A short while ago I was in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, a country immersed in a longstanding civil war. I had moved fast to get there. A double bombing had been triggered in a populated area and nearly 500 victims had been involved. At least 25% had died, most before they reached hospital. […]
Latest articles
Climate crisis and health: a call for papers
In September 2021, a few weeks before the Climate Conference (COP26) in the United Kingdom, BMJ Global Health joined more than 200 other medical and public health journals to note that “the greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C and […]
Visa discrimination: moving beyond global health
Visa discrimination has recently become a major topic in global health circles. This is following a spate of discriminatory policies in 2022, which specifically targeted African health professionals being denied visas to global health conferences in the Global North. A recent article in BMJ detailed such cases leading to greater calls for hosting such […]
Resurrecting a lost obstetric skill to reduce global maternal death
The incidence of having a baby in the bottom-down (“breech”) position at the end of pregnancy is about 1 in 25. The “Term Breech Trial” (TBT) is a landmark randomised controlled trial that changed the management of breech birth since its publication in 2000. It concluded that a planned Caesarean birth is safer for […]
The right to health, not equity, challenges intersectional disadvantage in global health
Assuring healthy lives and encouraging wellbeing for all people at all ages is the bold sustainable development goal for global health. But to accomplish this, we must first understand who is being left behind and why. It is generally acknowledged that intersectionality is a particularly effective analytical tool for understanding individual and population-level disadvantage. […]
Book review: How rotten is drug regulation in India?
Over the past decade, India’s drug exports have doubled to over $24 billion per year. While its long-established and rapidly growing generics industry has earned the country the accolade of ‘pharmacy of the world’, Indian companies are now also running clinical trials and developing new innovative products, including one of the world’s first nasal […]
The climate health crisis: A call to the medical community
When I started practicing as an internal medicine physician years ago, I had many thoughts about what my future in patient care might hold. I can confidently say that flying to Egypt for the international climate conference COP27 was not one of them! And yet, mid-career, I found myself in Sharm El-Sheikh, encountering images […]
FIFA’s anti-one love LGBTQ+ rights armband policy in the World Cup Qatar 2022: what could this mean to Global Health?
The One Love armband, which includes a heart containing colours representative of all backgrounds, was proposed by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Working Group in 2020 in support of inclusion of people from diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and expressions, including but not limited to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+). […]
Building a social movement for oral health
In 2020, when my dental colleagues and I organized the first oral health advocacy walk in our rural community in Ekiti State, Nigeria, people asked us questions on the streets. The most common was around why we were focusing on this issue at all. In my nine years as a dentist, I have seen […]
Bridging the global health divide: reflections of scholars in the global south
The agenda to decolonize global health has gained prominence internationally as a movement against the systematic dominance of former colonizing nations in research, policy and practice. A balanced composition of member representatives from different world bank regions seeks to address growing inequalities between nations. Scholarship programs have done a tremendous job harnessing resources for […]