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News outlets report on the murder of three polio workers in Karachi, Pakistan, and the suspension of the vaccination program. BBC News: Pakistan polio workers shot dead in Karachi “Three polio workers have been killed in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, a day after authorities began a new vaccination…

Writing in Humanosphere, development blogger Tom Paulson offers an annual letter in response to Bill and Melinda Gates’s recently published annual letter. “…By all means, let’s celebrate progress. But let’s not forget all those millions, if not billions, of people out there who don’t yet see cause to celebrate” (1/21).

In Bill and Melinda Gates’s 2014 Annual Letter, they discuss three myths that block progress for the poor: “poor countries are doomed to stay poor”; “foreign aid is a big waste”; and “saving lives leads to overpopulation.” They write, “The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease…

Huffington Post: Achieving Global Health Equality Within a Generation Lawrence Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University and chair of the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health, GlobalHealth2035.org, and Gavin Yamey, associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health…

Agence France-Presse: Nigeria, Pakistan could delay polio-free goal: Gates Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Co-Chair “Bill Gates warned on Tuesday that violence in Nigeria and Pakistan could set him back in his goal of eradicating polio by 2018. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation … made wiping out…

LiveMint: Scaling up water sustainability Giulio Boccaletti, managing director for Global Water at the Nature Conservancy “…As the United Nations prepares to adopt so-called sustainable development goals (SDGs) as the post-2015 successor to the MDGs, the high-stakes business of large-scale water infrastructure should be placed front and center. … While…

Gabrielle Fitzgerald, director of global program advocacy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, discusses in the foundation’s “Impatient Optimists” blog the critical role of midwives in delivering family planning in Indonesia. Fitzgerald writes, “On January 1, Indonesia introduced a universal health insurance plan for all citizens, which will be…

The Center for Global Health Policy “Science Speaks” blog summarizes a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event in which World Bank President Jim Kim advocated for universal health coverage, saying increased access to HIV treatments has helped show it is possible to achieve. “The successes and lessons from…

The Guardian: Tackling malnutrition in India: the role of higher education Tanusree Paul, research associate at Public Health Foundation of India, and Shweta Khandelwal, research scientist at the Public Health Foundation of India “…One of the biggest, but broadly overlooked factors contributing to India’s nutrition problem is that people are…

Foreign Policy: The Case for Aid Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University “…As experience demonstrates, it is possible to use our reason, management know-how, technology, and learning by doing to design highly effective aid programs that save lives and promote development. This should be done in…