Member states of the World Health Organization last week gathered for the first-ever Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health, and made a set of commitments in the time frame of the year 2030. The United Nations secretary general hailed the commitments as a "critical step" toward his own summit planned for 2019. WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (Dr Tedros) in remarks at the close of the conference highlighted the number of deaths from air pollution and laid out members' commitments from the meeting. These include sustainable energy sources for health facilities, establishing a multistakeholder action platform, educating and empowering health workers to bring change, scaling up WHO's air pollution programme, and looking into stronger institutional mechanisms such as possibly an air quality convention. Continue reading ->
Clemens Martin Auer, director general of Austria’s Ministry of Health, could be said to take a pragmatic and original perspective when it comes to European and national policy. In an interview with Health Policy Watch during the recent European Health Forum in Bad Gastein, Austria, he discussed health priorities for the current Austrian presidency of the European Union and beyond. He also discussed ongoing efforts by a number of European countries to address high prices of medicines and public funding for R&D. This is the second of two parts. Continue reading ->
Negotiators' agreed draft text for a United Nations political declaration on ending tuberculosis worldwide has been posted for all member states to see, and negotiators hope, not comment on. Under a UN procedure, the text has been placed "under silence" until 10:00am New York time on 14 September. If no one breaks the silence, the text is considered agreed and will advance to the High-Level Meeting on tuberculosis on 26 September as part of the annual UN General Assembly. Continue reading ->
The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is oversees the scientific evaluation, supervision and safety of medicines in the European Union, will scale back activities through 2019 due to significant staff loss when it moves from London to Amsterdam in March 2019 as a result of Brexit. Some of the areas that could be affected include the agency's work at the international level on supply chain integrity, antimicrobial resistance, vaccines, and clinical data analysis. Continue reading ->