Cholera outbreaks surge worldwide, renewing debates on vaccines
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Welcome to Harvard Public Health Weekly—a newsletter bringing you the best ideas and commentary on public health.
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This week in Harvard Public Health
We’ve reported on the global struggle to contain infectious diseases this week. COVID-19 has consumed our attention and resources for the past three years, but the spread of other deadly diseases didn’t stop. In some cases, they got worse. This week, we’re covering the fight against tuberculosis, the world’s oldest respiratory disease, and cholera, which has erupted across 29 countries in 2022.
Both are diseases that thrive in places with poor infrastructure, overcrowding, and scarce access to medical care. TB killed an estimated 1.6 million people in 2021—the most of any infectious disease aside from COVID-19. Cholera’s toll is less, but it still affects up to 4 million people a year, and up to 143,000 people die from it annually. Both diseases are preventable and treatable. People mostly die because they can’t get medical care.
For more, read my article on how the global drive to end TB by 2035 may be in jeopardy, reported with help from journalist Ritwika Mitra. Then read journalist Simar Bajaj’s in-depth analysis of the halting efforts to contain the now-widespread cholera outbreaks, featuring public health experts around the world.
Elsewhere at HPH…
This week might be a good time to revisit Tarun Gidwani’s essay on living with severe hemophilia in India, a country without easy access to life-saving clotting injections. His moving essay pairs his personal experience of managing unstoppable bleeding without proper care with a searing critique of the global drug trade that prevents treatments for rare diseases from reaching those who need them.
Hemophilia shouldn’t be life-threatening–but in some places, it is. By Tarun Gidwani.
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That essay led me back to Marianne Mollmann’s argument that health care should be considered a universal human right. Many countries around the world fall short of providing universal access to health care, including the U.S.
Health care is a human right–but not in the United States. By Marianne Mollmann.
Around the web…
The New York Times reports that Covax, a global effort to get COVID-19 vaccines to low and middle-income countries, may shut down as demand for shots wanes. -New York Times
Why did flu season start so early this year? -Scientific American
Researchers have linked severe COVID-19 to changes in the brain similar to those seen in old age. -Nature
That’s all this week.
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See you next week,?
Christine
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