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Add to Preferred SourcesWorld Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed the critical importance of innovation in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals for global health and said Unitaid’s work holds “the potential to transform the health of individuals, families, communities and nations.”
“The fact is, that human health has only ever progressed because of innovation. Penicillin. Anesthesia. Germ theory. Sanitation. Mapping the human genome,” Dr. Tedros said at the opening of Unitaid’s 2019 Grant Implementers’ Forum.
Dr. Tedros addressed Unitaid’s secretariat and an audience of global health experts, agenda leaders and 100-plus strategic and operational staff engaged in Unitaid’s 42 active grants.
“The entire health system benefits from the projects you fund and the price reductions you negotiate,” Dr. Tedros said.
He cited Unitaid’s “unique strength to constantly adapt to changing global health needs” and called for stronger alignment between WHO and Unitaid to ensure that health innovations don’t “get stuck on the path to scale and sustainability.”
WHO has a special role to play, he said, in securing large-scale introduction of health innovations.
Tedros endorsed Unitaid’s new work against Plasmodium vivax malaria, as well as the organization’s efforts to apply long-acting technologies to the fight against HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and hepatitis C in lower-income countries.
The forum runs with a focus on “scalability”—the expansion of proven innovations to all those who need them.
Original source: Unitaid
Published on 19 March 2019