Mundel Trevor
Global Health Division, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, Washington, United States of America.
PLoS Biol. 2016 Mar 2;14(3):e1002376. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002376. eCollection 2016 Mar.
In the aftermath of the Ebola crisis, the global health community has a unique opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned and apply them to prepare the world for the next crisis. Part of that preparation will entail knowing, with greater precision, what the scale and scope of our specific global health challenges are and what resources are needed to address them. However, how can we know the magnitude of the challenge, and what resources are needed without knowing the current status of the world through accurate primary data? Once we know the current status, how can we decide on an intervention today with a predicted impact decades out if we cannot project into that future? Making a case for more investments will require not just better data generation and sharing but a whole new level of sophistication in our analytical capability--a fundamental shift in our thinking to set expectations to match the reality. In this current status of a distributed world, being transparent with our assumptions and specific with the case for investing in global health is a powerful approach to finding solutions to the problems that have plagued us for centuries.
在埃博拉危机之后，全球卫生界有一个独特的机会来反思所吸取的教训，并将其应用于为世界应对下一次危机做好准备。这种准备工作的一部分将需要更精确地了解我们具体的全球卫生挑战的规模和范围，以及应对这些挑战所需的资源。然而，如果没有通过准确的原始数据了解世界的现状，我们如何能知道挑战的规模，以及需要哪些资源呢？一旦我们了解了现状，如果我们无法预测未来，又如何能在今天就决定一项具有数十年预测影响的干预措施呢？要争取更多投资，不仅需要更好的数据生成和共享，还需要我们的分析能力达到一个全新的复杂程度——我们的思维方式发生根本性转变，以设定与现实相符的期望。在当今这个分布式世界的现状下，对我们的假设保持透明，并明确投资全球卫生的理由，是找到解决困扰我们数百年问题的有力方法。
