Global health knowledge is expanding faster than ever, but so are confusion and inequity over who can access trustworthy information and use it to improve their lives.

In a live recorded discussion at the World Health Summit in Berlin, featured in the latest Global Health Matters podcast, Joy Phumaphi, executive secretary of the Africa Leaders Malaria Alliance, and Monica Bharel, clinical lead for public sector at Google, reflected on how health information has changed and what it will take to make it truly inclusive.

Phumaphi recalled a time when there was effectively one global reference point.

“Everything was recorded … by hand,” she said, and “you only had one source of information. That was the World Health Organization.”

Today, she noted, “there are so many sources of information, and it’s very, very confusing… We have the rogue scientists and the rogue medical practitioners who spread disinformation.”

The danger, she added, is that “the sad thing about both misinformation and disinformation is that is always mixed with a little bit of truth… What it does is that it kills people. You know, people who are not vaccinated during COVID died, and we see children who have not had their measles vaccines dying.”

Bharel brought the discussion down to the level of people living on the margins, drawing on her experience caring for patients experiencing homelessness in Boston. She argued that “information is also a determinant of health,” but many people lack “the infrastructure they have to get information… the phones, the internet access, the computer access.”

Both speakers stressed the need to strengthen trusted channels.

Phumaphi pointed to traditional, religious and social leaders as key messengers, saying health actors “should impart the right information to these… leaders, and even perhaps to the influencers.”

Digitalization and AI, they concluded, can be part of the solution.

Phumaphi called them “a huge opportunity,” saying, “we can reduce poverty, we can reduce ill health… We can bring the disenfranchised into the fold so, but we have to harness this in the right way and make it available to everybody.”

Bharel echoed the urgency: “We can close the gap in health equity and bring in those disenfranchised individuals… we can get people the right information at the right time, at the right level, that they can digest it, and we can do this now.”

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Image Credits: Global Health Matters Podcast.