While the U.S. recently recommitted to supporting the Global Health Security Agenda and extending it to 2024, progress to date is at risk if sufficient funding does not follow these commitments. In October, PATH released a new report titled, “Healthier World, Safer America: A U.S. Government Roadmap for International Action to Prevent the Next Pandemic.” In this episode of Take as Directed, Carolyn Reynolds, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at PATH, discusses the importance of continued U.S. leadership in global health security and the ways in which PATH is working to keep the health security conversation front and center throughout ongoing budget discussions. 
 
Hosted by Steve Morrison. Produced by Alex Bush. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari.

Dr. Bertha K. Madras is a professor of psychobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and was selected as one of six commissioners on the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. The Commission, which was established by President Trump in the spring of this year and chaired by Governor Chris Christie, was charged with studying and combating the scourge of drug addiction, drug abuse, and opioids in the United States. Dr. Madras played a leading role in the Commission’s work, and she calls their final report, which was released in early November, a “blunt force instrument to get agencies as well as states and local governments and humans responsible for [the crisis] to move and change.” In this interview, Dr. Madras discusses with us the key recommendations of the report as well as richly detailing the process in which the report came together and her roles and experiences in that process.
 
Hosted by Steve Morrison. Produced by Alex Bush. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari.

Michael Merson is the Wolfgang Joklik Professor of Global Health and Vice President and Vice Provost for Global Affairs at Duke University. Dr. Merson was the founding director of the Duke Global Health Institute and served in that role from 2006 to 2017. After serving as a medical intern and resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, he worked in the Enteric Diseases Branch at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, GA, and then served as the Chief Epidemiologist at the Cholera Research Laboratory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 1978, he joined the World Health Organization (WHO) as a Medical Officer in the Diarrheal Diseases Control Program. He served as Director of that Program from January 1980 until May 1990. In August 1987, he was also appointed Director of the WHO Acute Respiratory Infections Control Program. In May 1990, he was appointed as Director of the WHO Global Program on AIDS. This Program was operational worldwide and responsible for mobilizing and coordinating the global response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Michael Merson reflects on his career in global health, the evolving role of the WHO over time, and the main recommendations that came out of the National Academies of Science’s, Engineering, and Medicine’s committee on global health and the future of the United States.

Hosted by Sara Allinder. Produced by Cathryn Streifel. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari.

Dr. James W. Galbraith joined the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Emergency Medicine faculty in 2008. In 2011, Dr. Galbraith led the implementation of emergency department (ED) non-targeted, opt-out HIV screening. In the first five years, this HIV screening program has screened over 100,000 individuals and identified over 500 HIV infections, including a significant number of acute HIV infections. Leveraging the infrastructure developed for systematic HIV screening, Dr. Galbraith initiated targeted hepatitis C virus (HCV) screening and linkage to care in the UAB-ED in 2013. We asked him to discuss the findings and implications of his HCV screening program, which include identifying over 3500 previously unrecognized HCV infections with an 11.5 % infection prevalence among previously unaware “baby boomers” and 14% infection prevalence among white individuals born after 1965. This ED-based HCV testing program has prioritized raising HCV awareness and access to cure for a growing epidemic of HCV infection among young persons who inject drugs (PWID). Dr. Galbraith is currently collaborating with state and national stakeholders for the opioid and HCV/HIV syndemic to implement local harm-reduction interventions – including syringe service programs ­ – aimed at averting an outbreak of HIV infection among PWID.

Hosted by Steve Morrison. Produced by Cathryn Streifel. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari.

M.D. Anna Yaffee reflects on the opioid epidemic and her experience serving as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stationed at the Kentucky Department for Public Health. She also discusses the co-occurring epidemics of HIV and hepatitis C. Anna Yaffee is currently on faculty at Emory University and Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, and serves as emergency medicine liaison for the Serious Communicable Diseases Unit at Emory University Hospital.

Hosted by Steve Morrison. Produced by Cathryn Streifel. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari.
 

Healthcare and humanitarian workers are increasingly in the crosshairs as hospitals and aid centers have become part of the battlefield in today’s wars. So far, there has been little to stop the profound surge of violence seen across several open-ended conflicts which has claimed thousands of lives, destroyed health systems, triggered mass displacement and state collapse, and exposed the crisis facing the norms of international humanitarian law contained in the Geneva Conventions. The New Barbarianism is a CSIS Global Health Policy Center original feature documentary (58 minutes) that examines the crisis, its causes, the limited international response and possible ways forward through over 30 on-camera interviews and original footage obtained from inside Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. Steve Morrison, Justin Kenny, and Paul Franz discuss the process of developing the documentary. Justin Kenny is the Owner of Small Footprint Films, a news and documentary production company. He is an occasional contributor to the PBS NewsHour. From 2012-2015, he was the NewsHour's foreign editor. Paul Franz is Andreas C. Dracopoulos Chair in Creativity and Innovation at CSIS. He is a former Pulitzer Center fellow and TIME video journalist. The full documentary can be viewed at: https://www.csis.org/features/new-barbarianism.

Hosted by Steve Morrison. Produced by Cathryn Streifel. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari.

Jeff Sturchio is President and CEO of Rabin Martin, a strategic management firm based in New York City. Jeff previously served as Vice President of Corporate Responsibility at Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ USA, and President of The Merck Company Foundation, where he was responsible for major public-private partnerships, including the Mectizan Donation Program and the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships in Botswana. He has also served as Chairman of the Corporate Council on Africa and President and CEO of the Global Health Council. We asked him to reflect on his experience at Merck, the linkages between health and wealth, and the role of the private sector in advancing global health. 

Hosted by Steve Morrison. Produced by Cathryn Streifel. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari.

Gregg Alton is Executive Vice President of Corporate and Medical Affairs at Gilead Sciences, Inc. We asked him to share his reflections on Gilead’s role in bringing antiretroviral therapies to low-income countries and the importance of U.S. leadership. 

Hosted by Steve Morrison. Produced by Cathryn Streifel. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari.

This episode features a discussion with Dr. Tom Frieden about his new initiative, Resolve to Save Lives. Dr. Frieden is President and Chief Executive Officer of Resolve, a $225 million, 5-year initiative housed at Vital Strategies, a non-profit global health organization working toward the vision that all people are protected by a strong public health system. The Resolve initiative aims to save millions of lives from cardiovascular disease and make the world safer from epidemics.  Resolve is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Frieden was Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2009 to 2017, and led the CDC work that helped end the Ebola epidemic. Over the course of his career, he controlled the largest outbreak of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis ever to occur in the United States, helped establish the largest tuberculosis control program in the world in India, and directed efforts on several public health issues that led to a rapid increase in life expectancy in New York City.

Hosted by Steve Morrison. Produced by Cathryn Streifel. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari.

On June 8, the World Health Organization reported an outbreak of vaccine-related polio cases in war-torn Syria. As of August 1, 30 total cases of vaccine-derived polio virus had been reported, with 29 of the cases concentrated in the Deir-al-Zour governorate. Deir-al-Zour, one of the hardest hit regions of the Syrian civil war, has been largely cut off from outside health and humanitarian organizations since mid-2014, when ISIS gained control of nearly the entire area from Syrian rebel forces. Since that time, international groups have only been able to conduct sporadic and partial vaccination campaigns within the governorate, with the most recent occurring in March and April earlier this year. Two response campaigns have been planned for the current outbreak in both the Deir-al-Zour and Raqqa governorates. The first started on July 22, targeting 328,000 children under the age of five in Deir-al-Zour and 120,000 children in Raqqa. Dr. John Vertefeuille, Polio Eradication Branch Chief and Incident Manager in the Global Immunization Division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discusses the outbreak, the response effort, and what this means for the region moving forward. John has a long and distinguished history with the CDC, serving as country director in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Haiti before assuming his current role.

Hosted by Steve Morrison. Produced by Cathryn Streifel. Edited by Ribka Gemilangsari