This is a guest post by Ryan Lloyd, a Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Centre College. His research focuses on comparative political behavior and vote buying, particularly in Brazil. He can be reached at lloydr418@gmail.com, and on Twitter at...
This is a guest post from Kurt Ackermann, a civil society leader in South Africa who works through urban social agriculture to strengthen community resilience in cities. He is executive manager and...
This is a guest post from Sean D. Ehrlich, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida State University who researches international and comparative political economy, trade policy, and...
This is a guest post from Andrew Yeo, who is an Associate Professor of Politics at The Catholic University of America in Washington DC and a Fulbright Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of...
Ebola is back, but that doesn’t mean that the world should panic. A little more than a year ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the West African Ebola outbreak, which killed more than 11,000 people in the largest outbreak of the disease ever, was officially over. On May 11th, WHO announced that the Democratic Republic of Congo had identified 9 suspected cases of Ebola over the past three weeks. Three people had already died, and laboratory testing has confirmed that at least one of the cases has tested positive for the Zaire subtype of the Ebola virus. This is the first...
A dilute alcoholic solution of Brilliant Green (Viridis nitentis spirituosa) is a topical antiseptic, effective against gram-positive bacteria, also known under a Russian colloquial name zelyonka. If you grew up in the Soviet Union and ever had chicken pox, zelyonka turned you into a green-spotted leopard for at least a week: it’s hard to get it out of your skin. Brilliant green has, however, some serious safety issues: when ingested it can induce vomiting and contact with eyes can lead to grave injuries, even blindness. This is what a prominent Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny...
I’m not going to lie. When I heard that the Trump Administration was going to release its budget blueprint, I didn’t have high hopes for global health. The new administration’s commitment to global health has been ambiguous at best, and early word was that medical and scientific research was in for some massive cuts. So what does the budget blueprint tell us about the future the US’ commitment to global health? It’s not all bad. In fact, for a budget that goes so far as to zero out funding for Meals on Wheels, global health comes out relatively well in some very specific ways, but the cuts...
There’s a lot of turmoil in global health governance these days, and it looks like it’s only getting more chaotic. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is hitting the reset button in its quest to identify a new leader “due to issues in the recruitment process”—precisely at a moment when there are real fears about the future of funding for global health initiatives. What’s happening within the Global Fund may at first glance speak to dysfunction within that specific organization, but it’s better to think of the problems as emblematic of larger questions about legitimacy...
In the words of Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler from Donald Trump’s favorite television show, “Really!?!” Shortly after noon Eastern time in Washington, Donald Trump gave his inaugural address. In it, he proclaimed his desire “to free the Earth from the miseries of disease.” That’s not a bad sentiment. Health is important, the US has played a major role in developing and funding the global health system that currently exists, and there are a host of health challenges that continue to bedevil the world. Trump has made ambiguous statements about his global health commitments in the past, so this...
An event happens. Four different people tell four different versions of what happened. How do we figure out how to move forward? This is a very rough plot summary of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece Rashomon, but it’s also a pretty accurate description of what is happening to the World Health Organization these days. There’s probably a generation of folks who know Kurosawa because he was name-checked in Rent, but the Japanese director also gives us a window for thinking about international politics. The World Health Organization (WHO) has come under an immense amount of criticism over the...
It's the eternal quandary of thinking about the intersection of international politics and global health: where does Elton John fit in? We now have an answer. It's where we try to understand issues of moral and legal responsibility of an international organization. About a month ago, I wrote about cholera and global health. One of the reasons cholera is such a big issue is because of the ongoing outbreak in Haiti—the worst in recent history, and one that we can directly trace to the 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in October. Natural disasters can obviously disrupt the sanitation...
Writing about poo Raises awareness, saves lives Oddest line on CV I am definitely not a poet. Fortunately, the organizers of Poo Haiku had nearly 150 other entries from which to select 12 winners to have their haikus memorialized on the 2017 Poo Haiku calendar. This may seem like fun and games (and, let’s face it, trying to write a haiku about going #2 is pretty fun), but there’s a more serious purpose behind it. The Poo Haiku contest is sponsored by Defeat DD, an organization sponsored by PATH, a Seattle-based non-profit organization focused on global health. Michael Stevenson’s recent...