Archives: Morning Breakouts

A new poll finds that President Obama leads GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney among women in 12 swing states -- a finding fueled mostly by health care, the top issue for women, according to the poll.

The New York Times reports that last week's action at the Supreme Court gave the public an in-depth view of the insitution and the justices. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that, in a recent speech, Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn't give any hints about what the high court will do on the health law question.

Inter Press Service examines efforts to end female genital mutilation (FGM) in Liberia. "[T]hrough cooperative efforts with traditional leaders, the government of Liberia is quietly moving to ... bring an end to female genital cutting in Liberia," IPS writes, adding, "International organizations such as the United Nations Children's Fund argue that FGM is a human rights violation that denies women 'their physical and mental integrity, their right to freedom from violence and discrimination, and in the most extreme case, their life.'" According to the news service, "FGM remains a highly sensitive issue for the government, and officials interviewed maintained that it would take years to put an end to the practice" (Lupick, 4/2).

The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (IOM) on Monday released a summary of a workshop, titled "Country-Level Decision Making for Control of Chronic Diseases." As part of a series of follow-up activities to the IOM's 2010 report, "Promoting Cardiovascular Health in the Developing World," the workshop "aimed to identify what is needed to create tools for country-led planning of effective, efficient, and equitable provision of programs to prevent and reduce the burden of chronic diseases," according to its website (4/2).

"The need to ensure that people in Africa have access to essential, high quality, safe and affordable medicines has just received a major boost with the launch of the East African Community (EAC) Medicines Registration Harmonization Project in Arusha, Tanzania, on 30 March 2011," UNAIDS reports in a feature story on its website. An alliance "bringing together the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the U.K. Department for International Development (DfID), and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)," "hope[s] to strengthen regulatory capacity and systems for medicines in Africa, including antiretroviral drugs, so that fewer lives are lost due to drugs which are unsafe and of poor quality or which are largely unavailable or delivered inefficiently," according to the article (4/2).

In this Reuters opinion piece, finance blogger Felix Salmon responds to a New York Times (NYT) article published on Monday in which journalist Deborah Sontag examines the global response to Haiti's cholera epidemic. He writes, "There's no doubt that Haiti's cholera epidemic was massive and tragic, and that the response to it could have been better, in an ideal world. But Sontag barely attempts to address the question of why the response was suboptimal. ... Rather, [she] spends a huge amount of effort tracking down, on the one hand, purely anecdotal stories of individual Haitians who were exposed to the disease, and on the other hand, the detailed story of whether and how the outbreak could be traced back to a group of Nepalese peacekeepers on the island."

UNICEF on Tuesday launched a social media campaign "to raise awareness about children in the Sahel region in northern Africa who are in urgent need of food aid," CNN reports. UNICEF estimates that one million children in the region are at risk of starvation, and the U.N. says more than 10 million people risk severe acute malnutrition, the news agency notes. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, "the main causes of the humanitarian crisis in the region are 'drought, chronic poverty, high food prices, displacement and conflict,'" CNN writes. The campaign also aims to raise funds for the crisis, as UNICEF reports having only $30 million of a $120 million appeal in its coffers, according to the news agency (4/3).

Officials from the U.S., African Union and the international community "are working with Sudan's government to open humanitarian access to" the country's Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states, where refugees "fleeing fighting between local militia and government troops" have gathered and are in need of food aid, VOA News reports. The officials are asking "Khartoum to approve a plan for humanitarian corridors as more than 140,000 new refugees have left for South Sudan, Kenya, and Ethiopia," the news service writes, adding that Princeton Lyman, the U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, "said there are ways to get food aid into Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile without Khartoum's consent, but they are inadequate to the need" (Stearns, 4/2). On Thursday, the U.S. Senate approved by voice vote a resolution (.pdf) urging an end to cross-border conflict and "calling for 'the government of Sudan to allow immediate and unrestricted humanitarian access to South Kordofan, Blue Nile and all other conflict-affected areas of Sudan,'" Agence France-Presse reports (3/31).

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity's (NSABB) "reversal on publishing two controversial H5N1 studies is poised to shift discussions on the topic that continue in London this week, as more participants in the debate weigh in following the March 30 announcement," CIDRAP News reports (Schnirring, 4/2). But Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University, who is the acting chair of the panel, stressed on Monday that the "recommendation that two controversial papers on bird flu be published in full is not a reversal of the stand it took last year out of concerns over terrorism," Reuters writes. "'We had new information, confidential information, about benefits of this research, and we also had confidential information about the risks involved,'" Keim said, according to the news service (Kelland/Begley, 4/2).