09Feb 2018 by ib41@duke.edu

Penny-wise, pandemic-foolish

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog
This blog was originally published as an editorial in various newspapers including the Times Union on February 8, 2018 and the original version can be found here. A few days ago, I joined several thousand global health practitioners, researchers, activists and policymakers at a conference in Bangkok titled "Making the World Safe from the Threats of Emerging Infectious Diseases."  The audience was abuzz about a new study by a team of economists — including former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers — that shows the staggering economic costs of a future pandemic. They estimate the annual losses from a moderate to severe pandemic would be about $500 billion, or 0.6 percent of global income. That's similar to the annual costs of global warming, double the cost of natural disasters and five…
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23Jun 2017 by ib41@duke.edu

Pandemics and the poor

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog
This blog was originally published as part of the Future Development blog series of the Brookings Institution on June 19, 2017 and the original version can be found here. When epidemics or pandemics hit, they usually hit the poor first and worst. We have known this for a while. The German pathologist Rudolf Virchow described this link between poverty and vulnerability to outbreaks in his 1848 study of a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia: For there can now no longer be any doubt that such an epidemic dissemination of typhus had only been possible under the wretched conditions of life that poverty and lack of culture had created in Upper Silesia. What we have not known, until recently, is how best to help the poor protect themselves from pandemics. To…
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24Feb 2017 by ib41@duke.edu

Our new report on the role of the U.S. government in supporting product development for global health

Policy Blog
Despite recent progress in global health, poor populations in low- and middle-income countries continue to suffer and die disproportionately from poverty related and neglected diseases (PRNDs). For many of these diseases, new medicines, vaccines, and diagnostic tests are urgently needed. However, the lack of market incentives is a major barrier to research and development (R&D) for such health technologies. Governments and philanthropic foundations have helped to address this gap by funding product development for PRNDs. In a new study that we published yesterday, we focused on one important government funder of such product development: the United States government. Our study, called “Strengthening the United States Government’s Role in Product Development for Global Health,” conducted in collaboration with other colleagues in the Duke Global Health Institute and at the Duke Margolis…
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01Dec 2016 by Joy Stutts

Welcome to the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health

Policy Blog
Today we are excited to launch the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health, based in the Duke Global Health Institute, a new kind of policy lab that will apply design thinking principles to address critical challenges in financing and delivering global health.So what are these challenges, and what do we mean by design thinking principles? The financing and delivery challenges that the Center will address are related to three critical gaps: A gap in donor financing of crucial global public goods for health and other “global functions.” Donor financing for health has flat-lined in recent years and too little of it has been directed at global public goods for health—such as developing new medicines for neglected diseases of poverty—and at other “global functions,” such as preparing for pandemics. A…
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