Global Health Security: Blog Posts

A conversation with Dr. Bernard Nahlen, Director of the Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame and member of the MSH Board of Directors  Dr. Bernard NahlenSome countries are entering peak malaria transmission season over the next few months, overlapping with the COVID-19 pandemic. How might the crisis affect ongoing malaria eradication efforts? One issue is case management. As a reminder, there were more deaths due to malaria than to Ebola in West Africa in 2014, because people were reluctant to go to clinics for treatment for fevers and aches.

MSH at the 2018 Health Systems Research Symposium Last week, at the 5th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Liverpool, MSH presented on the approach and lessons learned during the community-level response to the 2017 plague outbreak in Madagascar.

This story was originally published by The Hill.  During the 22nd International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, scientists, policymakers, healthcare workers, advocates, and civil society shed light on the relationship between HIV and other urgent health crises, such as Tuberculosis (TB). A less known, but critically important fact: TB is one of the leading causes of death among people with HIV/AIDS worldwide. To effectively address HIV, budget and policy responses must reflect the challenge of HIV-TB co-infection.

This story was originally published on Global Health NOW’s website. It’s a public health nightmare: 250,000 doses of substandard vaccines for diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus administered to children through a government health program. While China has had scandals over tainted food or drugs before, this recent debacle threatens to destroy already shaky public confidence in the country’s growing pharmaceutical industry.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) occurs when a microorganism becomes resistant to a drug that was originally effective for treating the infections it caused. It is one of the world’s most pressing global health threats and could erode progress made thus far in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, and many other infectious diseases. Management Sciences for Health’s (MSH) role in combatting AMR was recently featured in the peer-reviewed journal, Global Public Health.

This story was originally published by STAT News. Ashley Arabasadi, Global Health Security Policy Adviser for Management Sciences for Health, describes the negative consequences of scaling back investments in CDC and USAID global health programs in this op-ed for STAT First Opinion.

This article was first published on the Brookings Institute Future Development Blog, found here. When epidemics or pandemics hit, they usually hit the poor first and worst. We have known this for a while. The German pathologist Rudolf Virchow described this link between poverty and vulnerability to outbreaks in his 1848 study of a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia: "For there can now no longer be any doubt that such an epidemic dissemination of typhus had only been possible under the wretched conditions of life that poverty and lack of culture had created in Upper Silesia."

Abstract:  Although the risk of onset in the next year, or in the next decade, cannot be quantified, a severe pandemic involving person-to-person transmission of a novel respiratory virus is considered by leading organizations to be a substantial global threat.  The ongoing threat posed by the H5N1 and H7N9 avian influenza viruses, and by the MERS coronavirus, should serve to remind us of the continuing importance of pandemic preparedness.  In a severe pandemic from a rapidly spreading novel respiratory virus, when all countries and all responding organizations will themselves b

Global health advocates are urging G20 leaders to emphasize global health security by strengthening health systems in the poorest countries, reported Andrew Green in Devex December 21, 2016. Previous G-20 summits have addressed individual epidemics, but public health professionals and advocates are urging the forum to widen its lens to include health systems, which form the first line of defense in emergencies. They hope the effort might ultimately help advance universal health coverage, which campaigners argue would provide the best guard against future epidemics.