If anyone ever doubts the value of the Emerging Voices for Global Health (EV4GH) programme, they only need to watch the just concluded Africa Convening to be convinced. Two EVs and young rising public health stars, Shehnaz Munshi (EV 2018) and Lance Louskieter (EV 2020), collaborated with Health Systems Global (HSG), the Atlantic Institute, Tek...

Within the global health community, the need to decolonise global health is becoming increasingly clear, and indeed, the idea may soon become a “universally acknowledged truth” (which may, admittedly, take years to actualise). When we talk about decolonising global health however, the focus is often on the Global South, representation (d...

One week on from the British elections, it is still a powerful talking point for people in the UK, from all parts of the political spectrum and both on social media and in real-life. The campaign was uncharacteristically divisive and acrimonious, so I suppose it was inevitable that whatever way the election went, some people would end up being ...

Approximately 491 days ago, the first cluster of COVID-19 cases was reported to the WHO and the infectious agent, a novel coronavirus, was identified. Since then we’ve expanded our knowledge of geography and added words and phrases such as WFH (working from home to the uninitiated), PPE, flattening the curve, contact tracing, herd immunity, l...

Last year, members of the health community came together to commemorate Alma Ata. While there was cause for celebration in Astana, it was nonetheless clear that progress had been uneven and people in some parts of the world were in danger of being left behind. There are of course many reasons why 40 years after the initial declaration, the worl...

Last summer we decided to evaluate the newsletter. We wanted to know more about our readers, and check if we were meeting our focal goal of providing a weekly update on global health policy & governance in the health SDG era, with focus on health policy & systems research, all this of course while “Switching the Poles”. The evaluation was a ...

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 ...

It is now three days after one of the most exciting FIFA world cups of recent times and already, to some of my male colleagues, it feels as if they have entered one of the black holes in the universe. In this year’s edition of the event, teams like Italy and the Netherlands which are usually fixtures in the competition were noticeable absences...

Last Saturday (26 May), the very last (side-)event of the World Health Assembly in Geneva was about one of the most embarrassing challenges in international health work: “#AidToo: Sexual exploitation in international cooperation”. #AidToo is a sub-section of the #MeToo movement which definitely needs no introduction, as the ripples it has ca...

More than a fortnight after the Times broke the news on the Oxfam scandal, the aftershocks are still being felt in the humanitarian assistance and development sector. The story has more twists and turns than a cheap garden hose, and there seems to be a new development every day, with several other organisations admitting to having the same probl...

Two weeks ago, Nigerian Twitter was in uproar over the death of a certain Ahmed Victor Idowu. He was a House Officer (i.e. a qualified doctor practising under supervision in hospital in the first couple of years after graduation) who died from Lassa Fever contracted in the line of duty. Lassa fever, for the uninitiated among us, is according to ...

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 ...

About this time a month ago, I walked into the arrival lounge of Catania International Airport, looking bleary-eyed for the shuttle driver who was supposed to pick me up. I was grateful to see the placard that had the words ‘WHO Summer School’ inscribed on it, because I was suddenly overcome with fatigue and felt lightheaded. The flight seem...