Advancing women, maternal, newborn, and child health equity

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Quarraisha Abdool Karim and Jivanka Mohan

Over the past three decades, through science, activism, and global solidarity, unprecedented progress has been made in the global response to HIV. Antiretroviral therapy has transformed AIDS from an inevitably fatal condition to one that is chronic and manageable and the use of antiretrovirals by mothers living with HIV has reduced transmission rates to infants to less than 2%. Notwithstanding, in 2024 an estimated 1·3 million new HIV infections occurred, mostly in adolescent girls and young

Zulfiqar A Bhutta

To many in my generation of medical students from the early 1970s, the concept of global health and equity did not exist. The reality of health disparities and poor outcomes among women and children stared at us in everyday practice but was not reflected in any solid epidemiology or global statistics. In my case, this early exposure to the abysmal state of maternal and newborn health sparked a deep interest in the nascent discipline of newborn medicine, eventually resulting in a decision to

Declaration of interests

ZAB is the Robert Harding Chair in Global Child Health and Policy at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto and is a Senior Fellow in Climate and Child Health, Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition, University of Toronto, Canada. ZAB reports that the Virchow Foundation will support travel in part to attend and deliver this lecture. QAK reports a patent with Gilead for Tenofovir gel for the pending prevention of HSV-2 infection and that the Virchow Foundation has contributed to travel and