Lancet’s new commission aims to tackle potential public health threats for this century

Subject: Environment

Context:

Leading general medical journal The Lancet announced a new commission December 15, 2022 to address public health threats.

About the new commission:

Name: The Lancet Commission on 21st-Century Global Health Threats
Scope of work: It includes global health threats like:
- demographic changes and inverted population pyramids,
- high body mass index,
- antimicrobial resistance,
- eroding sexual and reproductive rights for women,
- food insecurity, and
- fraying multilateralism
In 2024, the body will release its recommendations after assessing evidence presented by working groups over the course of the next two years.
Chairman:
- Natalia Kanem, the executive director of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, and Christopher JL Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent population health research centre at the University of Washington Medicine, United States.
Members of the commission come from diverse backgrounds:
- Current and former heads of state,
- intergovernmental organisation leaders,
  leaders of public health institutions, global health funders, global health thought leaders, and
- civil society and youth organisations.
The body will have a four-pronged approach:

Utilise available data from the Global Burden of Disease and related reference health forecasts as a foundation for a heterogenous debate on global and regional health threats;
explore alternative forecasting options;
search for solutions which can be adopted by a diverse population at a global and regional scale; and
produce “roadmaps that governments, donors and other stakeholders can use to translate findings into investment priorities”.

Commissions formed in the backdrop of global pandemic: