Solidarity is widely invoked as vital for overcoming present and future public health emergencies, as well as bridging global health disparities and inequities. However, despite its rhetorical prominence, appeals to solidarity have repeatedly failed to produce equitable outcomes in global health due to profound disagreements about the concept and how to institutionalize it in global health practice. Negotiations over the recently-adopted Pandemic Agreement revealed two key contrasting notions of solidarity: as redistributive and enforceable, grounded in demands for equity and historical redress; or voluntary, emphasising intellectual property protections and national discretion. We offer an account of solidarity that can function as a framework for integrating these rival views. Specifically, we theorise two understandings of solidarity that we have termed Deep and Responsive solidarity. While Deep solidarity refers to a normative principle of solidarity that is grounded on a profound understanding of being as fundamentally and intrinsically relational, Responsive solidarity is motivated as a response to crises. Our central intervention in this paper, drawing from the two accounts of solidarity, is to reorient solidarity from a crisis language towards a more foundational account of global health governance that can sustain justice both in ordinary times and in moments of rupture.

During the nineteenth century, a notable number of African physicians studied in British medical schools and then served as military surgeons across British West Africa. Despite their importance, the views of this distinguished group about the relationship between data and public health have remained largely unexamined. Focusing on the early career of Dr James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–83), this article explores how his standpoint as a black doctor led him to problematise the way in which large gaps in West African climatological and mortality statistics implicitly contributed to erroneous assumptions about the impact of tropical illness upon African people. It accordingly treats the new evidence he gathered as a form of ‘counter data’ designed to highlight the plight of the black civilian population living in the colony’s diverse topographical regions. Through treating Horton as a counter-data activist, the article offers insight into the larger historical relationship between colonial health and imperial information-gathering strategies, and it establishes Horton as a noteworthy West African public health statistician.

The rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), driven by relentless microbial evolution, threatens the foundations of global healthcare. Rather than following the so far undeliverable promise of evermore broad-spectrum antibiotics, infectious disease treatment can follow the example of oncology, which has, over a short period, augmented a platform of commodity anti-cancer agents with precision medicines and diagnostics to combat cancer evolution on a personalised basis. It is this shift that has allowed a significant extension in survival and has created entirely new subsectors of biotech. Sophisticated thinking and concerted action have also made changes to clinical practice and pathways. Applying these principles, precision antimicrobials, guided by rapid diagnostics and used alongside commodity products, offer a way to target resistant infections more effectively. Moreover, thinking about medicines that target multi-drug resistant infections as precision agents for rare occurrences opens up precedented reimbursement frameworks that could break the economic logjam that has smothered the sector for a generation. This is not the science of the future. The foundations of precision antimicrobial approaches are already emerging, with an ecosystem of initiatives to wrap around and support their development. Among these, Pathways to Antimicrobial Clinical Efficacy, a global AMR R&D platform that funds and offers wrap-around support for the development of new diagnostics and therapeutics, provides crucial infrastructure for emerging pipelines. Precision approaches have the potential to save lives that could otherwise be lost to resistant infections, while preserving the effectiveness of existing antimicrobials for future generations. Change is starting but cannot be left in the ‘too difficult’ tray. Microbial evolution and our own actions guarantee that we will need to adopt a new approach in our antimicrobial battle, and our lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic are that we need to act in advance, not in crisis.

International Relations scholarship has shown that persisting epistemic hierarchies rooted in colonial domination continue to exclude, silence, or sideline alternative knowledges in global governance, even as International Organizations increasingly open up to formally marginalized groups and attempt to pluralize their expertise. While building on such accounts, this article argues that epistemic hierarchies are deeply entangled with political-economic logics, which permeate global epistemic politics in multiple ways. These intersecting epistemic and political-economic logics produce complex forms of ‘political-epistemic disciplining’, which do not simply exclude alternative knowledges, but rearticulate them. I identify three intertwined modalities of this process: de-epistemization, whereby alternative knowledge claims are recoded as social or identity concerns rather than treated as competing epistemologies. This operation recognizes the subjects of the critique but not the epistemic critique itself. Conditional recognition occurs when prevailing criteria of validity regulate the acknowledgement of such claims. Finally, transposition constitutes or reformulates alternative knowledge claims through the lenses of dominant epistemic frameworks and categories. These processes rearticulate alternative knowledges and transform them a new into ‘globalized alternative knowledges’. The argument is developed through an in-depth analysis of engagements with Indigenous knowledges in Global Mental Health governance.

Dr. C. Norman Coleman, a distinguished cancer specialist and researcher, brought a passion for addressing health disparities to all of his roles from being on the faculty as a Radiation Oncologist at Stanford, as Chair of the Joint Center for Radiation Oncology at Harvard, as Associate Director of the Radiation Research Program at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, as Senior Medical Advisor to the US Government Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and as co-founder and Senior Scientific Officer for the International Cancer Expert Corps. With his passing earlier this year, this commentary by his colleagues at the International Cancer Expert Corps presents an overview of his many and significant contributions to addressing cancer disparities globally.

Dr. C. Norman Coleman’s impact is difficult to measure overall, even if one focuses only on his work as NCI’s Radiation Research Program (RRP) leader. His laboratory work spanned immune-oncology and radiation therapy, RNA biology, normal tissue and tumor tissue radiobiology, and the development of tissue chips for use in radiation biology research. His programmatic leadership helped the RRP develop health equity programs addressing Native American access to optimal cancer care, evaluation of hadron therapy biology, radiation biology, reproducibility and rigor, foundational molecular biology of the tumor and normal tissue caused by radiation therapy dynamically, and global health and security issues. While doing all these things, he found time to mentor countless people in the field, many now leaders, and to read and discuss science across disciplines. He was a dedicated, caring, kind scientist who truly wanted to help and improve the world for others.

Digitalisation in health introduces new actors, risks, and challenges into health governance. Global health institutions such as World Bank, World Health Organisation, and the now-disbanded US Agency for International Development play a central role in shaping how governments navigate this evolving technical terrain. This paper examines digital health discourses of these organisations in the early 2020s, asking why, how, and by whom digital health is promoted. Using Political Discourse Analysis, we study three flagship documents, selected from 72. Our analysis shows that these organisations engage in depoliticisation, portraying digital health as an inevitable wave that governments must adopt rapidly and extensively. This techno-optimist framing overlooks government capacity gaps concerning the complexity of strategic adoption and asymmetric power relations with technology providers, and the absence of political engagement with risks and challenges. These discourses foster a depoliticised vision of digital health, overlooking the political mechanisms for digitalisation to benefit the public.

Hyderabad, the fourth-most populous city in India, accounts for the majority of people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (PLWH) in Telangana, likely comprised of two populations with a disproportionately high national HIV prevalence: gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) and those who engage in sex work (SW). Research has shown that engaging in SW increases vulnerability to HIV transmission risk for both women and MSM, but less is known about contributors to non-optimal (ART) adherence. We analyzed data from 45 MSM and 49 women living with HIV who were enrolled in the first year of data collection from an mHealth education study in Hyderabad. Modified Poisson regression was used to measure factors associated with ART adherence measured with a visual analogue scale (VAS) (model 1) and pill count (model 2). Less than half (40.9%) reported ever engaging in SW, including 13 women and 25 MSM. The prevalence of non-optimal ART adherence was 14.9% with VAS and 42.4% with pill count. Engaging in SW was not associated with non-optimal ART adherence. Differences in non-optimal ART adherence measured by VAS and pill count suggest that future studies should utilize both methods to better distinguish the measures.

This paper examines the goals of organizations that sponsor short-term volunteer trips in global health, whether they be NGO’s, faith-based, educational, or corporate organizations. Results from a U.S.-based national survey of 177 such organizations and 27 interviews with trip organizers suggest that organizations often sponsor volunteer trips to achieve goals that are quite different from the improvement of health outcomes in poor countries. While providing health services is often cited as the most important goal, volunteer activity is also considered important in enhancing the organizations’ reputation, recruitment and retention, and financial well-being. The prominence of other goals has the potential for diverting resources and focus from what is presumably the primary purpose of serving host communities in the most effective manner possible.

The increasing health inequity and injustice of the COVID-19 pandemic rendered visible the inadequacy of global health governance, and exposed the self-interested decision-making of states and pharmaceutical companies. This research explores the advocacy activities of humanitarian and development international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in responding to this inequality and investigates how they framed alternatives for global health justice. It reviews 47 organizational documents and 43 media articles of five INGOs (ActionAid, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Save the Children, and World Vision) and points to the importance of understanding advocacy frames in analyzing how these organizations prioritize agendas and advocacy strategies. The dominance of the ‘human rights’ frame, sometimes in combination with ‘scientific evidence’ and ‘security’ frames, reflects the identities, mandates, and histories of campaigning and collaboration of these INGOs. This paper contends that the advocacy of humanitarian and development INGOs highlights both deontological and teleological ethics, promoting the voices of people in lower-income countries, clarifying duty bearers and their accountabilities, and addressing structural barriers from a human rights perspective in a global health agenda setting.

Public communication about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is widely acknowledged as a cornerstone of global, national, and regional strategies to tackle this urgent health threat. However, much like AMR itself, efforts to communicate about it are hindered by complex and intersecting challenges. This scoping review synthesises insights from 88 scholarly manuscripts published between 2015 and 2024 to explore critical issues in AMR communication and identify potential options to address them. We distil nine overarching themes that underpin effective public communication and engagement, with particular significance for engaging with disadvantaged and vulnerable communities. These themes encompass (1) social science theoretical frameworks, (2) varied sociocultural contexts, (3) public engagement and dialogue, (4) linguistic considerations, (5) messaging strategies, (6) media use and its impacts, (7) large-scale public campaigns, (8) creative communication approaches, and (9) evaluation. We discuss each theme and outline related recommendations, collectively advocating a re-imagining of AMR communication as a civic, cultural, and reflexive practice that is attuned to the complexities of diverse contexts and cultures, and designed to enhance societal relevance and impact.