Imran Manji is a Clinical Pharmacist at USAID-AMPATH and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy. Based in Eldoret, Kenya, he graduated from the University of Nairobi in 2006 and joined the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, one of the partner institutions of AMPATH, in 2008. He oversees the pharmacy activities […]
Dr. Benson Wamalwa is a research scientist at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. He is the recipient of a Grand Challenges Canada seed grant in the Stars in Global Health program. In rural Kenyan communities, many mothers are unable to have their children fully immunized. The remoteness of their homes means that reaching the […]
Maternal health is a global responsibility and it begins with a woman’s local community. In the medical literature, maternal health has been confined to a woman’s clinical characteristics like her age, weight, ethnicity and medical conditions. While these are important for her overall health and prognosis in pregnancy, the broader context that she lives in is just as critical.
On World Malaria Day I would like to celebrate the successes of the global efforts to control and eliminate malaria that have significantly reduced malaria mortality worldwide. I would also like to note that despite all these great efforts, well over half a million people, mostly children under the age of 5, died of the disease last year. This is an unacceptably high number.
Grand Challenges Canada supports 40 innovations addressing malaria in the developing world.
April 7 is the World Health Day, themed Small bites; Big threats, highlighting vector-borne diseases. Grand Challenges Canada, which is funded by the Government of Canada, joins other global organizations in commemorating this day by highlighting its projects aimed at raising awareness about the threats posed by insect and arthropod vectors, as well as the protozoa, bacteria, viruses, and parasites they carry, collectively known as vector-borne diseases (VBD’s) .
March 24th is World Tuberculosis (TB) Day, and a good time to take stock of global TB control. Sadly, despite the progress made, an estimated 8.6 million people developed TB in 2012, and 1.3 million died because of the disease. India alone accounted for 25% of this global TB burden.
TB remains a major global health problem. In 2012, an estimated 8.6 million people developed TB and 1.3 million died from the disease. It is second only to HIV/AIDS as the greatest killer worldwide that results from a single infectious agent. TB is a leading killer of people living with HIV, causing one fifth of all deaths. Over 95% of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.
Next time you open the water faucet, think for a minute about how much we take that flow of drinkable water for granted. If you are reading this in a high-resource country like Canada, the water that pours out of the tap is clean and perfectly safe to drink. Not only that, the water has been delivered right to your door. It is stored and transported in a safe, cost-effective and efficient way, and we focus on conserving our precious water for future generations.
The Phone Oximeter is making game-changing solutions available to those who need them the most, all while keeping the focus on the beneficiaries – in this case, mothers and unborn babies.