The Courage to Change the Rules: A Proposal for an Essential Health R&D Treaty

The medical needs of many of the world's population go unmet. A new treaty on essential health R&D could provide a binding framework to redirect today's scientific expertise to priority need

Clinical Officer Preparing Sodium Stibogluconate Solution Injection for a Patient with Visceral Leishmaniasis

<div><p>Sodium stibogluconate solution is administered by intramuscular injection for 30 days. The injection is painful and can cause toxic reactions. Developed in 1934, resistance of up to 65% has been documented in India. Around 50,000 people die from visceral leishmaniasis each year. New, effective drugs and diagnostics are urgently needed.</p> <p>(Photograph: Copyright Espen Rasmussen/MSF, Somalia, 2004)</p></div

Detection of African Sleeping Sickness by Lumbar Puncture

<div><p>Lumbar puncture in patients with African sleeping sickness can be a painful and potentially dangerous maneuver that is the only way to determine if the disease has progressed to the second stage. New diagnostic tools are urgently needed, as are new treatments; current medicines are old, toxic, difficult to use, and their production is not guaranteed. Around 60,000 people die from Afican sleeping sickness every year.</p> <p>(Photograph: copyright Serge Sibert/MSF, Uganda, 1998.)</p></div

Digitalization: The new extraterritorial challenge to extraterritorial obligations

More than ever, digitalization is all around us. For years, carried away by the fascination with digital gadgets and technologies, we have been allured to blindly enter a world of sophisticated machines without taking into consideration where this journey would take us and how it would revolutionize our existence – to the extent of taking over our human ability to control life. In such unaware mood, we have ceded much of our decision-making power to sophisticated invisible digital systems that have penetrated our daily lives. Only in recent months, since the outburst of COVID-19 has halted our ordinary lives, have we been able to get a better sense of the reality of transformation we have been in for some time. The internet has eased lockdown life for millions, digitalization and the web have been the critical unifying forces enabling work from home, school through online classrooms, social activities and mutual support and solidarity at a healthy distance. Policymakers have managed the unprecedented situation, and their international negotiations, through virtual meetings

Philosophy of Chinese medicine I

Moderators: KHO Tungyi (Chinese University of Hong Kong, China) Ephraim FERREIRA MEDEIROS (Brazil) Speaker (90 mins): LEE Kee Kok (University of Manchester, UK) Discussant (10 mins): Nicoletta DENTICO (Development Journal, Italy