Archives: Morning Breakouts

News outlets detail various progress reports from administration officials as well as several studies.

Democrats, including President Barack Obama and members of Congress, have different strategies for how they will handle the spotlight on the health law next week, when it comes before the Supreme Court. House Democrats plan to celebrate the law's achievements. President Obama will be in Korea. Republicans, meanwhile, are attempting to turn it into campaign fodder.

"Some 111.1 million children below the age of five are to be vaccinated against polio in a synchronized campaign covering 20 countries in West and Central Africa starting on Friday," the WHO and UNICEF said in a joint statement on Wednesday, PANA reports (3/21). The campaign, which will last for four days, "is intended to serve as a massive boost in efforts to eradicate the disease, and will involve national health ministries and U.N. agencies, as well as tens of thousands of volunteers who will go from door-to-door immunizing children," the U.N. News Centre writes (3/21).

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) provides a fact sheet (.pdf) detailing its efforts to improve access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in the developing world. According to the fact sheet, the MCC and its partner countries "have prioritized WASH sector development," and "MCC has invested $793 million in WASH-related projects in nine partner countries" (3/19).

In this post in the Center for Global Development's (CGD) "Global Health Policy" blog, Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy and a research fellow at the center, summarizes the history of G8 global health initiatives and examines why global health has been dropped from the G8 and G20 agendas, writing that "as we look to the U.S.-hosted G8 meeting in 2012, global health is still nowhere to be found." She concludes, "As G8 budgets decline, the meeting is a unique opportunity to discuss cooperation on global health with the G8+5 leaders from emerging economies" (3/21).

In this post in the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health's (MLI) "Leading Global Health" blog, MLI Director Rosann Wisman examines how a new, country-led development approach under the Global Health Initiative (GHI) -- which focuses on "[funding] the priorities of developing countries rather than solely the priorities of the donors" -- is "gaining steam." She writes, "I believe there are two reasons for this. One is that developing countries, having gained a foothold in funding their own priorities, are showing stronger results when they are in the driver's seat. Second, the tough economic times have caused several developing countries to internally face up to a key question: What do we do if our traditional donors no longer support our health programs?" (3/20).

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) says the spread of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) -- "a form of tuberculosis that does not respond to standard treatment and can kill in a matter of months" -- "is much greater than previously thought," VOA News reports. "'Wherever we're looking for drug-resistant TB we're finding it in very alarming numbers. And that suggests to us that the current statistics that are being published about the prevalence of MDR-TB are really just scratching the surface of the problem,' said Dr. Leslie Shanks, medical director for the group," the news service writes (DeCapua, 3/21).

"This year on World Water Day, Thursday, March 22, the United Nations highlights the critical role water plays in food security, at a time when water supplies are already under severe strain in many parts of the world," VOA News reports. As the world's population expands, "the demand for water is growing along with the demand for food," and agriculture accounts for 70 percent of water use worldwide, the news service notes (Baragona, 3/21). Additional information on World Water Day, which is coordinated by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is available online from U.N. Water (3/22).

"As we mark World Water Day, the alarming statistics underlying water scarcity are worth repeating. Worldwide 2.7 billion people are currently affected by water shortages," Manish Bapna, acting president of the World Resources Institute (WRI), and Betsy Otto, director of WRI's Aqueduct Project, write in a Forbes opinion piece, noting that population growth, increasing food demand, and climate change threaten access to water. "Clean, abundant water is essential for life and economic growth. Since it is a finite resource, we need to find solutions that will ensure we can use water more efficiently and mange water systems more wisely," they state.