As the academic year kicks into high gear, the Department of Global Health welcomes back students who recently conducted international fieldwork in global health. With work in Timor-Leste, Peru, South Africa, and more, these students share their stories (and photos!) from their time abroad.

Predicting where Ebola might strike next could become easier, thanks to a new computer model. The model tracks how changes in the environment and in human societies could affect the deadly virus’s spread. It predicts that Ebola outbreaks could become as much as 60 percent more likely by 2070 if the world continues on a path toward a warmer climate and a cooling economy.

Even successful methods for diagnosing, treating and caring for people who are suffering from cancer are not enough without effective, practical tools and guidance for putting those methods into practice.

Today we have the great pleasure of sharing the news that UW has named our future home, the Population Health Initiative building, after the Swedish physician and 'very serious possibilist' Hans Rosling.

Next year, the Hans Rosling Center for Population Health will become home to the Department of Global Health (DGH), the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the School of Public Health, and the UW's Population Health Initiative.

Esther Choo and Andrew Secor, Department of Global Health PhD students in Implementation Science, interned for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation during the summer of 2019. Choo served as part of the Global Delivery Program and Secor worked with the Qualitative Sciences initiative under the Integrated Development Team.

“My main project focused on health systems and seeing if we can draw lessons from past experiences, while also thinking of ways we can improve evaluation methods going forward,” Choo said. 

Analysis from leading researchers shows there could be significant benefits from a presidentially-led initiative focused on combatting pandemics. With the 2020 Presidential race under way, the researchers provide new evidence on the potential for a pro-active U.S. foreign policy effort to halt current pandemics, prevent new outbreaks from becoming pandemics, and address disease threats linked to climate change.   

By Cyrill Engmann, Clinical Professor of Global Health

Ten years into China's multi-billion dollar investment in health-care reform, the country has made "spectacular" progress on some top public health challenges — including insurance coverage and deaths of children. But it's facing an uphill battle on others, including second-hand smoke and cancer, according to a special China-themed issue on September 28 of the journal The Lancet.

When mosquito season brought past dengue outbreaks to regions across the Asian tropics, Nepal hardly had to worry. The high-altitude Himalayan country was typically too chilly for the disease-carrying insects to live. But with climate change opening new paths for the viral disease, Nepal is now reeling from an unprecedented outbreak.

At least 9,000 people — from 65 of Nepal’s 77 districts — have been diagnosed with dengue since August, including six patients who have died, according to government health data.

In sub-Saharan Africa, many young women and adolescent girls are at high risk of HIV infection. In a new research paper published in the open access journal PLOS Medicine, Kenneth Mugwanya and co-authors report on a study aiming to investigate the feasibility of providing antiretroviral drugs via family planning clinics to prevent HIV infection in young women.