My inspiration to engage in public health was drawn from continuous volunteering at the community level since an early age… While growing up in the rural areas of eastern region in Kenya, community health workers would move from home to home doing health promotion on WASH and giving polio vaccines, and I thought this was great!
In our "Champions for Change" workshop, ACTION trained its newest group of media champions; the participants include several pediatricians and a former senator and polio survivor. The eight are buoyed and ready to get started with their work as advocates for child health in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.
This year’s World Health Assembly (WHA) saw several “firsts” in its more than seven decades history. The 71st was a landmark WHA, showcasing a major shift in how the World Health Organization (WHO) engages with civil society and how it approaches global health: namely seeking to advance individual systems of care (i.e., primary health, childbirth, surgery, and diagnostics) instead of just monitoring individual diseases. Here are some key takeaways!
As Ministers of Finance gather at the World Bank Spring meetings, as donors are evaluating their continuing support for health, and as multilaterals are changing their guiding policies to how they will reduce country support, it’s the time to ask — how will we finance UHC? How are we building and financing sustainable health systems that can address the vast existing inequities in accessing health services?
The last case of wild polio in the United States was recorded in 1979. Latin America and the Caribbean celebrated its victory over the lethal childhood infection more than 26 years ago, making the Americas the first region of the world to eliminate the disease. Retired director of PAHO, Sir George Alleyne, describes the story of how the region became the first to defeat the once lethal childhood infection and how it has sustained its infectious disease control programs since as one filled with good fortune, intrigue, political will, the value of effective public policy and planning, and value of stakeholder buy-in.
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.