Contribution of the GAVI Alliance to improving health and reducing poverty.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), now 10 years old, was established as a successful and innovative public-private partnership to deal with a fundamental inequity. The poorest children in the poorest parts of the world were being denied access to life-saving vaccines simply on the basis of cost. GAVI has been successful in mobilizing significant funding from donors and through innovative financing instruments, immunizing large numbers of children.

Expansion of cancer care and control in countries of low and middle income: a call to action.

Substantial inequalities exist in cancer survival rates across countries. In addition to prevention of new cancers by reduction of risk factors, strategies are needed to close the gap between developed and developing countries in cancer survival and the effects of the disease on human suffering. We challenge the public health community's assumption that cancers will remain untreated in poor countries, and note the analogy to similarly unfounded arguments from more than a decade ago against provision of HIV treatment.

Meeting the demand for results and accountability: a call for action on health data from eight global health agencies.

Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO, and the heads of seven other global health agencies, call for a concerted global effort to collect better health data.