The Unrelenting Specter of Drug-Resistant Malaria

In India, failing road safety and accident respondent systems have created a nationwide crisis. SaveLife Foundation is addressing these problems head on, through outreach, legal battles, and innovative solutions to ineffective government policy.

A collaboration between architectural designers and medical providers created a cholera treatment clinic in Port-au-Prince where the design of the building itself supports treatment. The building is well ventilated and filled with natural light, provides an open space for providers to see many patients and be able to respond in case of crisis, and has the ability to collect and treat water.

For patients with tuberculosis, it is vital that they take their medicine consistently and on schedule, even after they are no longer contagious, which can be time consuming and expensive for public health departments to manage. Teleconferencing has helped people remember to take their medications, even during a disaster like Hurricane Harvey.

A Denver group called Dispatch Health is an urgent care "delivery" service. Instead of requiring the patient to come to the hospital, Dispatch Health come to the patient's home and administers care on site. The group is working to be more economical than a traditional hospital as well, with services from $40-50 for insured patients and a flat rate of $275 for the uninsured.

The poliovirus has plagued Nigeria for years, but the country is approaching near-eradication thanks to community public health workers' efforts to increase education, immunization and reporting. Throughout the country workers known as Disease Surveillance and Notification Officers are trained to recognize the symptoms of polio so the cases can be reported and addressed immediately. Coupled with the efforts of community informants, this approach has already resulted in parts of Nigeria becoming polio-free.

After realizing that too many people were calling 911 for issues that were not medical emergencies in Richland, Illinois, a program was launched to act as an intervention strategy. After the start, calls decreased by over 40 percent, which helped make emergency vehicles and responders available for more serious calls.

The United States and Italy have been playing catch up in the mitigation of the coronavirus pandemic and were resistant to implementing social distancing, while other countries took more aggressive approaches. Now both countries are looking to China and South Korea to learn how sweeping actions and industrialized scaling of measures such as fever clinics, temperature check points, portable CAT scanning, and social isolation, have helped to contain the pandemic.

When Henrico County Fire Department began to respond to calls for people exhibiting signs of coronavirus, they began utilizing recommendations of how best to stay safe. Although restrictive, this new playbook helps emergency responders stay safe by "limiting the number of responders that go into a facility" and encourages nursing homes to bring patients "as close to the ambulance entrance as possible."

The HIV/AIDS clinical trial network’s 30 sites have spent years building trust among historical marginalized communities so that more clinical trial participants come from communities of color. Educational outreach, awareness-raising efforts, and one-on-one conversations are among the strategies used to make the scientific process more transparent. The engagement model is upfront about abuses from the past and uses straightforward explanations with no medical jargon. Infectious disease experts are using the trust-building model to increase the racial diversity of participants in COVID-19 vaccine trials.

Teams of Community Direct Distributors (CDD) are leading drug distribution campaigns to prevent and eliminate neglected tropical diseases in hard-to-reach, rural areas. These CDDs are members of the community they serve and are trained to educate the locals on disease prevention and administer the drugs themselves. With the CDDs’ help, several states have already eliminated some diseases and greatly reduced the spread of others.