Blogs

African HIV Think-Tank Must Focus on Young Women
Oagile Bethuel Key Dingake Through the leadership of UNAIDS, the African Think-Tank on HIV, Health and Social Justice (the Think-Tank) was created in March 2015 to provide a platform for strategic thinking, leadership and collaboration to support,…

UK Abortion Help for NI Women Offers a Partial Solution
Photo credit: Alliance for Choice, Northern Ireland Claire Pierson and Fiona Bloomer Restrictive abortion legislation in Northern Ireland (NI) results in approximately 1000 women per year travelling to England to access the procedure. But these…

Drug Pricing Executive Order: Likely Win for Pharma
Fran Quigley Despite President Trump’s repeated promises to take on the pharmaceutical industry and drug pricing, his recently released Executive Order shows he will do no such thing. In fact, Trump hired industry executives to lead the process of…

WHO Budget Commitments Disappoint Global Health Advocates
WHO Watchers in Geneva Fran Quigley, in Geneva The election of Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as the new director-general of the World Health Organization has dominated the news from the 70th World Health Assembly. But, arguably, it was not the…

Dr Tedros Promises WHO Reform with Human Rights at the Core
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been elected Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) for the next five years. Dr Tedros, Ethiopia’s foreign minister and former health minister, believes WHO must evolve and adapt to urgent global health…

Listen to Civil Society: Medicines for People, Not Profit—Dr Chan
Fran Quigley, from the WHA in Geneva In her final address to the World Health Assembly as WHO Director-General, Dr. Margaret Chan identified access to medicines as the most contentious issue of her decade-long tenure. That struggle was engaged, she…

Remove the For-Profit Variable from Clinical Drug Trials
Fran Quigley At first glance, it seems that clinical trials are the much-criticized pharmaceutical industry’s best contribution to the medicines process. The industry leans on governments to fund early-stage research, then claims the patent rights to…

Hospital Bombings Destroy Syria’s Health System
Gina Li The humanitarian crisis in Syria is now in its sixth year. The rest of the world is barraged with alarming images and harrowing accounts of entire families, their homes, and their livelihoods persistently coming under attack. Amidst the…