To the evident frustration of the Danish Medical Association, Denmark has repealed the world’s first tax on saturated fats. The climb-down came after just over a year, the government citing strong public hostility. According to the Economist, “retailers and shoppers whooped with joy” at the announcement. Given that so much of the world is struggling […]
The standard approach to defining the global health challenges is to use some formulation of Abdel Omran’s epidemiological transition or what is known also as the health transition and show that the progression is inevitably from famine and pestilence through the stage of receding pandemics to the predominance of the chronic degenerative noncommunicable diseases globally. […]
Qian Li, West China Centre for Rural Health Research & Development, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. While we young researchers come from diverse backgrounds and careers, we share a common desire to dedicate ourselves to strengthening the health systems of our countries. I received medical training and I was once a doctor in an urban […]
Tomorrow is World AIDS Day and this year all the talk is of tipping points and “ending AIDS.” On both sides of the Atlantic lobby groups are calling on their governments to create blueprints to achieving an HIV free generation. So why, after 26 years of working in the sector, do these cries make me […]
Back in my early days as a radical medical student (a small, select group in the Belfast of the early 1970s) one of the international figures I admired greatly was Angela Davis. I was amazed and delighted to find her billed as the main speaker at the closing session of the American Public Health Association’s […]
The links between the global challenge of non communicable disease (NCD) and what happens to people in the first 1000 days of their lives are not new but are gaining increasing acceptance and attention. They were discussed earlier this month by thousands of those involved in maternal, newborn, and child health at the world congress […]
Introducing the topic of smoking in pregnancy as “an orphan subject in this area” seemed the right choice of words to the handful of people who turned up for the session out of the thousands participating in the congress of the International Federation of Gynecologists and Obstetricians (FIGO) in Rome earlier this month. WHO is […]
The global maternal mortality has dropped dramatically during the last decade. This is good news. Sadly, however, too many women continue to die from pregnancy related causes. In part, this is because unsafe abortion—one of the leading preventable causes of maternal death—is a public health crisis that is going largely ignored. Every year, 47 000 […]
Despite being considered as a disease of the past, tuberculosis (TB) kills seven people in Europe every hour and, worryingly, rates of multi drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) in the region are the highest in the world. With 81,000 MDR-TB cases in 2010 alone, the European region accounts for nearly 20 % of the global burden. […]
As 2015 approaches and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expire, the global health community is discussing the options for the next set of international goals for health. In the current set of MDGs, there are multiple goals that directly and indirectly relate to health (see below). Today, there is some worry that the next set […]