Category Archives: trends

Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases: A Conversation on Progress

collaboration, Global Health, london declaration, NGOs, NTDs, trends, U.S Government, UK government,

 

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Two years ago, global health leaders convened in London to hold the most significant international meeting on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) in history. The event galvanized major commitments from a diverse set of partners to eliminate or control 10 NTDs by 2020 – these commitments are now known as the London Declaration.

This Wednesday on April 2nd, The Global Network will once again join this unique group of partners to discuss progress toward the promises made in 2012.

Since the London Declaration on NTDs, The US, UK, and the World Bank have deepened their commitments, and NTDs are now being prioritized in global health and development agendas. In addition, control, prevention and research efforts for NTDs have expanded.

The London declaration also sparked new collaboration between public and private partners. These partnerships are identifying innovative, concrete solutions for delivering good health and strong economic futures to the world’s poorest people.

The progress we’ve seen since 2012 is also due in large part to the work of endemic countries in drafting and implementing national NTD plans. Through their national plans, countries burdened by NTDs are funding and driving their own solutions.

We invite you to tune into a live webcast of the April 2nd event in Paris. You’ll hear from Bill Gates, Co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization, along with other distinguished panelists.

Feel free to tweet about the event using the hashtag #NTD progress. The live webcast will run from 12:00 to 1:30 EST. To tune in, click here.

NTDs, trends, ,

By: Alanna Shaikh

Google has a new tool, . It’s based on Google Flu Trends, and it is intended to help public health authorities stay on top of Dengue outbreaks. It’s pretty much exactly the same as Google Flu Trends: Google has found that certain search terms tend to indicate a dengue outbreak.

The Dengue Trends tool describes itself this way:

We have also found a close relationship between how many people search for dengue-related topics and how many people actually have dengue symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “dengue” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the dengue-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional dengue surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when dengue season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much dengue is circulating in different countries and regions around the world.

The Solutions that Aren’t (Part 1)

Global Development, Global Health, money, policy, trends, ,

By: Alanna Shaikh

In the past couple of years we’ve faced major reconsideration of two of international development’s biggest miracles: micro-credit and the Green Revolution.[i] They have gone from being seen as world-changing silver bullets to just one more tool in a kind of effective arsenal.

Micro-credit – the extension of small loans to poor people – it seems, doesn’t lift most people out of poverty. Instead, what it does is help poor people to smooth their consumption – spread the cost of major expenditures over time. A loan that pays for a wedding, a home, or medical expenses allows a family to pay in installments slowly, as opposed to being suddenly drained of all their resources. It acts, in fact, in much the same way as micro-savings. Or a credit card, for that matter, and how many people have been lifted out of poverty by a Discover card? It’s a useful tool for money management, and a valuable tool for people who previously had no access to this kind of credit, but it’s not a game-changer. (For more information on micro-finance, I recommend reading anything David Roodman has written in particular this paper and his excellent blog.)

The Green Revolution has faced a similar rethinking. For those of you not familiar with the term, the Green Revolution was “a series of research, development, and technology transfer initiatives, occurring between the 1940s and the late 1970s, that increased agriculture production around the world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s…The initiatives involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers.”

The impact of the Green Revolution was felt primarily in South Asia, with Africa as a lesser beneficiary of the new technology. It has long been seen as one of international development aid’s greatest successes. We broke South Asia’s famine cycle. How do you not count that as a win?

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