On its 5th anniversary, The Lancet Global Health open-access research journal asks 5 of its International Advisory Board members to reflect on the global health field’s evolution over the past 5 years and highlight some priority issues.
June 29, 2018
Until 2016, Kenyans suffering from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis who were unable to finish prescribed courses of treatment—which often involve arduous daily treks to health facilities and could last for 20 months with debilitating physical side-effects—could be subject…
June 27, 2018
2 decades ago, Thailand was struggling to find a better way to address cervical cancer, as 30 years of the test-and-refer approach had not made a dent in the country’s death toll from the disease. The trajectory changed after a rural province, Roi Et, implemented a low-…
June 26, 2018
A polio outbreak has been confirmed in Papua New Guinea—declared polio-free 18 years ago—after a case surfaced in a 6-year-old boy. The same virus was also isolated from stool specimens of 2 healthy children from the same community “representing an outbreak,” according to…
June 21, 2018
Health care workers are exposed to manifold risks—overheating in a protective suit shouldn’t be one of them. Stanford researchers specializing in body temperature regulation developed a solution for Sierra Leone Ebola responders who struggled to work in hazmat suits for…
June 20, 2018
The DRC’s latest Ebola outbreak appears to be tapering off thanks to containment efforts that got out in front of the disease and overcame obstacles to reaching remote communities. What made this outbreak different than the 2014 epidemic, which killed 11,000 in West Africa…
June 19, 2018
After decades of work, the finish line was in sight for victory against guinea worm, an excruciatingly painful parasite. That success is now threatened by hundreds of cases among dogs in Chad. Scientists are desperate to stop it in its tracks before it spreads widely to…
June 19, 2018
Disease data reporting has come a long way since 16th century London’s weekly Bills of Mortality. Now we have the WHO’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, providing a common vocabulary to record and report causes of disease and…
June 13, 2018
Machines that can find volatile organic compounds in human breath—gas-chromatography mass-spectrometers—have been around for awhile. But analyzing them is arduous and error-prone; reams of data on complex compounds must be analyzed by hand. To expedite the process,…
June 13, 2018
Russia’s HIV/AIDS epidemic is worsening amid paltry government response and ongoing denial: The Ministry of Health’s estimate of about 1 million people living with HIV minimizes expert assessments of closer to 2 million. Numbers aside, even the MoH admits that only a third…