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Young (and occasionally less young) researchers, mostly from LMICs, present their views on global health issues.
Suddenly women are driving scooters everywhere in Mussoorie, the small North Indian town where I work with a local non-profit organisation. This change in the gender norms of vehicle driving means that I have to leave for work ten minutes earlier than I did a couple of years back. Two years ago, children went to school by foot, or riding with th...
When global health policy wonks talk about the financing pressures of the World Health Organization, there is a certain kind of despondency. Many of the 194 of its member states do not want to cough up more money to enable WHO to do what it must. Not only that, they also want WHO to do more than it does. As a result, it has forced the instituti...
For over a century various physicians, philosophers and scholars have used medicine or medical science to define health. This has contributed to the emerging issues around medicalisation of human experience and changed the dynamics around control and power within the health system. While modern biomedicine has made immense strides in medicine an...
Not every day we attend conferences that in their announcement declare global health to be “only the newest iteration of what was formerly international health, tropical medicine and colonial medicine”. Which is precisely what attracted this grey-haired whitey – working in what is still called an Institute of Tropical Medicine – to the “De...
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 disease...
When the Tedros administration assumed office in 2017, there was some apprehension in certain sections of the global health community, about the extent to which WHO would protect and pursue the contentious issue of access to medicines. Less than two years on, one can be fairly convinced that this administration is serious in leading from the fr...
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 He...
Yearly, since 1969, Nigeria suffers fatal Lassa Fever outbreaks. In a bid to increase awareness and curb the menace, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) hosted a two-day international conference on the disease. Participants at the event got some encouraging vaccine news among others. Tanko Al-Makura is governor of Nasarawa State, in n...
Rachel Thompson is a researcher currently based at a UK think-tank. In this blog she shares her personal reflections from the recent Prince Mahidol Award Conference (PMAC) on the political economy of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), considering the wider implications for our understanding of Global Health. Last week the elite of Global Health g...