A new study published in Nature online last week estimates that there are more than three times as many dengue infections as in the official World Health Organization (WHO) figure. The WHO estimates 50-100 million dengue infections a year, while “The global distribution and burden of dengue” report argues that there are 390 million dengue infections per year.

Today, the WHO and UNICEF released The Integrated Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Pneumonia and Diarrhoea (GAPPD), an integrated and intensified effort to reduce deaths and illnesses from these diseases.

The number of polio cases has plummeted in the last 25 years, from 300,000 to less than 300. Even so, last May the World Health Organization declared that global eradication of polio, reaching that last 0.1 percent, was a “programmatic emergency for global public health.”

In a recent blog post, Bill Gates describes his visit to Ghana, where he hoped to learn more about the country’s health delivery systems.

Today the Decade of Vaccines (DoV) Collaboration released the final, illustrated version of the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP), with a foreword by the DoV Collaboration Leadership Council, photographs, charts and important annexes.

When discussing public health campaigns and disease prevention, most people want to immediately jump to the solution – we want a vaccine, a cure, a narrative – so we can stop the cycle of disease and suffering. But we must remember to crawl before we walk, and this cliché could not ring more true than in the world of disease monitoring and surveillance, particularly for a disease like pneumococcal, a deadly bacterial infection that kills more than 1.6 million people annually, including half a million children.

Earlier this month, the Coalition against Typhoid (CaT), along with partners at the Bangladesh Pediatric Association, the International Vaccine Institute andthe International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), convened the 8th International Conference on Typhoid Fever and Other Invasive Salmonelloses in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Researchers and health professionals, as well as local, national and international policy makers were in attendance.