New Voices in Global Health

Abstract

The World Health Summit, held in Berlin, celebrates its fi fth anniversary this year. It has survived all the dangers of early childhood. Indeed, earlier this year the fi rst regional meeting of the World Health Summit took place in Singapore. During this gathering, the University of Makerere, Uganda, became the fi rst member of the M8 Alliance from sub-Saharan Africa. The M8 Alliance is a collaboration between academic health centres, universities, and national academies. Its vision is to harness academic excellence to improve global health. Following a successful fi rst event in 2012, The Lancet, together with the M8 Alliance, issued a further call for abstracts to fi nd the most inspiring “New Voices in Global Health”. Young researchers from 39 countries have submitted 122 abstracts. Five outstanding abstracts for oral presentation and 13 abstracts for poster presentation at the Summit have been chosen through careful peer review. This booklet contains those 18 abstracts. This year’s topics range from short message services to improve infant feeding practices in China, to a global economic and epidemiological analysis of investments in cholera vaccines; from research on universal health coverage in the Palestinian territory, to a key question for all of us: can we change research to change health? Research is also the focus of WHO’s World Health Report 2013, which will be presented and discussed at the Summit. Choosing the theme of “Research for Universal Health Coverage” is timely, since the UN is moving towards the fi nal stages of devising a post-2015 framework. The report of the HighLevel Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda proved that the global health community still needs to do considerably more work to ensure that health is fi rmly anchored in life after the Millennium Development Goals. This year, the Summit welcomes the contribution of Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission. In his message, Barroso notes that “there is no better indicator of the true wealth of a society than the state of its health systems, their eff ectiveness and inclusiveness”. The World Health Summit 2013 will focus on this interplay between health and prosperity, development and inequality, research and education, and on the role of health in all aspects of foreign policy. The voices we showcase here will send out strong signals that a new generation of scientists has already embraced and responded to this urgent call.