Panel, Conference Presentation
The Health of Nations: Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals
- Current policy trajectories project a social progress score increase to 62.4 by 2030, falling short of the mid-70s required to meet global goals, with only 65 or 67 possible through averaging improvements or uniform gains, respectively.
- The HIV/AIDS pandemic cannot be ended without the DREAMS intervention framework and a 21st-century health system, as business-as-usual strategies fail to address 40% more adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa or provide binding sites for men and youth.
- If current HIV incidence rates persist, 100 million infections are predicted, which would destroy the economic dividend of the workforce in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Tuberculosis elimination by 2030 is unachievable with current strategies given the infection level is over a thousand-fold higher than required, necessitating new tools, drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines.
- TB vaccine development faces a critical resource gap, with 2014 global investment at just over $100 million and 13 of 15 clinical candidates originating from Europe, creating a risk of MDR and XDR TB situations worsening within five to ten years.
- Achieving SDGs requires abandoning MDG-style approaches reliant on poor data tracking and self-reporting, shifting instead to geospatial mapping and data useful to service-level managers to incentivize high-quality collection.
- Private sector entities cannot achieve the 17 goals and 169 metrics alone within 15 years, requiring partnerships to simplify interventions and leveraging expertise in health, energy, water, and education.
- The GE Foundation seeks angel investors, venture capital, and industrial investors to scale the oxygen generation model from pilot to execution, expecting governments to fund successful programs post-pilot.
- Sustainable ecosystems for delivery, such as safe surgery or girls' education, are identified as priority interventions needing implementation within the next year.
- Government commitment to basic and translational research outside normal political cycles is necessary, alongside private sector incentives like guaranteed purchase commitments and priority review vouchers to extend patent life by one year.
- Social progress improvements become harder as income levels rise, and the US currently lags significantly below the curve regarding nutrition and basic medical care relative to per capita GDP.
- Disaggregating data to the granular level of individual service units is required to raise negative and mid-performers to match positive performers.