Posts Tagged ‘Developing world health’

Last week our team went to the filming of the BBC World Health Debate - ‘How to defeat disease and save millions of lives’.  The debate will be the final episode in the BBC World News Survival series which, as you’ve seen before on this blog is a documentary series on developing world health diseases and issues.  The panel of the debate included Dr Mukesh Kapila from the Red Cross, Clare Short, former UK Secretary of State for International Development, Dr Francisco Songane, Director of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health at the WHO and former Minister of Health for Mozambique, Tachi Yamada from the Gates Foundation and Dr Julian Lob-Levyt from GAVI.

Among the questions addressed in the debate, the panel was asked: What would you do with $10 billion to fix global health?  To find out what they said, you’ll have to watch the broadcast on 29 November on BBC World News (or online at bbcworldnews.survival.tv) but what was really interesting was that they couldn’t come to any consensus.  One member of the panel commented that for him, this wasn’t an academic question, and it got me to thinking about how do we best divide resources to ensure optimal health outcomes?  I for one am intrigued by diagonal approaches, but, perhaps it is time to put this question to the people affected by these diseases and issues and engage them on what they consider to be the priorities.