The Lancet: Offline: Ban Ki-moon’s global health initiative in jeopardy
Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet

“An important element of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s flagship Every Woman, Every Child initiative is under threat. That was the conclusion of last week’s stakeholder meeting on Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health, held in Geneva and opened by the Director-General of WHO, Margaret Chan. … Why have donors walked away from their promise to support more reliable monitoring of women’s and children’s health? Accountability is an uncomfortable word. … But if no further funding to improve the monitoring of women’s and children’s health is forthcoming, those who will lose most will be women and children, whose lives will remain invisible and discounted in a world where the yearning for short-term political credit seems persistently to trump the longer-term search for truth” (1/25).