Last week BMJ Group held an inaugural global health conference http://globalhealth.bmj.com/ in London, looking at policies for sustainable and effective healthcare. David Heymann, chair of the UK Health Protection Agency, and Martha Gyansa-Lutterodt, Director of Pharmaceuticals at the Ministry of Health, Ghana, discuss how vertical aid programmes can lead to systemic improvements in lower income countries. And, Kalipso Chalkidou, Director of NICE International, explains a bit more about its work.
Also, smoking is known to increase TB mortality. A modelling study this week suggests that the number of excess deaths from TB, caused by tobacco consumption, could be as high as 40 million over the next 40 years. Stanton Glantz, Director of the Centre for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, joins us to set out the numbers.