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Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity
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Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity
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Posts:February 8, 2010Daddy Healthbucks: How Will the Gates Foundation Leverage the New $10 Billion for Vaccines and Immunization?By Ruth Levine
8 Comments »December 22, 2009Girls Count, So Why Don’t We Count Girls?By Ruth Levine
Proof of successful programs is integral to convincing advocates, policy-makers and the public to increase investments in programs that benefit adolescent girls, and report author Cynthia Lloyd has made a valiant effort to provide just that. Read More… 1 Comment »December 18, 2009Dispute over Pneumococcal Vaccine Initiative: A ResponseBy Ruth LevineAn article by Ann Danaiya Usher in the December 5 edition of the Lancet focuses on aspects of the Advance Market Commitment pilot for pneumococcal vaccine that appear to be causing confusion. The article is similar to one published by the author in Development Today, a publication that has issued a series of negative (or at least skeptical) pieces about the AMC over the past few years. In particular, the article highlights the questions of whether the price offered for the first doses sold under the AMC subsidy program matters for the eventual health benefits anticipated from the AMC. The short answer is that it doesn’t. Read More… 2 Comments »December 14, 2009Johns Hopkins Makes a New Commitment to Vaccine AccessBy Ruth LevineLet’s think about what decisionmakers in Ministries of Health need to know to make informed choices about what vaccines to introduce into their immunization programs, when and how. The list is long: disease burden, vaccine efficacy, costs and benefits of different introduction strategies (general or high-risk populations? routine or campaign?), financing approaches and more. And the lack of that information, available in a credible and timely way, is one of the barriers to uptake of newer vaccines. Read More… 1 Comment »November 3, 2009Young People’s Health: Filling in the BlanksBy Ruth LevineThis is a joint post with Miriam Temin. When the Lancet published “Global patterns of mortality in young people: a systematic analysis of population health data” by George Patton et al., it brought into the public domain new data to tell an important story: adolescent boys and girls are at risk during this transitional life phase, and those risks have major implications for the health and well-being of this and the next generation. The article highlights just how much boys’ and girls’ lives diverge with adolescence and how gender fundamentally affects health. Traffic accidents cause 14 percent of deaths among males 10-24 years old deaths but only 5 percent of female deaths; violence causes 12 percent of male deaths but doesn’t even feature in the “top ten” for females. For girls and young women, the major causes of death are maternal factors, at 15 percent. Read More… 3 Comments »October 26, 2009Getting Down to Business in Global Health OR The Brain in Spain Works Mainly on Supply Chains (I think we’ve got it!)By Ruth LevineWhen business expertise combines with an opportunity to contribute to a social mission, the results can be remarkable. Let me share one powerful example. In mid-2006, as the Global Health Forecasting Working Group was underway, my co-chair Neelam Sekhri and I were feeling stuck. With working group members from a range of global health organizations, who brought perspectives from industry and international public health, we had been able to describe the magnitude of the challenge of forecasting the demand for global health products, particularly new ones like the rotavirus vaccine and artimesenin-based anti-malarials. We’d also developed a good understanding of how inadequate information about effective demand – how much money would be available to buy what, and at what pace countries would be likely to introduce – constrained the ability of firms to make the business case for investment in manufacturing capacity, let alone new R&D. What we were missing, though, was the deeper understanding about why the demand forecasting problem persisted, despite reasonably wide recognition that it caused shortfalls in supply, wasted of products, time and money. It’s often in answering the question, “So why hasn’t someone solved that yet?” that you discover the most interesting new ways to approach a problem. Read More… 3 Comments »August 24, 2009Reflections on NYT Magazine Special Issue on Gender: Three Questions to Guide the New CrusadeBy Ruth LevineThis is a joint post with Molly Kinder and originally appeared on the Global Development: Views from the Center blog. This week The New York Times Magazine is dedicated to a single theme: women. The main attraction of this special issue is a stirring essay by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who write passionately about the great moral, national security and economic development imperatives of investing in the world’s women and girls. The “women’s crusade” they call for seems already to have begun. A few pages beyond, an interview with Secretary Clinton heralds the start of a “new gender agenda” at the highest reaches of the U.S. foreign policy. Also noted is the growing philanthropic attention to the cause of women and girls – a trend that will be further evidenced next month, when the issue headlines at the annual (Bill) Clinton Global Initiative meetings in NYC. Read More… 4 Comments » |
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