Policy leaders must redesign global economic incentives to advance healthy diets, and take a harder line against commercial interests promoting excessive production and consumption of unhealthy foods. Current trends are driving the inter-related pandemics of obesity and undernutrition as well as climate change, according to a new report by The Lancet Commission on Obesity. Continue reading ->
A massive restructuring of WHO’s 2020-2021 budget should see a shift away from siloed disease control programmes to a more integrated approach, focused on building health systems and strengthening country operations. These were the key strategic features of the proposed budget of US$ 4.785 billion, reviewed by WHO’s Executive Board in a lengthy session today. Continue reading ->
Tafenoquine, the first new drug to be developed in over 60 years to treat relapsing malaria, has in fact been around since the late 1970s, when researchers with the US Walter Reed Army Institute of Research first took note of its antimalarial properties. But the drug’s potential to cure relapsing malaria caused by the Plasmodium vivax parasite, the less deadly but most widespread malaria species, has only been recently been recognised. Continue reading ->