Publications

This report highlights the key results achieved over Phase II of the Maternal Health Thematic Fund (MHTF), from 2014 to 2016, structured around the three cross-cutting principles of accountability, equality of access and quality of care, as outlined in the MHTF Business Plan Phase II (2014-2017). The report foregrounds the MHTF’s role in supporting health systems strengthening, and addresses its catalytic nature, its promotion of sustainability and its strong emphasis on advancing innovation. A vision and direction are outlined for the third phase of the MHTF, which will be further elaborated in a forthcoming Business Plan Phase III (2018-2021).

This document provides key considerations on when clinically stable children, adolescents and women who are pregnant or breastfeeding as well as members of key populations (people who inject drugs, sex workers, men who have sex with men, transgender people and people living in prisons and closed settings) can benefit from access to ART services for clinically stable clients, including less frequent clinic visits and multi-month refills for ART and other medications. The guidance provides the rationale and the approach to expand differentiated ART delivery to populations of people living with HIV who previously may not have been considered “eligible” for ART delivery models for clinically stable clients.

When we began this project, we realised that there was little consolidated information on the HCV situation in Malaysia, whether epidemiological reports, patient voices, or the diagnostics and treatment environment. This report seeks to fill that gap and be a useful tool for clinicians, civil society, policy makers, politicians, and other stakeholders working towards access and affordability of HCV diagnostics and medication.

This report provides in-depth technical discussions in areas that have direct implications to the containment of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a development agenda. The report is organized in five chapters which served as the technical background documents for the Biregional Technical Consultation on AMR in Asia, 14-15 April 2016.

The primary purpose of antiretroviral therapy is to keep people living with HIV in good health. In the large majority of people living with HIV, antiretroviral medication can be chosen that reduce the amount of HIV in the blood to levels that are undetectable by standard laboratory tests. It can take some months to reduce viral levels to undetectable levels and allow the immune system to begin to recover. Antiretroviral therapy is transformative for people living with HIV. It enables people to regain their quality of life, return to work, enjoy their families and enjoy a future filled with hope.

It is critical in understanding the information in this policy brief, that we recognize the historical and contemporary experiences of marginalization against all women, and that our analyses of these experiences as they relate to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) should not be limited to the relationships or dynamics between cisgender and heterosexual men and women. Recognizing the powerful intersectional dynamics at work here and how the lack pluralistic views on gender and sexual diversity blind advocates and policy makers to the natural pluralistic nature of gender and sexuality. This consequently contributes to the restrictions on women's human rights. This policy brief is based on a desk review of pertinent documents, including state submissions and shadow reports from ASEAN member-states and Timor-Leste. It includes the most recent periodic reports submitted by these countries, as well as the Concluding Observations from the CEDAW Committee, which were published between 2012 and 2017.

The Global Plan to End TB 2016–2020 calls for a paradigm shift in the approach to TB, demanding a scale-up of TB prevention and care services to unprecedented coverage levels. Without this paradigm shift, we cannot see the end of TB. Measuring progress towards the 90-(90)-90 targets will unveil the gaps at each stage of the TB care cascade, exposing the unacceptably high numbers of people who are being left behind and encouraging the mobilization of essential resources for countries to ensure the delivery of quality TB services. This report is the first in a series produced by the Stop TB Partnership. The goal is to assess the status of country TB programmes in terms of the Global Plan’s 90-(90)-90 targets and to provide a baseline for monitoring progress over the next 5 years. Currently, the 30 high TB and drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) burden countries that account for almost 80% of the global burden exhibit the biggest gaps in the areas of diagnosis for TB and DR-TB, and the provision of preventive therapy (PT). Moreover, monitoring the uptake of TB services in key populations remains a challenge due to the limited availability and disaggregation of data.

The report – “Antibacterial agents in clinical development – an analysis of the antibacterial clinical development pipeline, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis” – shows a serious lack of new antibiotics under development to combat the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. Most of the drugs currently in the clinical pipeline are modifications of existing classes of antibiotics and are only short-term solutions. The report found very few potential treatment options for those antibiotic-resistant infections identified by WHO as posing the greatest threat to health, including drug-resistant tuberculosis which kills around 250 000 people each year. In addition to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, WHO has identified 12 classes of priority pathogens – some of them causing common infections such as pneumonia or urinary tract infections – that are increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics and urgently in need of new treatments.

From March 2016 to June 2016, 15 field researchers met 104 people living with HIV in South Korea and asked about their experiences of stigma and discrimination in the last 12 months. The survey was conducted through a translated version of the standardized questionnaire developed by the UNAIDS and associated institutions.

The World Drug Report for 2016, the flagship publication of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), is framed by the recent United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs, and draws on key themes developing from the Special Session. It shows the influence of the Outcome Document, and of the Sustainable Development Agenda (SDA). The Report devotes considerable energy to examining the extent of drug use and its consequences for health. While emphasising the play of uncertainty within its field of knowledge, it nevertheless makes some rather grand claims, such as that one in 20 adults – or a quarter of a billion individuals – used at least one drug in 2014, the last year for which data are available. The narrative of stability is invoked alongside this claim by reminding the reader that this group has remained the same as a proportion of the global proportion, which has expanded in parallel.