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Nancy Okail is a visiting scholar at CDDRL. She has 20 years of experience working on issues of democracy, rule of law, human rights, governance and security in the Middle East and North Africa region. She analyzes these issues and advocates in favor of human rights through testimony to legislative bodies, providing policy recommendations to senior government officials in the U.S. and Europe. She is currently the president of the board of advisors of The Tahrir Institue for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), previously she was the Institute’s executive director since its foundation. Dr. Okail was the director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has also worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and managed programs for several international organizations. Dr. Okail was one of the 43 nongovernmental organization workers convicted and sentenced to prison in a widely publicized 2012 case for allegedly using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in the UK; her doctoral research focused on the power relations of foreign aid. 

More than 80% of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and diabetes mellitus (DM) burden now lies in low and middle-income countries. Thus, there is an urgent need to identify and implement the most cost-effective interventions, particularly in the resource-constraint South Asian settings. A 2018 systematic review evaluated the cost-effectiveness of individual-level, group-level and population-level interventions to control CVD and DM in South Asia. Of the 2949 identified studies through a search of 14 electronic databases up to 2016, 42 met full inclusion criteria. Critical appraisal of studies revealed 15 excellent, 18 good and 9 poor quality studies. Most studies were from India (n=37), followed by Bangladesh (n=3), Pakistan (n=2) and Bhutan (n=1). The economic evaluations were based on observational studies (n=9), randomised trials (n=12) and decision models (n=21). Together, these studies evaluated 301 policy or clinical interventions or combination of both. We found a large number of interventions were cost-effective aimed at primordial prevention (tobacco taxation, salt reduction legislation, food labelling and food advertising regulation), and primary and secondary prevention (multidrug therapy for CVD in high-risk group, lifestyle modification and metformin treatment for diabetes prevention, and screening for diabetes complications every 2–5 years). Significant heterogeneity in analytical framework and outcome measures used in these studies restricted meta-analysis and direct ranking of the interventions by their degree of cost-effectiveness. The cost-effectiveness evidence for CVD and DM interventions in South Asia is growing, but most evidence is from India and limited to decision modelled outcomes. There is an urgent need for formal health technology assessment and policy evaluations in South Asia and other low- and middle- income countries using local research data.

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/P1-Q0OSo4yM

About this Event: The governance of big data and the prevention of their misuse is among the most topical issues in current debates among security experts. But what does it mean when security is not an issue for the stakeholders governing big biomedical data? This paper answers this question by looking at what it describes as a peculiar omission of the issue of security in the biggest harmonization cluster of biomedical research in Europe - BBMRI-ERIC. While it does treat personal data, the risks and threats are constructed through a language of anticipation and self-governance rather than security. The analysis explains why: based on document analysis, interviews, and field research, it studies (1) how are risks and threats constructed in the research with big biomedical data, (2) what regime of their governance is established in this area, and (3) what are the implications for the practices of science and the politics of security. The paper argues that this silence is a by-product of bureaucratization and responsibilization of security, which is in biobanking characteristic by discourse and practices of responsible research, ethics, and law. The paper suggests that this regime of governance precludes the prospects of addressing bigger questions that biobanks may need to deal with in the future, such as regarding the access to the biomedical data by state or private actors and their use for policing, surveillance, or other types of population governance.

Speaker's Biography: Dagmar Rychnovská is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Techno-science and societal transformation group at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. She holds a PhD in International Relations (Charles University in Prague), an MA in Comparative and International Studies (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich), and an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security (VU University Amsterdam). Her research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, security studies, and science and technology studies. Her current research explores security controversies in research and innovation governance, with a focus on bioweapons, biotechnologies, and biobanks.