How has Bangladesh been so successful in achieving MDGs and good health outcomes? Richard Smith discusses. […]
Richard Smith: Why has Bangladesh done so well?
Category: Global health
Nick Hopkinson: Why an academic boycott of Trump’s America is misguided
How should a European clinical academic react to the fact that the US election appears to have sent a racist, misogynist, climate change denier to the White House? One response, arising in the context of President Trump’s ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries entering the US, has been a call to boycott US […]
Seeing human lives in spreadsheets: The work of Hans Rosling (1948–2017)
Hans Rosling died last Tuesday (7 February 2017) at the age of 68, as the Gapminder Foundation—which he co-founded—announced. My deepest condolences to his family, friends, and the many of us who will miss his contributions to the public discourse. A medical doctor and professor for international health at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, Rosling became famous […]
Danielle Solomon: The global gag rule is only one of many barriers to contraceptive access
The first week of Donald Trump’s presidency was bookended by two definitive and controversial actions. The first, on 23 January, was the reinstatement and expansion of the “Mexico City policy”—a piece of legislation that prevents NGOs that receive federal funding from providing abortion counselling. There has been a lot of debate, particularly in global health circles, […]
Chris Simms: Trump and the role of data driven resistance in global health
“Resistance” is an evocative term common to the natural and social sciences where it denotes the act of resisting, opposing, or withstanding. In the so called hard sciences it is easily identified and measured. A physicist, for example, will gauge resistance in ohms; in medicine, the intrarenal arterial resistance index (RI) is used to calculate […]
Priscilla Claeys: Ensuring the right to food for rural working people
On 18 January 2017, the issue of the human rights of agricultural workers with no land of their own and other people working in rural areas was placed on the agenda of the European Council Working Party on Human Rights (COHOM) for the first time. As a researcher studying how the human rights regime is […]
Forgetting Aleppo: Fatalism has no place in this tragedy
William Faulkner wrote, “We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practise it.” Such freedom cannot be better encapsulated than by the herculean health workers in the midst of the Syrian tragedy, risking and even sacrificing their lives to limit bloodshed. In this ambiguous conflict, woven with persecution and the complexity of […]
Vanessa Yarwood: Stories of Samos refugee camp—“The situation seems to be reaching boiling point”
Our team arrives on mass to the camp, greeted by cold steel fences criss-crossing up two metres high and crowned by coils of sharp barbs. This is juxtaposed by colourful paintings on concrete walls. The next assault to our senses is “hallo,” “hallo,” “my friend,” “how are you,” and hugs and kisses from 10 or […]
R N Karuga: “Building a resilient and responsive health system needs strong community support”
“Forget about these people in the national office,” said Maria (not her real name). “They are not in touch with reality!” Maria is a district health manager in Kenya. This was her response when I asked how closely she works with the national Ministry of Health in delivering community health services. In 2013, the governance […]
Daniel R Lucey: “Much more must be done to implement post-Ebola reforms”
In a recent Analysis in The BMJ, Suerie Moon and colleagues convincingly argue that not enough has been done to implement actions recommended by seven post-Ebola reports in order “to ensure we are better prepared for the next pandemic” [1]. These arguments resonate with my own experiences of caring for people affected by the West […]