Archives: Morning Breakouts

"The rising enthusiasm for providing more medicines threatens to come at the expense of promising initiatives for preventing HIV infections in the first place -- initiatives that could save many lives, with less money," Craig Timberg, the newspaper's deputy national security editor, and Daniel Halperin, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, write in this Washington Post opinion piece. "Ambitious treatment efforts and smart prevention programs are, of course, not inherently at odds. But especially in an era of fiscal constraint, these two goals could come into conflict," they write, continuing, "The result, wasteful in dollars spent and lives diminished, would represent only the latest misjudgment by powerful donor nations such as the United States, which still struggle to understand the root causes of an epidemic that has spread most widely in weaker, poorer nations."

"The Syrian government will allow the United Nations to assess the basic medical needs of Syrians in four areas where opposition forces have clashed with government troops and to also carry out a preliminary humanitarian needs assessment, officials said Friday," the Associated Press/Huffington Post reports. WHO spokesperson "Tarik Jasarevic says a 'very preliminary and basic survey' overseen by his agency and the U.N. Population Fund will be carried out next week with the cooperation of Syria's health ministry," the news service writes.

As the date of the high court arguments grows nearer, news outlets have a number of editorials and opinions about the health law case.

Genetic tests could become a $25 billion market by 2021. Currently, spending on these tests is estimated at $5 billion annually.

GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum continues to attack rival Mitt Romney's Massachusetts' health reform record, arguing that it weakens his ability to run against President Barack Obama and the federal health law. Fellow candidate Newt Gingrich also is not escaping Santorum's criticism.

"Scientists, stymied for decades by the complexity of the human immunodeficiency virus, are making progress on several fronts in the search for a cure for HIV infections," but "[a] major stumbling block is the fact that HIV lies low in pools or reservoirs of latent infection that even powerful drugs cannot reach, scientists told the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, one of the world's largest scientific meetings on HIV/AIDS," in Seattle last week, Reuters reports. "Promising tactics range from flushing hidden HIV from cells to changing out a person's own immune system cells, making them resistant to HIV and then putting them back into the patient's body," the news service writes.

The Daily Beast reports on a panel discussion at the third Women in the World summit on Friday in which Barbara Bush, CEO and co-founder of Global Health Corps, and Gabi Zedlmayer, head of Hewlett-Packard's (HP) global social innovation program, talked about "how to harness technology to solve world health problems." According to the news service, Zedlmayer "called for a full 'eco system': Pharma, [research & development], the works," adding, "Much of HP's approach is through partnerships, which the company has established with many organizations, including Global Health Corps." Bush "talked passionately about her company's accomplishments, ... explaining that Global Health Corps was created on the Teach for America model: recruit the best and the brightest, just out of university, and send them into the field -- wherever there's a need -- for one year," the news service notes (Schwartz, 3/9).

PSI's "Healthy Lives" blog presents global health-related excerpts of USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah's annual letter that was published on March 9. Shah touches on programs to improve infant and child health; water, sanitation and hygiene; malaria prevention; HIV/AIDS care; and health care in several countries, including Afghanistan, Ghana and Ethiopia, according to the blog (3/9).

Representatives of 40 member countries of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), as well as senior officials from the agency, on Monday opened the 31st FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific in Hanoi, Vietnam, to "discuss in depth the issues of food security and rural poverty reduction," Xinhua/China Daily reports (3/12). Hiroyuki Konuma, FAO assistant director general, "sa[id] rising food prices and frequent natural disasters are making it harder to ease hunger and malnutrition in the Asia-Pacific region," VOA's "Breaking News" blog writes, adding he "said the challenge of eradicating hunger has also been complicated by the effects of climate change, trade policies, soaring crude oil prices and the growing use of food crops for biofuels." According to the blog, "ministers [at the meeting] will review a report on measures to speed up progress toward the goal of cutting hunger levels in half in Asia-Pacific by 2015," a "target was set at a World Food Summit in 1996" (3/12).