The top 10 global health stories of 2014

This was originally published by Global Health TV on Dec. 22, 2014.

Ebola, the biggest global health story of the year, is one that no one could have predicted when the year dawned almost 12 months ago. It did something that few global health stories do: It entered the consciousness of the global public in an important way. Beyond Ebola, though, there was much to celebrate in 2014.

Ebola: That one word represented not only the biggest global health story of the year, but one of the biggest stories of the year, of any type. As of Dec. 17, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 18,603 cases and 6,915 deaths. Late in the year, incidence was declining in Liberia, slowing in Sierra Leone and “fluctuating” in Guinea. Sierra Leone surpassed Liberia as the country with the most reported cases. As I wrote here on Global Health TV last month, Ebola has made the definitive case for stronger health systems and health workers in developing countries.

New momentum to end preventable child and maternal deaths by 2013

A six-year-old girl in a small village in Nicaragua. Photo: David J. Olson

This originally appeared on Global Health TV on July 22, 2014.

In June 2012, the governments of Ethiopia, India and the U.S., in collaboration with UNICEF, hosted the “Child Survival: Call to Action,” designed to focus the disparate priorities of the global health world into a single, achievable goal of ending preventable child deaths by 2035.

Much progress has been made in the last two decades – the total number of child deaths fell from 12.6 million in 1990 to 6.6 million in 2012. And maternal mortality worldwide dropped by 45% between 1990 and 2013, according to the World Health Organization, from 523,000 deaths in 1990 to 289,000 in 2013.

However, there are still unacceptably high levels of maternal and child mortality, as shown in this terrific infographic, and the status quo will not get us where we need to be — the elimination of preventable child and maternal deaths by 2035.

We are not making particularly good progress towards Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 on child and maternal health, which expire in 2015. Out of the 24 high-priority countries on which the U.S. Agency for International Development focuses, only six countries have achieved MDG 4 (Bangladesh, Malawi, Nepal, Liberia, Tanzania and Ethiopia) and only two have achieved MDG 5 (Rwanda and Nepal).

Kenyans struggle to come to terms with abortion and its impact on maternal health

This was originally published on The Huffington Post on Oct. 17, 2012.
 
NAIROBI, Kenya -- The abortion issue in Kenya is raucous, rancorous and highly emotional and political, just like in the U.S., but there is one major difference: In Kenya, abortion rights have been liberalized in certain cases in a Constitution approved in a public referendum two years ago.

I spent four weeks in Kenya this year working with the Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance, a coalition of six Kenyan organizations committed to improving maternal health, to communicate better to key groups the nature of those changes. I talked to some 40 doctors, gynecologists, nurses, lawyers, government bureaucrats and technocrats and non-governmental workers and journalists. And a few taxi drivers.

The issue of abortion is so sensitive and taboo in Kenya that it almost derailed the constitution-making process. I discovered that even though the debate was heavily covered by the Kenyan media leading up to the August 2010 referendum, there's still a lot of misinformation on what exactly the Constitution changed, or didn't change -- even among health providers. Some think the Constitution legalized abortion on demand. Others think it changed nothing and abortion remains virtually illegal. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.