In this podcast, Margaret Odera discusses her job as a community health worker, and the need for better training and pay to promote health.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) will hold the 12th Trilateral Cooperation Technical Symposium on “Antimicrobial Resistance: Addressing the Innovation Gap, Access Inequities, and Supply Challenges” on December 11, 2025. The registration deadline is December 9, 2025.

India’s national guidelines on voluntary blood donation, reviewed and published by the Ministry of Health India’s national guidelines on voluntary blood donation, reviewed and published by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the World Health Organization (WHO) India, in 2024, list a range of criteria that permanently disqualify individuals from donating blood (GoI 2024). Most are grounded in specific medical conditions or histories, such as cancer, hepatitis, or recent surgery, or in the documented health status of a spouse or partner. But one category of exclusion stands apart in both form and substance: people “at risk for HIV infection,” which includes men who have sex with men (MSM), transgender persons, female sex workers, injecting drug users, and persons with multiple sex partners.

The conference on “AMR Next 2025 –Transformative Strategies to Tackle Antimicrobial Resistance: for Safer Tomorrow” brings together global experts to explore

Employee mental well-being, supported by a positive work environment is crucial to enhancing firm productivity and sustaining long-term growth. However, research on the mental well-being of working populations in developing countries remains limited. This study examines the mental health status and key predictors of depression and anxiety in working men and women in India, one of the world’s most populous countries. For this, we collected quantitative data from 2,698 individuals using self-administered online surveys. We used bivariate and multivariate regressions to analyze the predictors of depression and anxiety in working men and women. We also used Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method to assess the association between gender and depression and anxiety. Finally, we assessed the role of personal stressors, work stressors, use of social media and siblings to understand the gender differences in anxiety and depression using OLS regression methods. Around 23% of female and 17% of male workers in our sample reported symptoms of either depression or anxiety, or both. Key predictors of mental health issues of the working population in the call centers included younger age, financial difficulties and, conflicts with supervisors, with additional mental health predictors of experience of domestic violence, unmarried status, and lack of siblings for women. Our regression results suggest that women in our sample exhibited 0.13 standard deviations higher depression and 0.26 standard deviations higher anxiety than men. Furthermore, women experiencing high personal and work-related stress, along with frequent social media use, reported the highest levels of depression and anxiety. Lastly, we find that relative to men without siblings, men with siblings report lower depression levels, and women without siblings report higher anxiety. These insights underscore the need for targeted interventions to support the mental health of working populations, particularly among women in developing contexts.

Background Antimicrobial consumption (AMC) measures the level and types of antibiotics consumed in a specific setting. Monitoring AMC is critical component of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) containment strategies. However, AMC data at both facility and national-levels are scarce in Africa, which limits our understanding of the rate, patterns and drivers of antibiotic consumption, and prevents the establishment of evidence-based antimicrobial stewardship. Methods We determined facility and national-level rates and patterns of AMC from data retrospectively collected between 2016 and 2019 in 327 pharmacies from 14 countries AMC data collection followed a backfilling strategy leveraging from public and private central medical stores, wholesalers, distributors or import services as data sources. Participating hospital and community pharmacies were selected based on their location in or proximity to hospitals capable of producing AMR data. Levels of AMC were determined as defined daily dose (DDD) and DDD per inhabitant (DID). AMC patterns were analysed according to the WHO Access, Watch, and Reserve (AWaRe) Categories, the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classes and the individual antibiotic molecules included in the Drug Utilisation 75% (DU75). The availability of antibiotics was examined against the WHO and the National Essential Medicine Lists (EML). Results National AMC data was available in 11 of the 14 participating countries, revealing a collective AMC of 8.42 DID varying from 2.8 to 115.5 at individual country level. AMC was also determined in 327 hospital and community pharmacies. Nine of 11 (82%) countries with national data available, and 219 of the 327 (72%) participating pharmacies achieved the WHO AWaRe target of at least 60% of antibiotic consumption from Access drugs. Eighty percent of country-level AMC was accounted for by five ATC sub-classes classes of antibacterial for systemic use. Facility-level antibiotic consumption was dominated by a narrow scope of less than five drugs, taking advantage of only 10% of all possible WHO-recommended Access drugs within ATC classes. Collectively, the 14 national EML included 70% of Access, 60% of Watch and less than 5% of Reserve antibiotics listed in the WHO EML. Forty-eight uncategorized and 50 categorized non-WHO-recommended drugs were included in national EMLs or documented to be circulating in countries. Interpretation The relatively low AMC and the poorly diversified subset of antibiotics available in countries underscores that strategies to expand equitable access to adequate treatment of bacterial infections should complement current efforts to promote the judicious use of antimicrobials. Interventions to increase the volume of analysable data on AMU, AMC and AMR, should be prioritized in national AMR action plans as well as in wider infrastructural and economic development plans.

Health expenditure is indicative of the financial burden of health care and serves as a yardstick of health system performance. However, health expenditure may be shaped by multiple factors such as prevalence of morbidity, income inequality and above all, unobserved heterogeneity such as disease severity. This study uses finite mixture models (FMM) to analyze health expenditure distribution based on a National Sample Survey (NSS) which is a nationally representative dataset. This exercise identifies three different class of health care users, acknowledging the heterogeneity within the expenditure distribution. The classes demonstrate variations in spending behavior and associated characteristics. It is observed that health spending is influenced by disease severity, age, gender, education, social group, and economic status. Notably, health expenditure for similar diseases varies significantly across three classes, with the highest expenditure observed in the third latent class. It also reaffirms the gender disparities in health spending irrespective of the class. Additionally, socio-economic status consistently affects health expenditure across classes. These findings underscore the importance of recognizing unobserved heterogeneity in health expenditure for the design of effective healthcare policies. In conclusion, there is a need to recognize the unobserved heterogeneity in health expenditure data and such a recognition that distinct classes within may have greater significance in designing better health care policies. Beyond health expenditure, this analytical framework can be adopted to other medical and public health research to identify the latent classes, thus offering a broader methodological value.