Health

Just a few of my favorites from this last week… Learning from developing countries – Jaclyn Schiff at NPR has written an excellent article about lessons that so-called first-world countries can learn from third-world countries.  She references Lord Nigel Crisp’s op-ed in The Times which precedes his forthcoming book, Turning the World Upside Down: The Search for Global Health in […]

Today, as health crises are played out in an ever-increasingly inter-connected world, I believe that leaders (or at least the enlightened ones) are seeking methods to stabilize systems as a long-term risk mitigation strategy. Since health is one of the foundations upon which stable societies are created, it is increasingly important to analyze and incorporate all of the determinants that factor into the functioning of a healthy community and society.

Just a quick post to highlight a documentary that I downloaded over the weekend.  The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard is an excellent and quick study on consumerism, which she describes as a system in crisis.  Her description of a linear system being unsustainable is very interesting, quote: “you cannot run a linear system […]

Where should global health dollars go?  The good news is that more funders are investing energy into devising ever-more-sophisticated ways to allocate health spending.   When priorities are aligned, such as the international commitment to reducing maternal and child mortality rates through the Millennium Development Goals, these sophisticated allocation methods can assist in deploying scarce resources to greatest […]

My intention was to do a weekly round-up each week, but an electricity outage this weekend destroyed my best intentions.  So I’m making up for lost time and am rounding-up last week on Tuesday.  Apologies!  Here’s just a few snippets of the best stuff I’ve read this week in Global Health. Advocating Health as a […]

I personally get “number fatigue” when I look at too many large numbers–it’s a professional hazard.  But the numbers associated with Tuberculosis (TB) made me sit up in my chair.  Shocking facts: one-third of the world’s population, or 2 billion people, are infected with the bacteria that causes Tuberculosis (TB).   This translates into more than 9 […]

I feel a little bad for the big pharmaceutical companies. Their big announcement today amounted to little more than a mention in the “more news” section of the NYTimes, sidelined by breathless articles about Obama signing the health reform bill. But more news is truly big news: both Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline have signed up to give […]

Today I want to focus on Water and Health (my fellow FPA blogger, Bill Hewitt, has something to say on the environmental front as well). The UN has dubbed March 22nd World Water Day, and in my reading I stumbled upon a pretty amazing statistic. According to the World Health Organization, each $1 that we invest in clean water access gets returned to us 3-34 times in time savings, productivity, improved education and reduced healthcare costs. Compared to the majority of social investments – which often achieve only a 1:1 return, and very frequently, less – this is phenomenal. In terms of “social return”, improved access to clean water is clearly a sound investment.

As the inaugural post to ‘Global Health’, I thought I’d start with a bit of philosophy.  A colleague of mine, with a career in the public sector, who at the time was pursuing his MBA, once remarked to me: “I’ve been pursuing equality my entire career; I decided now it was time to take a closer look at efficiency.”  As someone with a business […]