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I was approached by my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press about preparing a revised second edition of my book The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria. The book was the first volume in the Johns Hopkins Biographies of Disease...

What makes a person healthy? Before 2020, most people in high-income countries would have said: good personal choices and good health insurance. After 2020, people everywhere—rich and poor alike—realize that their own good choices were not enough. Now, the...

Alim, an immigrant from Liberia, was quick to realize why fewer passengers were using his services as an airport-shuttle driver at the Dallas Fort Worth airport. A few weeks earlier, Thomas Duncan, a native of Liberia, had died of Ebola at a hospital in Dallas...

Stigma is all around us – messages communicated about how you don’t fit, don’t belong, or have no value. Mostly though, unless you happen to be the one being stigmatized, it’s pretty much invisible. Think of the discomfort of flying. As a New Zealander who...

The biodiversity crisis is worse than climate change. This was the conclusion of leading international experts, meeting in Paris last week to assess the status of ecosystems. More than 1 million species will be annihilated in the next decades. Plants, insects...

Under the Big Tree: Extraordinary Stories from the Movement to End Neglected Tropical Diseases is a collection of stories about neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), a group of bacterial and parasitic diseases that affect the world’s 1.5 billion poorest people...

One of my most vivid memories from my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Senegal occurred soon after I moved to my assigned village. A group of NGO and government workers arrived to immunize children. Village elites enthusiastically told them to...

1. At the start of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, a maternity hospital was forced to close. As one of the poorest countries in the world, Sierra Leone has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world; approximately 900 women die in childbirth...

With numerous ongoing conflicts and disasters occurring around the world, the work of surgical humanitarians is never ending. To understand the context and prepare to provide surgical care under such conditions, it is essential to know the following: Learn how...

I first became interested in the history of global health while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in a trachoma-eradication campaign in eastern Uganda in the late 1960s. The campaign was well intentioned but poorly designed and implemented. It was sponsored...