Sufficient treatment capacity during pandemics like COVID-19 saves lives. The idea behind “flattening the curve” is to keep the number of sick patients below the existing capacity for treatment.
August 10, 2020
In a watershed moment, the prestigious Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago suspended intersex surgeries last month. Activists hope other hospitals will follow suit. The UN has condemned these surgeries, but they are legal in almost every country. (“…
January 21, 2020
“History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children,” said Nelson Mandela at the 2002 UN General Assembly Special Session on Children. 1.3 billion children around the world lack access to surgical and anesthesia care.
September 23, 2019
For anyone who performed surgery on landmine survivors, the need to ban the weapon was obvious. We were seeing kids with their limbs being blown off. It’s little different to see a child in need of amputation from a preventable post-surgical infection that got out of…
September 16, 2019
When the UN convenes its High-Level Meeting next week on universal health coverage, increased access to surgery not only needs to be a top priority for political rhetoric but for genuine commitment.
August 29, 2019
In Africa and Asia, 2 million women and girls live with obstetric fistula that leaves them incontinent. The condition is “effectively a hole in the birth canal” resulting from lengthy, obstructed labor without key emergency care, Sarah Newey reports. In developed nations…
March 10, 2019
We are thrilled to congratulate Hikmet Ceyhun Göcenoğlu and Beth Ann Eanelli, the winners of the Untold Global Health Stories of 2019 contest.
October 23, 2018
Institutional Barriers Sitting in a large auditorium, my eyes scanned across the 300 or so highly respected cardiothoracic surgeons who came from all over Japan. Many were dozing or fast asleep. All but 5 or 6 of the surgeons were men. The gender imbalance shocked me. It…
August 20, 2018
Around a third of the global disease burden is surgical, but relatively little is known about the accessibility to surgical treatments in sub-Saharan Africa. A new study sheds some light, detailing how to better estimate access to surgery and factoring in geographic access…
June 26, 2018
Spain’s opt-out system of presumed consent for organ donation is lauded for the country’s unrivaled organ donation rates. Other countries are quick idealize an opt-out transition to boost rates, but Spain’s infrastructure and culture are the much bigger determiners of its…