It provides a template for a broad range of global health efforts and is an excellent example of evolving, increasingly effective approaches to disease control and elimination.

With a foreword by Bill Gates, this book fascinates, inspires, and gives readers concrete steps for further engagement.

An analysis of the many factors that have contributed to the striking success of the Onchocerciasis Control Program in West Africa (OCP), a major public health initiative now entering its twenty-first year. Throughout its history, OCP has been distinguished by its large size, the complexity of its operations, the long time frame needed for success, and the degree of commitment required by donors and participating countries alike. The Program has also been distinguished by its explicit aim to eliminate a disease, which has been a major obstacle to socioeconomic development as well as a cause of great disability and suffering. In examining the Program's many successful features, the author, who has directed OCP since late 1980, draws upon extensive personal experience, supported by the results of several external evaluations, to show how international collaboration, careful planning, and well managed field operations can overcome what may seem to be insurmountable obstacles. Throughout this analysis, an effort is made to extract lessons useful in the management of other large public health programs. The book also gives careful attention to managerial principles that will be important when OCP ceases operation and participating countries take over responsibility for the surveillance and management of recrudescence. The book has two parts. Chapters in the first part give a detailed account of the history, structure, operation, and achievements of OCP. Part two, on the management of OCP, explains how sound budgeting, detailed plans, time-limited goals, task-focused training, and careful computation of costs worked to maintain well-organized operations and keep staff motivated and efficient

Doctors are ordinary people who experience challenges and failures just like everyone. This short must-read book offers the reader stories and sound advice on how regular women struggled with failure and rejection to finally succeed in medicine. At the core of this book are lessons on resilience, faith, determination and persistence told by 15 immigrant African women who dared to dream in the face of different challenges in order to answer the physician's call in faraway America.Born and raised in parts of the African continent where for many, hardship is commonplace and opportunities few, these women were as fearless as they were bold in pursuing their dreams. Their career aspirations would be enwrapped in different journeys characterized by years of rejection and failure in Africa, the Caribbean Islands, and the United States where some would eventually join the ranks of life-saving physicians and others, rejected but ever hopeful residency applicants.Recounts of the challenges common to the 21st-century woman on finding love, interracial dating in a racially charged society, heartbreak, divorce, single parenthood, acculturation, managing life-changing illnesses and successfully balancing family life and career aspirations, are as many as the tales of the academic and career challenges experienced by these women, further exacerbated by being women, immigrants and racial minorities.The stories are different and the experiences unique; but they all have the common result of demystifying medicine and echo recurrent lessons of resilience, strength, unwavering faith, resolve, and the tenacity that is needed to soar beyond challenges.

Most accounts of health and healthcare in Africa are written by foreigners. African Health Leaders: Making Change and Claiming the Future redresses the balance. Written by Africans, who have themselves led improvements in their own countries, the book discusses the creativity, innovation and leadership that has been involved tackling everything from HIV/AIDs, to maternal, and child mortality and neglected tropical diseases. It celebrates their achievements and shows how, over three generations, African health leaders are creating a distinctively African vision of health and health systems. The book reveals how African Health Leaders are claiming the future - in Africa, but also by sharing their insights and knowledge globally and contributing fully to improving health throughout the world. It illustrates how African leadership can enable foreign agencies and individuals working in Africa to avoid all those misunderstandings and misinterpretations of culture and context which lead to wasted efforts and frustrated hopes. African Health Leaders challenges Africans to do more for themselves; build on success; tackle weak governance, corrupt systems and low expectations and claim the future. It sets out what Africa needs from the rest of the world in the spirit of global solidarity - not primarily in aid, but through investment, collaboration, partnership and co-development. It concludes with a vision for improvement based on three foundations: an understanding that 'health is made at home'; the determination to offer access to health services for everyone; and an insistence on the pursuit of quality.

Why do diseases of poverty afflict more people in wealthy countries than in the developing world? In 2011, Dr. Peter J. Hotez relocated to Houston to launch Baylor’s National School of Tropical Medicine. He was shocked to discover that a number of neglected diseases often associated with developing countries were widespread in impoverished Texas communities. Despite the United States’ economic prowess and first-world status, an estimated 12 million Americans living at the poverty level currently suffer from at least one neglected tropical disease, or NTD. Hotez concluded that the world’s neglected diseases—which include tuberculosis, hookworm infection, lymphatic filariasis, Chagas disease, and leishmaniasis—are born first and foremost of extreme poverty. In this book, Hotez describes a new global paradigm known as “blue marble health,” through which he asserts that poor people living in wealthy countries account for most of the world’s poverty-related illness. He explores the current state of neglected diseases in such disparate countries as Mexico, South Korea, Argentina, Australia, the United States, Japan, and Nigeria. By crafting public policy and relying on global partnerships to control or eliminate some of the world’s worst poverty-related illnesses, Hotez believes, it is possible to eliminate life-threatening disease while at the same time creating unprecedented opportunities for science and diplomacy. Clear, compassionate, and timely, Blue Marble Health is a must-read for leaders in global health, tropical medicine, and international development, along with anyone committed to helping the millions of people who are caught in the desperate cycle of poverty and disease.

The sociologist Thomas Sowell writes, "We need to confront the most blatant fact that has persisted across centuries of social history—vast ddifferences in productivity among peoples, and the economic and other consequences of such differences." Poverty demeans dignity, shrinks the soul, wastes potential, and inflicts suffering on three billion people on our planet. We must also acknowledge that, during the past fifty yyears, the record in international assistance to the least developed countries has been disappointing; the economics-based abstractions developed in the think tanks of Europe and North America are insufficient. In the River They Swim is the antithesis of that search for solutions to the next big theory of global poverty. From the fresh perspective of advisors on the frontlines of development to the insight of leaders like President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Pastor Rick Warren, it tells the story of change in the microcosms of emerging businesses, industries, and governments. These essays display a personal nature to their work that rigorous analysis alone cannot explain. We learn that a Sufi master can teach us about the different levels of knowledge, the "different ways to know a river." These practitioners could have written about its length, its source, its depth, its width, the power of its current, and the life it contains. They could have invested time and money to travel to that river so that they could sit on its shores and look at it, feel the sand that borders it, and watch the birds at play over it. Instead, they dove in to swim in the river, felt its current along their bodies, and tasted something of it. They wondered, briefly, if they had the strength to swim its length, and now they share the answer. If human development is a river, the authors in this volume, and perhaps some readers, will no longer be satisfied to stand along its banks.