Because of reporting requirements that are too stringent and time consuming, some Global Fund principal recipients have had to overhaul their organizations and have had to reject potential sub-recipients who could not meet the reporting standards. Read more.
The international public health community that has watched itsfinancing dwindle, even as scientific advances make it increasingly possible to actually end some of the world’s worst diseases. That includes HIV, officially the deadliest epidemic in history. The decline in global health funding threatens not just to stymie scientific advances against diseases like HIV, but to actually reverse gains made in the past decade. Read more.
Despite the many challenges to developing health markets in low- and middle-income countries, there are programs — often efforts to treat specific illnesses — that have shown enormous success in meeting the needs of some health consumers. Now, to improve markets, innovators in some places are looking to layer additional services onto those systems — and they are pursuing partnerships with a variety of actors in order to do so. Read more.
An interview with Claire Reading, a British midwife who is on her second mission with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), serving as a midwife supervisor at a primary care health clinic in the remote South Sudanese town, Bentiu. Read more.
Ugandan police interrupted the Mr. and Miss Pride Uganda pageant at Kampala’s Venom nightclub on Thursday night, detaining several well-known LGBT activists for about three hours before releasing them without charge. Read more.
Update: Uganda's remaining Pride events were later postponed. I contributed to BuzzFeed's report on the evolving situation.
Scientists say the tools are available to end the AIDS epidemic. But public health interventions are running out of money. And even as officials talk about the approaching end of a pandemic that has killed more than 35 million people, the goal of eradicating AIDS is looking ever further away.
Funding has dropped before, but this time seems different, said Mike Podmore, the director of STOPAIDS. Global fatigue has set in after nearly two decades of funding the AIDS response. Donors are pushing middle-income countries to take on a greater share of funding their HIV/AIDS programs, but health budgets and systems are already stretched. Some costs can be cut by delivering services more efficiently, though that approach is unlikely to bring about the end of AIDS.
All this added up means the indefinite continuation of the world’s deadliest epidemic. Read more.
The 21st International AIDS Conference convened last week amid an emerging global consensus that the end to an epidemic that has killed 35 million people might be achievable. Just weeks before the conference, a high-level meeting of United Nations members in New York issued a declaration renewing commitments to end AIDS by 2030.
That optimism faded as delegates arrived in Durban to news that donor countries had reduced global HIV funding by more than $1 billion from 2014 to 2015. The reduction could jeopardize the remarkable gains made from investments over nearly two decades, including tens of billions of dollars from the United States.
Global funding shortages and challenges in ensuring adherence to treatment are threatening to delay or even derail new recommendations that all HIV patients begin antiretroviral drug therapy as soon as they are diagnosed. Read more.
As the global public health community gathered in the South African city of Durban this week to talk about the end of AIDS, they were greeted with news that annual international support for combating the epidemic had fallen by more than US$1 billion.
Many of the world’s middle-income countries say they are willing to take on that challenge, and with it the opportunity to assume more control in guiding their national programs. However, there are deep concerns, both among officials and activists.
Governments fret that there is not enough time to plan and guide the rapid pace of the transition, which could cause critical services to be interrupted. And civil society groups are concerned that the move to greater dependence on domestic funding will allow administrations that already criminalize specific groups – including gay men and sex workers – to drop HIV services for them entirely. Read more.
The first time Yiech Pur Biel boarded a plane, in 2005, it was to escape the war-torn corner of southern Sudan where he grew up. He has lived in a refugee camp in northwestern Kenya ever since. If all goes as planned, the second time he boards a plane, in just a few weeks, it will be to make history. Biel is slated to compete in the 800-meter track and field event at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro as a member of the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team.
Update: I spoke to WBEZ Chicago's Worldview program about this story on July 13. Listen here.
Ugandan expert in family medicine who helped coordinate Liberia's Ebola response. She was born in Kumi, Uganda, on Nov 22, 1956, and died from pancreatic cancer in Kampala, Uganda, on May 5, 2016, aged 59 years. Read more.
A team from the World Health Organization has arrived in South Sudan to investigate a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in the north of the country, the cause of which remains unknown. Read more.
More than a decade of experimentation in digital health has seen the rise of a range of innovations that build on the promise that emerging technologies can dramatically improve health care, especially in low- and middle-income settings.
What has also emerged is a range of challenges, as innovators have wrestled with everything from building partnerships to reproducing successful programs in new settings. One of the biggest hurdles has been how to channel the lessons from the proliferation of projects that never grew beyond their pilot stage into scalable interventions. Read more.
In 2008, when fighting broke out near her home in North Kivu province, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo’s, Kathy Mbweki fled with her family to neighboring Uganda. Mbweki and her husband struggled to pay rent and to feed their five children in the capital, Kampala, and after two years decided to move to a refugee settlement in western Uganda.
They received a plot of land and made some money selling the produce they grew, but Mbweki said it was still a constant struggle to stay afloat -- especially because the children were constantly falling sick. So two years later they decided to try to make it in Kampala again -- except this time she had a plan.
Thousands of African asylum seekers have fled to Israel, only to be systemically ostracized by a government that has made it clear it wants nothing more than for them to leave. The situation is especially difficult for women, who sometimes experience abuse from their partners and their employers or have particular health concerns, but without access to vital social services. Read more.