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This Is a Global Threat as Big as Climate Change
This morning, I delivered keynote remarks at the release event for the Global Health Risk Framework Commission report on “The Neglected Dimension of Global Security: A Framework to Counter Infectious Disease Crises." The commission, sponsored by the National Academy of Medicine and chaired by Peter Sands, has delivered a very important report on what I think is the issue with the highest ratio of seriousness to policy preparation in the global system. Indeed, for reasons I sketched in my remarks, I believe the threat to global well-being from pandemics over the next century is comparable to the threat from global climate change.
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- Health Care
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Global Health Forecast For 2016: Which Diseases Will Rise … Or Fall?
No one predicted the Ebola epidemic before it burst forth in 2014 and continued to claim lives throughout 2015. And so, as 2016 begins, readers might well wonder what biological culprits — parasites, bacteria and viruses — are lurking out there, ready to unleash another outbreak of something terrible on an unsuspecting world.
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- Health Care
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Shkreli’s Latest Plan to Sharply Raise Drug Price Prompts Outcry
Martin Shkreli is once again provoking alarm with a plan to sharply increase the price of a decades-old drug for a serious infectious disease. This time the drug treats Chagas disease, a parasitic infection that can cause potentially lethal heart problems.
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- Health Care
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Harvard Leadership Programme Helps Baby-Boomer Bosses to Save the World
About a year and a half ago, Ken Kelley, the founder of Paxvax, a vaccine company which focuses on the travel industry, became afflicted with what he calls an “intellectual itch”. He wondered why certain diseases, such as Ebola and dengue fever, lack vaccine protection.
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- Environment, Health Care
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Vaxess Co-Founder Wants to ‘Play a Role in the Eradication of Polio’
It's a rarity that an idea borne out of a classroom has the ability to take shape in such a powerful way -- but the team at Vaxess Technologies has come closer than many.
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- Health Care
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NexThought Monday: Women Entrepreneurs to the Rescue
Ebola was always an emergency within an emergency, says Faruque Ahmed, executive director of BRAC International. Now, with the immediate threat of the disease gone, West Africans have the much-needed space to shift their energies back to tackling the even greater scourge of rural poverty and powerlessness.
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- Agriculture, Health Care
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Viewpoint: Health: The Glaring Omission at COP21
Malaria in Europe? It sounds quite implausible doesn't it but such a scenario may not be too far off. The disease is currently confined to Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia, but the impacts of climate change on the health of individuals and populations, combined with the globalization of trade, could see it spread to parts of southern Europe. This scenario will happen if the issue of health is still ignored by world leaders meeting this week for the United Nations climate change conference in Paris.
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- Health Care
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The Ebola Vaccine, Latrogenic Injuries, and Legal Liability
Making vaccines is a risky, oftentimes unenviable business. Vaccines are administered to healthy people who tend to be unforgiving if an adverse side effect or injury subsequently develops. The risk of being sued, even when a vaccine supplier follows best practices, combined with growing anti-vaccination sentiment, creates a climate that is not conducive to vaccine innovation. The dissuasive effect of litigation risk and legal liability is heightened both for vaccines aimed at diseases of poor countries, for which the financial inducements are weak anyway [1,2], and vaccines for public health emergencies, which are developed in accelerated clinical trials that may lack the statistical power or detailed follow-up necessary to detect rare adverse effects. Yet, as the West African Ebola outbreak demonstrates, the world can ill afford not to have vaccines against diseases of poverty in emergency situations [1]. Several reasons exist for not having a vaccine available, relating to the biology of the virus and the epidemiological challenges pertaining to evaluating a vaccine for a rare disease. However, financial incentives and disincentives for vaccine manufactures to invest in vaccine trials for rare diseases in resource-poor countries also need to be considered. We argue that, as one part of a comprehensive plan to promote vaccine development, there needs to be a plan to lessen the risks of litigation and liability to remove disincentives for these vaccines to be developed and later deployed. As others point out, no satisfactory plan now exists [3].
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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