Health Policy and Initiatives

In advance of World Cancer Day, speakers discuss developments in cancer treatment and prevention, and the prospects for closing the global cancer divide. 

Archbishop Albert Chama, Rebecca Vander Meulen, Robert W. Radtke, and Charles K. Robertson discuss mobilizing Anglican communities toward eliminating malaria. 

CFR Senior Fellow Thomas J. Bollyky discusses his new book, Plagues and the Paradox of Progress: Why the World Is Getting Healthier in Worrisome Ways.

Pollution kills nine million people each year and sickens many more, mostly in poorer nations. The global health effects of climate change are less well quantified, but also increasing with lower-income countries again bearing the brunt of greater food insecurity, increased rates of chronic respiratory illnesses, and shifts in malarial zones. CFR’s Global Health, Economics, and Development Roundtable Series held a discussion on the global health nexus between climate change and pollution and how a more coherent approach to these issues can advance progress at a time when some policymakers, especially in the United States, are unmoved by the environmental, health, and economic consequences expected in the coming decades. The featured speaker for this discussion was Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, dean for global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and recent co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health.

Girls and women make up more than half of the 36.7 million people living with HIV globally. Research shows that gender inequalities, including gender-based violence, exacerbate girls’ and women’s vul…

Nearly one year has elapsed since the seventieth World Health Assembly elected Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as the new director-general of the World Health Organization. This meeting of CFR's Global Health Governance Roundtable Series examined the agenda of the seventy-first World Health Assembly, which took place during May 21-26, and provided an overview of the World Health Organization’s performance under Tedros’s leadership. The featured speakers for this discussion were Ariel Pablos-Méndez, professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and Werner Obermeyer, deputy executive director of the World Health Organization Office at the United Nations.

Nearly forty years ago, Jon Rohde wrote a paper that argued that the “road to health has shortcuts,” advocating a strategy of expanded childhood immunization that helped inspire the UNICEF and World Health Organization campaign to improve child survival. In recent years, the field of global health has been moving away from donor-funded international initiatives on individual diseases, and toward mostly domestically-financed investments in universal healthcare, quality health systems, and achieving health for all. The role of philanthropy in this transition remains a work in progress. This meeting of CFR's Global Health, Economics, and Development Roundtable Series held a discussion of that role and whether technology-driven, community-focused initiatives might still offer shortcuts on the long road to better health. The featured speaker for this discussion was Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation.

Panelists discuss the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic as we near its centennial and how this historic outbreak informs our responses to global health emergencies today.

Speakers discuss the growing opioid epidemic in cities across the United States, the influx of inexpensive heroin and potent synthetics such as fentanyl, and the lessons the United States can learn from other countries in curbing the deadly crisis.