In September, 2023, heads of state will reconvene at the 2023 UN General Assembly
and report back on progress in keeping the promises made at the first UN High-Level
Meeting on Tuberculosis in 2018.1 All three of us were privileged to be a part of
this meeting, and still remember the excitement and hope we felt about the pledges
made by world leaders to end tuberculosis, and the ambitious targets that were laid
out.1
Although mental health problems are widespread in many African nations, they rarely
receive the attention they merit. Stigmatisation is a prevalent factor that makes
patients reluctant to seek mental health care in most African countries. As knowledge
about mental health increased, some African countries, such as Ghana, Kenya, South
Africa, Uganda, and Zambia, began passing legislation and laws to safeguard the rights
of individuals who have mental health problems. In 1916, Nigeria, Africa s most populous
country, enacted its first mental health legislation, which was called the Lunacy
Ordinance.
We thank F A Klok and B Siegerink for their interest in our article and for their
suggestion to consider ordinal outcomes for pulmonary arterial hypertension trials.
Indeed, an ordinal outcome not only improves the granularity of patient-relevant outcomes
compared with a dichotomous outcome, such as mortality, but it can also allow for
smaller trial sample sizes than with a mortality outcome.1
March 24 marks World Tuberculosis (TB) Day. It is important to reflect on the progress
we have made in the fight against TB and the opportunities that lie ahead. Over the
past few years, breakthroughs in research and development mean that treatment of drug-resistant
TB has been shortened from 20 months to 6 months,1 and a pipeline of new treatment
options means that some forms of drug-susceptible TB might be treatable with as little
as 2 months of therapy.2 Additionally, affordable and accurate molecular diagnostics
promise to revolutionise how we detect TB.
Alcohol is thought to be responsible for 1·6% (women) and 6·0% (men) of disability-adjusted
life-years, and 2·2% (women) and 6·8% (men) of deaths, globally.1 In an attempt to
reduce these harms, Scotland introduced minimum unit pricing (MUP) of £0·50 per unit,
a floor price at which a standard drink could be sold, in May, 2018.2 This policy
was projected to decrease consumption and thus harms in people with high consumption
of alcohol, while also reducing health inequality by reducing harm among people in
lower socioeconomic groups who consume alcohol.