Fran Baum is blogging from the 8th World Health Organization Global Health meeting. Read her other blogs here. The day started with Cecilia Vaca Jones, the Minister of Social Development in Ecuador presenting some impressive indicators of Ecuador’s progress. They have tripled health and social spending between 2006 and 2012 with the aim of eradicating poverty. […]
Category: South Asia
Jane Parry: Why real name HIV testing won’t fly in China
Two interesting documents that came across my desk this week got me thinking about how different HIV-related human rights look depending on where you’re standing. The first was a press release from UNAIDS, UNDP, and the International Commission of Jurists about the first ever judicial dialogue about HIV, human rights, and the law. The second […]
Fran Baum on the globalisation of unhealthy lifestyles
Fran Baum is blogging from the 8th World Health Organization Global Health meeting. Read her other blogs here. Sauli Ninistö, President of Finland, opened the conference stressing that health is important for achieving other goals, but also has value in its own right. He spoke of Finland’s huge improvements in health since the 1940s achieved […]
Sandra Lako on x-ray machines and emergency rooms in Sierra Leone
Today marks three years of working for Welbodi Partnership and it’s hard to believe that so much time has gone by. The last time I blogged, I wrote about getting more involved clinically. Well, that spell ended rather quickly, and before I knew it I was back to managing various projects. Managing projects might sound […]
Fran Baum: From Ottawa to Helsinki—the 8th global conference on health promotion
In 1986 the World Health Organisation held the first global conference on health promotion at which the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion was drafted and adopted. It has become the bible for health promoters with its five strategies of building healthy public policy, creating a supportive environment, strengthening community action, promoting individual skills and re-orienting […]
Richard Smith: How often do men think about sex?
Everybody knows that men think about sex every seven seconds. What people haven’t perhaps considered is that means more than 8000 times a day or 56 000 times a week. Despite the joke that if men only think about sex every seven seconds what on earth do they think about the rest of the time, […]
Readers’ editor: Abbreviations and patient safety
In January this year a hospital pharmacist contacted us after a colleague had questioned a prescription for amlodipine 10 mg four times a day for migraine. She contacted the prescriber, who said he had got the dose from this clinical review about pharmacological prevention of migraine published in The BMJ. […]
Richard Smith: “Longevity is one of the greatest curses introduced by the scientists”
“Longevity is one of the greatest curses introduced by the scientists,” wrote Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Harold Action in 1961, a few days after his 58th birthday. I read this a few days after I had given a talk on the pandemic of NCD (non-communicable disease) where I emphasised that the pandemic was […]
Anita Jain: “It’s time for men to deliver”
The infamous Delhi gang rape led to an outpouring of public outrage across the country. It signalled a tipping point in people’s angst with the growing pervasiveness of such incidents. Shaken by the brutality of the act, people took to the streets to question the state of affairs of women’s safety in India. With relative […]
Scott Fraser: Do doctors have a responsibility to lead on climate change?
When learning biology for my school exams (longer ago than I imagine but not so many years ago) I clearly remember that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) was rounded down to 0.03%. If I gave that answer today it would be marked as incorrect. According to the US government’s Mauna Loa laboratory, atmospheric CO2 has now […]