Opinion

  • 14 July 2023
    Japan’s Fight Against TB Can Be a Roadmap for Pandemic Preparedness

    By Peter Sands, Executive Director, The Global Fund

    In March this year, I visited Japan for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. Although I have been to the country several times before, every time I walk Tokyo’s vibrant streets I am still struck by the sheer volume of people who live, work and...
  • 29 June 2023
    Pop-Up Booths to the Rescue in the Fight Against TB in Kenya

    By Peter Sands, Executive Director, The Global Fund

    In August 2022 Josphat Muoki, a father of four from Nairobi, Kenya, discovered he had TB when he stopped at a pop-up screening station on a busy pedestrian bridge over Nairobi Central Railway Station. The bridge links the city and the industrial zone...
  • 16 June 2023
    It’s Time to Overcome Gender Inequality in the Fight Against HIV

    By Peter Sands, Executive Director, The Global Fund

    Last year I met a woman called Shani Ally in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Shani leads a full life as a mother, wife and small-business owner. She has also been on HIV treatment for more than 20 years. That treatment has kept her alive and prevented the t...
  • 25 May 2023
    One Mozambican Woman’s Fight Against Malaria – “the Devil” That Took Her Husband’s Life

    By Peter Sands, Executive Director, The Global Fund

    “Malaria is the devil that came to my house,” Celina Tembe says softly, her hand touching the head of her 3-year-old daughter, Manuela Manuel. In August last year, her 35-year-old husband, Manuel Maxaieie, came home late from work as a machine operat...
  • 16 May 2023
    We Will Only Beat HIV if We Protect the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ People Everywhere

    By Ralf Jürgens, Senior Technical Coordinator on Human Rights in the Community, Rights, and Gender Department (CRG) at the Global Fund

    On this International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, we can celebrate some important steps forward for the rights of LGBTQI+ people, and thus progress in the fight against HIV.
  • 15 May 2023
    President Museveni, Please Tear Up This Bill

    By Linda Mafu, Head of Political and Civil Society Advocacy at the Global Fund

    A toxic wave of homophobia is surging across East Africa. It is crashing down in Uganda, where members of parliament recently passed a bill that makes being gay a crime that is punishable by death and not reporting homosexuality a criminal offense.
  • 10 May 2023
    The Challenge of Malaria

    By Peter Sands, Executive Director, The Global Fund

    In February 2020, just before COVID-19 made such trips impossible, I visited a village in the Kongo Central province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and talked to a community health worker, called François Mvueki. Looking at his daily logbook...
  • 05 May 2023
    Felled by a Warming World: Will Malaria Be the Next Pandemic?

    By Peter Sands, Executive Director, The Global Fund

    The next global health crisis might not be another pandemic caused by a novel respiratory infection. Instead, we could see climate change dramatically increasing the threat from an existing infectious disease–for example, malaria, a disease that kill...
  • 24 March 2023
    Fighting Tuberculosis Will Protect Us From the Next Global Health Threat

    By Eliud Wandwalo, Head of Tuberculosis, the Global Fund

    One of the best ways to prepare for future pandemics is to turbocharge the fight against tuberculosis and stop considering it the “pandemic of the poor”, writes Dr. Eliud Wandwalo, head of TB at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria...
  • 20 March 2023
    Tuberculosis: The Unseen Pandemic

    By Peter Sands, Executive Director, The Global Fund

    TB will likely kill more people in low- and middle- income countries in 2023 than COVID-19. Yet it attracts a tiny fraction of the political attention and financial resources we’ve deployed against the new virus.