The CommonHealth

The population of Africa is expected to double over the next 20 years, which means that many countries are facing either a demographic dividend or potentially a disaster, with critical implications for global health and development. In this episode of Take as Directed, Janet Fleischman sits down with Amb. Mark Dybul, Director of the Center for Global Health and Quality, and Professor in the Department of Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center, and formerly head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. They discuss why these demographic trends matter and how U.S. programs can better engage young people, especially adolescent girls and young women, to address their needs and support local innovation.

At the end of June, the Board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, approved their new “5.0” strategy for 2021-2025, with an ambitious set of priorities for this new phase. In this episode of Take as Directed, Nellie Bristol sits down with Amanda Glassman, Executive Vice President and Senior Fellow of the Center for Global Development, and Katherine Bliss, Senior Fellow with the Global Health Policy Center, to discuss these changes and their implications for the broader immunization landscape beyond 2020.

Since its inception in 2017, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, has come to be seen as among the most promising innovations in global health security. It works to accelerate the development and introduction of new vaccines against known, dangerous pathogens, and to build common platforms for future development of vaccines. In this episode of Take as Directed, J. Stephen Morrison sits down with Richard Hatchett, Chief Executive Officer at CEPI, to discuss the organization’s origins following the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014-15, and its further evolution two years into its mandate.

In this episode of Take as Directed, J. Stephen Morrison sits down with Jason Stearns, Director of the Congo Research Group at the Center for International Cooperation at New York University. Jason is among America’s premier experts on Congolese politics and economics. In this episode, he shares his astute insights into the opaque networks in eastern Congo which are deliberately and violently targeting health providers, paralyzing the international and local response to the Ebola outbreak. This is the second of a pair of episodes that examines what steps are now essential to end violence and win community trust and confidence in eastern Congo.

In this episode of Take as Directed, J. Stephen Morrison sits down with David Gressly, the UN Emergency Ebola Response Coordinator in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Gressly was appointed in May by the UN Secretary General to lead a more strategic, coordinated, and better funded effort to arrest the dangerously escalating Ebola outbreak. This is the first of a pair of episodes that examines the root causes of targeted violence against health providers and active community resistance, and what steps are now essential to end violence and win community trust and confidence.

In this episode of Take as Directed, J. Stephen Morrison speaks with Dr. Trevor Mundel, President of the Global Health Division at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They discuss the arc of Dr. Mundel’s personal career and his remarkable tenure at the Gates Foundation, including the creation of the Medical Research Institute; the launch of CHAMPS, the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Service; and the establishment of CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. In closing, they discuss the issues that give him the greatest concern, and the reasons he is hopeful looking to the future.

In this episode of Take as Directed, host Janet Fleischman sits down with Geeta Rao Gupta, executive director of the 3D Program for Girls and Women, former president of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), and former Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF. They discuss the new series of The Lancet, of which Geeta was a principal author, that outlines the impact of gender norms and inequalities on health, describes persistent barriers to progress, and provides an agenda for action. They also discuss the recent Women Deliver conference in Vancouver and how to maintain optimism for the future.

In this episode of Take as Directed, Sara Allinder is joined by special guest host Haim Malka, Deputy Director and Senior Fellow of the CSIS Middle East Program, to discuss the future of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The two interview Dr. Akihiro Seita, Director of Health and WHO Special Representative for UNRWA, and Elizabeth Campbell, Director of UNRWA’s Washington D.C. office, about their concerns for Palestinian refugees’ health as humanitarian aid declines amid continuing political uncertainty in the region.

In this episode of Take as Directed, J. Stephen Morrison speaks with Dr. Heidi Larson, Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. They discuss why vaccine confidence is currently in crisis, and how this has fueled outbreaks such as measles and the persistence of polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Plus, Dr. Larson walks through her work with the Vaccine Confidence Project, including monitoring public confidence in immunization programs and building an information surveillance system for early detection of public concerns around vaccines.

In this episode of Take as Directed, Steve Morrison speaks with Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of the University of Washington. Dr. Murray walks through IHME’s ongoing Global Burden of Disease analysis, as he and his team have been evaluating eating habits and food systems for people in 195 countries. Dr. Murray shares the study’s most important—and surprising—findings about global diet-related issues.