Wellcome Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the African Academy of Sciences have joined together in a new initiative to make clinical practice guidelines more efficient and adaptable for clinical trials that require less stringent approaches, such as those that take place during infectious disease outbreaks. Additionally, by applying a more flexible approach towards the application of these guidelines, the initiative also hopes to make them “future proof,” or able to better incorporate new technologies. Continue reading ->

Image Credits: Wellcome Trust .

An innovative five-year agreement between the Australian government and pharmaceutical companies, involving a lump sum payment of about US$ 766 million for an unlimited five-year supply of the most advanced Hepatitis C (HCV) drugs, has reduced the per-patient costs of these cutting-edge treatments by roughly 85%, according to a study today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Continue reading ->

Image Credits: hepatitisc.org.au.

The World Health Organization and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have partnered to develop the first-ever international standard for “safe listening” devices, including smartphones and audio players, to raise awareness and to prevent sound-induced hearing loss. Over 1 billion teenagers and young adults are at risk of hearing loss around the world due to unsafe levels of sound, according to the WHO. Continue reading ->

Image Credits: WHO-ITU.

NEW DELHI, India — Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has been an extraordinarily successful financing instrument in global health. It says it has saved 27 million lives as of the end of 2017 and reduced the number of deaths caused by AIDS, TB and malaria each year by one-third since 2002 in the countries where it invests. Now the Global Fund director has some ideas to increase funding to carry on the fight. Continue reading ->

Image Credits: Global Fund, Patralekha Chatterjee.