Bloomberg examines effects of financial crisis on global health

Bloomberg examines the effects of the global financial crisis and a resulting stall in development aid for global health programs, writing, "Governments struggling to curb deficits from Spain to the U.S. have cut or slowed the growth of their contributions to the World Health Organization and disease-fighting funds that prop up health services in the world's poorest countries, according to a report by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a research unit at the University of Washington in Seattle."

Bloomberg reports on trends in global health spending across various countries and discusses job cuts across the global health sector. "Still, the financial crisis doesn't necessarily mean poor nations will suffer, according to David Stuckler, a public health researcher at Cambridge University. Health aid hasn't decreased during previous recessions, Stuckler and colleagues wrote in the Bulletin of the WHO last year," according to the news service (Bennett et al., 1/17).