Since October 2018, I have brought together more than 700 colleagues from over 80 different institutions and 40 countries worldwide with – especially in recent years – good balance between ‘global north’ and ‘global south’ participants. This page gathers in one place some of the key agendas, reports, and published papers of this body of activity.
Initially, I organised this as part of Oxford in Berlin Global Health Initiatives (see links here and here) with a very broad focus. Later we narrowed it down to four big challenge areas (AMR, pandemics, AI for health, planetary health). In 2021 we brought the global health activities back to be managed from Oxford with close collaborations with numerous global partners (management of the other areas followed three years later). The phrase ‘Global Health Strategy Group’ was replaced with ‘Global Health Policy Partnership’.
The philosophy of the Global Health Policy Partnership
Currently, Global North think tanks, research centres, forums, and summits have a disproportionate role in shaping the advice given to and decisions made by foundations, bilateral funders, governments, UN institutions, multilateral and regional development organisations. Indeed, those who secure large resources from their own governments for their activities often get the biggest voice.
Even when groups work together, differences in organisational capacity are perpetuated by the way resources flow primarily through global north partners to global south partners, sustaining inequity in power within partnerships that keeps LMIC partners all too often in a junior position.
Breaking away from this requires concerted effort and a willingness to let go.
The vision is for a ‘policy-focussed’ partnership that is hierarchy light with financially modest demands that:
- Does not overemphasise any one partner, but is globally inclusive.
- Supports local ownership of solutions by those who are charged with implementing those solutions and not by distant experts however well intentioned and informed.
- Enables two-way sharing of lessons, from low-income to high-income countries and from high-income to low-income countries.
- Strengthens pathways to impact of all the incredible research and innovation going on across the many partners and the communities they work with.
Recognising that achieving this is largely in the hands of the next generation of global health scholars and policy makers, a big focus has been to support (and sometimes to fund) young researchers and future global health leaders (recently four research scholars, two RAs, six summer students, numerous places to attend workshops and meetings in Europe and Africa, and a range of DPhil projects, and summer school initiatives). They have been the unsung heroes of the early days of this endeavour.
Early preparation and stage-setting workshops
In the early phase (because that was the role given to me) the focus was disproportionately on bringing Oxford colleagues together, increasingly from overseas units. I organised the following workshops:
Global Health dialogues October 2018
Healthy People- Healthy Planet October 2019
Better health and wellbeing, Building a roadmap for research and action February 2020
In little over a year, and before the pandemic stuck, for the Oxford-Berlin dialogue and brainstorm meetings, I had organised 14 sessions, with 65 presentations (38 presentations from Oxford speakers), with about 200 invited participants. Despite the pandemic (and maybe because of it) we trebled the numbers of participants in the following year.
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)
The global pandemic has reinforced the lesson that responses to global health threats must be preemptive, evidence-led, and multi-disciplinary. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) was a regular theme across our meetings. Before the pandemic struck, a plan emerged for a robust, no-holes-barred questioning of all approaches to tackling AMR, epidemiological models, supposed evidence, and research and policy priorities, leading to a major report detailing solutions and a call for action based on:
End-to-end mechanisms connecting and streamlining links between basic science and the research and development of a pipeline of novel new antimicrobials;
Improved stewardship of current and future antimicrobials;
Livestock and environmental hazard management, including environmentally-sustainable animal husbandry and alternatives to antibiotics and meat;
Health systems strengthening, changing prescription and pharmacy practice tackling substandard and falsified medicines;
Practicable context-sensitive incentives, and sustainable finance;
Mapping the global patterns and drivers of AMR, and its health and economic costs;
Continued strong focus on tackling infectious diseases;
Achieving access everywhere to sanitation and universal health coverage.
Key activities included:
AMR Strategy Group fist meeting agenda pdf
The state of AMR data and performance tracking:
If we are to reduce the risk of AMR, we need to be smarter in our use of data and evidence. Some of the young Global Health Policy Scholars explored data availability and how to improve use of data to identify research gaps and to guide priorities, and to convert research findings into new tools for tackling AMR.
State of AMR data This combines two state of data reports and was prepared by Farlow, A. Ijeoma Nweje, M., Matika, T., Bashir, H.A., Jalloh, M.B., Joung, S.Y., Worm Hortelano, A., (2021).
This supported work on some new visualization metrics on policy performance, led by Yuzana Khan Zaw, as part of the FT Future of antibiotics and FT AMR tracker.
In 2021, I wrote the Foreword to the Handbook of Research on Information Management and One Health. IGI Global. You can find the book here and read my Foreword here.
We then ran a series of thematic workshops:
AMR and One Health agenda January 2022
AMR and One Health January 2022 meeting summary
AMR Anthropology, Tracker, Surveillance, AI challenge, September 2021 meeting summary
Data Intellingence to support access to antibiotics and good stewardship
AMR in the Community concept note March 2022
AMR in the community report 2022
GARDP, RKI, Oxford, Kenya meeting minutes November 2022
Roundtable get-to-know-each-other-better meeting May 2023
Access to antibiotics Farlow June 2024
For food systems and AMR, ongoing activity since June 2024: Springboard agenda 6 July 2024, IOI Cambridge Andrew Farlow, and Food Systems and AMR.
Related to this, I became a partner/mentor for a new Kenya-UK-LMIC Partnership on Leveraging Fish Genetics and genomics. See more here. I co-authored a short Lancet Correspondence related to this: Reza HM, Rono S, Chemoiwa E, Ayua E, Chebichii S, Mkrtchyan H, Eltholth M, Zemanay W, Farlow A, Cole J. Establishing equitable partnerships between the Global North and Global South. Lancet. 2024 Aug.
In 2025, I will be running a meeting in Oxford to support the launch of the Lancet One Health Commission Report.
Future Pandemic Prevention and Response
SARS-CoV-2 is the most disruptive virus the world has faced in a century, in part because of the virus but also because of sometimes inadequate or inappropriate responses. It followed a series of recent epidemic wake-up calls that were largely ignored at the global level. Without fundamental change, it will not be the last, nor even the worst. The current heightened attention around the world is an opportunity to fundamentally reboot our preparedness and responses to pandemic risk, and, indeed to risks to health in general. We visualize three layers:
- The best way to tackle pandemics—involving the least loss of life, economic damage, and global hardship—is to stop them before they begin. This requires reshaping the human relationship with nature to reduce the risks of animal to human spillover events in the first instant, stronger global surveillance (viruses and the species carrying them, populations at risk, waste water analysis, etc.), global early warning systems, and immediate action on pandemic threats;
- If, nevertheless, outbreaks start, the next step is quick interruption of chains of infection, and the ramping up of global prevention and treatment capacity. This necessitates better grasp of the true underlying situation—epidemiology, virology, testing, and comparable data across countries to guide responses—and stronger health systems, including in some of the poorest populations on the planet.
- If the above responses fail and a virulent virus is highly transmissible, we need an ongoing mechanism to support the research, development, and manufacture of always-close-to-ready vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tools, and their rapid and equitable global deployment.
Our day-conference (24th October 2019) on “Healthy Planet Healthy People” weeks ahead of the pandemic taking off had several sections identifying the risks including Section 2 on “One Health, human-animal interactions, infectious disease emergence, spatial modeling, and pandemic preparedness”
Reports on this theme:
Digital Health and AI for Health
Digital health and AI tools have been proliferating globally, including in bioinformatics, telehealth, telemedicine, lifestyle and fitness apps, screening, diagnosis, biomarkers, omics, therapeutic selection, disease management (including remotely), medical image analysis and motion recognition, surgery, pathology, tumor and organ analysis, pandemic prediction, blockchain data/records management, trials and medicine discovery. Such tools are fast evolving, with huge transformative potential for health and medicine, but also posing many challenges:
- Efficacy and equity—it is not always clear what works, in what settings, and who benefits.
- Ethics and trust—patients and their data can be misused, leading to discrimination and exclusion.
- Traditional approaches to demonstrating value, and modes of reimbursement, pricing, and financing are all significant barriers to implementation, and are in need of pragmatic innovation and guidelines. There are multiple potential needs for cost effectiveness and other forms of evaluation to improve decision-making.
- Regulation—regulators are in constant catch-up in a fast-evolving space;
- Health systems—new tools can help, but might also waste resources, and integration into health and care systems is challenging.
- Users/patients—tools require training, realistic expectations, willingness to adopt by end-users and to support by healthcare managers, based on understanding that goes beyond the clinical and economic aspects.
- Europe-wide and global data platforms—there are great opportunities for integrating and interrogating data at scale linked to health problems and clinical practice.
- A particular focus of ours will be on the needs of the bottom two billion people on the planet, and vulnerable and elderly populations everywhere.
Digital and AI kick-off agenda
In late 2021 we moved the AI for to health activity into the ITU-WHO Focus Group AI for Health, and set up a new Working Group for Collaborations and Outreach of which I was made Chair. To support management of this activity, we partnered with the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich Hertz Institute, HHI.
In late 2022 in Cameroon, we proved that we could fill a workshop, ‘AI and Digital Innovation for Health and Human Development in Africa: From Ideas to Impact’ (online here) in one country in Africa relying on amazing people from mostly just that country, including its diaspora, working with local implementers innovating context-relevant projects deploying AI for health in local communities.
The ITU-WHO Focus Group is currently transitioning into the new Global Initiative for AI in health (see here, and here). The ITU-WHO Focus Group will contribute its benchmarking and open-source tools, and – it is proposed –the Working Group for Collaborations and Outreach will contribute networks and collaborations. The last meeting I joined live was in Geneva in July 2023. A recording of the meeting is here. My focus, as much as I am able, will be to make the global initiative focus on local innovators and be led ground up.
As I noted in my talk at the WHS in October 2024, the nature of AI innovation in health works differently from innovation in the case of other health interventions like drugs and vaccines. This also needs to be reflected in our approach to setting up digital health and AI for health challenges that factor in global public health impact, affordability, implementability, and equitable access. All this thinking generated an AI innovation paper in PLOS Global Public Health, which became also part of the focus of the WHO/ITU Focus Group for AI for health here, and the notion of an ‘innovation factory’ as part of the Global Initiative: Farlow, A., Hoffmann, A., Tadesse, G.A., Mzurikwao, D., Beyer, R., Akogo, D., Weicken, E., Matika, T., Nweje, M.I., Wamae, W. and Arts, S., (2023). Rethinking global digital health and AI-for-health innovation challenges. PLOS Global Public Health, 3(4), p.e0001844.
I am working especially closely with the Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam (and in the future South Africa) and with PATH’s new Public Health Impact through Artificial Intelligence, PHIXAI. I joined a panel at the Telengana Global AI Summit 2024, Hyderabad, India, in September “Accelerating AI in Public Health: Fostering South-South Collaborations”, as a guest of, and kindly sponsored by, PHIXAI.
I am also working with colleagues in LMICS on the creation of an economic assessment function so that digital health tools can be evaluated for their local, context-sensitive cost effectiveness as well as their ability to be integrated into health systems. We are exploring the support of Foundations and other funders for this.
In 2024, I set up a one-week Summer school on AI for health, as part of Oxford Certificate programmes, in the beautiful setting of Worcester College, Oxford.
As part of my engagement with the Coalition for Equitable Research in Low-Resource Settings (CERCLE, previously, COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition) I am helping to create a new AI and digital group.
I am working with colleagues to incorporate some new content on AI for health into the Oxford International Health and Tropical Medicine (IHTM) masters programme and the new Oxford MSc in Health Service Improvement and Evaluation.
Planetary Health
Planet earth is our only home. As Carl Sagan once put it, we live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam (I often start my lectures on planetary health with the famous ‘Pale Blue Dot‘ photo). An even smaller speck of dust follows us around and is the only part of the cosmos outside of earth that the human species has ever visited. A thin film of air (equivalent in thickness to that of the skin on an apple, another prop, with a bite taken out of it, that I sometimes leave on the podium just before my lecture) protects us from the harshness of the sun’s rays and the perils of space objects. As far as we are aware, we are the only life in the cosmos; there is nobody to come to our rescue if we destroy our planetary home. At the bottom of that thin skin of air, is a remarkable rustling and bustling surface, teaming with astonishing lifeforms, plants, bacteria, animals, humans.…. rich inn biodiversity. If we look after and enhance that biodiversity, it will look after and protect us.
To support action in this area, I:
- Set up a Global health Strategy Group to focus on planetary health (including climate change, pollution and health, biodiversity and health, plants and fungi for health), incorporated its activities into the Global Partnership, and set up a new Biodiversity, Medicine and Health Partnership to give a home specifically for work on biodiversity and health.
- Brought groups together (GHN, Kew, Oxford… Plants for Health) to explore the value of plants, fungi, algae.
- Have run numerous themed meetings.
- Encouraged students via numerous lectures and touring lectures (China, Brazil, Europe, UK, and online).
- Supported collaborations and new networks.
- Wrote papers and contributed to reports and chapters in books.
We joined in supporting the creation of the Berlin Principles on One Health and others working on the links between ecological integrity, emerging infectious diseases originating from wildlife, and other aspects of human health.
The principles were published as: Gruetzmacher, Kim, William B. Karesh, John H. Amuasi, Adnan Arshad, Andrew Farlow, Sabine Gabrysch, Jens Jetzkowitz et al. “The Berlin principles on one health–Bridging global health and conservation.” Science of the Total Environment 764 (2021): 142919 (and 2019 statement is here).
A number of other papers and chapters followed:
COVID-19, wet markets, and planetary health Petrikova, I., Cole, J. & Farlow, A., 1 Jun 2020, In: The Lancet Planetary Health. 4, 6, p. E213-E214.
Foster, Alexander, Jennifer Cole, Andrew Farlow, and Ivica Petrikova. “Planetary health ethics: beyond first principles.” Challenges 10, no. 1 (2019): 14.
Which led to an invited chapter: Alexander Foster, Jennifer Cole, Ivica Petrikova, Andrew Farlow, Howard Frumkin, Planetary Health Ethics, Chapter 17, Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves, Eds. Sam Myers and Howard Frumkin, Island Press, 2020.
Content and reviews of the book can be found here: Planetary Health – Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves content and reviews
Farlow, Andrew. “The natural capital approach: opportunities and challenges.” Chapter 4 of Planetary health: human health in an era of global environmental change, Ed. Cole, J. CABI 2019.
I presented at the FIOCRUZ, Brazil, International Seminar: “Pandemic of Syndemic: A critical approach to planetary health?” You can watch on YouTube here.
And I also lectured at CIDACS, Brazil (see here).
I lectured on planetary health all over China in the 2-3 years before the pandemic (at about 50 institutes – I will create separate page shortly ) including at the Beijing Forum: Andrew Farlow Beijing Forum 2 November 2019 and Beijing forum EH subforum Environment and Health agenda.
A particular focus in recent years has been on biodiversity and health, especially natural products from plants, fungi, algae, insects.
Biodiversity Medicine and Health Review 25 February 2022
Biodiversity, medicine, and health workshop May 2022
This is the mission statement of an initiative I set up: Global Partnership for Biodiversity, Medicine and Health mission statement
Here is a fun talk I have given on the topic: Biodiversity and Medicine talk.
I took part in the workshop generating publication of Planetary Health: Scoping the German Research Landscape, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), Potsdam.
I have also developed a keen interest in protecting nature for its health benefits and have a strong relationship with Kew and other botanic gardens, which has resulted in a body of work:
Howes, Melanie‐Jayne R., Cassandra L. Quave, Jérôme Collemare, Evangelos C. Tatsis, Danielle Twilley, Ermias Lulekal, Andrew Farlow et al. “Molecules from nature: Reconciling biodiversity conservation and global healthcare imperatives for sustainable use of medicinal plants and fungi.” Plants, People, Planet 2, no. 5 (2020): 463-481.
– Antonelli, A., Fry, C., Smith, R.J., Simmonds, M.S.J., Kersey, P.J., Pritchard, H.W.*, Abbo, M.S., Acedo, C., Adams, J., Ainsworth, A.M., Allkin, B., Annecke, W., Bachman, S.P., Bacon, K., Bárrios, S., Barstow, C., Battison, A., Bell, E., Bensusan, K., Bidartondo, M.I., Blackhall-Miles, R.J., Borrell, J.S., Brearley, F.Q., Breman, E., Brewer, R.F.A., Brodie, J., Cámara-Leret, R., Campostrini Forza, R., Cannon, P., Carine, M., Carretero, J., Cavagnaro, T.R., Cazar, M.-E., Chapman, T., Cheek, M., Clubbe, C., Cockel, C., Collemare, J. Cooper, A., Copeland, A.I., Corcoran, M., Couch, C., Cowell, C., Crous, P., da Silva, M., Dalle, G., Das, D., David, J.C., Davies, L., Davies, N., De Canha, M.N., de Lirio, E.J., Demissew, S., Diazgranados, M., Dickie, J., Dines, T., Douglas, B., Dröge, G., Dulloo, M.E., Fang, R., Farlow, A., et al. (2020) State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2020. Royal Botanic Kew Gardens.
I brought together FIOCRUZ, Brazil, The Global Health Network, and Oxford to support the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England in its (successful) application to the Wellcome Trust for a Kew’s new Plants for Health initiative.
I am preparing the introductory chapter of the Royal Society of Chemistry Book “Natural Products for Disease Chemoprevention”, part of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Drug Discovery book series.
I supported colleagues in the launch of ‘Climate and health’ component as part of the next wave of the CANDOUR study
Oxford has recently joined the Planetary Health Alliance, and I regularly engage with the Planetary Health Eastern Africa Hub, the LSHTM Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health, and the new Centre for Planetary Health Policy, Berlin.
Working together to protect the planet and the health of life on the planet needs strong, equitable, and courageous partnerships. In particular, it also means listening to young people. I am working with colleagues on syllabi for undergraduate and graduate courses in planetary health (engaging with the strong planetary health groups in Germany, Africa, Brazil, and SE Asia) so that our endeavours might have lasting impacts and benefit fellow human beings yet to come long after we are gone!