The current refugee crisis and mass migration into Europe is the biggest since World War Two and is probably the greatest humanitarian challenge of the century. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that at the end of last year almost 20 million people worldwide were living as refugees. I had been particularly […]
Category: Global health
Building up the research capacity of government medical officers in LMICs
The Nepal Health Research Council was established in 1991 for the purpose of: regulating health research in Nepal (ensuring the ethical conduct of health research), generating and collating evidence for translation into policies and programs, and building the capacity of health research in the country. As part of one of our three major mandates we […]
Gavin Yamey: Can Japan rouse the G7 nations to action on universal health coverage?
In Tokyo last week, at a workshop to prepare for the May 2016 G7 summit in Ise Shima, I arrived early at the hotel’s conference room; I was giving a presentation later that day and wanted to pre-load my slides. The hotel staff were setting up the room, placing print copies of the day’s meeting […]
Aula Abbara et al: British air strikes may affect Syrian healthcare
The vote by the British parliament on 3 December for air strikes on Syria has consequences for the already catastrophic humanitarian and medical situation in Syria and surrounding countries. The four and a half year conflict has already led to considerable destruction of health infrastructure, hospitals, and clinics, and has resulted in the death of […]
Chapal Mehra: Is the world prepared to defeat tuberculosis?
On the eve of the World Lung Conference in Cape Town, many of us crowded into the auditorium at the convention centre to listen to Grania Brigden, MSF Access Campaign TB advisor, from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) as she presented highlights from the key findings of Out of Step—a report of a 24 country survey of […]
Grania Brigden: Step up to stop TB
Grania Brigden discusses the findings of the Out of Step report on national tuberculosis (TB) policies. The report is being launched on 2 December at the 46th Union World Conference on Lung Health, Cape Town, South Africa. TB is winning a deadly race—this year it overtook HIV as the world’s deadliest infectious disease, killing 1.5 million people […]
Helen Bygrave: More people, more time, better data—what we need to “treat all” with HIV
On World AIDS Day and with the ICASA conference ongoing, Helen Bygrave discusses the implications of the recently announced World Health Organization (WHO) “treat all” policy. On the back of the headline studies Temprano, START, and new data from HPTN 052, the WHO recently announced the “treat all” policy: everyone diagnosed with HIV should start […]
Chris Ham: Learning from others—devolved governance in the Australian state of Victoria
I spent a week working in Australia earlier this month and it made me reflect on similarities and differences with the NHS in England. The funding context feels quite different, with healthcare spending in Australia having risen by 5% per year in real terms over the past decade. On the day I departed, a report […]
Terence Gibson: Pulling through an Ebola outbreak
The King’s Sierra Leone Partnership (KSLP) aims to strengthen Sierra Leone’s health system by working with local partners to improve training, clinical services, policy, and research. Following on from Colin Brown’s (KSLP’s infectious diseases lead) blog post in November 2014, consultant physician Terence Gibson shares his experiences in Sierra Leone before, during, and after the […]
Sarah Walpole: Health through peace—mixing stories and science, and grabbing rays of hope
“We were deployed to attack civilians in their homes.” He stood in front of our 700 strong audience, bared the horrors of his experiences, and shared the pain of his realisation, all with brutal honesty. He described a standard operation carried out by British soldiers in Iraq: waking a family from their sleep with an […]