Women’s History Month, the Food Industry, and Health Care in Southeast Asia

Editor's Note

As Black History Month came to a close earlier this week, we welcomed Women's History Month. To commemorate both occasions, we launched a new interview series highlighting the trailblazing role of Black women in global health. Our first interview is with Mary Bassett, former commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and covers her experience as a biracial woman growing up in New York City, the lessons she learned during her twenty years working in Zimbabwe, and her storied career in the United States.

Our interview with Helene Gayle, president of Spelman College, chronicles the social movements that shaped her ideas of the world, her early career at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and how being a Black American women affected her work in global health.

Our next contributor, Ed Gomez, highlights the problem of obesity among adolescents in low- and middle-income countries. Rates of overweight and obese youth are increasing much faster in poor nations than in wealthy ones. Gomez draws on research from his recent book in arguing that politicians have a duty to stand up to processed food companies and do more to protect children's health.

Switching gears, our next piece is the second installment in a two-part series based on the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's analysis of international development assistance for global health. That article shows that pandemic preparedness has never accounted for more than one cent of every dollar of global health aid spent between 1990 and 2021.

Our last author argues that South Asian countries can sustain their progress toward achieving universal health care only if more adopt value-based care models that better account for aging populations and rising health-care costs.

As always, thank you for reading. —Thomas J. Bollyky, Editor.