Spring 2010
Tracking Goals
The word implies an achieved and desired outcome, more specifically, the end of a challenge. In global health, our goal is to improve the lives of people around the world primarily by reducing the burden of disease.
The Millennium Development Goals, ICPD, Alma Ata, and other targets have guided much of the work in our community in recent years. While we are nowhere close to reaching them, we carry lessons – the need for vaccines, better delivery systems, newer, less expensive, more portable technologies – that accelerate progress. In addressing the goals, we gain better tools and greater wisdom toward achieving them.
As Linda Fried and Lynn Freedman of the Mailman School of Public Health allude to in their article, goals keep us on track. They enable resources to be mobilized amid decreases in funding and emerging disease threats. But it begs the question, are we finding sustainable solutions?
Robin Gorna of the International AIDS Society reflects in her article, it’s not the goals that are the problem. Rather, it is a lack of commitment to following through with what needs to be done in order to achieve them. But we all know that lip service is not enough. Resources – money, people, knowledge – have to be invested for real gains to be made.
And then there is smallpox eradication – the gold standard in public health achievements. As Dr. D.A. Henderson shows, through ingenuity and plain stubbornness, it has been eradicated. To think that with a single mindset in the late 1960s, and with an international staff that never numbered more than 150 in the field, the World Health Organization provided the framework within which all countries could constructively work, even during the days of the Cold War.
Indeed, there are still many lessons to be learned, and many challenges to be conquered.
The Editors
Features
Is Universal Access for HIV a Realistic Goal?
From my perspective, the problem is not over-promising. It's under-achieving
Chasing goals rather than solving problems?
This is a critical time to be cognizant of the broad changes that are in process
The Death of a Disease
In 1967, 43 countries experienced more than 10 million cases and 2 million deaths
NGOs Seek Seat at Table
With Big $ Behind Them, NGOs Want Haitian Partnership
From the Ground Up
Rebuilding Haiti's Health Structure
A New Angle on Pediatric HIV/AIDS in Swaziland
This child's parents are HIV-positive, and she is HIV-negative
Achieving Maternal Health
MDG 5: Getting Further, Faster
Online Exclusives
Hot Escapes
Tina Flores Explores the Gentile Side of Santo Domingo
Dim Sum
A collection of book reviews, music picks and other cultural forays
Going Viral
What's the buzz on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other places online
Field Notes
Cuban-Trained Doctors in Haiti for the Long Haul
Dominican Republic
Tina Flores Explores the Gentile Side of Santo Domingo
