Maarten van der Heijden

‘They forced me to stand for hours in the cold, arms raised and shackled’: eight Gaza doctors on their Israeli prison ordeal Senior doctors and surgeons describe the torture, starvation, humiliation and denial of medical care they endured while being held without charge

Grateful to Annie Kelly and The Guardian for the opportunity to publish this opinion piece alongside the testimonies of those who have dared to bear witness to the assault on healthcare they experienced in Gaza.

www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

The playbook for bombing hospitals in war: deny, deflect, justify. The law must close these loopholes | Maarten van der Heijden Cynical actors exploit the legal ambiguities around targeting healthcare facilities, as seen in Gaza. Unequivocal protections are needed

It is often assumed that international law provides an absolute prohibition on attacks on healthcare facilities in war.

It does not. But it should.

www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

We are in a constitutional crisis. Thank you congressmen Murphy and Raskin.

Fight or Flight — Facing the Marburg Outbreak in Rwanda | NEJM Having diagnosed two ICU patients with the first known cases of Marburg virus disease in Rwanda, a physician must prioritize limiting spread, despite pleas for transfer from the patients’ families.

"I knew a premature VHF diagnosis could cause panic and have profound political implications." – A very strong piece in NEJM by Dr JP Sibomana on the personal and political complexity of diagnosing Rwanda’s first Marburg outbreak. doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2413951

We now have 3 starter packs for Global Health Nerds!

go.bsky.app/DgwRPwD

go.bsky.app/RScFWyt

go.bsky.app/ADqkPeH

Will keep updating!

Progress amnesia? 🧠

Fantastic work!!

Who says that? Nobody oposes alcohol-free beer overall. Health agencies just ask for similar advertisement standards so as to not expose children/youth to alcohol brand names, and do further research on impact. The author is some libertarian misinformer paid by Big Alcohol...

EU - Sierra Leone Beach Clean-Up 2024 EU - Sierra Leone Beach Clean-Up 2024

Right!!! Freetown is calling you. 😉 This was even right after the annual beach clean up. oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/eubeachclean...

imagine if you could imagine things

and then they were just like you imagined.

well, now we all get to live there --

or else

Thanks Anita!!

CHAI wrote a good article on the causes of the shortages of BPG that partially caused this or at least hamper treatment. academic.oup.com/inthealth/ar...

ELS is ‘experimental lab sample’, basically means improve the compound in the lab

(5/5) ⏰⏰⏰ We need to talk more about access to asthma medication, and access to treatment for NCDs as a whole. ⏰⏰⏰

#AsthmaCrisis #AccessToMedicines #NCDs

(4/5) Data does show severe asthma rates of around 25.6% in sub-Saharan Africa, with 4.6% of cases remaining uncontrolled despite high-intensity treatment. In these cases only biologicals could help, but universal access to those remains far away.

www.jaci-global.org/article/S277...

(3/5) Even in the USA 1 in 3 patients are estimated struggled to access their inhalers, but also in India where the majority is produced they are not affordable for all. Most cases I heard about were about young people in sub-Saharan Africa. But there is really little data there on access.

Patents and regulatory exclusivities on inhalers for asthma and COPD, 1986-2020 Inhalers are the mainstay of treatment for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. These products face limited generic competition in the US and remain expensive. To better understand the st...

(2/5) Inhalers are costly due to monopolistic pricing, patents on drug-device combos (device-hops), and regulatory hurdles that block cheaper generics. Recent reforms in inhalers to eliminate ozone-depleting propellants did not help either.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Cost of asthma inhalers: ‘People shouldn’t be paying to breathe’ Some inhalers in Nigeria have doubled or tripled in price since last year, leaving many struggling.

(1/5) The past months, I’ve heard many stories of people losing family members to asthma because they couldn’t access medication.

Asthma inhaler prices were already high, but have increased by 2-5x over the last years in many countries.

www.bbc.com/news/videos/...

www.voanews.com/a/nigerians-...

What's Cooking? An assessment of potential impacts of selected novel alternatives to conventional animal products The food systems are responsible for about 30% of the current anthropogenic GHG emissions, and animal products account for almost 60% of those emissions. There is a need to change the way we produce a...

Consider yourself surprised! FAO usually does not welcome or push so much as a technical organisation, but it does significant work on the food safety of these products. UNEP wrote a report about the environmental promise of these products, FAO co-authored: www.unep.org/resources/wh...

Cultivated meat: opportunities and challenges | International Bar Association A webinar presented by the IBA Agriculture and Food Section Cultivated meat, also known as lab-grown or cell-based meat, introduces a groundbreaking approach to meat production, poised to tackle the c...

Have been dabbling a bit outside of the global health/medicines sphere lately. This Thursday I am speaking about countries' legislative frameworks for cell-based meat at the International Bar Association on behalf of the FAO. 🧫🥩https://www.ibanet.org/conference-details/CONF2628

Visa-friendly venues for global health meetings Conference organizers have an obligation to host meetings in locations that are not visa-hostile. Are there ‘visa-friendly’ options that conference organizers should be considering? This crowd-sourced...

And if you plan to host global health events and meetings, here is a list of visa friendly countries

communities.springernature.com/posts/visa-f...

@jessicareinisch.bsky.social So cool you’re researching UNRRA! I’m preparing a short piece on the role UNRRA/WHO in the local production of antibiotics atm :) Would love to discuss!

Hello new followers from that bleak gray place! Reposting my first post on this site: a cyanometer, the instrument Alexander von Humboldt (among others) used to determine how blue any sky actually was

Hey #AMR people - am wanting to broaden the capture of the feed for other languages so if you know the key words for antimicrobial resistance in another language, please drop it in the replies below!

Would love to be added as well!

Would love to be added as well Lance!

(3/3) For English/German there's this nice list from the Wellcome Trust's Reframing Resistance study with the terms used in news outlets.

(2/3) Geneesmiddelenresistentie (drug resistance); multiresistente bacteriën (multi-resistant bacteria); medicijnresistente bacteriën (medicine-resistant bacteria); superbugs (superbugs); superresistente bacteriën (super-resistant bacteria/superbugs).

(1/3) Great initiative! Thanks Anita. For Dutch it often become two words, I do not know if that works: antibioticaresistentie (antibiotic resistance); antimicrobiële resistentie (antimicrobial resistance); bacteriële resistentie (bacterial resistance)

Would love to join! I mainly work on AMR law + policy at WHO and FAO.