Mandip Aujla talks to Binita Kane, co-founder of South Asian Heritage Month, about South Asian culture, history, and community, and the two new chairs of the Lancet's Group for Racial Equality discuss the group's work on diversity and inclusion.

Find out more about South Asian Heritage Month here

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

Nine Lancet journals are top of their categories for Impact Factor in the latest measurements. What is the value of Impact Factors? What do they capture, and what don’t they capture? Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, joins Gavin and Jessamy to discuss impact.

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

Poor mental health can contribute to HIV risk and affect outcomes of HIV care, and living with HIV or risk of HIV can contribute to poor mental health. Editor-in-chief of The Lancet HIV, Peter Hayward, joins Gavin and Jessamy to discuss new research on the overlapping issues and where the opportunities for improving care can be found.

Read the Series papers here:
Alignment of Mental Health and HIV Services

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

How many people have had their sense of smell affected in the long-term by COVID-19? What does it mean for them? Did some COVID-19 waves have a greater effect on sense of smell than others? How can people regain their sense of smell? Prof. Carl Philpott joins Gavin and Jessamy to discuss anosmia and parosmia.

Rola Hallam joins Gavin to talk about her path from being a Syrian refugee in the UK to running CanDo, a humanitarian organisation enabling local relief efforts, and the lessons for aid in warzones and protecting healthcare from attack.

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

How does health shape politics? How does politics shape health? Why do some diseases get international attention and funding when others don’t? What role do institutions play? Richard Horton, Eduardo Gomez, and Jeremy Shiffman join Jessamy and Gavin to discuss the talking points from a new Lancet Series on Political Science and Health.

Read the full Series of papers:
Political Science and Health

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

In 2019 there were 8.6m deaths globally among children and adolescents aged 0-20 years. Almost two decades on from The Lancet’s first ever global health series, on child survival, we've published our new Series, Optimising Child and Adolescent Health and Development. Richard Horton reflects on the progress and setbacks across 20 years of child health and global health.

Read the full Series of papers:
Optimising Child and Adolescent Health and Development

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center For Countering Digital Hate, joins the podcast to discuss the proliferation of misinformation across social media, how medical misinformation has become a profitable industry, why it's been allowed, and what can be done.

Read the CCDH's reports, The Disinformation Dozen and Pandemic Profiteers.

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

Prof. Gabriel Leung, Dean of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, joins Gavin and Jessamy to discuss Hong Kong's recent Omicron wave of COVID-19 and what this variant means for health systems and zero-COVID containment approaches.

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

Oksana Pyzik joins Gavin and Jessamy to talk about the short and long-term health impacts of the conflict in Ukraine, and what happens next for those forced to flee.

Ibrahim Abubakar, Tolullah Oni, and Obinna Onwujekwe join The Lancet Voice to discuss how Nigeria's history affects the modern-day health system, and the challenges and opportunities for Nigeria in the future.

Read the Commission and see infographics and videos:
The Lancet Nigeria Commission: investing in health and the future of the nation

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

Professor Samuel K. Roberts joins Gavin and Jessamy to discuss racial inequities in the USA and how infectious diseases historically find and exploit the gaps in societies.

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

Read our profile:
Samuel K Roberts: illuminating history, racial bias, and public health

What actually is long COVID?  How much do we know about what causes it? How many people do we think currently have it? Dr. Claire Steves joins Gavin and Jessamy to talk about the future of long COVID research now that we have a definition for the condition.

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

How has our relationship with death changed over the last few decades? What is a "good death"? Dr. Richard Smith, Dr. Libby Sallnow, and Dr. M.R. Rajagopal discuss a new Lancet Commission which looks to address questions about how society treats death and dying.

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

Prof. Kevin Fenton, Public Health Regional Director for London and advisor to the Mayor of London, joins Gavin and Jessamy to talk about strategies for tackling low vaccination rates, Omicron in London, and living with COVID-19.

You can continue the conversation with Jessamy and Gavin on Twitter by following them at @JessamyBagenal and @GavinCleaver.

Editor-in-chief of The Lancet Richard Horton looks back at the "year of vaccines", discusses what surprised him the most about 2021, and talks about where the pandemic might go from here.

Hilary Cottam, author of Radical Help, joins the podcast to talk about reimagining care and the welfare state to better support the health issues faced by the modern world.

Prof. Salim Abdool Karim, director of CAPRISA and former leader of the South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19, describes the discovery of the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant, explains what we know about it so far, and discusses how South Africa feels about the global response.

Climate research pioneer Prof. Michael E. Mann joins the podcast to lay out the most important things that happened at COP26.

Further reading:
https://www.thelancet.com/countdown-health-climate

Why are the countries which currently suffer the most direct health impacts from climate change some of the least likely to publish climate research? In the lead-up to COP26, Prof. Penny Murage of LSHTM discusses the field and her community work in sub-Saharan Africa, and Ayesha Tandon of CarbonBrief talks about her recent piece on inequality in climate research.

Lancet Countdown: https://www.thelancet.com/countdown-health-climate
CarbonBrief article: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-the-lack-of-diversity-in-climate-science-research

We hear from Prof. Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein and Alexandria Macmadu on how COVID-19 has affected the prison system in the USA, and Prof. Marie Claire Van Hout talks about the health problems faced by prisoners in sub-Saharan Africa.

Vaccine-rich countries are beginning programmes of COVID-19 vaccine booster shots, but what's the evidence for them? What does this mean for countries which have no vaccines? Prof. Sir Richard Peto lays out the current evidence and Prof. K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, discusses what booster shots mean for the rest of the world, and how India is currently coping with COVID-19 following the wave there in early 2021.

Further reading:
Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

What are the most pressing humanitarian needs in Afghanistan? How can the country preserve its health system? Former Afghanistan government public health director Dr. Mohammad Haqmal and Dr. Ayesha Ahmad highlight the main issues, and Prof. Muhammad Zaman discusses the changing needs of refugees worldwide as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Further reading:
Urgent health and humanitarian needs of the Afghan population under the Taliban:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01963-2/fulltext

The mental health of health workers is often overlooked, but with the pandemic still raging around the world, a conversation about their wellbeing is vital. In this episode we speak to Pier Bryden, Julie Maggi, and Lisa Richardson about their work in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, and to Sam Harvey of the Black Dog Institute in Sydney about his new Review of the subject.

Jocalyn Clark and Jessamy Bagenal of The Lancet are joined by Prof. Sarah Kaplan, Director of the Institute for Gender & the Economy,  to discuss what a feminist recovery from COVID-19 might look like.