A Foreign Health Service, Morphine in Bangladesh, Family Planning, and Eight Billion People

Editors' Note

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated the unresolved challenges in global health diplomacy. Our first piece this week makes the case for a foreign health service to fill the gap—a specialized corps of U.S. foreign service officers who can help manage the complex, evolving demands of the current global health environment.

While some wealthy nations struggle with oversupply and misuse of prescription opioids, needed pain medication is often scarce in many poorer countries, especially for cancer patients. Our next piece takes a detailed look at palliative care in Bangladesh and the reason for this morphine shortage.

The United States is in the midst of one of the largest animal outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza in its history, with forty-nine million birds across forty-three states affected. Infections are also beginning to appear among other mammals. Our third piece assesses the risks this outbreak poses and the early lessons it offers for targeted surveillance and mitigation efforts.

Next week, policymakers, researchers, and advocates are meeting in Thailand for the International Conference on Family Planning, and they will have much to do. The 1.6 billion young people who live in low- and middle-income countries are the most affected by unmet family planning needs. Our next article presents research, disaggregated contraception method, on where progress is and is not occurring.

We cap off the week with a nod to the "Day of Eight Billion," November 15, when the world's population is set to hit eight billion people (advances in health care can take a big chunk of the credit). Data visualizations illustrate shifting country population trends behind the world's population growth.

As always, thank you for reading, and be well. —Thomas J. Bollyky and Mary Brophy Marcus, Editors 