COVID-19 is currently dominating the global health world, causing widespread social, economic and medical fallout across the globe, including in wealthy countries. Meanwhile, however, the health challenges facing the worlds poorest and most regions continue.

Masanga is a small mining village in the middle of the Sierra Leonean rainforest. Over the last 10 years Masanga has had to endure not only multiple more cholera outbreaks but an Ebola pandemic and now COVID. The impact of COVID on life in the poorest parts of the world might not, though, be quite what you expect: the environment and demographics mean that the pandemic is playing out quite differently to high income countries. In fact, could the rich world's focus on COVID be pulling funding away from even more serious illnesses that have plagued the global south for decades already? Does the rich world have something to learn from the way places like Masanga adapted to manage the Ebola epidemic?

With us to discuss all that and more is Dr Erik Wehrens, a Dutch Medical Doctor specialised in Global Health and Tropical Medicine and currently the program coordinator of the CapaCare Surgical training program in Sierra Leone, and Mohamed Kallon Manseray is a 34 old Community Health Officer working in Masanga Hospital, Sierra Leone currently pursuing a bachelor in Public Health at the university of Makeni.

For more information about Masanga Hospital please visit: http://masangahospital.org

For information on CapaCare and how to donate, please visit: http://capacare.org

Almost 4 billion people around the world use some form of social media, a number that has double in just 5 years. Lockdowns due to the pandemic have pushed our social interactions even further online and as such, social media forms a large basis for how we not only perceive others, but also ourselves.

For all the benefits these platforms have brought come caveats: heightened insecurities, comparison cultures, feeding into our narcissistic tendencies and portraying unrealistic expectations of the kinds of lives we should be living.

To discuss the effect that social media is having on self-esteem and mental health more generally we talk to three fascinating guests: Robin Mercado, a wellness coach and avid social media user in the US, Dr Daria Kuss, an expert in cyberpsychology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, and Steve Rose PhD, an addiction counsellor specialising in online forms of addiction including social media usage.

For more information on Robin Mercado please visit: https://www.instagram.com/robinellen/

For more information on Dr Daria Kuss and her MSc in Cyberpsychology please visit: https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/social-sciences/daria-kuss

For more information on Steve Rose please visit https://steverosephd.com