Commentaries

If you asked the average global health professional to name the countries where alcohol caused the most health problems, what would they say?

Representatives of national governments are now coming together to set the next development agenda, under the umbrella of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as the era of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) concludes. In order to attain the new goals, it may help to revisit what worked — and what didn't — in achieving the successes of the MDGs over the past 15 years.

The negotiations for the next set of development goals have yielded hope for advocates fighting hepatitis. The disease made it under goal 3 in the draft outcome document that is expected to be adopted in September at the UN General Assembly, which means it now has a better chance of mobilizing resources. But just how much will it really take to bring the disease under control, and eventually eliminate it?

We propose a Lives Saved Scorecard to drive funding and policy attention to where it is most needed. The ideal scorecard would track all investments by donors and governments, the coverage of each life-saving intervention, the quality of interventions delivered, and the link to child deaths averted in a cross-country, comparable manner.

There’s plenty of moral and rhetorical support for fighting diseases of poverty, but if you look at global health spending trends lately the story is one of stagnation, or even decline.

People are living longer, but with more disease and disability: an unprecedented transition from a world with communicable diseases to one with chronic disease and disability, with implications for welfare of people worldwide. Yet health systems and economies are not prepared for this transition. Instead, asymmetry between health-system responses and the growing needs is worsening, as are inequalities.

A lot of progress has been made against measles, but many around the world remain unlucky when it comes to this deadly and disabling disease. And bad luck, when it comes to infectious disease, travels.

The benefits of breastfeeding to the health and development of newborn children are well-documented, with ‘exclusive’ breastfeeding in the first six months of life shown to enhance children’s immunity to infectious disease

Like many fields, public health is in the midst of a data revolution: randomized control trials, pay-for-performance and value calculations, all based on data, are changing our ideas about what works and how to finance it.

Many governments are trying to make it harder for the tobacco industry to do business in their countries.

With wars taking place in several regions of the world right now, and regular news accounts of violent deaths in the United States, it seems like it would be easy to tally up the countries where people face the highest likelihood of dying from interpersonal violence.

When people in rural Uganda or Kenya don’t get the care they need or want, for example, we don’t always know why. Is it because local health facilities don’t stock the medications, or have enough trained medical staff? Did patients have to wait too long for service – or do they think their local health facility isn’t clean or has the services they need, and so they don’t seek care in the first place?

Five years after a massive earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince, the crowded capital of Haiti, killing between 160,000 and 200,000 people and displacing more than 1.5 million people to tent camps, there are signs of improvement.

We’ve learned that falls are the leading cause of death for elderly Americans, and that this is due in part to the shrinkage of people’s brains as they age – leading to extra risk of “jostling” from falls. In the US, fall prevention has become a major priority for nursing homes nationwide, and the National Institute on Aging has recently embarked on a $30 million dollar study on reducing fall injuries.

In The Lancet Global Health, Stephen Resch and colleagues’ study benchmarks 12 countries’ government expenditure on HIV/AIDS. This important research emphasizes that many governments are not meeting spending goals, and in many countries the financing gaps are so great that, even if they met the spending goals, expenditure would still fall short of what is needed (expenditure would cover only 64% of estimated future funding requirements, leaving a gap of around a third of the total US$7.9 billion needed).