from their school, half-clad, mid-winter, to make the 12 mile trek to their families in Nautley Reserve. When they were found the next day in the slush-ice on Lake Fraser less than a mile from home—arms wrapped around one another in a frozen embrace—few […]
Category: Global health
Jane Parry: Organ donation is an emotive topic, and rightly so
Recently, there was a very moving piece in The Guardian about a doctor’s experience of a family donating their dead child’s organs for transplant. It got me thinking about organ transplantation here in Asia, specifically in Singapore, and why donation rates there are so low. Singapore has an opt-out organ donation policy: a 2009 amendment […]
Fionnuala Finnerty: Lessons must be learned from the Calais “jungle” camp
Protection against sexual and gender based violence is imperative in the current refugee crisis Last autumn, I began to volunteer in the Calais “jungle” camp with the Hummingbird medical project in a weekend first aid clinic. Travelling by Eurotunnel, it took less than three hours from my comfortable home in Brighton to arrive at a […]
Canada’s First Nations: The social and political determinants of health
To what extent are the social determinants of health (SDH) political determinants, and which of these are the most amenable to policy reversals that will increase or decrease inequalities? Reviewing the actions of the conservative government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006-15), together with early initiatives taken by the just elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, […]
Aeesha NJ Malik: Teaching surgery in rural China—who are we benefitting?
I recently bumped into a colleague I hadn’t seen for a while at a conference. He started asking me about a short trip I had made with a Chinese charity to teach cataract surgery in rural China. They had asked him to teach too and he was wondering what it was like and, importantly, what […]
Shakir Mustafa: A return to Nepal after the earthquake
In the immediate aftermath of last year’s earthquake in Nepal I took part in an emergency mission. A few weeks later we returned for an aid and education mission. And now, here we are again, in Dharan, East Nepal for another mission to support local doctors and empower them to implement change and drive healthcare […]
Vector-borne diseases in Europe: far more than Zika virus
Certain emerging vector-borne diseases are entering high income countries’ attention in an unprecedented way. Two years ago we wrote about chikungunya, a disease that most Spaniards—including doctors—had not even heard of, but which has already become far more familiar. Now Zika virus disease is gaining broad interest in the wake of its impact on foetal […]
Arthy Santhakumar: Taking stock—Exposing the multi-billion pound medical gloves industry
Tops, frocks, bananas, and coffee—these are likely to be your top answers when asked to think of “fair trade.” Historically, the fashion industry and agriculture sector have claimed the top spots for industries most likely to violate workers’ rights. But is it time we applied the same scrutiny to the healthcare industry and promoted the […]
Jay Achar: Drug resistant tuberculosis—not just a precursor to the post-antibiotic apocalypse
In 2015 the world woke up to the idea that the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) will ultimately lead to a post-antibiotic era in which even simple medical treatments will cease to be possible. Over the past decade the infectious disease medical community has looked on in horror as NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1—an enzyme rendering […]
Mohammad Razai: What have we learnt from our work in Botswana?
Three years ago I travelled to Gaborone, Botswana for my medical elective. I was there to learn about glaucoma—the complex eye disease and so called “silent thief of sight.” After the initial excitement of arriving in a country known for its dazzling birds, savannahs, and pristine natural beauty, came the challenge. Glaucoma is the second […]