Farlow: Health organizations failing to battle global disease

Though global health organizations strive to control disease in the developing world, the funding for such programs is often costly and difficult to sustain, Oxford scholar Andrew Farlow told an audience of about 30 students, professors and community members in Robertson Hall last night.

Farlow analysed the growth of funding into global health initiatives over the past ten years and observed that donors often opt for short-term fixes in place of long-term solutions. "There is an incentive to always do the thing that looks new or novel," he said.

Farlow explained that health organizations want big solutions instead of using simple tools to confront epidemics.

For example, he explained that two-thirds of all the African children who die under the age of five could be saved by low-cost treatments such as Vitamin A supplements, oral rehydration salts and existing malaria interventions. He also reviewed the continuing underuse of even basic cheap vaccines.

"Sometimes it's the simple, unglamorous thing," he said, "but ... some would say [that] it is not 'sexy' enough, so it doesn't get done."

Farlow also noted that organizations often overlook leading causes of mortality in developing countries such as measles, pneumonia and death in childbirth. "Maternal mortality runs at almost criminal levels in some countries and regions," Farlow said. He added that people in global health often say that the focus is on more high-profile diseases like HIV/AIDS instead of these other problems.

Bureaucracy and overlapping organizations are other problems facing global health initiatives, Farlow added. "Groups on the ground face layers and layers of paperwork in order to deal with all the different sponsors"

Since these different initiatives are competing for funding, he said, they often fail to pool resources and information, working against each other instead of working together.

He also criticized health organizations' tendency to use "numerical targets" in measuring efficiency. "Other targets that are harder to quantify get overlooked."

He added that global health initiatives are always looking to fund a quick fix to the problem of mortality and disease in the developing world. "We spend lots, then worry about longterm sustainability later," he said.

Following the talk, both students and professors posed questions on global health policy. The question-and-answer session was moderated by Adel Mahmoud, a lecturer in the Wilson School, which sponsored the lecture.