EA - Open Philanthropy's newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy by JamesSnowden

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Open Philanthropy's newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy, published by JamesSnowden on November 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We're pleased to announce that we've added a new cause area to our Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio:Global Public Health Policy.The program will be overseen bySantosh Harish,Chris Smith, andJames Snowden. Santosh will lead the majority of grantmaking for the program.We believe that some of the most important global health problems can be addressed cost-effectively by working with governments to improve policy. Policies likeair qualityregulations,tobacco andalcohol taxes, and theelimination of leaded gasoline have saved and improved millions of lives.These policies typically improve public health by addressing risk factors to alleviate the burden of non-communicable disease, which comprises agrowing share of the health burden but receivesrelatively few resources. Policy interventions affect entire populations and are often cost-effective for governments to implement. We think philanthropy can have an outsized impact by helping governments design, implement, and enforce more effective public health policies.We've already made some grants for related work:Grants in ourSouth Asian air quality program (which is now part of our Global Public Health Policy program)Several grants aimed at reducinglead exposure and excessivealcohol consumptionFunding for theCentre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention, to support work aimed at reducing deaths from the deliberate ingestion of pesticidesThe chart below shows how little funding goes to address our current global public health policy focus areas relative to their estimated burden:Sources:Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation;Mew et al. 2017;Open Philanthropy estimatesThese four topics are our current focus, but in the future we may explore other large health burdens addressable through public health policy such as tobacco, asbestos, and exposure to other pollutants.We believe our grants to date have already resulted in meaningful impact, and we're very excited for the potential of this new area. For more details, see thearea page. And if you'd like to get in touch with us for any reason, please comment here or [email protected] for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org