The South Pacific countries of Vanuatu, Samoa, and Papua New Guinea have ascended rapidly up the development spectrum in recent years, refining an independent and post-colonial economic and political identity that enhances their recognition on the world stage. All three countries have overcome economic, political and public health challenges in order to stake their claim to sovereignty. In this...

We demonstrate an early version of a semantic web tool, Global Health Explorer (GHX), that can be used to conduct public health surveillance using Twitter. Our infrastructure can use any controlled vocabulary to extract term uses in Twitter and supports hypothesis formation and exploration of data sets using visual analysis. The resulting data, gathered in RDF, makes it possible to analyze term...

Public health instruments have been under constant development and renewal for decades. International legal instruments, with their binding character and strength, have a special place in this development. The start of the 21st century saw, in particular, the birth of the first World Health Organization (WHO)-era health treaties – the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) and i...

Global Health 2035, the report of The Lancet Commission on Investing in Health, laid out a bold, highly ambitious framework for making rapid progress in improving global public health outcomes. It showed that with the right health investments, the international community could achieve a “grand convergence” in global health—a reduction in avertable infectious, maternal, and child deaths down to ...