Each year, hundreds of thousands of women die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth that are well understood and largely preventable.  Most of these deaths occur in low and middle-income countries, with sub-Saharan Africa carrying the greatest burden. At the same time, millions of families continue to face financial barriers to essential health services, […] Continue reading ->
Andrew Ullmann and Michael Moore  For six decades, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in infants was a public health problem without a solution.  According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), an estimated 250,000 children under five are hospitalised each year across Europe due to RSV infection, overwhelming paediatric wards each winter, and […] Continue reading ->
DAVOS – In this snow-covered Alpine town where the world’s rich, powerful and elite met in January for the World Economic Forum, a quiet but consequential shift in thinking about dementia research crystallized – one with the potential to shape political engagements and research investments for the coming decade.  Long treated as a disease primarily […] Continue reading ->
Argentina took a step backwards last month when it revoked key guidelines that defined what could – and could not – be patented in its pharmaceutical sector.  For more than a decade, Argentina’s patentability guidelines have helped prevent pharmaceutical monopolies, enabling timely competition to enter the market, lowering prices of medical tools, and improving people’s […] Continue reading ->
Cervical cancer should no longer be killing women. It is one of the few cancers that we already know how to prevent, detect early, and treat effectively.  Yet it remains the fourth most common cancer among women worldwide, causing around 600,000 new cases and 340,000 deaths each year.  The tragedy is not just the scale […] Continue reading ->
Final talks on the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) system, the last outstanding piece of the Pandemic Agreement, are being held in Geneva this week. The Pandemic Agreement, being negotiated in Geneva, emerged to address the unacceptable inequities that defined the COVID-19 global health disaster. During this pandemic, delayed and inequitable access to vaccines may […] Continue reading ->
Climate resilience is a key theme of the World Health Summit’s regional meeting in Nairobi 27-29 April, which is bringing leaders together to address the structural realities of health security across the continent and advance a transformative reform agenda. In some parts of Africa, like Ghana, December marked the beginning of the Harmattan season characterized […] Continue reading ->
On the eve of the African Union’s annual meeting, leaders need to secure their countries by increasing spending on health. The year 2025 will go down in history as the moment the traditional model of global health financing ruptured. Sudden, sweeping aid cuts exposed a reality African policymakers have warned about for decades: while foreign […] Continue reading ->