A billion people around the world lack access to health care because they live too far from a clinic. 2017 TED Prize winner Raj Panjabi aims to extend health services to the last mile.

American journalist and Havana resident Gail Reed spotlights a Cuban medical school that trains doctors from low-income countries who pledge to serve communities like their own.

Maryn McKenna recounts the often terrifying stories behind emerging drug-resistant diseases that medical science is barely keeping at bay.

Dr. Myriam Sidibe promotes hand-washing with soap, setting up partnerships with governments, companies and communities to promote this simple, cheap, powerful disease-fighting tactic.

At the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, economist Ramanan Laxminarayan looks at big-picture issues of global health.

Why basic sanitation should be a right, not a privilege.

Margaret Bourdeaux investigates the best ways to protect, recover and reconstruct health systems and institutions disrupted by war or disaster.

Francis de los Reyes works with cutting-edge microbiological techniques in environmental biotech. But his passion, both professionally and personally, is helping to improve the plight of the world’s 2.5 billion people living without adequate sanitation. Reyes is a TED Fellow.

Karen DeSalvo, the chief health officer at Google, explains the partnership between big tech and public health in slowing the spread of COVID-19 -- and discusses a new contact tracing technology recently rolled out by Google and Apple that aims to ease the burden on health workers and provide scientists critical time to create a vaccine. (This v...

Sue Desmond-Hellmann is using precision public health -- an approach that incorporates big data, consumer monitoring, gene sequencing and other innovative tools -- to solve the world's most difficult medical problems. It's already helped cut HIV transmission from mothers to babies by nearly half in sub-Saharan Africa, and now it's being used to ...

For years, Jean Béliveau walked from country to country, with the goal of circumnavigating the globe on foot. While few people have the time or desire to walk such extreme lengths, research shows that adding even a modest amount of walking to your daily routine can dramatically improve your health. So, what exactly happens to your body when you ...

Clearing tropical forests isn't just dangerous to the natural world — it's also a threat to human health and wellbeing, says physician Neil Vora. Tracing how environmental devastation led to deadly epidemics like Ebola, he presents three ways deforestation unleashes disease and calls on each of us to help preserve the delicate ecological balance...

Dr. Leana Wen is Baltimore City's Health Commissioner.

An exploration of what it would like if the medical industry practiced a more patient-first mentality.

Rally your community to a healthier and happier way of life with these aspirational, yet accessible talks (that also offer some great ideas on where to start).

Global scholar, University of Pennsylvania civil rights sociologist and law professor Dorothy Roberts exposes the myths of race-­based medicine.

"Everybody pees and poops — and we know that urine and stool contain a rich source of information on our health," says data detective Newsha Ghaeli. Exploring the growing field of wastewater epidemiology, she shows how studying sewage can (anonymously) reveal a lot about the collective well-being of our cities — leading to real-time quality-of-l...

The coronavirus pandemic won't be the last crisis to test public health systems worldwide, says physician and health policy leader Georges C. Benjamin. He details what's needed to lead us out of the pandemic and prevent future ones -- including a robust governmental health entity equipped with updated technology and well-trained staff -- and exp...

Myriam Sidibe is a warrior in the fight against childhood disease. Her weapon of choice? A bar of soap. For cost-effective prevention against sickness, it’s hard to beat soapy hand-washing, which cuts down risk of pneumonia, diarrhea, cholera and worse. Sidibe, a public-health expert, makes a smart case for public-private partnerships to promote...

Could the tech industry's complex algorithms support people during their darkest times, rather than just deliver targeted ads? Drawing from his own experience with depression, global mental health researcher Sandersan Onie shows how internet search behaviors can provide valuable insights into suicide risk and potentially help save lives by reach...

Mary Bassett is fighting what may be the greatest stumbling block to equitable health care in the US: institutional racism.

Germs -- they get around. Learn what their travels and overall existence can teach us about not just ourselves, but the past, present and future of humanity.

TED Fellow and global health researcher Francisca Mutapi discusses how COVID-19 responses borrowed from the West created significant obstacles for other public health programs in Africa -- and makes the case for the continent to chart out its own health care policies. "The solutions to Africa's health problems must be home-grown and must be led ...

Sue Desmond-Hellmann leads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s mission to establish equity for every person.

The lack of private and fully functioning toilets threatens the health and welfare of too many people. John Kluge, co-founder of Toilet Hackers, explains that access to toilets affects everything from education to the economy, and offers some workable solutions to address the crisis.

What happens if you get infected with the coronavirus? Who's most at risk? How can you protect yourself? Public health expert David Heymann, who led the global response to the SARS outbreak in 2003, shares the latest findings about COVID-19 and what the future may hold. (Recorded February 27, 2020)

Malaria is a disease as old as humankind, yet we may be closer than ever to eliminating it, says medical entomologist Abdoulaye Diabaté. He explains the potential of "gene drive" technology — which aims to disrupt mosquito reproduction as a means of halting malaria transmission in Africa — and shows how his team is partnering with local communit...

Why do we still think that drug use is a law-enforcement issue? Making drugs illegal does nothing to stop people from using them, says public health expert Mark Tyndall. So, what might work? Tyndall shares community-based research that shows how harm-reduction strategies, like safe-injection sites, are working to address the drug overdose crisis.

Consider the following scenario: a highly infectious, sometimes deadly respiratory virus infects humans for the first time. It spreads rapidly worldwide, and the WHO declares a pandemic. The death toll starts to rise and everyone is asking the same question: when will the pandemic end? Alex Rosenthal details the three main strategies governments...

The US health care system assumes many things about patients: that they can take off from work in the middle of the day, speak English, have a working telephone and a steady supply of food. Because of that, it's failing many of those who are most in need, says Mitchell Katz, CEO of the largest public health care system in the US. In this eye-ope...