Stay ConnectedThe relationship between health and security is an area of increasing importance in the twenty-first century. The Global Health Policy Center bridges foreign policy and public health communities by creating a strategy for U.S. engagement on global health. The research topics covered include family planning, maternal and child health, immunizations, and infectious disease, among others.
Find the latest research from our scholars and CSIS events on this topic below.
Copyright: All content © 2019 Center for Strategic and International Studies
Investing in nutrition is one of the most cost effective health and development programs, yet is often underprioritized in the larger global development agenda. In this episode of Take as Directed, Sara Allinder speaks with Shawn Baker, Director of the Nutrition team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to discuss how the arc of Vitamin A supplementation fits into the larger story of global health, the need to reinvigorate programs that have stalled, and Shawn’s hopes for long-term, systems-based interventions that can sustain progress.
At the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong last fall, Professor He Jiankui made a controversial announcement that he had made heritable genetic changes in human embryos, which resulted in the birth of twin girls. This action has been universally condemned and has sparked intense international debate over whether human germline genome editing should be permitted, and what regulatory or governance framework is needed. In this episode of Take as Directed, host Steve Morrison sits down with Dr. Victor Dzau, President of the National Academy of Medicine, which was one of the conveners of the summit in Hong Kong. Dr. Dzau is a prominent leader in the current conversation as the scientific community seeks the best way forward.
The event will explore how the U.S. government can address the critical gaps and opportunities outlined in our nutrition policy primer, which will be launched at the event. The primer provides a global nutrition 101 for policymakers with key terms, interventions, and target cohorts and a landscape overview of the priority issues in global nutrition, important players, and the U.S. government’s investments. The primer also identifies critical gaps including a $70 billion global funding gap toward the World Health Assembly’s stunting, anemia, exclusive breastfeeding, and wasting goals; data gaps in how best to reach adolescents during a critical growth period; and the lack of transparency of U.S. government nutrition investments and impact. The primer sets forth a proposal to increase the annual U.S. investment with specific ideas for how those additional resources can have impact programmatically and operationally, as well as in filling knowledge gaps.
A diverse group of panelists will share their perspectives on how the U.S. government can better utilize its global nutrition investments as a powerful U.S. foreign policy tool that can maximize its other health and development portfolios, drive economic growth, and mitigate conflict and political instability.
Welcoming Remarks:
Sara M. Allinder
Executive Director and Senior Fellow, CSIS Global Health Policy Center
Primer Introduction:
Amy R. Beaudreault
Research Fellow, CSIS Global Health Policy Center and Global Food Security Project
Panel Discussion:
Shawn Baker
Director, Nutrition Team, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Beth Dunford
Assistant to the Administrator, Bureau for Food Security and Deputy Coordinator for Development for Feed the Future, U.S. Agency for International Development
Asma Lateef
Director, Bread for the World Institute
Moderated by:
Sara M. Allinder
Executive Director and Senior Fellow, CSIS Global Health Policy Center
March 24th was World TB Day, a World Health Organization-designated day of advocacy to raise awareness about the devastating health, social, and economic consequences of tuberculosis. In this episode of Take as Directed, host Steve Morrison is joined by Dr. Eric Goosby, the UN Special Envoy on Tuberculosis. Dr. Goosby recently led a Lancet Commission on tuberculosis, a two-year effort that has culminated in a longform report titled “Building a tuberculosis-free world”, and spoke about some of the main findings of the report and what the next steps are in creating a world free of TB.
Women’s health services, including maternal health and family planning, are critical to enable women and girls to access economic empowerment opportunities. In this episode of Take as Directed, GHPC Senior Associate Janet Fleischman speaks with Margaret Schuler, Senior Vice President of the International Programs Group at World Vision, and David Ray, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at CARE. The three discuss how the current bipartisan momentum around economic empowerment for women provides an opportunity to strengthen linkages with U.S. investments in women’s global health.
The anti-vaccination movement has recently come into the spotlight after the resurgence of measles, a vaccine-preventable respiratory illness, has emerged across the United States in the past year. In this episode of Take as Directed, Steve Morrison speaks with Lena Sun, award-winning national health reporter for The Washington Post to discuss how the anti-vaxxer movement has evolved into what it is today—a small but vocal, social media-savvy, activist group of Americans. Over the course of her career, Lena has written widely on a number of issues related to public health and infectious disease, and her most recent work is on the topic of the anti-vaxxer movement in the U.S., its implications on public health, and state and federal responses to the anti-vaxxer movement.
Improving nutrition is among the most transformative and cost-effective interventions in global health and food security. In this episode of Take as Directed, Sara Allinder speaks with Dr. Robert Mwadime, Chief of Party of the USAID Integrated Community Agriculture and Nutrition Activity in Uganda, a program administered by Abt Associates. Dr. Mwadime has spent his career working with local governments and donors to administer nutrition and agriculture programs, and shares his thoughts on the future of U.S. investments in nutrition and the importance of multisectoral approaches in improving health outcomes. To learn more about U.S. government nutrition investments in Uganda, visit the CSIS Global Health Policy Center program page for our report titled “Improving Nutrition in East Africa’s Bread Basket”.
At this year’s Munich Security Conference, the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was highlighted as top health security threat of international concern. As of February 17th, there have been 840 cases and 537 deaths in the outbreak, and the response effort continues to encounter insecurity on the ground. In this episode of Take as Directed, Steve Morrison speaks with Dr. Mitch Wolfe, Acting Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Washington, D.C. office and the CDC’s Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Wolfe discusses the role and methods of the CDC in the current Ebola response, as well as what to expect from this outbreak as we look ahead.
In this episode, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff joins us to discuss the story of his son Jonathan, who died from a fentanyl overdose last year. Admiral James "Sandy" Winnefeld is a retired four-star Navy admiral, and has become a vocal advocate for opioid death prevention. He heads Stop the Addiction Fatality Epidemic, or S.A.F.E. Project U.S., a national nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the opioid epidemic in the United States. Admiral Winnefeld describes how difficult it was to find treatment for Jonathan and recounts the challenges of recognizing signs of recovery--and signs of relapse.
Please join the CSIS Global Food Security Project for the launch of our newest report, Risk and Resilience: Advancing Food and Nutrition Security in Nigeria through Feed the Future, by Julie Howard and Emmy Simmons. The report examines what the new Feed the Future strategy's emphasis on resilience means in Nigeria, one of the newly-designated target countries. Nigeria, with the continent’s largest economy, is arguably the most important partner for the United States in Africa and is on the verge of a critical presidential election. Through the lens of Nigeria, especially the northeast, the report examines the risks and opportunities related to extending the highly-regarded U.S. global hunger and food security initiative to more fragile countries.
The event will feature a dialogue on why the United States’ leadership on global food security, particularly in fragile, climate, and conflict-affected regions, is critical to U.S. national security and reducing global poverty and malnutrition. How can the U.S. adapt its successful experience with facilitating inclusive, private sector driven agricultural development to more fragile environments? Can boosting resilient systems, jobs, incomes, and nutrition in the agricultural sector – where most people live and work – help address the root causes of fragility and conflict in Nigeria and other regions?
This event is made possible through the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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