The Bay Area global health community convenes to launch The Lancet’s Global Health 2050 report, discussing both challenges and progress made towards significantly reducing premature death around the world. 

By Aya Aziz, Stanford Class of ’25

Whether making her rounds in Sri Lankan, Jamaican, or Central American hospitals, sometimes Stanford nephrologist Shuchi Anand, MD,  has felt that all she could offer her patients under the circumstances was “death with dignity… ” before they even reach the age of seventy.

Anand’s research specializing in kidney disease has led her all around the world to patients who suffer from heat stress, lack of clean water, and dengue — these conditions often leading them to pass away prematurely before age seventy. Despite having personally witnessed this devastating interplay between climate change and non-communicable diseases, she and many global health researchers find hope in the progress several populous nations have made in halving the probability of premature death (PPD) by mid-century.

On January 22, Anand joined other regional global health leaders involved in academia, medicine, and policy at the Bay Area Launch Event for The Lancet Commission’s Global Health 2050 Report. The event was hosted at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Anand and four other researchers represented the Bay Area among the fifty authors on the report, which was published in October. Dr. Michele Barry, MD, the Director of Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health, moderated the first panel of the night with Anand and Dr. Stefano Bertozzi, PhD, MD, from UC Berkeley, Dr. Dean Jamison, PhD, from UCSF, and Dr. Justina Seyi-Olajide, MBSS, from the Lagos University Teaching Hospital in Nigeria. 

When asked by Barry what report finding was most surprising to her, Anand answered that she was pleasantly surprised by the “tangible forward progress” being made in many nations to reduce by 50% the chance of premature death from baseline pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Dr. Gavin Yamey, MD, MPH, Director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health based at Duke Global Health Institute, echoed Anand’s optimism while overviewing the report earlier on in the event. He cited how the current pace of development for new health technologies will likely result in over 450 new medications, vaccines, and diagnostics by 2044, all of which will be critical in preventing another pandemic of COVID-like magnitude. As a pediatric surgeon, Seyi-Olajide expressed her hope for physicians to leverage the findings of the report to strengthen surgical interventions and analysis in the domain of non-communicable diseases. 

The report proposes that to achieve the 50-by-50 goal, countries should allocate sufficient action and resources to mitigate fifteen priority conditions, seven being non-communicable diseases and injuries and the remaining eight being infectious and maternal conditions. However, speakers at the event also expressed the urgent need to maintain optimism in the face of “massive obstacles.” These include: rising geopolitical tensions, amplified nationalistic populism, online misinformation, mistrust in public health institutions, and recent changes in administration that led the White House to announce plans to withdraw from the Paris Accord and World Health Organization last week. During the Q&A, one audience member also expressed concerns about the “global burden of violence” being a major threat to the 50-by-50 goal. 

In light of these obstacles, Dr. Payam Nahid MD, Executive Director of the UCSF Institute for Global Health Sciences, opened the event by emphasizing that global health professionals are “stronger together” and must “come together as a community.” Vice-Chancellor at the Malawi University of Science and Technology and distinguished UCSF visiting professor Dr. Address Maukawa Malata, FAAN, PhD, MSc, BSc, highlighted the need for “leadership at all levels” by drawing analogies to the archetypal qualities of the “Big Five” safari animals of Africa. She closed the night by citing a buffalo’s capacity for teamwork and collaboration as being ideal for the global health community to adopt, inspiring chuckles and cheers from the audience. 

Persistent throughout the event was the hope for today’s youth to rise to the challenges ahead and spearhead meaningful progress toward the 50 by 50 goal. In the second panel of the night (moderated by Neelam Sekhri-Feachem, MS, from UCSF), Thu Do, Medical Director with Gilead Patient Solutions, praised university students and early career professionals for their proactive “ability to create unlikely alliances” between different sectors of health care, policy, and tech. University and medical students present at the conference were given special stickers on their name tags, making them easily identifiable as the “50-by-50 generation.”