Blogs examine progress on NCDs one year after U.N. summit

On the one-year anniversary of the U.N. High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), two blogs examine what has happened since. In the Center for Global Development's (CGD) "Global Health Policy" blog, Victoria Fan, a research fellow at the center, and Laura Khan of Princeton University ask, "[W]here has the attention and commitment to NCDs gone?" They say "subsequent attention and action after the NCD Summit last year has been paltry," and they explore some reasons why this might be the case (9/19). In an interview on the Council on Foreign Relations blog, Thomas Bollyky, senior fellow for global health, economics, and development, says, "So on one hand, the U.N. NCD meeting hasn't yet managed to follow the HIV/AIDS blueprint in producing a groundswell of popular support, new donor resources, and concrete country action. On the other hand, optimists on this issue believe the U.N. meeting elevated a long-neglected cause to the heads-of-state level and firmly established it as an ongoing concern for the U.N." (Johnson, 9/19).