Take as Directed

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 important—and surprising—findings about global diet-related issues.

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 at the United Nations Foundation; Carmen Tull, Chief of the Child Health and Immunizations...

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 health, the need to reinvigorate programs that have stalled, and Shawn’s hopes for long-term,...

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 what regulatory or governance framework is needed. In this episode of Take as Directed, host Steve...

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 culminated in a longform report titled “Building a tuberculosis-free world”, and spoke about some...

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 three discuss how the current bipartisan momentum around economic empowerment for women...

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 is today—a small but vocal, social media-savvy, activist group of Americans. Over the course of...

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 governments and donors to administer nutrition and agriculture programs, and shares his thoughts on...

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 Wolfe, Acting Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC)...

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 organization dedicated to ending the opioid epidemic in the United States. Admiral Winnefeld describes how...

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 through 2018. The senator discusses the evolution of Pakistan’s polio program, the challenges...

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 Policy Center Senior Associate Janet Fleischman speaks with Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya, a Kenyan educator,...

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. In this episode of Take as Directed, CSIS senior fellow Nellie Bristol sits down with Adrien de...

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. Episode produced in 2018 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

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 this plateauing of progress while also discussing data integration, the new malaria strategy of the...

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 Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to discuss the potential of new technologies,...

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 conversation that provides critical context on operating in eastern DRC, including clarity on...

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 three discuss how the current bipartisan momentum around economic empowerment for women...

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 discusses the importance of creative financing needed to achieve The Global Fund’s goal of investing...

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 exist in treatment and recovery services, and the dangers of stigma in the midst of a public...