Archives: Morning Breakouts

"The Secretary's Office of Global Women's Issues (S/GWI) and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) are committed to advancing the rights and health of women and girls around the world," U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby and Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues Melanne Verveer write in this post in the State Department "DipNote" blog, commemorating International Women's Day, which was observed on March 8. "Promoting the rights of women and addressing gender inequities and gender norms are essential steps to reducing HIV risk and increasing access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services -- for both women and men," they add (3/14).

In this post in the Huffington Post's "Impact" blog, UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe examines the role of the fight against AIDS in sustaining economic and social development in Africa. "Africa is breaking records," he writes, noting the economic growth, increased access to information, rise in democracy, decline in poverty, increased school enrollment -- especially for girls -- and decline in AIDS-related deaths on the continent. "Africa is now poised to push towards a new vision of: zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths," and "it needs everyone's support," he continues.

Japan on Monday provided a $340 million contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, "the highest amount that Japan has ever made in 10 years of vigorous support for the Global Fund," according to a fund press release. "This new contribution represents a significant increase over Japan's previous highest contribution of $246 million in 2010" and "raises Japan's contributions to the Global Fund to more than $1.6 billion since its creation in 2002," the press release states (3/13).

Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues Melanne Verveer and U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby on Monday "announced a joint initiative to provide $4.65 million in small grants to grassroots organizations to address gender-based violence (GBV) issues" through HIV/AIDS programs, according to a State Department press release. With funding coming from PEPFAR, "the initiative supports programs that prevent and respond to GBV, with a link to HIV prevention, treatment and care," the press release states, adding, "Grants of up to $100,000 for programs that leverage existing HIV/AIDS platforms will be awarded to organizations working in one of more than 80 PEPFAR countries" (3/14).

"Tens of thousands of Kenyan nurses agreed Wednesday to end a two-week strike after talks with Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who revoked their mass dismissal during the standoff," Agence France-Presse reports. "'The meeting agreed that the ongoing health workers strike should be called off immediately and all the officers return to work unconditionally,' a statement from Odinga's office said," the news service notes. "The nurses stopped work on March 1 to protest the government's failure to raise wages as agreed last year, when they also demanded improved services in Kenya's mostly ill-equipped public hospitals," the news service writes, adding, "The strike has crippled hospitals, with patients sometimes being sent home untreated, [with] others languishing in wards unattended" (3/14).

"There is a lot of optimism now in the community of public health officials and advocates who work on AIDS. ... But, even as we know more, there are still disputes about how best to move forward on both prevention and treatment," commentator Richard Socarides, a former White House adviser under President Bill Clinton, writes in the New Yorker's "News Desk" blog. "Such is the nature of AIDS, especially as it involves an attempt to understand the complexity of human behavior as it relates to sex," he adds.

"Late Chadian government recognition of a food crisis, a slow build-up from aid agencies, and severe pipeline constraints due to closed Libyan and Nigerian borders mean food aid has not yet arrived in Chad, despite many thousands of people having already run out of food," IRIN reports. "While staff in agencies such as the World Food Programme (WFP) are working furiously to beat the clock, a lead time of up to six months to get food to where it is needed means that the very soonest food will start to arrive is sometime in April," the news service adds.

An antiretroviral (ARV) drug given to HIV-positive children "can boost the preventive power of a key malaria drug," according to a study conducted in Uganda and presented last week at the 19th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, ScienceNow reports. The researchers, led by clinicians Diane Havlir of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Moses Kamya of Makerere University College of Health Sciences, "compare[d] two different cocktails of anti-HIV drugs, only one of which contained protease inhibitors, in HIV-infected children who live in a malarial area of [Uganda]" and found "that one protease inhibitor indeed helped stave off malaria."

In this post in The Hill's "Congress Blog," Chris Collins, vice president and director of public policy for amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, responds to a recently released analysis of adult mortality rates in African countries, which "found that between 2004 and 2008, in those nations where the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was most active, the odds of death were about 20 percent lower than in other countries in the region." He writes, "It was one more piece in the growing collection of evidence that PEPFAR has been a tremendously successful program, advancing U.S. humanitarian and diplomatic priorities and saving millions of lives." Collins continues, "That is why the proposal in President Obama's fiscal year 2013 budget to cut bi-lateral HIV programming through PEPFAR by nearly $550 million, or 11 percent, has stunned so many on Capitol Hill and in the global health community."

"Using smartphones is cheaper and more effective than using paper surveys to monitor diseases in the developing world, according to a new study by Kenyan researchers with the [CDC] ... presented Monday at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta," the International Business Times reports. "The study compared 1,019 paper-based questionnaires to 1,019 smartphone questionnaires collected at four sample sites for influenza surveillance in Kenya," the news service notes (3/12).

Aidspan, an independent watchdog of the Global Fund, on Tuesday published Issue 178 of its "Global Fund Observer." The issue features an article regarding applications for funding under the Bridge Funding Mechanism (BFM), currently being processed by the Global Fund Secretariat; an article on the reorganization of the Global Fund Secretariat; an analysis examining financial transaction taxes to potentially generate additional revenue for the Global Fund; and excerpts from three recent commentaries on the current state of the Global Fund (3/13).