We are three Filipino planetary health advocates who had the privilege of participating in last week’s One Sustainable Health (OSH) for All Forum held in Lyon, France. In recent years, terms such as “Planetary Health” and “One Health” have become increasingly popular as part of the global health sector’s response to growing ecologic...

The interdependence of people, animals and the environment is the foundation of the One Health movement. We, three Emerging Voices alumni from three different countries, were naturally on the lookout for the spirit of oneness at the 7th World One Health Congress in Singapore, from 7 to 11 November 2022. Situated at the Sands Expo and Convention...

Once again the global health community congregated in Bangkok for the annual Prince Mahidol Award Conference (28 Jan-2 Feb). I’ve chronicled my annual pilgrimage a few times before, calling attention to PMAC’s “elephant in the room” (2015) and examining its “political economy” (2019). While I’m still wishing for a future PMAC “p...

It was great to be back in Berlin, which I’ve always called “my intellectual city” since the first time I visited it in 2007. Its many streets and parks are named after some of Germany’s – and the world’s – greatest thinkers such as Karl Marx, Max Planck, Robert Koch, and of course, Rudolf Virchow, the Father of Social Medicine and...

This April, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) released a report entitled “Universal Health in the 21st Century: 40 Years of Alma-Ata.” As the title implies, the report commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Alma Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care (PHC), arguably one of the most important documents in the history of global he...

The history of the field of global health is always traced back to tropical medicine, an earlier discipline started by former Western empires. Generally, the focus of tropical medicine was the study of infectious diseases prevalent in colonies in the tropics. The purpose was to find measures to protect the colonizers from acquiring these diseas...

Each year, the global health calendar (as graphically summarized by Kent Buse on Twitter recently – here’s part one) begins with the Prince Mahidol Award Conference (PMAC) in Bangkok – together with the WHO Executive Board Meeting in Geneva, of course. Under the patronage of the Thai royal family, PMAC honors Thailand’s Father of Public H...

      Roopa (center) and Renzo (far right) with WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (2nd from left), UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman (2nd from right) and other youth delegates during the 30th-anniversary conference of the Alma Ata Declaration in 2008   It has been 40 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Alma-Ata, which reaffirmed...

Two weeks ago, I read with much delight the suggestions that my friend Kristof proposed for the future of planetary health. Overall, there is nothing to oppose with his suggestions and observations. In fact, these are the kinds of conversations that are very much needed to push the frontiers of a young idea. I would even say that planetary healt...

Last week, my Facebook newsfeed was flooded with posts from friends and colleagues about the practice of public health in the Philippines and abroad. On one hand, my fellow Filipino friend Harvy Joy Liwanag, who is doing his PhD at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, noted in his FB wall the lack of ‘an influential group to represe...

  Last January 29-31, 2016, I was blessed to attend the Prince Mahidol Award Conference (PMAC) – Thailand’s annual global health event – for the third time, and I felt very elated that this year’s award for public health went to Sir Michael Marmot – a global health icon who of course needs no introduction. This news did not come as a s...

It may already be a month since the world’s governments, at last, after 20 years of fancy (and I hope carbon-neutral) conferences, arrived at an agreement for global climate action, but people are still talking about COP 21 – which is a good thing because most UN conferences end up vanishing in oblivion and then suddenly re-emerge in politic...

Last August 22-24, 2015, nearly 500 new leaders in health research and innovation gathered at the New Leaders for Health (NL4H) Pre-Forum, which was held at the Philippine International Convention Center in Manila, Philippines. This event served as a prelude to the Global Forum on Research and Innovation for Health (also called Forum 2015), whic...

    In last week’s New Leaders for Health (NL4H) Pre-Forum in Manila, four Emerging Voices alumni – three from Class 2014 (Renzo Guinto, Nasreen Jessani, Bhaskar Purohit) and one from Class 2012 (Beverly Ho) – participated in a panel entitled “Emerging Voices for Global Health: The Future of Health Systems Research.” The panel aimed to...

Tourists from around the world often come to Thailand to watch and ride on its lovely elephants, but last week in Bangkok, at the annual Prince Mahidol Award Conference (PMAC), more than 600 participants from 58 countries confronted the ‘elephants in the room’ of global health and development as they tackled the theme “Global Health Post-2...

On December 14, 2011, Unni Gopinathan, a medical student from the University of Oslo (UiO) and one of my closest friends in the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA), informed me and another UiO-IFMSA colleague Usman Mushtaq about the plan to create a Youth Commission that would work in parallel with the Lancet-Uni...