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Think Global Health

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  • Poverty
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Think Global Health

The State of Global Health Funding and Pollution Trading in India

August 1, 2025

 

Editors' Note

On Wednesday, the Indian Space Research Organisation, in partnership with NASA, launched a new satellite for monitoring climate change and natural disasters. The technological achievement comes amid a clean energy boom in the South Asian nation—which this year could overtake the United States as a renewables superpower.  

Local governments in India are also moving to release less pollution into the air. One idea involves emissions trading schemes (ETS) that create business incentives to cut pollution more efficiently. Journalist Sushmita Pathak describes one ETS in Surat, a textile hub in the western Indian state of Gujarat, that reduced pollution emissions for participating factories by 20% to 30% and lowered abatement costs.  

Next, TGH heads to Colombia, where health journalist Hannah Harris Green offers a tour of the first safe injection sites in Latin America. Harris Green describes how the sites foster client safety and how their success is inspiring a new approach to overdose prevention for surrounding countries.  

With the global goal of ending tuberculosis (TB) by 2030 fast approaching, Africa stands at a crossroads. Although TB infections still claim hundreds of thousands of lives across the continent annually, the death toll is dropping. Still, recent foreign aid cuts threaten to reverse that progress. In light of those developments, Africa Regional Cochair of the Global TB Caucus Christopher Kalila calls on African governments to build self-sufficient TB responses that ensure citizens' health does not hinge on foreign goodwill. 

Continuing with aid, TGH Associate Data Editor Allison Krugman surveys how the Trump administration's cuts to development assistance for health are reshaping global health governance and programming. 

To wrap up, this week's newsletter includes recommendations from our archive about the food and health-care crises in Gaza. See below for details. 

Until next week!—Nsikan Akpan, Managing Editor, and Caroline Kantis, Associate Editor 

 

This Week's Highlights

ENVIRONMENT

An employee works inside the Century Textiles and Industries Ltd. textile mill, in Gujarat, India, on October 22, 2009.

The Pollution Market: An Auction for Better Air Quality in West India

by Sushmita Pathak

An experiment using emission trading schemes between factories offers an alternative fix for industrial air pollution

Read this story

 

URBANIZATION

Miguel Restrepo, 62, a former drug addict, looks up from his sewer home in Medellin, Colombia, on December 4, 2012.

Colombia Opens South America's First Safe Injection Sites

by Hannah Harris Green

July's launch of a second site signals a shift in overdose prevention that could spread across Latin America

Read this story

 

Figure of the Week

Chart with six separate line graphs showing health funding flows from Australia, Japan, South Korea, France, United Kingdom, and United States from 1990-2025
 

Eyes on Gaza and Israel

As Israel faces growing international pressure over famine in Gaza, many wonder about the conditions that led to the territory's mass starvation and the destruction of health-care systems. TGH recommends these expert analyses from our recent archives:  

Health Care Under Fire: How the Middle East Reflects a Global Crisis (July 14, 2025) 

Hospital Attacks in Gaza and Israel: What Counts as a War Crime? (July 1, 2025) 

The Gaza Gray Zone: Between War and Recovery (March 11, 2025)

Humanitarian Aid in Gaza: Failure and Success a Year On (October 7, 2024

A Nightmare for Pregnant Women in Gaza (August 7, 2024)

Gaza's Food Crisis Began Long Before the Israel-Hamas Conflict (April 18, 2024)

 

Recommended Feature

GOVERNANCE

Patients with HIV and tuberculosis (TB) wear masks while awaiting consultation at a clinic in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 23, 2010.

Africa's Tuberculosis Funding Crisis: Moving Beyond External Saviors

by Christopher Kalila 

Recent foreign aid cuts have exposed the need for domestic responses to maintain progress against the fatal disease

Read this story

 

What We're Reading

Controversial FDA Official Dr. Vinay Prasad Departs Agency (CNN)

Burning, Burying and Banning: Indonesia's Cities Struggle to Manage Their Garbage (Mongabay)

BRICS and the Rewriting of Global Health Diplomacy in a Post-United States Era (The Loop) 

Paying Tribute to David Nabarro (World Health Organization)

Major Alzheimer's Group Says Some Blood Tests May Be Used in Place of Brain Scans for Diagnosis (STAT)

Mass Grave Scandal, Cover-Up Claims Rock Southern Indian State (South China Morning Post) 

 

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