National policies must incorporate good practices derived from lessons learnt so far to strengthen their health systems. Critical policy elements include preparedness and response.
Emily B. Wong, Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI)
South Africa needs a public health response that expands the successes of the country’s HIV testing and treatment programme to provide care for multiple diseases.
Having survived the HIV/AIDS pandemic, gay communities in the US were well equipped to get residents health and social services early in the pandemic, when the government’s COVID-19 response lagged.
Harsh socio-environmental factors, especially when they happen in the early years of a child’s life, can establish a developmental “biology of misfortune”.
Unidentified or late identified hearing impairment has significant implications for the speech-language, cognitive and scholastic development of the child.
Cecília Tomori, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing
Around the globe, 823,000 child deaths could be prevented annually with appropriate breastfeeding. Formula makers continue to defy a 40-year-old international code on marketing their product.
Gardening provides a helpful metaphor to help us understand how individual and platform approaches to misinformation need to be accompanied by policy and cultural reforms.
The reasons for the hesitancy to donate blood are complex and include a fear of needles and lack of awareness. Awareness and education drives to dispel the fear of donating are important.
Green spaces can be part of the plan to ‘build back better’ after COVID-19. But city officials and policy-makers must address systemic racism for urban green spaces to benefit public health.
Not achieving the targets for children and adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa means that new infections will continue to increase and HIV related mortality will be a reality for decades to come.
A successful rollout isn’t just about the physical points where people can get the vaccinations. It’s also about having a trained workforce to administer them.
The key actions needed to end AIDS are relatively clear. The question is whether every government, funder, and implementing organisations will apply them.
The Gambia’s success in eliminating trachoma means that resources previously allocated to combating the disease can now be reallocated to other public health conditions
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand
Principal Medical Scientist and Head of Laboratory for Antimalarial Resistance Monitoring and Malaria Operational Research, National Institute for Communicable Diseases
Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand
Professor of medicine and deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town