I grew up in a village where malnutrition was a big issue, where our neighbors did not have enough food and had a big number of children—some of them stunted. The stunted children repeated countless number of classes. Imagine how painful it is to live in a village and have 38 percent of children, which is 2 in 5, stunted, affecting their academic performance and ultimately their productivity in the future.
A group of teenage boys huddle around Michelle in the mangroves behind Joyce Bay, a spot frequented by men who have sex with men (MSM) in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea (PNG). She asks them how regularly they have sex and whether they have been tested for HIV or tuberculosis (TB). Her questions are met with giggles, intrigue and confusion. It turned out that none of the eight present have been tested for either disease.
Dozens of men crammed into a small, dark, window-less prison cell, peering out from the barred doorway, pleading looks on their sweaty faces; this is the image I cannot forget from a week-long research trip to Haiti in 2016. Many prisons around the world are essentially factories for production of TB, including drug-resistant TB, now the single biggest infectious disease killer in the world. Unless the world tackles prison conditions, ending this disease will remain just a distant dream.
The congregation of health leaders at the 2018 World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva, Switzerland, this week, is an opportune time to shine a light on the problem of stunting in Africa and for African governments to do more to reverse the negative trends on the continent. While Africa’s land is fertile and productive, children here experience the highest rates of stunting. The contradiction can be explained by the fact that good nutrition is dependent on good agricultural practices.
The words “global health crisis” evoke the image of aid workers rushing to prevent the spread of a pandemic disease or virus such as Ebola or Zika — a widespread emergency. Malnutrition is a global health crisis of epic proportions that is linked to 45 percent of deaths among children under five years of age in low- and middle-income countries. Lack of appropriate nutrition extends the cycle of poverty; exposes the world’s youngest children to more death and disease; and inhibits physical, cognitive, and emotional development.
Each year, the timing of World Immunisation Week coincides with ANZAC Day, when we acknowledge the achievements and sacrifices of our military personnel. In 2018, two 100th anniversaries remind us that infectious diseases have taken, and still take, a greater toll than the loss of life in warfare.
As the flu season begins in Australia, several media reports have reminded us that the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 led to more deaths than military and civilian casualties in the war (estimated at 20 million) in order to strengthen the argument for us to have our flu vaccinations.
It is also a time to remember the millions of preventable deaths that occur today due to poor health and nutrition, and to promote the actions to prevent these deaths.
I remember being vaccinated against smallpox as a child. We got the vaccine every two to three years to protect us during epidemics—and these were frequent enough. Thanks to a global immunization campaign by the World Health Organization (WHO), smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980; the last known case was in Somalia in 1977.
A global campaign to eradicate polio seems set to yield similar results. Last year, there were only eight reported cases worldwide, three of which were in Pakistan.
A Pakistani female vaccine worker carries a cooler of polio vaccines to the remote town of Harnai. Today she will have to administer 50 vaccines. This is her third visit to Harnai in three months and she now knows all the children there. Some of them wait for her up the street. They giggle and scatter as she approaches. She’s on a first name basis with many of the mothers, and some already feel like friends.