Commentaries

The myriad of challenges contributing to the persisting spread of Ebola in West Africa – the biggest Ebola outbreak since the viral haemorrhagic fever was discovered in 1976 – echo some of the biggest obstacles which continue to challenge the global efforts to eradicate polio.

Here, we take a deeper dive into Zambia’s health landscape, and how the country has improved its delivery of health interventions.

But when it comes to the health situation in Israel and Palestine, the lopsided death tolls during periods of conflict are only the tip of the iceberg.

Studies have shown that, done right, public discussion of celebrity suicides can help educate people and prevent those at risk from taking their own lives. What will be surprising to many is that, worldwide, more years of life are lost as a result of suicide than

Eastern and Southern sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 55% of total deaths from HIV/AIDS in 2013. In most countries in these regions, deaths from the disease are dropping. Such progress, however, must be considered along with countries where death rates have stagnated or even increased.

Despite this progress, major challenges remain: there were an estimated 11.9 million cases of tuberculosis (TB) worldwide in 2013, including those individuals with HIV (11.2 million excluding those with HIV); more effective vaccines against the disease are badly needed; and multidrug resistant TB is a growing threat.

An AIDS fable: Once upon a time, in the years after AIDS went from being a death sentence to a manageable disease, at least for people rich enough to take antiretroviral therapy, many of the people who ran the world believed that these medicines weren’t appropriate for residents of very poor countries. Even leaving aside the cost, they thought that poor people couldn’t take their medicines on time. Andrew Natsios, the head of the United States Agency for International Development in the George W. Bush administration, argued against funding antiretroviral therapy in Africa. “People do not know what watches and clocks are,” he told the Boston Globe in June, 2001.

Death rates for people with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria all have decreased globally since the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) were established in 2000, according to a report published Monday as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD).

The world has seen tremendous progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS over the last decade, documenting huge advances in treatment effectiveness, access to affordable drugs, and ways to prevent further transmission of the deadly virus.

As it turns out, Costa Rica has been scoring big on and off the soccer pitch – especially for child health. Between 1990 and 2010, the small Central American country documented a 48% decline in rates of premature mortality from preterm birth complications and a 53% decrease from neonatal encephalopathy.

Child mortality is widely recognized as an indicator of a community’s overall health, with reductions in child deaths often cited as evidence of the impact of a particular intervention.

While soccer fans globally have been following the excitement of the World Cup matches in Brazil, riots in the country have thrust its poverty and inequality into the international spotlight. While Brazil has made progress in reducing poverty and improving health, much work remains to improve well-being in the country.

While mass shootings attract a great deal of attention from the media here in America, is the problem overblown? The evidence suggests it is not. Gun violence is a leading cause of death among young men in the U.S.

It turns out that sexual violence is mostly perpetrated by people known to the victim – not strangers.

The global health community cannot afford to ignore the problem of obesity and overweight. Globally, it killed 3.4 million people in 2010 alone. According to new findings published as part of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013, more and more people in developing countries are joining the ranks of the world’s obese, especially women.

In order to solve a health problem, it may sound a bit obvious to say you first need to know what it is. A diagnosis. What may not be so obvious is that one of the biggest, and perhaps less appreciated challenges, in global health today is the lack of complete, accurate and comparable health data.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the burden of schistosomiasis – a disease caused by water-borne parasitic worms – disproportionately affects females. What’s more, it may explain why women uniquely account for a greater percentage of people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa.

It’s well known that malaria is a major killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa, but it also causes substantial suffering, especially among children and the elderly.

Visualizing the different ways that alcohol impacts people’s health across regions also highlights how data can help policymakers choose approaches for combatting harmful alcohol use that make the most sense for their region. These approaches range from enforcement of drunk driving laws to alcohol taxes and programs to screen and treat alcoholics and discourage binge drinking.

These analyses indicate that if donors invest more global health dollars in Western and Central Africa as they have elsewhere on the continent, it may translate to accelerated health progress in these regions.

Nationally, in 1996, 27% of American men were daily smokers (this is also known as prevalence of daily smoking). Sixteen years later, in 2012, prevalence dropped to 22%. Similar progress was found among American women, with rates of daily smoking falling from 22% to 18% between 1996 and 2012.

The significant progress made against child mortality around the world over the last two decades is frequently cited as one of the biggest success stories of international development. Much more remains to be done, but it’s worth looking at what we know – and don’t know – about this propitious decline in child deaths.

March 24 is World TB Day, and organizers are calling for a “global effort to find, treat, and cure” everyone who has tuberculosis (TB) and to “accelerate progress toward eliminating TB for good.”