Dear HIFA colleagues,
The lead editorial in the current issue of The Lancet looks at infectious disease. Citation, extracts and comment from me below.
CITATION: Infectious diseases in 2025: a year for courage and conviction
The Lancet, 2025, Volume 405, Issue 10473, 97
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)00036-4/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email
“The COVID-19 crisis may have passed, but a harsh lesson remains: the world is woefully unprepared for the next pandemic”, said António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, on the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness, Dec 24, 2024.
May, 2025 is the deadline for WHO Member States to conclude their protracted negotiations on a Pandemic Agreement at the World Health Assembly...
In March, Gavi's 2025 High-Level Pledging Summit will be co-hosted by the EU and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is also expected to launch its eighth replenishment fundraising cycle this year...
2025 is not the time to falter; it is the time to reaffirm commitments to global health and wellbeing, to put into practice the lessons of COVID-19, to strengthen solidarity, and to ensure that the world can confront the health challenges we all face. Making this vision a reality is possible, with enough courage and conviction.
COMMENT (NPW): Our collective failure to confront health challenges is largely due to a dysfunctional global evidence ecosystem - a failure to translate the most basic elements of medical knowledge into policy and practice. The central message of the HIFA global consultation is for WHO to explicitly champion the goal of universal access to reliable, relevant healthcare information, and to convene stakeholders to develop a coherent global strategy to strengthen the global evidence ecosystem.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org
