Background
Anthony Costello was born in Beckenham, Kent, and graduated from Street Joseph’s Academy in Blackheath.
Anthony Costello was born in Beckenham, Kent, and graduated from Street Joseph’s Academy in Blackheath.
He attended Street Catharine’s College Cambridge where he took a degree in Experimental Psychology and qualified as a doctor in Medical Sciences after clinical training at the Middlesex Hospital in London.
Until 2015 Costello was Professor of International Child Health and Director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London (University College London). He was an attending paediatrician at University College Hospital, and the University College London Pro-Provost for Africa and the Middle East. In September 2015 he joined the World Health Organisation in Geneva as Director of the Department of Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health.
He then trained in Paediatrics and Neonatology at University College London.
His areas of scientific expertise include the evaluation of cost-effective interventions to reduce maternal and newborn deaths, women's groups, strategies to tackle malnutrition, international aid and the health effects of climate change. In 1999 he published a pioneering book on how to improve newborn infant health in developing countries.
Costello was instrumental in establishing participatory women's groups as one of the most effective interventions to reduce maternal and newborn deaths in poor communities. With a Nepali organisation (MIRA), that he helped to establish, a large community trial of participatory learning and action using women's groups in the remote mountains of Makwanpur district, Nepal was published in The Lancet in 2004.
He went on to establish partnerships and further studies with local organisations in eastern India, Mumbai, Bangladesh and Malawi.
Seven cluster randomised controlled trials of women's groups in Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Malawi, led to a meta-analysis published in the Lancet in May 2013. Results showed that in populations where more than 30% of pregnant women joined the women"s group programme, maternal death and newborn deaths were cut by one third. The intervention has now been recommended by the World Health Organisation for scale-up in poor, rural populations.
Costello chaired the 2009 Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change, and was co-chair of a new Lancet Commission which links the United Kingdom, China, Norway and Sweden on emergency actions to tackle the climate health crisis, published in June 2015.