A new index finds that while pharmaceutical industry efforts to get their products to people in low- and middle-income countries has accelerated, companies are still not moving fast enough. Read more.
The World Bank’s Pandemic Fund managed to quickly get funding in place to assist with the global mpox response. Will it use that experience to create a new funding mechanism? Read more.
At the World Health Summit, many of the leading international agencies and multilaterals arrived looking to shore up their fundraising efforts. But donors warn there is not enough money to go around. Read more.
Building local capacity to manufacture drugs, vaccines and health products is not enough. Officials must work to ensure there is actually a sustainable market for the products that are produced. Read more.
It was while she was in a clinic in Cape Town, South Africa, enduring the complicated, agonizing treatment for extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, that Phumeza Tisile began to question why “there weren’t better medications that had less side effects.”
In 2010, soon after her initial diagnosis with multidrug-resistant TB, or MDR-TB, Tisile had received a painful injection of the drug Kanamycin. It had caused her to go deaf essentially overnight, but did not stop the disease’s progression. She had not even been told that hearing loss was a potential side effect.
Only after she was finally cured, more than three years after starting treatment, did Tisile became aware that the drug company, Johnson & Johnson, had actually just developed a safer treatment with fewer risks. The treatment, bedaquiline, had only gained approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, in 2012. Had it been available to her it would have prevented her hearing loss and cut her daily pill count from 25 to fewer than 10.
She also came to understand the tangle of complications that made the treatment inaccessible to people across South Africa and in other parts of the world.
In a first-ever analysis, the Access to Medicine Foundation looked at the approaches 20 leading drug companies are taking to determine how many patients actually access their products. Read more.
A recently released draft budget spells out nearly €1 billion in cuts to the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, or BMZ, from €11.22 billion ($12.36 billion) this year to €10.28 billion in 2025. The proposed cuts to humanitarian aid are even more drastic, with plans to slash spending by more than 50% — from €2.23 billion in 2024 to €1.04 billion next year. Read more.
Amid disputes over the meaning of a word that is set to transform development, some are asking if it's still fit for purpose. Read more.
All of my coverage from the 2024 International AIDS Conference in Munich:
Latin America has pioneered the use of warning labels to guide consumers away from foods that are high in sodium or sugar. Now the rest of the world is looking for lessons. Read more.
While the impact of the outbreak on global food supplies and nutrition is currently low, experts say that the outbreak serves as a warning of how disruptive the virus could be to agrifood systems and how dangerous to animal — and potentially human — health. Read more.
As donors increasingly recognize the importance of supporting locally determined priorities, African governments and their partners work to lay out more concrete visions for the future of health care on the continent. Read more.
The Food and Agriculture Organization's ambitious effort to get the world to transform food systems could have broad-reaching implications. But not everyone is on board with the direction of travel. Read more.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, multinational drug companies sought to dictate the terms on which the South African government could negotiate for access to COVID-19 vaccines, according to newly released confidential contracts and documents.
It's not easy for NGOs to deliver health services to refugees and migrants in South Africa without stoking the xenophobic outrage that causes those communities to shy away from services in the first place. Read more.