Take As Directed

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 of the main findings of the report and what the next steps are in creating a world free of TB.

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 provides an opportunity to strengthen linkages with U.S. investments in women’s global health.

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 her career, Lena has written widely on a number of issues related to public health and infectious disease, and her most recent work is on the topic of the anti-vaxxer movement in the U.S., its implications on public health, and state and federal responses to the anti-vaxxer movement.

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 the future of U.S. investments in nutrition and the importance of multisectoral approaches in improving health outcomes. To learn more about U.S. government nutrition investments in Uganda, visit the CSIS Global Health Policy Center program page for our report titled “Improving Nutrition in East Africa’s Bread Basket”.

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) Washington, D.C. office and the CDC’s Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Wolfe discusses the role and methods of the CDC in the current Ebola response, as well as what to expect from this outbreak as we look ahead.

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 difficult it was to find treatment for Jonathan and recounts the challenges of recognizing signs of recovery--and signs of relapse.

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 remaining in achieving an end to transmission, and her hopes for the new government in sustaining momentum.

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, activist, and founder of “Kakenya’s Dream”, a leading nongovernmental organization for girls’ education, health, and empowerment, which also works to end FGM and child marriage. Dr. Ntaiya discusses the personal journey that led her to form “Kakenya’s Dream”, and how her work is helping to develop the next generation of women leaders in her community. Hosted by Janet Fleischman.  

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 Chaisemartin, Director of Strategy, Funding & Performance at Gavi, to discuss Gavi’s continuing work to improve partner engagement, build management capacity, and bolster immunization systems.

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 Gates Foundation, and the importance of U.S. funding and leadership in the malaria endgame.

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, strategies, and partnerships to improve vaccination rates and strengthen immunization systems even in the most difficult of settings. Hosted by Nellie Bristol.  

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 who the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) are and perspective on the relationship between the Ebola outbreak and the upcoming, highly anticipated elections in DRC. Hosted by J. Stephen Morrison.  

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 provides an opportunity to strengthen linkages with U.S. investments in women’s global health, how such an approach fits with USAID’s “Journey to Self-Reliance” framework, and the role of women’s groups and faith-based organizations in promoting access to both economic empowerment programs and women’s health services.  Hosted by Janet Fleischman.

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 resources to end the pandemics of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Hosted by Sara Allinder.

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 health crisis.   Hosted by J. Stephen Morrison.

In this episode of Take as Directed, we are joined by Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Since assuming his position as CDC Director in March of this year, Dr. Redfield has led the effort to enhance the CDC’s role in the continuing polio endgame. In part one of our two-part conversation, he discusses the complexities of the polio endgame, and shares what he believes to be the CDC’s most significant contributions to this global effort.    Hosted by J. Stephen Morrison

With the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo rapidly escalating to dangerous levels, the global health community must consider how much progress has been made to prevent and efficiently respond to outbreaks since the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In this episode of Take as Directed, we are joined by Gabrielle Fitzgerald, founder and CEO of Panorama, a Seattle based action tank dedicated to solving global problems. Gabrielle discusses the main points of a British Medical Journal piece she recently co-authored, Global epidemics: How well can we cope?, which addresses the gaps that remain in the global capacity to respond to outbreaks from various standpoints such as financing, research and development, and knowledge sharing.  Hosted by J. Stephen Morrison.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a long-standing, urgent threat to global public health, yet it has never been discussed at the highest level of the world stage. That changes this week, as heads of state gather in New York for the UN General Assembly, where they will convene the first-ever UNGA high-level meeting on tuberculosis. After three years of dialogue in advance of this historic event, the meeting will aim to accelerate efforts in ending TB, and it should result in a Political Declaration on TB endorsed by heads of state. On this episode of Take as Directedwe are joined by Dr. Eric Goosby, the current UN Special Envoy on Tuberculosis, to share his hopes and expectations for the meeting, and its potential as an important step towards realizing the WHO global end TB strategy.  Hosted by J. Stephen Morrison.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic of the Congo poses unprecedented challenges to emergency responders as the first ever case in an active warzone. The response has had remarkable mobilization and promising achievements thus far, with successful vaccination campaigns, and a constant readjustment of strategies and resource allocation to best contain the virus. However, six weeks into the response, the outbreak sits on the edge of some of the most insecure and inaccessible areas of the country, where the virus could potentially wreak terrifying levels of devastation. In this episode of Take as Directed we are joined by Peter Salama, Deputy Director General of the World Health Organization and Director of the Emergency Programs, to provide an inside look at how the response team is navigating the complex dynamics of a highly dangerous outbreak.   Hosted by J. Stephen Morrison.