At the beginning of this year, a somewhat nebulous period, when a little known disease was bubbling up in China, it was difficult to distinguish between politically motivated decisions from those taken solely based on evidence keeping public health concerns in mind. A month ago, in her early assessment of the novel coronavirus outbreak that was...

“Hey, aren’t you afraid of dying from the coronavirus? No! I’m afraid of dying dismembered and be blamed for it”, a Chilean cartoonist tweeted a few days ago. And that is more than just a perception for hundreds of thousands of women across Latin America who flocked to the streets on Sunday, in commemoration of International Women’s Da...

All four authors are also co-founders of the WGH India Chapter. We are thrilled to announce our initiative on the occasion of International Women’s Day (March 8), and in so doing, pay tribute to all the women fighting for equal rights and equal representation at their workspaces worldwide. Despite decades of global targets on gender equality, ...

Managing an epidemic requires tackling the health consequences of the outbreak, as well as its social, political, security, and economic dimensions. This implies setting priorities and making trade-offs between various interests and goals – in short, a lot of politics. The biomedical angle: science versus politics in epidemic response? Covera...

Last weekend, Dr. Farida Al Hosani, Director of the Communicable Diseases Department at Abu Dhabi’s Department of Health, reported in a televised interview that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had confirmed 13 cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). According to reports from the Institute of International Finance in Washington DC, the outb...

My father used to say that “there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” In global health these days it’s difficult not to be part of the former tribe. At the start of this new decade, there are those who peddle “elixirs of optimism” about how the world has neve...

The 146th Executive Board meeting of the WHO was like an investment case in action for donors. Here was WHO leadership noting the passing of key resolutions, lending support to new initiatives, urging countries to work together to arrive at a consensus on vexatious issues, while briefing technical experts and the media every day on the emerging...

The 2020 Oscars made history for multiple reasons, among others: a foreign language film took the top prize, an actor from a Netflix series won, and one winner had 52 nominations in his lifetime!    What stood out for me, however, as a significant moment in the ceremony was when The Peanut Butter Falcon actor Zack Gottsagen took the stage with h...

Since the watershed moment of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the concept of health system resilience has been a recurring theme in global health discussions.  Although most frequently used in the context of epidemic response, resilience has also been framed as a ‘key pillar’ of health, and invoked in high-level calls for countries t...