What we're reading: An article, a platform and a petition urge presidential candidates to prioritize responses to diseases and the inequities that drive their spread

Ending Pandemics: U.S. Foreign Policy to Mitigate Today's Major Killers, Tomorrow's Outbreaks, and The Health Impacts of Climate Change - This analysis in the Journal of International Affairs makes the case that the leadership needed to confront the most dangerous global health threats, including the pandemics to come, and the factors that will fuel them, must come from the highest levels. Estimating the global cost of lost productivity in low and middle income countries -- that include growing economies and important U.S. trading partners -- caused by infectious diseases at $1.7 trillion, and a 17-20 fold return on every disease fighting dollar invested, the also authors propose a presidential level effort to address the drivers of economic, racial, and gender, and sexuality-based inequities that enable pandemics.