Climate change, an ageing and growing global population, and depleting planetary resources are well established issues. There is a call for urgent action, especially in healthcare. The NHS has been scrutinised for being a major contributor to the national carbon footprint. Health services globally need to act more sustainably to maintain the world we live […]
Category: Global health
Richard Smith: A tobacco company CEO writes to his marketing department
Dear all, I see a great opportunity for us. You won’t believe this, but I’m at a public health conference in Sousse in Tunisia. I’ve come with my twin brother, a professor of public health. I am, of course, incognito. My brother asked me—yes, asked me—to come. Despite what you might think, we agree on […]
William Cayley: Thinking about Ebola from the sidelines
Recently I was staring at two dramatically different bits of “news” on my computer screen. Yet another story on the spreading Ebola outbreak was in one window, and the latest update on our practice’s clinical performance metrics was in the next window. News of an out of control plague, juxtaposed with little red and green numbers […]
Tony Waterston and Jean Bowyer: Teaching and learning about disability in the West Bank
“We want to improve the attitudes of nurses towards their patients.” This call from senior nurses at an Educating of Educators course in Ramallah (a Palestinian city in the central West Bank) could have been echoed in any country in the world, but these nurses are determined to bring about change and have the capacity […]
Sharon Lewin: The challenge of infectious diseases
It was not so long ago that there was a broadly held belief that modern society had defeated the worst of the world’s most lethal infectious diseases, and that the horrendous plagues of centuries gone by were no longer a possibility moving into the future. The emergence of HIV in the early 1980’s certainly challenged […]
Suchita Shah: Malaria in the Little Novels of Sicily and why we need literature in medicine
“And you feel you could touch it with your hand—as if it smoked up from the fat earth, there, everywhere, round about the mountains that shut it in, from Agnone to Mount Etna capped with snow – stagnating in the plain like the sultry heat of June.” With these words Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga begins […]
Abdullah Aljoudi: Are you fit for the journey of a lifetime?
“Pilgrimage to the House is a duty owed to God by people who are able to undertake it.” Quran 2:97. On Friday 3 October, over three million Muslims from more than 180 countries will come together for the Hajj, probably the largest human gathering on earth. […]
Gavin Yamey et al: Our hunches on how to tackle humanitarian disasters can cause harm
It seemed, on the face of it, to make a lot of sense. It seemed intuitively the right thing to do. When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck on 26 December 2004, psychologists flew in to encourage survivors to openly discuss their feelings in detail—a process known as “debriefing”—as a way of warding off post-traumatic stress […]
Jocalyn Clark: Why has Bangladesh had such success in improving sanitation, but not neighboring India?
Much has been made recently about the appalling rates of open defecation in India, a country that has on other development indicators shown stunning successes. Almost 600 million people in India defecate in fields, forests, bodies of water, or other open spaces rather than in closed latrines or toilets—that’s more than 10 times the number […]
Grazia Caleo: Ebola—a blind outbreak
In José Saramago’s book Blindness, he describes an epidemic of an unknown infection that causes people to lose their sight. A single person remains uninfected to bear witness to the anger, chaos, violence, and death generated by the spread of disease. In the novel, humanity’s descent into blindness represents the loss of reason and shows how […]