At the World Health Summit in Berlin, the Global Health Matters podcast celebrated a milestone anniversary with a live recording exploring misinformation, the power of social media shaping information, and the future of health communication

BERLIN — Five years ago, in a field not exactly known for its podcasting, Dr Garry Aslanyan spotted a gap. Global health, for all its conferences, scientific papers and panel discussions, lacked spaces for dialogue that could transcend disciplinary boundaries. So he started one.

“A lot of the information in global health is quite siloized,” Aslanyan, the podcast’s founder, told Health Policy Watch in a recent interview at the World Health Summit, where the show recorded its fifth-anniversary episode. “We look at things that are more cross-cutting. People who are not working in an area could listen to the episode and get inspired by how they dealt with something in another context.”

The approach has resonated. With over 130,000 downloads across more than 180 countries, Global Health Matters has become a platform bringing together voices ranging from former Médecins Sans Frontières president Joanne Liu to Wellcome CEO Jan-Arne Rottingen, alongside lesser-known innovators, scientists, authors, academics and public health officials whose work might otherwise go unheard by the broader scientific community.

The long-form interview format, Aslanyan explained, allows listeners to understand not just what experts do, but their motivations and experiences: what their personal journey was, why they decided to pursue their work, and the contexts shaping their perspectives. “We don’t really have a chance to know who they are,” Aslanyan said. “Where they work, how their context is, what it means to them.”

“We know the general public is probably not our main audience, but in terms of destroying silos between different parts of global health… we’re covering everything,” he added. “We’re doing it with different perspectives, so I think we’ve overcome [those divisions].”

Kissing bugs

One interview with essayist, memoirist and journalist Daisy Hernández stands out to Aslanyan as exemplifying what his podcast is after. Far from the corridors of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Hernández wrote a memoir about Chagas disease woven through her family’s story—a book most global health professionals could easily miss.

“For many listeners, they would never pick up that book,” Aslanyan said. “But the way she presented the story really incorporated the disease, the system, the culture, the environment, and the lack of understanding of these kinds of diseases in developed countries.”

Chagas disease, caused by a parasite transmitted mostly through the “kissing bug” Triatominae, which thrives inside the mud or concrete walls and floors of poor dwellings in Latin America,  was barely recognized by physicians in the United States and Europe until recently. 

Doctors misdiagnosed it as simple heart problems. Hernández’s narrative approach made visible what technical papers couldn’t: how a neglected disease, medical system failures, and immigrant experiences collided to lead a family and community affected by the disease with little understanding of its true causes.

The experience of Chagas disease, and Hernandez’s power to communicate it through story, also ties deeply with the work of TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, where Aslanyan works. 

The conversation was a reminder to global health professionals to “go beyond our public health silos and to present our work in a way that motivates experts, policy-makers and lay audiences towards greater action,” the episode description wrote — a mission statement for what Aslanyan is trying to achieve, and a narrative vision to achieve TDR’s raison d’être: improving the health vulnerable of burdened by infectious diseases. 

To inform or to misinform

The podcast’s five-year anniversary recording on the opening day of Berlin’s World Health Summit tackled one of global health’s most urgent challenges: ensuring accurate health information reaches those who need it.

The live session on “Bridging the Knowledge Divide” featured Joy Phumaphi, executive secretary of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, and Monica Bahrel, Google’s clinical lead for Public Health, in a discussion that laid bare both progress and persistent problems.

“When I first started working, everything was written by hand,” Phumaphi recalled, describing her early career years in health systems decades earlier. “You only had one source of information—the World Health Organization. You didn’t have to search to find out which source is right and which one is wrong.”

“There are so many sources of information, and it’s very, very confusing,” Phumaphi said of the current landscape. “We have rogue scientists and rogue medical practitioners who spread disinformation. And there’s misinformation, which is a little bit more innocent but can do as much damage.”

“Misinformation is always mixed with a little bit of truth, which is why it misleads,” she explained. “But what it does is that it kills people. Non-vaccinated people died during COVID. Children who don’t have measles vaccines die. Children who are not sleeping under mosquito nets die from malaria.”

In Mozambique’s Zambezia province earlier this year, misinformation claiming that government-distributed mosquito nets spread cholera led to violent attacks on health centers, leaving one person dead. Communities blamed health workers for a cholera outbreak. Provincial officials had to conduct emergency visits urging residents to stop attacking the health workers attempting to help them.

The misinformation challenge has grown particularly acute in an era when figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now hold positions of global influence. Kennedy, who built his political profile as leader of Children’s Health Defense, the world’s largest anti-vaccine organization which led the crusade against COVID-19 vaccination in the pandemic, now installed atop the US health system. 

In recent months, Kennedy has overhauled US vaccine schedule requirements, claimed circumcision causes autism, and eliminated federal funding for COVID vaccines for uninsured children and pregnant women.

Google health HQ

Against that landscape, the social media platforms operated by tech companies like Google, Meta and others, are playing an outsize role in health information – and thus facing an increasingly heavy burden of responsibility as well.  

“Two hundred billion health queries are made on YouTube annually,” Google’s Bahrel noted during the panel. Across Google’s search engine—which handles approximately 90% of all search queries globally—over one billion health-related searches occur every day, translating to more than 365 billion annually, she said.

Three out of four Americans, Bahrel added, begin their “health journey” with an internet search.

Google and YouTube have implemented systems to elevate “trusted voices,” requiring healthcare professionals to show proof of licensure to be featured in prominent health information sections. 

The companies rank content using what Bahrel described as “expertise, experience, authority, and trust” metrics, and now employ AI-powered overviews to provide summarized answers alongside traditional search results.

“We want to flood the system with high-quality information,” Bahrel said, describing Google’s approach.

Yet the architecture of these platforms, and the massive flow of exchange, means misinformation is always nearby, often driven by emotional testimonials or shocking statistics that draw users’ attention but lack the evidence base of peer-reviewed scientific studies and authoritative sources.

“I think that approach is very good, but in order to make it more useful to our communities, I would like a [social media] system like [Google’s] that to be endorsed by WHO and national health authorities around the world,” Phumaphi said, voicing a concern shared by many public health professionals.

The disconnect between information availability and actual reach from validated sources remains a major challenge for the health world. The World Health Organization, for instance, uploads multiple videos weekly that garner fewer than 20 views on Youtube.

Just last month, a new United Nations report found that UN reports are not widely read, showing the challenge of communicating complex and accurate information continues to be a major sticking point beyond the health world. 

“Many people are not influenced by WHO, they are influenced by what they see,” Phumaphi observed. In Africa, she noted, traditional and religious leaders also continue to serve as “influencers” – and their views are often far more powerful than international health organizations.

The problem extends beyond misinformation to what Bahrel termed being “misinformed”—people lacking complete information to make good decisions about their health. Information, the panelists agreed, has become a social determinant of health itself—as critical as access to food, clean water, or healthcare professionals.

“There’s also a language barrier between scientists and health experts and normal people,” one audience member noted during the Q&A. “A fundamental communications problem.”

Looking ahead

As the podcast enters its fifth season, Aslanyan is pushing toward what he describes as more “provocative” territory. He envisions creating space for global health opinion-makers to debate contentious issues the field typically avoids. Like a political talk show, but focused on policy questions that shape billions of lives, he said.

He envisions seeing “more of a consistent sort of episodes and places where very neutral, experienced global health opinion makers can discuss global health issues together,” Aslanyan explained. The difficulty, he acknowledged, will be maintaining neutrality while hosting a platform that can provide space for the respectful exchange of different views.

How the podcast can thread that needle remains to be seen. But in a field increasingly dominated by silos, polarization, and platform power, the journey of Global Health Matters will continue to add value to viewers in the global health domain.

“We go through either sanitized kind of things to sometimes extreme, polarized stories,” Aslanyan said. “But we should have a neutral platform. I hope—well, it’s my dream.”