NPR

The Decade In Global Health: New Drugs, Faster Trials, Social Media To The Rescue

Leading health experts shared the innovations and breakthroughs that they said saved millions of lives over the past ten years.
Women of the Treatment Action Campaign and are affected by the HIV virus campaign for the use of Dolutegravir (DTG) at the International Aids Conference at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre.

Millions of lives were saved in the 2010s as new ways of tackling global health problems made their debut.

But there is a problem with the decade's greatest medical moments. Most medical advances originate in rich countries, so they are sometimes out of reach for the world's poor — even when they address health problems more common in low-income countries. Treatment for HIV, for example, became available in the U.S. in 1996 but the rollout in Africa didn't begin until 2002.

But some breakthroughs of the past decade have gone on to have a truly global impact.

Here's a sampling that literally broke through those walls of affordability and availability to save millions of lives around the world.

A drug puts

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