Dear Colleagues,
This week we found again a number of interesting articles on global health, which just shows that health continues to figure high on the international agenda. In the Lancet online, Richard Horton discusses the need to place maternal health at the center of our efforts to improve global health. The European Union is preparing a communication on Global Health through a participatory process that (we hope) will also include you, experts from the South. The Obama administration is slowly starting to release some of its plans on the Obama Global Health Initiative and Mark Dybul, former Global AIDS coordinator for the US, explains in Foreign Policy how he ditched the bureaucracy, stopped intergovernmental turf wars, pushed for results, and helped create an anti-poverty machine that actually works (that is at least what the editor’s introduction to his opinion piece promises).
Numerous top level meetings are taking place these days, and although nuclear proliferation, climate change or global economic imbalances all get a fair amount of attention too, many also tackle global health issues, one way or another. We propose you a discussion paper on the links between health security and economic growth, poverty reduction and political stability. An article in the Lancet online already looks forward to the upcoming Canadian G8 presidency and stresses the need to restart the G8 engine. An article in the Broker explores what a new narrative (on post-MDGs) could look like, to guide global development after 2015. We also include a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation on some of the health related side events to the UN general assembly.
On innovative financing, we included three articles highlighting three different ways of financing health aid. The first one presents the global extension of the airline tax to fund the fight against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a tax that has already raised 2 Billion USD in two years in the countries where it was originally launched. The second one presents Gordon Brown’s initiative to make cash readily available to developing countries through loans taken up by the donor countries. And a NYT opinion piece discusses the need to develop new sources of financing and supports the idea of a tiny tax on foreign exchange that would already generate substantial amounts of money.
Enjoy your reading.
David Hercot, Kristof Decoster, Josefien Van Olmen & on behalf of Wim Van Damme
Global Health
1 Lancet – What will it take to stop maternal deaths?
Richard Horton ; fulltext
2 AFGH Towards the Communication on the ‘EU’s role in Global Health’
3 Science speaks – Emanuel Offers Some Details of Administration’s Global Health Initiative
Christine Lubinsky ; sciencespeaks.wordpress.com/
4 Foreign policy (opinion piece) – How to Save Lives by Breaking All the Rules
Mark Dybul ; foreignpolicy.com
G8, G20 and UN
5 G20 – Health security from economic and environmental innovation
Jeffrey L. Sturchio ; www.g7.utoronto.ca
6 The Lancet – Canada 2010: what should global health expect?
Richard Horton ; fulltext
7 The Broker – A need for a new narrative. The MDGs post-2015
Ellen Lammers ; http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/
8 KFF – African Leaders Malaria Alliance Launched At U.N. General Assembly
Innovative Financing
9 TIME – New Airline-Ticket Tax to Aid the Developing World
Peter Gumbel ; summary on kff.org/or full text on heavy website at TIME.com
10 NYT – All together now
Gordon Brown ; http://www.nytimes.com/
11 NYT – A Tiny Tax Could Do a World of Good
Philippe Douste Blazy ; NYTimes.com
