Global Health Matters
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Global Health Matters
The Inside Track: Broken chairs, horses and audiences
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In our first episode of The Inside Track, we examine the fragile state of information integrity in global health. Host Garry Aslanyan and recurring expert-pundits Catherine Kyobutungi and Ricardo Baptista Leite unpack how misinformation spreads, why trust erodes and what responsibility health leaders carry in this environment. We explore how perception, belief and narrative shape public understanding — especially in the wake of COVID-19. We also react to a recent Guardian article linking climate change to chikungunya in Europe, questioning why warnings so often fail to translate into sustained action. We close with some gratitude — spotlighting promising innovations and leadership, and reaffirming our commitment to clear, courageous conversations in global health. The views expressed are those of the host and guests in their individual capacities and do not necessarily reflect those of their respective organizations.
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Welcome to the Insight Track, a series from the Global Health Matters Podcast. In this series, we step inside the conversations shaping global health, the debates, the dilemmas, and the decisions that don't always make the headlines. Each episode features two recurring expert pandits, Katherine Chiobotungi and Riccardo Battista Leit, offering informed independent analysis grounded in lived experience. Consider this your invitation to the inside. Hi and welcome to the first episode of the Inside Track. I'm Gary Aslanian, the host of Global Health Matters. Before we begin this new Insight Track series, I just wanted to tell you that Global Health Matters has been around over five years. We've expanded our reach. We became very, very known in the global health circles. We really feel that we provide something unique. When we started Global Health Matters, we wanted to really break silos and look at global health issues from a broader perspective, where we had signature episodes, we had dialogues, and we do trailblazer videos. We had our guests write uh opinion pieces and commentaries based on their discussions and insights. But we also noticed something was still missing in the global health discourse. We heard from some of our audiences that you want honest and critical discussions and debates around global health affairs, current global health affairs. So this is where the insight track idea came in. So Insight Track is going to be about clarity, foresight from people who actually know the terrain. The Insight Track is going to be context, it's not going to be news, but it will cover the current affairs in global health. I will be joined by two brilliant recurrent voices, and both of them you've heard here on Global Health Matters. And first of all, it's Catherine Chobotunghi. She brings the evidence and real-world insight from the front lines of health. And the second guest and a permanent guest will be Ricardo Batista Leit, who is a physician, former parliamentarian, and a global thinker in health AI and politics. So welcome to the show, Catherine and Ricardo. Where do I find you today?
SPEAKER_00Hi, Gary. And I'm happy to be here.
SPEAKER_03Hi Gary and hi Catherine. It's it's an honor to be on this show with both of you. I'm calling in from Lisbon, Portugal, just before hopping onto a plane to go to Brussels, where an important discussion on AI and health will be happening. So very excited about this new venture around global health matters. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Great. And I'm actually in Panama City here at a conference focused on health systems research. So welcome to Inside Track. When you first heard that we were going to do this, what do you think of this kind of an episode?
SPEAKER_00Yes, I mean I think in your intro you talked about the need for honest conversations. And I think conversations themselves are important. I don't think we're having just we're having enough conversations in the global health community. And so we need more conversations. And then you talked about honest conversations. I like to be honest, so I'm like, hey, sign the app. We'll go check some tables, hopefully. Yeah, so I think it's it's a it's it's an interesting format, and yeah, we'll see how it goes. But I'm happy to be here.
SPEAKER_02Great. What about you, Ricardo?
SPEAKER_03Well, uh I I share, I share Catherine's enthusiasm uh towards shaking things up and uh hopefully making sure that uh we can humbly give our own contribution through this dialogue um to move the agenda forward in terms of promoting health for all uh globally. Uh right now, what we're seeing is the world as we knew it in crisis, uh, especially in the field of health, uh in the field of multilateralism, a lot of the assumptions that we took for granted are now being questioned. And so in this context, uh, you know, in the triangle I work in between policy, technology, and health, uh, everything is moving. And so when I got your invitation, Gary, and uh you put the cherry on top, which was to be able to do this with Catherine, I thought it was a unique opportunity uh to be able to take our voices a bit further and hopefully be the voices of those that don't many times have a voice, and to discuss current affairs in a way that hopefully can help organizations and leaders uh move in a direction that can be impactful to improve people's lives.
SPEAKER_02Great, great. And and both of you and myself, we all will be doing this in our individual capacity and not really representing our organizations. And this will be on YouTube as well, both audio and video. Uh we know lots of our audience follows our uh us on uh YouTube. And we also know that um this high quality content is sometimes used in courses, classes, in course room, uh classrooms. So it's really hoping this will uh have that kind of uh effect as well. And and um we really will try and look at the matters uh in terms of uh we said already, candid conversations, but also uh what is um um what does that mean and and really grounded in your experience and building on both of you and your experiences. So we will have this uh episodes divided into three chunks. Uh we'll have a topic we'll discuss, um, then we'll have a clipping session where we'll review uh a written article or written piece uh recently published, and uh we'll have a bit of a discussion about that article, and then we'll have kudos, and that's something new where I uh will ask you and myself uh to recognize something or somebody in global health. So let's um move into the topic, and it's not surprising uh in light of what we just said, that uh I hope that today we will discuss a little bit the information uh integrity and global health information integrity. Um, in a way, it's also kind of a continuation from uh an episode we had last October when we recorded a live episode at the World Health Summit uh with two guests, Joy Pumaffi and Monica Barrell, uh, on bridging knowledge divides. So I want to get started with this topic and hear from you how the uh information integrity has been threatened recently when it comes to global health. Uh how do we uh really uh um spot these situations and manipulative narratives? How uh to see really what motivates people who produce misinformation or uh yeah inadvertently uh share this information. Who wants to get started on this topic?
SPEAKER_03I don't mind uh kicking off uh um on on this topic because I I do feel that the the idea of uh information integrity is currently at at risk. Um because it it directly connects to the concept of truth, which uh in a way we as scientists uh were strong believers of the scientific method, and uh we are believers of that method being able to produce results that then we take as facts and those facts as truth. However, uh nowadays many people uh challenge that and uh come up with concepts that have no basis, saying it's their own truth. Um, you know, I'm based typically in Geneva, and uh, you know, we i i Geneva is not doesn't have that many landmarks, but there is one famous one in front of the Palais of Nations, which is a chair, a broken chair. And, you know, everybody looks at it and can see that's a chair with a broken leg. But if someone comes along and says, no, it's it's not a chair, it's a horse, um, then the the conversation becomes impossible because you cannot find a middle ground there. And that's taken over the political discourse right now, where we're not talking about different opinions around the same conceptual scientific facts. We are dealing many times with actors that are inventing uh their own reality for different purposes, for their own gain many times, just to distort whatever people's concepts are based on a previous world order, if you will. And this is extremely challenging because when it comes to health, when it comes to science, Catherine knows uh leading in uh uh world leading or research institution knows this well, this is highly risky. You put people's lives at risk if you do not have a common ground of understanding of that scientific method, of what is the truth. And you know, what we're seeing in many parts of the world is sometimes the greatest risk comes from uh family WhatsApp groups where people are sometimes sharing completely false information, but they see it on their phone, they see it on the internet, they just assume it's true. And so you actually have people who take advantage of lack of literacy, of lack of understanding, of the the and many times driven by AI bots to promote this kind of information. And it's not something new. In the past, we've seen how you know you used to have snake oil vendors, right? Uh 200 or 300 years ago that would travel around uh rural areas uh uh and uh and towns trying to sell snake oil as something that would give you eternal youth. And people would buy it, they want to believe in it, uh although there was no facts around the the useless, the useless, the usefulness of that that that snake oil. And the truth is, if you take that to today's world, snake oil vendors are put on steroids with social media because using AI bots, they can expand their false information much faster. They can target people uh that they know will be more vulnerable to this kind of information. And just one last point on this, because I think it's extremely important to understand how this connects to geopolitics. Uh, there was a paper published, I think it was 2017, by the American Journal of Public Health, that looked at the origins of dissemination of false information around measles vaccination and autism. And the conclusion the authors came to is that the vast majority of tweets at the time in the platform that we now call X came between 2014 and 2017 from bot farms out of the Russian Federation that intentionally promoted false information around what was known to be false information around a vaccine, that until this date today continues to fuel vaccine hesitancy. And so this goes to show how an ill-intended actor that wants to cause social disruption by causing distrust between the state and the citizens, where vaccination, of course, plays an important role because people get vaccinated because they trust their global health institutions, their public health institutions. Well, we see how that kind of disinformation has led, and we've seen the cases of rise of uh several infectious diseases due to the fact that people are afraid to vaccinate their kids based on completely false information.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So, Catherine, where where where do you come into uh this topic? What's what's your um what's your experience, so to say?
SPEAKER_00Um so um I think as somebody who is uh quite active on social media I I do observe patterns. And sometimes you ask yourself where when we, I don't know, like crossed a certain line and things changed, like the dynamics of information, power, and and maybe information asymmetry changed. And I can trace it back to several factors. Of course, I think as Ricardo has said, there's a supply of information or misinformation or disinformation. There's an industry that actually supplies that. That industry grew slowly and then I think exploded at a certain point in time. And so right now, you know, with time, careers evolve. Now we have full-time influencers. Like influencing is a career, and influencing comes from having followers, and followers come from posting things that people find compelling, and then they follow you. And sometimes things which are sensational attract more followers than those which are new-den and factual. So there's been a growth of the information economy that has happened. So this is what is supplying information or misinformation. And then on the other side, we have the scientific community where people have been trained in a certain way to look at the hard facts. There's a certain methodology, there are certain principles, there are certain rules. And these rules give you something that is close to the truth, at least at a particular point in time. And these scientists communicate in a certain way. And I don't think scientists have adapted to the new reality of this information economy. So the information economy has exploded in a context where the people, the purveyors of truth, if I could call them that, of the past, don't have the tools or the skills or the to be like the second source of truth because now the other truth has taken over. And I don't think we are prepared for this. And it's something that I observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. And by the time the pandemic was sort of waning, I said for me, the biggest, maybe the most colossal failure that maybe the global health community had was a failure of communication. Whether it was communication within countries, whether it was communicating basic concepts like what is risk. You know, people want solutions that are foolproof. And science doesn't work like that. And I think we failed to communicate the concept of risk because it has been an issue. Somebody would say, oh, if you say smoking causes cancer, they say, no, my grandfather has smoked for 85 years and they're still alive. That's failure to communicate risk. And now that gets amplified on the world stage with, you know, cameras, non-stop information cycles about the pandemic, and there was not enough ingredients to communicate risk to the public. And so we lost the we lost the war around a basic understanding that perhaps could have altered the course of the pandemic and many other things that have happened after that. So we are in this situation where on one side there's a the supply, there's a market that supplies information, and on the other hand, there's uh a failure of what could be a counter force. Um they are not enough, and then of course they are not prepared. And then something has happened because it's a business. Um, if I if I stuck out my head and talked about vaccines, I would get people camped in my mentions for days telling me how my sellouts, how can I be an African and I'm promoting the destruction of the African race? Um, how much have I been paid by big pharma? Even up to now, when I tweet about vaccines, we are like, yeah, yeah, we know you guys are paid by pharma to, I don't know, do whatever to finish as Africans, your such sellouts and all that. So there are few people who can put up with that. And in the recent past, I've observed um, if you look at X, scientists fled and left X. And now there's a new community that has taken over the public square and they are running crazy with X. And scientists have now formed new communities, but those communities are still closed, they're still closed, they're scientists there. Those communities are not yet mainstream. And so we have this gap where the dominant narratives are those which are being fed by people who make money out of this. And then there's a handful of scientists putting up valiant fights, trying to fight these habits of bots and influencers. And it's not hopeless. And interesting, in the recent weeks, I've seen scientists coming back to X. At least I get more content about people fighting anti-vaxxers and all this. I'm like, who? Uh, you know, maybe people are waking up again. But in the last three years, it's been depressing because people just left the square. And you're constantly bombarded with all this information, and then you have to ask yourself, how much energy do I have to fight? Uh maybe alone or with a handful of others. And so we just let things slide and hope that at some point maybe something magical will happen and uh we regain the initiative. But for now, we've lost it.
SPEAKER_02Okay, okay. No, I'm not gonna let us lose this because we're here to actually fight that. So do not go anywhere. Uh because really this is impossible. We cannot just say, Oh, yeah, we just did it, right? And I'm not I'm I'm not really saying that that's not what the reality is. But how? Like Ricardo, you said the chair is not a horse. Okay, fine. You walked in a room, someone said it's a horse. What do you do?
SPEAKER_03Great question. That's why you're the host. And that's not easy to to address. And you know, I before I take it, uh, just to say what to pick up on what Catherine mentioned, I think it's extremely important that we also bring in the political angle to what Catherine mentioned, in the sense that politicians after COVID also became in a way, they they felt COVID as a repellent to any health matter discussions, which became a serious problem. And so only the the group that Catherine called the anti-vaxxers and so forth, the more radical groups, many of which are associated to the disinformation or inf or leading to lack of integrity of information or plaintly lying out there, are the ones that keep motivated in plowing forward their agenda. And so this is a huge problem. And when you're trying to convince a policymaker to step up and they're saying, I don't want to touch global health right now because it's, you know, people are fed up of that. Now security and defense is the big thing, that becomes a major challenge. But going that leads me then to your question. How do we build bridges between different views that are so extreme to the point where the counterpart we're dealing with has a completely distorted view of reality? Exactly. Yeah. And in that sense, I would say that there is one of two approaches. Um on one hand, if you're dealing with someone who intentionally has no motivation to change.
SPEAKER_02Or understand.
SPEAKER_03Their only goal. Exactly. And so their only goal is really to disrupt, then it's not through a dialogue or conversation at that moment you're going to change them. You have to understand what are the buttons that they that you can push, be it diplomatically or whatnot, to mo to what truly motivates them, and you have to go around before you meet at that negotiation table. Uh because without fixing the incentives part on their side, they will not meet middle ground with you. But if you're dealing with someone, and this happens, if you're dealing with someone who bought into a false narrative, um but is genuinely interested in their own good or their common good or or the good of their own family and friends, well, that's a different situation where you have good faith. And in a good faith conversation, I believe that presenting information and data on one hand is important, but what I I think the community, the scientific community has done that historically. What I think we have failed, and vaccination is a very good example, is it it's so clear to us the benefits that we sometimes forget to stop and say, What concerns you? Why are you hesitant? Why are you not getting vaccinated or not getting your kids vaccinated? What are the things that truly brought what are truly what is truly bothering you? Um uh on this matter. And turning the table around where you give them an opportunity to speak instead of us unidirectory director in a unidirectionally um pathway, try to bombard them with data and information and the science that s is at the basis of of our positions. And so it's a question I would say of humility and never forgetting our end game, which is to meet that middle ground and to get them to understand the concepts and hopefully buy into the science of what we're shaping. I have seen and you know sometimes bringing concrete examples of people who have suffered for following bad advice for example who have lost their children due to that and have now acknowledged that they were following misinformation. Those kind of examples have a much more powerful impact in these kind of negotiations if you will than sometimes our classical approach which is basically sending out a policy brief and say follow the guidelines and and that's it. That kind of approach doesn't work anymore.
SPEAKER_02No clearly clearly so Catherine you said public's trust I mean especially when you hear from people who you are in touch with through social media as you said you're very active so um I I'm not gonna let us uh kind of say well we've lost it what exactly can we do to strengthen the public's trust? If public well public follows few things but not everything. So um in exactly where and again from your context where would we start by gaining that start uh that trust back from the public?
SPEAKER_00I think that's a hard one. I I said we've lost the initiative not the battle it's like the momentum is towards more promising one direction and we need to bring it back. We need to bring back the momentum and shift the tide um somehow so um where do we start and again I we we need to look at this as a long-term thing it's something which has grown slowly and then of course at some point it got I think it exploded and it's going to take time to undo um some of the damage which has been done and we're already late but but we we are late but we don't we can't do quick fixes because quick fixes are not going to solve the problem.
SPEAKER_02Good point.
SPEAKER_00So we need to start from the basics about who are the potentially trusted sources um you know that communities can trust. But at the same time um so those trusted sources can talk about different things. One is now the truth as we know it but also the people who speak about the fact that information has been monetized and therefore everything you see don't take it at face value. In the past we thought the internet was the source of truth so anything that was on the internet was true. But now we know that it's not but that information we know it when I say we I talk about people like myself and Ricardo we know that not everybody does. My mom can receive a WhatsApp clip and she thinks it's real. And so the awareness that not everything is true and not everything is real, I think it's the beginning point. And of course that's why you start with okay the government has a role to play but then of course all of us have a role to play that that they are that when you see something, question first, don't assume that everything that you see is real. That's something which can happen. And of course it's we might start from the top and say yes from the global health perspective but it's something which has to go all the way back to education like our education system, information literacy, whether it's medical literacy, scientific literacy, there are lots of things that we need to do downstream much, much, much further no sorry upstream much further upstream to to deal with the and the sort of the broad understanding of the information ecosystem that we live in. And then after that you know scientists used to be trusted maybe could still be trusted if they'll just come out of the shadows and like put themselves out there. So I think we can regain the trust but we can't regain the trust by shying away from controversy. We can't regain the trust by hiding from all these things. We can try to regain the trust by showing up. And so I'm always making this appeal if you are a global health practitioner, if you're a scientist, whatever you are, it's we owe it ourselves, we owe it to society to come out there and speak about the things that we know. There are lots of things that we know we are experts in different ways, but there are things that our positions have given to us in terms of information. We have to start speaking out about certain things. And I'll just give some examples talk about social media. So you get confronted once in a while there's this sudden death phenomenon that is sort of uh I would say penetrating the public psyche. There's something about sudden death and it's not just in in in the US it's also it's also happening for instance in Uganda or Kenya. So once in a while you see this oh this doctor 50 years old was jogging and they dropped dead. In Uganda there's a clip circulating right now somebody was putting growth ears in the in the car and they just collapsed that they just you know with the the carboard open and there's a video that is that is circulating. And then people start saying oh so when these clips show up if you read through the commentary maybe the majority of it is like oh the COVID vaccine and the COVID vaccine and the COVID vaccine. And this is not just on social media like X, it's also in closed WhatsApp groups. Some of them made up of professionals that actually health professionals and you see this coming up all the time. So people are now associating sudden death more with COVID vaccine than with COVID itself. And unless somebody starts pushing back and say what is the evidence are you are you do you know the vaccination status of this person? Do you know whether they were vaccinated or not? Or use it as an opportunity to educate now the spectators in this social media discussion. Regard what what would you do if you enter the room and somebody said this is the host and and and he's right if somebody's saying this is the host because they know that this host is going to get them engagement and likes and you know and then they will get some paycheck at the end of the month it's pointless trying to convince them it's a chair. But sometimes this is there's a there's an audience sometimes there's an audience and what I've learned is when I'm engaging with somebody who is clearly um is monetizing it information I communicate in a way that communicates to spectators and the audience. So try to break down things try to break down concepts and sometimes you get feedback like oh I actually didn't know this I actually didn't know this I've learned something new. So focus on the spectators at um if any rather than the person that you're you're not trying to convince the other person. You'll never convince them because they know exactly what they're doing. And so it's um you know just fix things because every time you respond to one thing then there's something else you respond to this then they bring something else. And for them every engagement is a click and every click is potential sense of money that they get to pay out at the end of the month. And so it's um you you engage for the audience.
SPEAKER_03And so that's what I'm I'm saying that even when these controversies arise when this information hits our our spheres of influence we need to push back gently um with information that is easy to digest but that is focused on the spectators or people on the fence about which side of the debate they they are and if I may Gary just to jump in here because uh I I think this is so important um because what Catherine is highlighting is that to defend and stand up for science and truth and in information integrity it is an act of courage nowadays. And the reason that so many scientists are shying away is because as did politicians in the past um they were typically the main group that would be shunned away by society as non credible now sometimes scientists are put in the same bucket uh and the first thing as Catherine was saying is being accused that you are in the pockets of some big industry or whatnot. Right. And a lot of people don't want that for themselves. They don't want to expose themselves or their families to that kind of hardship. I remember I mean when I was uh in parliament during COVID and I I stood up for vaccination uh very publicly and I remember at the time with my six year old son walking in the middle of the street and being physically confronted uh by by anti an anti-vaxxed couple that basically said in front of my son my six year old that I should be in jail and so forth and and you know and becoming physically aggressive for I mean who wants that? And so it's easier to step away. Right and and keep you you know yourself on your path and your life but there's something greater at stake here. And that's I think Catherine is sending out a very important call to action which is all of us particularly those that know the science that have had the the fortunate opportunity to be trained to work in this field we all have a uh an additional responsibility today which is to speak up uh despite the the the consequences and if all of us do it it becomes much easier to do as a community than as individual uh leaders trying to to move the agenda and so uh sorry for jumping in there but I I think this is extremely important.
SPEAKER_02Very important and and I know both of you are doing that so really uh this this topic's not gonna go away I'm sure if we uh look at the current affairs topic for a year from now it will still be there but let's maybe come back in a year and see what happened but to summarize I had three words I think it's broken chairs horses and uh audiences or the spectators um so we uh let's close this one and move to our cliff a mosquito born virus is spreading fast across Europe and the world may not be ready.
SPEAKER_01It's called Chikungunya and it's back. But what is it? How dangerous is it? And why are scientists sounding the alarm now in 2025?
SPEAKER_02It will be in the show notes for our listeners we picked an article published in The Guardian recently on resurgence of infectious diseases in Europe and in particular the Chikungunya transmission study was uh um really discussed in that article uh so look for the show notes to find the article itself uh but just to quote something from the article so it says shocking data shows the climate crisis and invasive mosquitoes mean chikungunya could spread in 29 countries. Basically uh chikungunya is really excruciating painful disease and and and and um uh transmitted by mosquitoes and now basically it will be more uh found in Europe where it really um didn't used to. So uh while this focused on Europe only obviously and and the central question may be uh what uh is is this what's gonna take for global health to really become global and be kind of a wake up call from global north maybe another wake up call there have been so many uh to treat really uh what's happening in the world and climate change um uh more seriously and and and and what do you think of this uh and I know you already uh read a bit over the article who wants to go first I can I can go fast um so when I saw the article um it reminded me I think about 20 years ago I was in si I was sitting in a master's course it's more than 20 years maybe close 25 I was sitting in in a master's course at the University of Heidelberg and uh we had a module on climate change.
SPEAKER_00And so this was some of the that was one of the things we learned that with climate change um the temperatures in some areas you know they they become warmer than they've been in the past or the periods of warmth are longer and then you you give some uh vectors an opportunity to to actually survive longer than they should if the temperatures were not as warm in certain at certain times of the year. And there were all these maps that were showing how diseases like dengue fever were going to spread and I think there's another one which is tick borne um some tick borne disease that was going to spread across Germany and across Europe and there were these maps so when I saw the article I was like oh this is the map I saw 25 years ago which in a way in itself is is interesting. And and maybe it shows the challenge that we face as a scientific community. One is that um climate change is so insidious there's somebody who said that um the it will it it's like you see this clip of um flooding horrible flooding like somewhere in Spain and it's flooded for like three days and then you know everybody moves on because the new cycle maybe something else has happened and then we move on but you don't know what has happened to that community in Spain that was affected by this severe flooding. And then the next time one year later it's flooding in Nairobi. It's flooded two years ago it's not flooded again. So we've forgotten that actually flooded. So it's these things but they keep on happening but they're not happening like at this at something that like compels people to say we need to do something really like right now. Scientists have been warning about all these extreme weather events they've been warning about all the diseases affected with climate change. I get surprised that in the last one year I've sat in maybe five forums where all of a sudden I talk about climate and health and I'm seeing presentations I'm like I saw this 25 years ago why is this new information that all of a sudden is in our heads and is in our psyche that there's there are these there are these connections between climate and health this is this has been known for more than 20 years. So now it's here now whether this will be the the the turning point I'm not so sure. I think we need something more dramatic probably is going to happen. And um again when when perceptions shift you don't see them it's not that people are broadcasting their perceptions about about um you know their awareness and maybe they need to do something. So perhaps somebody will read this and like okay maybe I need to do better. I don't know at what exactly so but as uh as in terms of shifting the tide completely uh I think it will take more than that more than that and um again I've been I've been part of competition together that are looking at um what are the levers that we need to press because clearly the science lever of climate change is going to do XYZ is not doing it. The science of all these diseases are going to be become more prevalent is not doing it. So the other levers we are looking at that that people are looking at whether they are legal levers whether they are financing levers whether they're levers around penalties and all these reparations whatever it is maybe those are the ones that may eventually shift the tide uh but but um um in the in on the on the positive side I think it shows that the scientists were right because again this is something that we learned. These were projections they were models that this is going to happen and now that it has happened maybe it's it's a good thing that um they were right um which we've known for a long time but maybe which not everybody has known for a long time. So let's see what happens after this.
SPEAKER_03Ricardo what do you think well uh it's an interesting article and those listening should should read it. I I think it will highlight how you know I come from infectious diseases as a background and so seeing Chukungunya being discussed as a public health concern in the United Kingdom is is quite mind blowing. But as Catherine said I mean for those following the data and the models it is expected. You know I I'm I'm from Portugal originally and now there are discussions around the return potential return of malaria or dengue. And so we are living in a world that we know that no one is safe until everyone is safe. And the whole concept behind looking at health from a multilateral lens or an international development lens is precisely because it's not the global north investing in the global south out of charity. It's actually in everyone's interest. And it's such an obvious case that sadly is not easy to make especially in the with the rise of a lot of nationalistic movements where people tend to forget that there's a world beyond their own borders and that that world that goes beyond their own borders will have an impact on their own lives. And so I'm I I I think this is a a potential I don't know if I would call it a wake up call, but it's another alarm bell, certainly um the reason I'm not I and I agree with Catherine, I don't know if it's going to be enough to get people moving is because we had a global pandemic with COVID that affected basically everyone on the planet. And one thing that I thought for myself in my positive optimistic nature of looking at the world was if nothing else comes out of this, at least in a hospital setting people will always use masks. They'll understand the importance of always using a mask in a in a healthcare setting. And you know three years later nobody's using masks again and we're back to business as usual. And so even these basic things uh of course this is not the same across the planet but just those basic learnings that it's it's almost like we have generational forgetness of things that are hard to deal with. And that is something that I guess we as a scientific community need to continue to push forward the data and to make sure that people understand. And going back to the specifics of the article the intersection of climate and and health are absolutely true. I mean the same could be applied to respiratory diseases and air pollution and so forth. And it's just going it's going to get worse. And once again it's always those that are most poor and most vulnerable conditions that are going to be the first to suffer. Sadly the policies tend to change only when the devastation has already happened. I would like to see um our leaders taking a more uh a stronger approach on prevention also when it comes to the impact of climate and acknowledging that climate change mitigation is critical uh to to avoid the negative consequences for health but I think there's a lot of investment that still needs to be made for us to get there.
SPEAKER_02Interesting oh and uh just before you mentioned COVID uh Ricardo I was going to say no no no um Catherine let's be more positive and then I said oh my god of course we had COVID and then I remembered uh you know TB in Canada uh resurges from time to time in big cities or in the north and it's only then public health remembers that uh it has to be engaged globally that because TB is uh anywhere and everywhere it's not just you know uh in in certain parts of the world etc and then we go back to to this to kind of the same cycle uh of um remembering and forgetting and forgetting and remembering but yeah good articles so uh let's um uh our audience please uh read and send your comments what you think uh good insights and let's hope that it will contribute to the wake up call one way or the other so we come to our last part which is um kudos to uh global health somewhere or somebody or some event that you want to call in as uh kudos to uh who wants to go first I was recently at one of the world's um biggest health expositions the the World Health Expo uh that takes place in Dubai and the UAE and uh a dear friend of mine um I want to send a shout out to him Osama il Hassan who is from the Dubai Health Authority presented to me a concept that is being advocated in Dubai and this expo was a big platform for that around what one could call family AI.
SPEAKER_03And and the idea here is you know I work a lot in the field of artificial intelligence and health a lot of concerns about the regulations of safety a lot of optimism about the opportunities that the technology brings to help transform health systems, to make us more efficient, to improve health outcomes. But from the Emirates, this concept of family AI brings a very important angle that I don't think we talk enough about. And that's why I'm highlighting it and my kudos to those that are promoting it because they're focusing on okay we're developing these technologies that are going to transform the way we we give health and care to our citizens. We need to do it in a way that is similar to the importance we give to a family member Caregiver when it comes to the compassion and empathy that is behind all of the way we deliver that kind of health and care uh on the ground. And so that angle of empathy is one that I feel sometimes is missing in the conversations about technology and health. It's all about the robots and the efficiency or the safety concerns. And ultimately I think this concept of family AI grounds us to the importance of recentering the discussion on how does this contribute to us as humans and how do we keep a human-centric approach in terms of dealing with each other, be it healthcare professionals with their patients, be it among family members uh taking care of someone who is ill or within uh a wider a wider community. And so kudos to to the Emirates and to the Dubai Health Authority for promoting this concept of family health, family AI, and I hope that that that that notion of compassion and empathy can can spread on. And I'm looking forward to see investments in technologies that actually contribute to a more compassionate uh health workforce in the future.
SPEAKER_02Okay, Catherine, your kudos.
SPEAKER_00Yes, um, so my kudos go to a team that is based out of South Africa and that has launched the first phase one trial of new HIV um vaccine.
SPEAKER_02Basically, um it's called the Brilliant, it's only from there. Yes, I heard about that. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it's based in South Africa. It's called the the trial is called Brilliant, that's 011, which is which I think is appropriate. And uh, I think what's unique about this trial, okay, the fact that it's purely Africa-based. The African-based scientists, uh, some of them from the South African Medical Research Council, some from VIT, and they're working with scientists from Uganda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Zambia. And so they're the the the idea of behind um, you know, why this is so exciting is that they are trying to see how you can um, you know, sort of train the immune system to produce what they are calling broadly neutralizing antibodies. And they're using like different components of different um parts of the HIV that is common in that country, and then trying to see can you put all this together so that the body is stimulated by different parts of different strains of the HIV virus, and therefore it can produce antibodies that potentially could work on very many subtypes of HIV, which is it's a complex virus, it keeps on evolving. So, but I think it's really, really exciting. This has taken years and years of hard work from those scientists, and so um yeah, I I hope it works. It's really added days, they're they're they are doing their first enroll, the enrollment of 20 uh volunteers to test all sorts of things. But I think it's it's amazing. And I met one of the scientists, uh Tumbi Ndugu, uh Tumbi, Tumbi, I'm trying to pronounce it nicely. Um, so uh these are people who have been at HIV issues for decades. And finally having a product that's in trial, I think is amazing. So kudos to everybody, brilliant 0111, 011 uh team, and uh I wish you great success. Maybe a few years from now we'll have something to in our uh you know, other tools to deal with HIV on the continent. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Okay, that's a great one. I initially I wasn't gonna give any kudos uh because I said I'll just ask you. But I said I'm in Panama uh at the moment. Uh I knew about the work of um somebody called Dr. William Gorgas about 100 years ago. Uh but I do want to give him kudos today, 100 years after, uh, because I was really reminded of the visionary work that he's done here controlling yellow fever and malaria in Panama. And and not only really uh safeguarded you know countless lives and and really introduced good public health measures, but and and was maybe one of the reasons why the greatest engineering fit in the history, which is Panama Canal, really worked out. And his really work reminds us that public health is integral to really unlocking economic progress, human potential. So we just can't forget that, can we? So I that's my kudos for today to uh William Gorgas, who worked on that 100 years ago. So thank you both for today's first Inside Track. Uh, we did well, and we will continue. So thank you for our listeners for joining today. Uh, we will meet again uh on a monthly basis for the next round. If any of you have any ideas or topics you want us to talk about, please send them our way and or uh suggest any questions you have to our pundits uh to discuss. So we're open for that as well. So uh with uh do thanks both of you and see you next time.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
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