Greater collaboration needed to reduce global burden of disease

Health researchers should improve their communication with policy makers and align their research more closely to reduce the global burden of disease, participants agreed at a recent meeting in Cairo of the Global Forum for Health Research.

More than 600 researchers from 90 countries attended the meeting, where there was also broad agreement that the processes and products of research should be made more widely available to poor countries and that these countries should be given more support to participate in setting the research agenda, assessing research findings, and putting them into practice.

Views varied about the extent to which research can deal with deep rooted health problems that stem from socioeconomic inequality, and from limited political will to tackle them (in rich as well as poor countries).

Egypt's minister for health and population, Hatem Mostafa El-Gabali, said that research had “only a limited role.” What …