The world is in a dire state and everybody is talking about it  – and I want to just say a few words about how we do this. The Wintermanifest  (published at the start of the Omicron wave in Belgium) questioned the perceived dominance of virologists and epidemiologists in the battle against the Corona virus in Belgium. The manifest was mainly c...

Anna is a 36-year old woman living on the streets of New York. She has been homeless since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. She has been using toilet paper as her sanitary pads when she can, otherwise she would reuse old fabrics. She doesn’t have access to clean underwear, and she lives in shame and uncertainty every month. Before Covid...

In 1978, the Alma Ata declaration affirmed that care is a fundamental right as well as a social justice target. Furthermore, it set primary health care (PHC) as the key to meet this target and emphasised full participation (and self-reliance and self-determination) of the community. More than four decades later, community participation remains e...

COVID-19 was a watershed moment for all countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, especially after decades of geopolitical and economic shocks. But even before the pandemic struck, sustainable development was already jeopardized by an unstable economic environment and scarce resources, among other challenges.  See for example ...

In November 2021, in a mid-term evaluation for their paper on ‘Fundamentals of Political Science’ (an introductory course to political science that I teach), one of the questions I had asked my students in their first semester of the undergraduate integrated Humanities/Law honours programme, was the following: explain the (heavy) ‘luggage�...

In early 2021, local media reports in Brazil uncovered that some healthcare workers were injecting people with what were termed “wind vaccinations” – empty syringes. At the time, it was unclear whether these were cases of accidental poor practice, purposeful deception because of antivax sentiment amongst health professionals, or whether va...

Since 2012, Mali has been facing a socio-political crisis due to terrorists and rebels in the north, and an inter-community conflict in the center. Illegal armed groups, both jihadist and non-jihadist ones, have been spreading terror, taking advantage of the weakness (or even absence) of state services to establish their rule at the expense of t...

Many low-middle income countries rely at least partly on international foreign aid to tackle public health problems. The funding is generally managed by non-government organizations (NGOs). I used to work as a technical officer in an NGO in my home country, Indonesia, before starting my masters in the health economics, policy and management at K...

According to recent estimates  nearly 1 in 3 women aged 15 years and older, face either physical or sexual violence in their lifetime globally. And that was before the Covid pandemic.  Indeed, in the slipstream of the worldwide pandemic, Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sadly also seems to have no boundaries. When I reflect on these dire ...