In the aftermath of the Ebola crisis, the global health community has a unique opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned and apply them to prepare the world for the next crisis. Part of that ...preparation will entail knowing, with greater precision, what the scale and scope of our specific global health challenges are and what resources are needed to address them. However, how can we know the magnitude of the challenge, and what resources are needed without knowing the current status of the world through accurate primary data? Once we know the current status, how can we decide on an intervention today with a predicted impact decades out if we cannot project into that future? Making a case for more investments will require not just better data generation and sharing but a whole new level of sophistication in our analytical capability--a fundamental shift in our thinking to set expectations to match the reality. In this current status of a distributed world, being transparent with our assumptions and specific with the case for investing in global health is a powerful approach to finding solutions to the problems that have plagued us for centuries.
We in the global malaria community are at a critical juncture in our journey toward malaria eradication. Decades of experience in deploying our existing interventions have made it clear that there is ...no single “silver bullet.” Rather, driving down morbidity and mortality requires that we use combinations of interventions across a range of product classes and also that these combinations be uniquely tailored to local epidemiologic, demographic, environmental, and socioeconomic contexts. Although our existing tools remain effective for now, we know that the threat of drug and insecticide resistance necessitates a robust research-and-development pipeline capable of delivering not only improved . . .
In 1988, the World Health Assembly endorsed the goal of eradicating poliomyelitis worldwide. At the time, the estimated annual number of new cases of paralysis was 350,000, and poliomyelitis was ...considered to be endemic in 125 countries.
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In the 25 years since then, the incidence of poliomyelitis has been reduced by more than 99%, and only three countries — Pakistan, Nigeria, and Afghanistan — have never terminated indigenous transmission.
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Wild-type poliovirus type 2 has probably been eradicated; the last naturally occurring case was detected in 1999.
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Wild-type poliovirus type 3 appears to be close to eradication, with no new . . .
It is critical to ensure that COVID-19 studies provide clear and timely answers to the scientific questions that will guide us to scalable solutions for all global regions. Significant challenges in ...operationalizing trials include public policies for managing the pandemic, public health and clinical capacity, travel and migration, and availability of tests and infrastructure. These factors lead to spikes and troughs in patient count by location, disrupting the ability to predict when or if a trial will reach recruitment goals. The focus must also be on understanding how to provide equitable access to these interventions ensuring that interventions reach those who need them the most, be it patients in low resource settings or vulnerable groups. We introduce a website to be used by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and other funders of the COVID Therapeutics Accelerator that accept proposals for future clinical research. The portal enables evaluations of clinical study applications that focus on study qualities most likely to lead to informative outcomes and completed studies.
More than 85% of Covid-19 mortality in high income countries is among people 65 years of age or older. Recent disaggregated data from the UK and US show that minority communities have increased ...mortality among younger age groups and in South Africa initial data suggest that the majority of deaths from Covid-19 are under 65 years of age. These observations suggest significant potential for increased Covid-19 mortality among younger populations in Africa and South Asia and may impact age-based selection of high-risk groups eligible for a future vaccine.
In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has struggled to deliver new therapies, especially for diseases that affect the most vulnerable in developing countries. The global health community can ...fill this vacuum by catalyzing innovative partnerships across academia, government and the private sector, fostering a more rigorous environment for scientific decision making and creating the tools and infrastructure to conduct effective translational research.
Now, CEPI--the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a partnership between public, private, philanthropic, non-governmental, intergovernmental, and civil organisations, is launched on Jan ...19 at the World Economic Forum's 2017 meeting. CEPI will be based in Oslo, Norway, with offices in the UK, India, and the USA, but will be a global organisation with partners on all continents. CEPI provides a new funding model for the development of vaccines against epidemic infectious diseases through pooling resources from several investors.
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