The Ebola crisis in West Africa might have preyed on weak health systems but just strengthening them – although necessary – is not the magic bullet to fixing the next epidemic. “We have to be very careful when we say that a better health system is the answer,” said Prof. Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropic...

In Uganda, a compulsory one-year internship placement at the end of five long years of medical school is long awaited. The internship placement at a hospital offers recent medical graduates an opportunity to practice the skills acquired over the five years education under supervision of a senior doctor. This compulsory placement is to groom the ...

  It has been said before, and it appears to have been proven once again this week: social media can be used for the good, the bad and the ugly. In these times of increasing polarization and xenophobia, we’ve seen plenty of the latter (social media often seem to further increase polarization, rather than boost empathy for the downtrodden), but...

Earlier this week, forty-seven WHO member states in the African Region unanimously adopted a new malaria framework with specific actions to reach ‘an African Region free of malaria’ by 2030. In a meeting held in Addis Ababa on the 21st of August, they came up with a framework to guide member countries towards attaining targets of the Global ...

Every Friday, Kristof Decoster, the editor of the International Health Policies (IHP)  newsletter sends it out to ardent readers from all over the world including those in Africa. The newsletter is an initiative of the Health policy unit at the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp, Belgium and has been in existence since 2009. It is ...

The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio (“Rio 2016”) are the first Olympic Games taking place in Latin America since 1968 in Mexico (not exactly a resounding success, we recall); it’s also the first time such an event is held in South America. People around the world are eagerly following the games on TV and social media, and Latin Americans are n...

Like many others, I enjoyed Sophie Harman’s recent paper on the legitimacy of the Gates foundation in global health governance (GHG). I’m not sure I understood everything (I’m one of these people who see their IQ decrease by at least 1 % with every year that passes, unfortunately), so I won’t attempt a review of the paper here. I hope So...

Over a year ago, I suffered from an unusual fever with severe weight loss. Fifteen days into the fever, desperately despondent and confused about the cause of my ailment, being a medical doctor myself I realised that this was not just any ordinary infection. I consulted a general physician in town and was recommended a thyroid profile test based...

On a warm, sunny Sunday morning I arrived in Antwerp, the second biggest city after Brussels in Belgium and my home to be for the next two months. More specifically, my new “home” is the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM). Coincidentally, I arrived on the 31st of July, and Belgium, a country in Europe, not a city as US presidential nominee...