Cholera is one of the fastest-acting diarrheal diseases in the world and can result in death in 24-48 hours if left untreated. There are between 3-5 million cases each year, and about 100,00 deaths are attributed to this bacterial-borne illness.

As prevention and treatment measures for infectious diseases become more successful, the global burden of disease is shifting towards non-communicable diseases (NCDs).  According to the World Health Organization (WHO), NCDs currently represent 43% of the global burden of disease, but this number is expected to increase to 60% by 2020, with NCDs also accounting for 73% of deaths in that year.

Global efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) targets are being hindered by a shortage of health workers, often due to inequitable distribution, and gaps in their capacity, motivation and performance. (GHWA). Due to health workers being the core of health systems and achieving health outcomes, a global strategy is needed to find out how to take up health worker development.

The US distributed more than $21B in foreign aid in 2017. Non-country specific aid totaled $5.9B with Afghanistan, Jordan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Syria receiving  the largest amounts of country specific aid at $1.1B, $814M, $798M, $749M, and $582M respectively. 

Life expectancy around the world has increased and is continuing to rise. Due to economic development people are now expecting to live longer. Life expectancy has increased because of improvement in a number of areas including sanitation, improved public health measures, refrigeration and vaccination. Despite the progress made in extending life expectancy, there are still disparities among regions.

Conventional wisdom is that high income countries spend a higher percentage of GDP on healthcare than low income countries and therefore have better health outcomes, but data shows that this is not always the case. To compare healthcare spending between high income countries and low income countries we can look at healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP.

Google trends is a freely available search engine that can quantify a country’s interest in a certain matter over time. Using this tool, the interest in the Zika epidemic among Google internet users is compared to reported cases of the Zika virus in the Central, Latin, and South American region.

The article attached explores one big player in international development - OECD. The article uses public data published by OECD to look at where OECD gets the majority of its money and how they are spending this money. Public data is available from 2007 to 2015 so the article also explores how funding and spending have changed over the years. 

The fight against HIV/AIDS has made significant strides due to the development and delivery of antiretroviral therapy in sub-Saharan Africa. This article addresses how the continued rise of ART delivery and declining HIV/AIDS morality rates are causing a substantial increase in deaths due to non-communicable diseases in sub-Saharan African. 

From 2011 to 2015, USAID spent nearly 2.5 billion dollars, in an effort to improve health performance worldwide.  These interventions focus on specific efforts such as Family Planning and Reproductive Health, HIV/AIDS, Maternal and Child Health, Tuberculosis, Water Supply and Sanitation, Malaria, Pandemic Influenza and Other Public Health Threats.Despite a large decrease in the global burden of these two infectious diseases during the recent 5 years, malaria and tuberculosis have remained among the top 10 causes of death in low-income countries.