“Class”- a word that (most) researchers are more than reluctant to employ. Don’t get me wrong, analysis of health inequalities based on income, poverty, socioeconomic gradients and so on abound. Sophisticated statistical tools are being used to show us the obvious – that health outcomes are poor for those with fewer resources, no matter ...

Having previously never attended a tropical medicine conference, I was equal parts excited and apprehensive about ECTMIH. I wondered if I would find anything to suit my non-clinical, non-biomedical interests, and yes, I admit I was being a bit finicky, seeing as the congress was supposed to be focusing on tropical Medicine. Anyway, it turns out ...

As you might have noticed, Latin America is going through a period of important political changes and turmoil. As the political pendulum is swinging back, more and more conservative (or downright neoliberal) governments are replacing the democratic, progressive ones that were prevailing in previous years. These changes have a number of causes, a...

While awaiting some real & in-depth analysis of what exactly went wrong before the weekend in the unsavoury Mugabe-story, as well as what triggered the rescinding of the goodwill ambassadorship by Sunday afternoon –  we hope with many this was just a one-off gaffe, but only time will tell …- below you find a fictitious conversation among WHO c...

The ninth edition of the World Health Summit (WHS) was held during October 15th -17th, in a nice former cinema hall in the city of East Berlin, built in the early 1960s and with a rather appropriate name for the occasion, “Kosmos”.  This year, the event was attended by 2,000 participants from 100 countries, all aiming “to improve healthca...

Although #ECTMIH2017 was starting only at 5 pm with a grandiose musical opening ceremony in the all the more grandiose Elisabeth center, a few students and some more professors were already rushing to the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) building on Nationalestraat as the clock rang 1 pm on Monday. What were they all so excited about at a ti...

It appears these are the times of “angry young women” who are tired of being ridiculed, ignored, or worse, harassed or bullied… the conference on global health women leadership certainly came timely. 390 women and 20 (!) men gathered in Stanford on the 12th of October. And indeed, in the morning, there was a hoo-hoo-hoo-hooray atmosphere (...

According to UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson, “Water is one of the highest priorities for development and lives in dignity, as well as a serious factor in maintaining peace and security.” In fact, for centuries, water has been central in human, economic, and environmental development, but water was and still is a political tool f...

In Quantum of Solace, Bond thwarts yet another greedy plot to gain over-arching power. But in the new millennium his villain is hungry – thirsty – for water: “This is the world’s most precious resource and we need to control as much of it as we can.” Dominic Greene (villain). Water is essential. Currently, 40% of people live in an ar...