Intended for healthcare professionals

Feature Review of the Decade

Wins, losses, and draws in global health in past 10 years

BMJ 2019; 367 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l7025 (Published 30 December 2019) Cite this as: BMJ 2019;367:l7025
  1. Sophie Arie, freelance journalist
  1. London, UK
  1. sophiearie{at}fmail.co.uk

Sophie Arie highlights five challenges and breakthroughs that defined the decade

Much has happened in the past 10 years. There’s a new international interest in the value of primary care in rich and poor countries, and the universal health coverage movement is growing. Both are key to achieving the United Nations’ 2030 sustainable development goals, set in 2015. New vaccines were introduced, at the same time that the antivaccination movement’s activities led to a return of vaccine preventable illnesses such as measles. And mental illnesses and the effects on health of climate change made it onto the global health agenda.

Ebola

For decades outbreaks of Ebola, a haemorrhagic fever virus that spreads through contact with bodily fluids, were relatively small, killing scores or at most hundreds of people, mostly in Africa. Then in 2014 Ebola jumped to a whole new level. It emerged for the first time in West Africa and spread rapidly across three countries, killing more than 11 000 people. The disease caused chaos on the ground and fears of a global epidemic before it was brought under control. The crisis exposed the weakness of the health systems in some of the world’s poorest countries,1 and brought attention to the World Health Organization’s “egregious failure”—as …

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