September 3, 2015
July 30, 2015
In high-income countries, cervical cancer ranks in the bottom half of all new cancer cases – below gallbladder, mouth, or brain cancers. In places like Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uganda, and 20 other African countries, according to 2013 health surveys, it is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women.
July 28, 2015
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?
July 14, 2015
We have reached a defining moment in the AIDS response. Against all odds, we have achieved the AIDS targets of Millennium Development Goal 6. AIDS changed everything. In these pages are valuable insights and ground-breaking and heart-warming experiences from the innovative and exciting work that partners, communities and countries have done and are doing in the AIDS response. There are also heart-breaking stories about the challenges that still remain.
In the pantheon of human aches, pains and killer diseases, few might think back pain merits much attention. But, in fact, lower back pain ranks above diabetes and heart disease worldwide when measured according to a common health metrics yardstick known as Years Lived with Disability (YLDs).
July 2, 2015
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.
June 16, 2015
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.
June 12, 2015
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.
May 8, 2015
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.
April 10, 2015
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
April 9, 2015
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.
April 2, 2015
Interventions for improving maternal and child health have resulted in significant national health gains in Zambia since 1990. However, these national gains mask substantial variations across districts and interventions. Emmanuela Gakidou discusses the findings of her study on this area published today in BMC Medicine.
A new study reveals that while Zambia has made great progress against malaria over the past decade or so it was losing ground on many other health needs like basic child immunizations and maternal health care.
March 6, 2015
Many governments are trying to make it harder for the tobacco industry to do business in their countries.
February 19, 2015
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.
January 30, 2015
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?
January 27, 2015
The rapid scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART) has been one of the great achievements of global health in the last decade. But the efficiency and quality of ART programs in developing countries must improve to have maximum benefit for those in need.
January 21, 2015
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.
January 16, 2015
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.
January 2, 2015
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).
Non-communicable diseases today account for nearly 70 percent of all deaths globally, according to the latest results from the Global Burden of Disease study, an ongoing project to measure the impact of disabling and deadly conditions across the world.
December 19, 2014
The GBD researchers, who this year focused on mortality trends between 1990 and 2013, discovered that cirrhosis as a cause of death – which has seldom received much attention as a leading killer – is on the increase even as global interventions targeting infectious diseases have produced major reductions in mortality from some of the more high-profile deadly diseases such as AIDS, malaria or TB.
December 18, 2014
A massive cause-of-death study finds that we are living about six years longer than we did in 1990, that child deaths have plummeted thanks to greatly expanded immunizations, among other things, and that non-communicable diseases like diabetes are gaining prominence as top killers largely because of big gains made against infectious diseases.
November 13, 2014
Pneumonia may be the leading killer of children, but that doesn’t mean it is a priority for global health spending. Only 2 percent of the $30.6 billion in international assistance spent on health care was directed to the disease. The impact is clear, progress against pneumonia deaths is not keeping up with other lesser child killers.