Today is World Pneumonia Day. While #WPD2012 should lead us to be optimistic about the capabilities we have to prevent and treat pneumonia around the world, it also provides a solemn reminder that despite being preventable and treatable, pneumonia continues to be the leading cause [...]
This post was originally published on Views From Beyond the OR. Poor-quality medicines are found all over the world, and can be of poor quality for a variety of reasons: they might be made with poor-quality chemicals, they may contain toxic substances instead of the proper active ingredients, [...]
This post originally appeared on Views From Beyond the OR. I recently came across a post on the Council for Foreign Relations’ Development Channel that asked: Are Randomized Controlled Trials a Good Way to Evaluate Development Projects? This is an incredibly important question because, as the authors note, “International donors have spent well over $2 [...]
On July 20, 2011 the United Nations announced that in parts of Somalia, food security had deteriorated so significantly that two regions were now considered to be in famine, and more than 3.7 million people were in desperate need of assistance. This was the first major famine to be declared since 2000, and became the [...]
This piece is cross-posted from Views From Beyond the OR. On June 30, bill C-31, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, came in to effect, drastically changing the access that refugees in Canada have to health care. The short name is a misleading one: rather than enhancing the protections that refugees have in this country, [...]
I am wrapping up my thesis research (finally!), which focuses on the mapping of health facilities in crisis settings. Over the past 3 years, I have spent countless hours looking at datasets, GPS coordinates, and long lists of indicators of the functionality of health facilities. I have been looking to see what effective tools are [...]
In global public health, we talk about a class of diseases that cause significant morbidity and mortality, but for which treatments are either unavailable, ineffective, or toxic, known as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). One of the main problems with NTDs is that they predominantly occur in populations who lack the financial means of purchasing new [...]
An article caught my eye in last week’s Lancet. Soofi and colleagues conducted a cluster-randomised controlled trial of community case management of severe pneumonia in children aged 2-59 months in a rural district of Pakistan to try and understand how community health workers might be able to recognize and diagnose pneumonia in this population. Basically, [...]
Today marks the two year anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010. Far from celebration of the progress made since, the anniversary has drawn criticism from a range of dignitaries and aid workers in the country and around the world. That the billions in international humanitarian assistance have failed to [...]
Today, a colleague, Amir Attaran, and I had a paper published in PLoS Medicine where we discuss some of the international legal constraints that hinder the availability of one of the world’s most basic and essential medicines: morphine. The paper, titled “The Inadequate Treatment of Pain: Collateral Damage from the War on Drugs” provides a [...]
It has been just over one year since cholera emerged in Haiti, the first time in perhaps 100 years. Since then, it has wreaked havoc within the country, whose water and sanitation infrastructure was already poor before the earthquake, while the displacement of upwards of a million people after the earthquake undoubtedly contributed to its [...]
In August of this year, Tufts University (in collaboration with OCHA and CARE International) released a report called Sex & Age Matter: Improving Humanitarian Response in Emergencies. The central message of this report is an important one – good data are integral for making decisions and prioritizing interventions; but when the data aren’t specific enough [...]
The current food crisis in the Horn of Africa (consisting of the countries of Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Ethiopia) is an evolving humanitarian emergency that is bordering on disaster. Millions of people face serious health risks related to malnutrition, fuelled by a drought in the region but largely compounded by a worsening security situation, conflict, [...]
Pharmacopolitics and anesthesia rarely go hand-in-hand. Many of the campaigns seeking enhanced access to essential medicines focus on therapeutics, vaccines and treatments. Anesthetics fall into a somewhat different world than antibiotics or antiretrovirals. While anesthetics are arguably therapeutic, most of the drugs used don’t actually lead to an end-therapeutic goal in the same way that [...]
