Nearly 30% of child deaths around the world could be prevented using tools we already have. That we fail to prevent these deaths is one of the single largest failures of humanity.

Can most of us even imagine a world in which two million less children die every year?...

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." - Rudyard Kipling

While Kipling may have been referring to flowery, impassioned words that can motivate or deceive us in literature, for me it is often seemingly dry or innocuous policy documents that can have an intoxicating...

I was 19 when I served as a peacekeeper in Somalia in the early 1990s. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations at the United Nations was officially created the year before, and I was moved by Kofi Annan's Agenda for Peace.

I admit, before shipping out...

It's been 20 years since the World Health Organization declared tuberculosis (TB) a global health emergency. This weekend, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) declared: "Global TB Fight hits a wall."

Both declarations were an understatement.

The WSJ article, featured on the front...

During the annual U.S. president's State of the Union many of us become scavengers. We sit on our sofas and barstools and pick over the speech's sentences, words and nuances trying to find hidden crumbs -- those tiny nuggets that might impact the issues we work on and care about....

In Washington, D.C. right now there is no getting away from the fiscal cliff.

So in the lead up to World AIDS Day, usually a pretty good day for making the general public aware of the global AIDS crisis, I feared that it would be all lost -- HIV/AIDS...

Conferences. You sit in stuffy rooms fighting jet lag wondering if you are wasting your time. It can be tiresome, boring, and frustrating. Except sometimes it isn't. Last week I attended the Union Lung Conference in Kuala Lumpur -- and it was extraordinary.

Why? The TB Posse....

The U.S. presidential foreign policy debate. It's long gone, but I can't stop thinking about it.

The most complex challenges we face as a country, as humanity, are foreign policy challenges.

Where would our economy be if we had made different decisions about war and peace? Where would...

On Monday, President Obama and Gov. Romney squared off in their third and final debate before the election. After debating domestic policy and fielding questions from undecided voters, their last debate focused on foreign policy.

Amongst the bayonets and bravado, there was no discussion about how either of them would...

"The global emergence of extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis heralds the advent of widespread, virtually untreatable tuberculosis." - CDC, August 30, 2012.

We've all seen the Hollywood version: a man or a woman suddenly becomes ill, assumes it's a common illness, shrugs it off, then drops dead. The mystery illness spreads,...

Last week's 19th International AIDS Conference saw over 20,000 activists, scientists, health workers, celebrities, and people living with HIV from virtually every corner of the world together in Washington D.C.

It was a historic occasion for countless reasons. As I replay the events of the week in...

I don't function well in crowds. I get anxious and nauseated. So on Sunday night last, as I funneled my body through the corridor of the Washington, D.C., Convention Center, shuffling shoulder-to-shoulder with 10,000 other humans while the sun beat down through the massive windows on our tense and sweaty...

I was still using coloring books when the first HIV/AIDS activists hit the streets. I knew about Ryan White and the discrimination in the U.S. from misinformation, fear and prejudice. But I had no idea then the devastation that AIDS would cause around the world, the lives it...

On Saturday, I joined the RESULTS Educational Fund (REF) global grassroots conference call. If you are thinking that 'conference call' and 'Saturday' don't go together, bear with me.

Once a month, REF 'super activists' from around the U.S. get together and hear from leaders in...

It's no secret that political conferences tend to be highfalutin talk shops.

All leaders are compelled to congregate with other leaders from time to time, at what is typically referred to as a "high-level event." There, the leaders treat observers to soaring speeches...

The BBC reported this week on the ongoing investigation into the death of 15-year-old Alina Sarag, a teenager from Birmingham, UK. She died in January of tuberculosis (TB), a disease caused by a bacterial infection that passes from person to person through the air. She was one of...

If we needed more evidence that the funding cuts at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria were going to be detrimental to people's lives, a new study published this week makes it clear: Providing funding to fight malaria makes malaria go away. Cutting funding for...

You can be forgiven if you're fatigued when it comes to commemorative days. There are so many worthwhile causes and campaigns that compete for media, funding and political and popular support that often these days come and go without a notice.

Too bad then, that we still desperately need...

Bill Gates released his third annual letter this week. The letter is part a Year In Review of the human challenges the Gates Foundation works to address -- global health, agriculture, and education -- and part treatise on Gates' views and priorities for the future. The...

When you're trying to break into the news cycle, the first rule of thumb is never to compete with someone who's bound to upstage you. So I was surprised that Bill Gates would choose the same night as the State of the Union to issue his annual public letter. It's...