Archie C. Gbessay is hard to get on the phone. When I caught him over a patchy Facebook call in early April, he was rushing through the streets of West Point—Monrovia’s largest slum—checking on hand-washing stations.
May 12, 2020
The majority of people in the world cannot afford healthy food, according to the Global Nutrition Report 2020. The report was written before the coronavirus pandemic—but the global crisis only makes the findings more significant.
April 14, 2020
As high school students in St. Louis, Missouri, we reaped the benefits of global health security every time we sat in classrooms with our friends. Now that sense of safety has evaporated, and students everywhere are living the consequences of inadequate health policies.…
April 6, 2020
COVID-19’s multiple frontlines now include at least 46 countries across the African continent. Many, including Ethiopia, have frontline health care facilities battling without one of the most critical tools: adequate water and sanitation.
February 17, 2020
Both men and women unconsciously think of science as “male,” and that implicit bias plays a role in who gets promoted to elite positions in science, Vox reports
October 15, 2019
It was January of 1925, and Nome’s children were dying. Diphtheria had struck the Alaskan town, but the curative serum the local doctor needed was in Nenana, nearly 700 miles away.
September 30, 2019
One day last summer after I returned home to Mongolia, my uncle knocked frantically at the door. He stormed inside, gasping for air. He had been diagnosed with cancer a few months earlier and was now struggling to breathe. We needed to get him to the hospital right away.…
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…
August 12, 2019
Recently, an African researcher I met expressed her frustration about how American “kids” with little or no experience come all the time to “advise” her government on what to do about health. I have seen this myself, but her rant really hit a nerve. For the want of a…
June 26, 2019
In the last 2 decades, more than 30 countries moved from low-income to middle-income status, a billion people were lifted out of poverty, and there were major reductions in maternal and child mortality globally. Despite this progress, middle-income countries, where over 70…