Female Genital Mutilation

FGM is declining globally. That’s probably not a headline you’ve seen much of recently, but according to a 2013 UNICEF report ‘the dangerous centuries-old tradition is now on a slow but steady decline in key areas around the world’. What great news that is. But it’s not what we heard on International Day of Zero Tolerance, an annual UN sponsored awareness day, when the European Parliament’s Gender Equality Committee proposed that Europe should toughen its stance against FGM and that ‘cutting’ practitioners should be prosecuted.

Polio-free India. A fantastic achievement

A lasting memory from my recent holiday in India is recalling the pride that people took in telling me that a polio-free subcontinent was expected to be declared by the WHO in February 2014. The world’s largest democracy had gone from being one of the most affected countries in the world – with the last polio case in 2011 – to achieving this monumental feat through public support and conviction, political will and an ambitious public health campaign.