Take as Directed

In this episode of Take as Directed, J. Stephen Morrison speaks with Dr. Heidi Larson, Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. They discuss why vaccine confidence is currently in crisis, and how this has fueled outbreaks such as measles and the persistence of polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Plus, Dr. Larson walks through her work with th...

In this episode of Take as Directed, Steve Morrison speaks with Dr. Christopher Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of the University of Washington. Dr. Murray walks through IHME’s ongoing Global Burden of Disease analysis, as he and his team have been evaluating eating habits and food systems for people in 195 countries. Dr. Murray shares the study’s most im...

As the decade of vaccines comes to a close, public health experts are busy developing new strategies for the next era of global immunization. Among those efforts is a second version of the Global Vaccine Action Plan — or GVAP — which will cover the period 2021 to 2030. In this episode of Take as Directed, GHPC Senior Fellow Nellie Bristol sits down with Kate Dodson, Vice President of Global Health...

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 heal...

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 wh...

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 cul...

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 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...

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 govern...

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...

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 organizatio...

The global campaign to eradicate polio is focused on three countries that remain polio-endemic: Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan. In this episode of Take As Directed, Senior Fellow Nellie Bristol is joined by Senator Ayesha Raza Farooq of Pakistan, chairperson of the senate committee on delegated legislation. The senator served as the prime minister’s point person on polio eradication from 2013...

February 6th marks the International Day of Zero Tolerance of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a United Nations-sponsored awareness day meant to highlight efforts to eradicate FGM. An estimated 200 million women and girls today have undergone some form of FGM, a practice that can cause irreversible physical and mental health challenges. In this episode of Take as Directed, CSIS Global Health Polic...

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has had unprecedented success helping low income countries purchase and deliver vaccines. This has helped to increase immunization coverage for many underserved populations. But as global immunization rates have stalled over the last few years, the public/private partnership is looking for new approaches to ensure that vaccines are available to all the world’s children....

Around 47,600 Americans died in 2017 of opioid overdoses. It’s the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, surpassing car accidents. What makes this crisis have such a wide reach and penetrate racial, economic, and geographic lines? Take As Directed host Steve Morrison dives into its origins of the crisis in the first episode of a special miniseries on the American opioid epidemic....

While global rates of malaria have been declining over the last fifteen years, those unprecedented gains have recently slowed. In this episode of Take as Directed, we are joined by Dr. Philip Welkhoff, an expert in disease modeling who is the current director for malaria at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Welkhoff speaks with guest host Robert Newman, GHPC Senior Associate, to address thi...

Greater attention and resources to low-income country vaccination programs over the last decade have resulted in tremendous gains in immunization coverage. But coverage rates have now stalled, calling for new approaches to overcoming enduring barriers to health care access. In this episode of Take as Directed we are joined by Dr. Orin Levine, Director of Vaccine Delivery for the Global Development...

The ongoing Ebola crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the first Ebola outbreak in a war zone, is posing unprecedented challenges to responders. Much of the difficulty stems from the difficult security situation in the region, yet the particulars remain a mystery to many. In this episode of Take as Directed, we are joined by Judd Devermont, Director of the CSIS Africa Program, for a...

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....

In this episode of Take as Directed, we hear from Peter Sands, Executive Director of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, about his reflections on his first 7 months in that post, takeaways from the UNGA high-level meeting on tuberculosis, as well as his expectations for the lead-up to the 2019 Global Fund replenishment conference, set to take place in France. He also discusse...

In part two of our series with Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he addresses what he calls “the public health crisis of our time” – the ongoing opioid epidemic.  Combating the opioid epidemic has proven to be a challenge with a multitude of complexities, and Dr. Redfield shares his thoughts on where we are in the arc of this epidemic, the gaps that e...

In this episode of Take as Directed, we are joined by Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Since assuming his position as CDC Director in March of this year, Dr. Redfield has led the effort to enhance the CDC’s role in the continuing polio endgame. In part one of our two-part conversation, he discusses the complexities of the polio endgame, and sha...

With the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo rapidly escalating to dangerous levels, the global health community must consider how much progress has been made to prevent and efficiently respond to outbreaks since the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In this episode of Take as Directed, we are joined by Gabrielle Fitzgerald, founder and CEO of Panorama, a Seattle...

Tuberculosis (TB) is a long-standing, urgent threat to global public health, yet it has never been discussed at the highest level of the world stage. That changes this week, as heads of state gather in New York for the UN General Assembly, where they will convene the first-ever UNGA high-level meeting on tuberculosis. After three years of dialogue in advance of this historic event, the meeting wil...

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic of the Congo poses unprecedented challenges to emergency responders as the first ever case in an active warzone. The response has had remarkable mobilization and promising achievements thus far, with successful vaccination campaigns, and a constant readjustment of strategies and resource allocation to best contain the virus. However, six weeks into the response...