Ending the HIV epidemic by 2030 is undoubtedly a noble endeavour, and is the aim put forward by the UN in SDG 3.3. In full, the target states: “By 2030, end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases and combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other communicable diseases”. To quantify the current progress...

India’s journey towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is gaining special attention since the Modi Government announced the country’s largest health care programme ever, named ‘Ayushman Bharat’ on 1st Feb, 2018 – just a year before the general elections scheduled in 2019. By way of example, Richard Horton discusses in this week’s Lanc...

It’s that time where in South Africa and the Southern hemisphere, at least, there are blossoms everywhere and a spring in our step literally! Not to be corny, but this analogy does resonate with the Emerging Voices (#EV2018) distance learning phase which is the first stage to getting that health-system-spring-in-your-step, thoughts and actions...

In my later years as a medical student, I was fortunate to take calls in a local clinic in the neighborhood of my medical school – University of Buea, Cameroon. Still struggling to finetune the clinical skills I had learned through my training, making sense of clinical presentation of diseases, prescription of medicines and para-clinical inves...

Global research, large scale innovation and socio-economic development have become a product of collaborations, partnerships and networks. This applies not just to collaborations between individual scientists but also and especially to institutions, organisations and industry. Without effective collaboration, science is stifled, and impact on he...

In the summer of 1978, Grease, the cult movie opened in theatres, and some weeks later, Louis Joy Brown – the first test tube baby – was born in England. These two facts were momentous enough in themselves, but only a few months later, something else would join them in the annals of global history, and no, it wasn’t Godzilla. In the autumn of ...

This summer I took up IHP’s suggestion and read Paul Mason’s ‘PostCapitalism: a Guide to Our Future’. That triggered my interest in Ilias Alami’s ‘On the terrorism of money and national policy-making in emerging capitalist economies’. My “summer of Marxism” provided me with a few clues on why investing in health and the health ...

“I’m standing in a place people call the playground. My eyes are hurting from the brightness of the sun…I keep my head down and twitch my eyes. The sounds around me are hard to distinguish from one another, I hear people’s voices; I hear children crying; I can hear and feel the vibration of the wind every time the swing next to me goes up ...

Each year, 5.6 million children die before their fifth birthday, while millions more fail to reach their full development potential. While global strategies like Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) and integrated Community Case Management (iCCM) have contributed to significant reductions in child deaths, what can we learn from 20 y...