A podcast interview with Professor Lesley Regan, President of the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

In this podcast I chat with Lesley about what brought her into medicine and women’s health, her thoughts on women in leadership and breaking through the glass ceiling, and her fight to ensure all women receive their reproductive rights and safer childbirth.

Before the interview I talk briefly about the current Ebola outbreak in the Congo and mention a Figure showing its geographical spread. Here it is up to the first week of July 2019.

My latest podcast conversation with David Nabarro about food systems, food company regulation and the challenges for 2.5 billion people who rely upon small farming for their livelihoods.

You might like to look at some recent reports which I refe

In which I joined Ed and Geoff, along with Julia Unwin and Dr Agnelo Fernandes, to chat about humanity, kindness and sympathy groups in public services.

My thoughts on Cannabis drawn from a new review by Michael Bloomfield and colleagues:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163725818301906?via%3Dihub

And two interviews with Rajani Ved (Advisor, Community Processes and Primary Health Care, at the National Health Systems Resource Center, which provides technical support to the Government of India’s National Health Mission) and Tanya Doherty (professor, South African Medical Research Council) about health systems for women and children in low income settings linked to papers in the recent BMJ Series, especially one that they both authored on

https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k2823

News Update Topics

Yemen conflict; Spain’s donation to UNRWA; Leptospirosis in India, UK child poverty; the WHO Global Exercise Report

Interviews on the latest BMJ Series on the WHO UNICEF Strategic Review of Child Health

https://www.bmj.com/child-health

1. Mike Merson

Wolfgang Joklik Professor of Global Health and Vice President and Vice Provost for Global Affairs at Duke University. He joined the Duke faculty in November 2006 as the founding director of the Duke Global Health Institute and served in that role through 2017. In addition, Dr. Merson was Vice Chancellor for Duke-National University of Singapore (NUS) Affairs until 2017.

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 AIDS pandemic.

2. Theresa Diaz

Public health physician, trained at Columbia University, Coordinator Epidemiology and Monitoring and Evaluation Team, MCA, WHO. Formerly with CDC Atlanta and UNICEF.

David Sanders, an internationally renowned paediatrician and public health researcher, has spent fifty years involved in struggles for health in Zimbabwe, the UK and South Africa. David has always been passionate about participatory socialist democracy as a way to improve health and reduce inequality. In this wide-ranging one hour interview he offers analysis of the causes of the causes of inequality and poor health, and guidance to young social and health activists about how to tackle contemporary challenges for health, the environment, gender and inequality.

In the UK, as a political emigre from Rhodesia, he trained in paediatrics and became a Founder member of the Medical Association against Private Practice. At St Thomas’s hospital in London he learnt much “about the British Class system”. At the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine he became an advocate for the Alma Ata Declaration on primary health care and was influenced by the writings of the Marxist doctor Vicente Navarro.

Returning to Zimbabwe for twelve years, 1980-1992, he was active for Zapu and Zanu PF, took a post as health adviser for Oxfam, and then as lecturer in the medical school. Over time he became disillusioned with the Mugabe regime, especially after the Matabeleland massacres.

Since 1992, through his pioneering work at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, and in the People’s Health Movement, he has been a leading critic of structural adjustment, neoliberal economics and the causes of social and economic inequality which underpin poor health. His research and books have highlighted the links between social and political injustice as the root cause of maternal and child ill-health.

One lesser known fact about David is that he is a passionate and expert fly fisherman. For many years he went fly-fishing in the UK with the jazz singer, author and raconteur, George Melly.

My conversation with Patralekha Chatterjee, international journalist and author, about politics, health, diet, the environment, caste, cultural diversity and the status of women in India.

Also a round-up of news from the World Health Assembly, about the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and on the Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala, India.

Conversations with WHO Director of Ageing John Beard and Scarlet McNally, orthopaedic surgeon on healthy ageing, integrated care for older people,  and how to keep people active and engaged.

John Beard, Director of the Department of Ageing and Life Course at the World Health Organization.

The new WHO integrated care for older people (iCOPE) guidelines can be found here.

http://www.who.int/ageing/health-systems/icope/en/

(from left to right: Alyssa Parpia, Emma Ryan, Hanna Erlich, Kayoko Shioda).

Yale women graduate students discuss their attitudes to climate change, emerging student activism, nationalism, feminism, gun control, drug use, the feckless baby boomer generation, and reasons to be optimistic or depressed about the world.