[Blog post] Working as partners to save lives
As I was writing my new book, my granddaughter of 6 asked me what I was up to. I am writing my book, I said. What is it on? She asked. On what grandpa thinks is most important. Do you know what grandpa thinks is most important? That the children may live, she replied with a big smile.
She is so right, and that is also the common goal behind the efforts of the partners working together in the GAVI Alliance: That the children may live.
[Blog post] A triumph for vaccine advocacy by pediatricians!
A mother cares for her baby, suffering from severe diarrhea, at the gastroenteritis ward in Dar-es-Salaam’s Muhimbili hospital.
As a pediatrician in Tanzania, my days are spent making individual children healthy and working to save their lives. But today, I am celebrating my contribution to an effort that will save millions of children’s lives – more than I could treat in an entire lifetime!
[Blog post] Vaccines bring hope to Tanzania's children
Over the past few weeks excitement has been building for the upcoming GAVI Partners Forum that took place in Tanzania.
[Blog post] CHWs generate local buy-in for health interventions in Zambia
A community meeting to receive health messages from a CHW.
Community-level perception of a public health intervention is tantamount to the success or failure of its uptake. Programs generated in the West can often be perceived as irrelevant, culturally removed, or unimportant by the local population. Local buy-in is critical and, as development professionals have learned again and again, without it projects fail.
[Blog post] An interview with Nicole Bauers: Enteric vaccine enthusiast and fighting champion
The brilliant scientists of PATH’s Enteric Vaccine Initiative (EVI) conduct clinical trials for vaccine candidates against bacterial forms of diarrheal disease. Next month, they will launch a trial for a Shigella vaccine in Bangladesh.
[Blog post] World Water Day 2013: Making Cooperation and Integration Key Priorities for Development Policy
This past Friday was World Water Day and an opportunity to celebrate the excellent work being doing to promote water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in the developing world. The UK has played a leading role in making WASH a priority for international development funding and the Government’s commitment to doubling the number of people reached by WASH by 2015 sets an ambitious target for us, and other developed nations, to follow.
[Blog post] Mind the GAPPD—A pivotal new resource offers global and local strategies to overcome leading child killers
This week, we celebrate integration. Though it is intrinsically at the heart of what we and our partners do in addressing myriad global health challenges through thoughtful, efficient strategies, today integration is particularly at the fore. For the very first time, there is a global plan to simultaneously take on the two diseases killing more than 2 million young children each year: pneumonia and diarrhea.
[Blog post] Turning an Action Plan into Actual Impact
We can prevent 95% of deaths from diarrhea and 65% of deaths from pneumonia by scaling up cost-effective interventions. How cool is that? That was the bottom line from US AID’s briefing about the Integrated Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia and Diarrhoea (GAPPD). Speaking at the event, Samira Aboubaker of the World Health Organization (WHO) invoked US President Obama’s campaign slogan, “yes, we can.”
[Blog post] Investing in the future of child survival: A pneumonia perspective
Dr. Mark Alderson is the director of the pneumococcal vaccine project at PATH. Since 2006, his team has been advancing the development of vaccines tailor-made to protect the world’s poorest children from pneumonia—a disease that, together with diarrhea, claims more than two million lives each year. We sat down with him to get insights into strategies that could be child survival game-changers for the future.