Global Health Policy

Our new visiting fellow Andy Sumner has drawn attention to the fact that most of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries, not low-income countries.   As it turns out, most of the world’s unvaccinated one-year olds also live in middle-income countries, specifically the lower middle-income countries. It’s actually been this way for the past decade. Although, on average, vaccination rates are higher in the LMICs than the LICs (86% vs.

Drug resistance finally got its day on Capitol Hill last week when the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee held a hearing on the topic.

Last week, I participated in an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in which U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg announced a remarkable shift in the FDA’s thinking on food and drug import safety. If adequately supported by Congress and translated into concrete action, this change in strategy on food and drug safety could have significant benefits for U.S. and global health and development.

There’s a lot of attention being paid to the counterfeit drug trade at the moment. Former President of France, Jacques Chirac, recently chaired a meeting with West African leaders to discuss how to crack down on counterfeiting. Meanwhile, the Wellcome Trust and the American Pharmaceutical Group held an Opinion Formers' conference on counterfeit medicines (presentations here); the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations produced a brief on the issue; and Roger Bate has continued to draw attention to counterfeits and other drug quality issues in developing countries, including through his book Making a Killing. And this is all on top of the WHO-hosted IMPACT initiative on counterfeits, which started in 2006.