Anthony Costello

Costello was born in Beckenham, and graduated from school at St Joseph's Academy, Blackheath. Costello attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a degree in Experimental Psychology and qualified as a doctor in Medical Sciences after clinical training at the Middlesex Hospital in London.[2] He then trained in Paediatrics and Neonatology at University College London. His aunt was the atheist activist Barbara Smoker.

After living in Baglung district in western Nepal from 1984 to 1986, two days' walk from a road, he became interested in challenges to mother and child health in poor, remote populations. 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.[3]

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.[4] He went on to establish partnerships and further studies with local organisations in East 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.[5]

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 Organization (WHO) for scale-up in poor, rural populations.[6]

Costello chaired the 2009 Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change,[7] and was co-chair of a new Lancet Commission which links the UK, China, Norway and Sweden on emergency actions to tackle the climate health crisis, published in June 2015.[8]

At WHO he has helped to lead the Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents’ Health (2016‒2030) with its three objectives of surviving, thriving and transforming – to end preventable mortality, to promote health and well-being, and to expand enabling environments. Its guiding principles include equity, universality, human rights, development effectiveness and sustainability.

With the WHO team, Costello has also launched the global accelerated action for the health of adolescents (AA-HA!) and established an expert review group called Maternal and Newborn Information for tracking Outcomes and Results (MONITOR) to harmonize maternal and newborn health indicators.

In February 2017, together with UNICEF and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Costello helped to launch the Network for Improving Quality of Care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health to introduce evidence-based interventions to improve quality of care for maternal and newborn health supported by a learning system. The Network aims to improve care in Ethiopia, Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, Malawi, Côte d'Ivoire, Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana. He also leads work on community empowerment for family health - what it means, how to measure it, and how to plan interventions at the district level.[9]

Costello is co-chair of the Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change.[10][11]

With UNICEF, he is helping WHO to coordinate a new Lancet Commission on redesigning child health for sustainable development goals.

In November 2018 he published the book The Social Edge. The Power of Sympathy Groups for our Health, Wealth and Sustainable Future.[12] The book explains why a new science of cooperation is needed and suggests twenty two social experiments which use sympathy groups for resolving 21st century problems.

Costello has been critical of the UK Government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On 16 April 2020, he told The Telegraph:

We should have introduced the lockdown two or three weeks earlier but we didn’t. It should be combined with testing, tracing and digital apps that have been used so successfully in South Korea.... It is a total mess and we have been wrong every stage of the way. We have to change our policy and at the moment I don’t hear anything to suggest we are. They keep talking about flattening the curve which implies they are seeking herd immunity but what we should have done is crushed the epidemic and then keep it down.[13]

Costello and his wife Helen have two sons and one daughter.[16]