The biggest global health stories of 2015, and one untold story

A billboard warning about Ebola in Bamako, Mali.

This was originally published on Global Health TV on December 17, 2015

There seemed to be a lot of good global health news in 2015, especially when compared to 2014, when Ebola was ravaging West Africa and scaring the rest of the world. In the last 12 months, Ebola has mostly passed, progress was made against malaria and AIDS and the climate deal in Paris raised hopes that less climate change could improve global health.  Here are what I consider some of the top global health stories of the year, not necessarily in order of priority:

Ebola on the Decline: A year ago, Ebola was raging. As of Dec. 16, there have been 11,315 deaths and 28,640 cases of Ebola. But Ebola has not disappeared entirely. It re-emerged in Liberia after having earlier been declared Ebola-free. Dr. David Nabarro, the UN special envoy on Ebola, said that he expects transmission in Guinea to finish before the end of 2015 and in Liberia in early 2016. Here’s an update on Ebola in an interview with Dr. Nabarro.

Crisis in Horn of Africa is not over; how can we prevent another one in future?

This article was originally published in The Huffington Post on Oct. 4, 2011.
 
The last time the Horn of Africa was hit by a famine as severe as the current one, it was 1985 and I was just finishing two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. My wife and I, moved by the horrific images coming out of Ethiopia, volunteered to work at a feeding camp with World Vision. But the U.S. relief organization was besieged with similar offers, and politely turned us down. Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones convinced a plethora of pop stars to record "We Are the World." That humanitarian disaster somehow became firmly entrenched in the hearts and minds of people around the world.

The current drought and famine is worse than the one in 1985 -- some say it is the worst in 60 years and affects more than 12 million people, most of them women and children -- but seems to be attracting a fraction of the world's attention, despite the proliferation of social media and social networks.

By some estimates, 300,000 children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and are likely to die at a very high rate and very quickly, according to Executive Director Lisa Meadowcroft of AMREF USA, the U.S. affiliate of the African Medical and Relief Foundation (AMREF) based in Nairobi, who just came back from a trip to the Horn of Africa.