Once referred to as the ‘open defecation capital of the world’, in four years India has gone from less than half of all families having toilets to a situation where almost every household has a toilet. Almost 100 million toilets have been built since 2014.

In 2005, gambling in Britain underwent a radical overhaul. No longer was gambling to be treated as an embarrassing secret, something that many did but didn’t admit, it was to be brought into the light by New Labour’s Gambling Act.

Two years ago, I was in an intensive care unit in Brazil, where I met a mother and her newborn baby. The baby had Zika virus-related microcephaly, in other words, an abnormally small head. The mother was young and frightened. The baby was tiny, with a shrunken-looking head and a disproportionally large face. The father was anxious, with blood-shot eyes, and wondering aloud why this had happened and what the future would hold for them.

This year we sadly lost many esteemed colleagues and friends.

Clostridium difficile often referred to as C. difficile is a leading cause of healthcare-acquired infections, with more 38,000 reported cases in 2017 and over 3000 deaths. This equates to one person dying from the infection every two hours in our hospitals. It is a bacterial infection which resides in the intestines of humans. The bacteria can be found harmlessly living in one in every 30 adults, but these bacteria are usually balanced out by hundreds of other healthy bacteria in our stomachs. These healthy bacteria prevent C.

We’ve all heard the statistics—intimate partner violence (IPV) is one of the most pervasive forms of violence globally: one in every three women aged 15 years and over is estimated to experience physical and/or sexual violence by a partner in her lifetime.

Since the earliest days of the epidemic, community-based programs have been at the heart of the AIDS response. Many of these are funded, designed, and implemented by highly-trained individuals from high-income countries, with marginal input from local communities. Yet it is the local communities who often know what would be feasible and culturally appropriate. So what options are there to turn the conventional paradigm upside down and invite greater feedback from local communities on health programs?

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria is undoubtedly part of his legacy. It was at a special summit of Heads of State of the Organisation of African Unity in Abuja in April 2001 that Kofi Annan called for a “war chest” to fight AIDS and other major infectious diseases that particularly affect Africa.

Despite widespread media attention, repeated public health alerts, and the US President’s declaration of the opioid overdose epidemic as a ‘public health emergency’, fatal overdoses continue to rise.

Glyphosate (Roundup) is one of the most commonly used herbicides in the world, and in most countries is available to the general public – you can buy it in the UK at your local garden centre. More court cases are pending in the USA, and similar cases in other countries are likely to follow.