Reflecting on a visit to Bucharest last week in an effort “to understand the origin of the recent outbreak of HIV among people who use drugs in the city,” Michel Kazatchkine, the U.N. secretary-general’s special envoy for AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, writes in the Huffington Post U.K.’s…

Noting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “new ban on ‘homosexual agendas,'” Frank Wong, an associate professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, writes in an Al Jazeera opinion piece, “Putin’s anti-homosexuality agenda is only one part of a much larger problem. Not all Russian citizens are entitled…

“According to the World Bank, Guatemala has the third-highest rate of chronic malnutrition, or stunted growth,” in the world, The Guardian reports. However, “[r]educing malnutrition is a priority for the government,” the newspaper states, noting a recent visit by Guatemala Vice President Roxana Baldetti to Pamumus, a village outside Guatemala…

“Europe is at risk of a re-introduction of polio, more than a decade after the region was declared free of the disease, after the disfiguring virus was found in sewage in Israel, according to a European Union report [.pdf]” released this week, Bloomberg News reports. “Poliovirus was identified in 91…

In an address to the 68th U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta “called for greater local and global action to overcome food insecurity,” the U.N. News Centre reports. He “noted that the eight anti-poverty targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have made ‘tangible improvements’…

British Secretary of State for Development Justine Greening, along with Prime Minister David Cameron, “faces one of the most important decisions she will make as secretary of state: how much to allocate to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria,” Adrian Lovett, Europe director of ONE, writes in…

“Liberia and Sweden might seem to be worlds apart. But in today’s interconnected world, the challenge of defeating poverty, gender inequality and infectious diseases is truly part of a single universal aspiration,” Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Sweden’s Minister for International Development Cooperation Gunilla Carlson write in the Huffington Post’s…

In a guest post on Humanosphere, Katie Leach-Kemon, a policy translation specialist from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), discusses the recently released reports from IHME and the World Bank on regional disease burdens. “One of the six reports, ‘Global Burden of Disease: Generating Evidence,…

The Guardian features a video interview with U.K. Under-Secretary of State for International Development Lynne Featherstone, who discusses how ending female genital mutilation (FGM) is a priority for the U.K. government. She talks about the importance of reporting cases of FGM, which is illegal in the U.K.; collecting information and…

The PLOS “Speaking of Medicine” blog highlights a number of new articles published in the current issue of PLOS Medicine. “Sohni Dean and colleagues identify the most important research areas for improving pre-conception care for women in low- and middle-income countries,” including integration of care into the wider health care…