Archives: Morning Breakouts

"Child marriage is a one-way ticket to a life of poverty, illiteracy and powerlessness for girls and the international community needs to take urgent action to stop it," according to an analysis (.pdf) published Friday by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the Guardian reports. "Brown's review, seen exclusively by the Guardian, says that the issue of child brides has been 'conspicuous by its absence' in the efforts to cut global poverty, bring down child and maternal death rates and get children into school, which are stated Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015," the newspaper notes.

At a plenary session Thursday at the 19th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) "presented preliminary data from the 2010 revision of the Global Burden of Disease," which "is aimed at analyzing global health trends to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries and risk factors by age, sex and geography for specific points in time," the Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog reports. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the study is a collaboration of IMHE, the University of Queensland, the WHO, and the Harvard and Johns Hopkins Schools of Public Health, according to the blog, which notes that the analysis of 225 health conditions and more than 50 risk factors is expected to be published this year and made available to the public online (Lubinski, 3/8).

A feature article in the Ugandan Observer examines a recent agreement signed by the U.S. and Ugandan governments "to drum up more support for maternal and reproductive health in Uganda." U.S. Global Health Initiative (GHI) Executive Director Lois Quam spoke at the signing, saying, "Investment in health in Uganda is one of the largest we make anywhere else in the world. Government must do more. They must put in more resources. Too many mothers die because they are giving birth to too many children. Far too many women lose their lives," according to the Observer.

"U.S. officials pledged Thursday to work for permanent solutions to ease hunger in the Horn of Africa, warning that Somalia remained a major crisis even though its famine is officially over," Agence France-Presse reports. Testifying before a congressional commission on human rights, Nancy Lindborg, USAID assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance, "said that the United States and other major donors would meet in Kenya in late March to support longer-term Horn of Africa plans," according to the news agency. She added, "We cannot afford to let people slide into crisis every couple of years and respond with massive humanitarian assistance," AFP reports. According to Lindborg, the U.S. "provided $935 million during the crisis, ensuring direct food assistance to 4.6 million people and emergency health care for nearly one million more," the news agency notes (3/8).

A new report (.pdf), "jointly published by the Korekata AIDS Law Center in Beijing and the U.S.-based non-governmental organization Asia Catalyst," calls for the Chinese government to conduct "a full and independent investigation into the number of people affected" by illegal blood selling in central China in the 1990s that helped to spread HIV, "an official apology to the people affected, as well as compensation," BMJ reports.

Too often patients who thought they had all the right approvals from their insurers get hit with surprise bills for out-of-network medical costs, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says in a report that calls on insurers, doctors and hospitals to help craft reforms (Appleby, 3/8).

Illinois' largest hospital system and biggest health insurer agreed in late 2010 to form an accountable care organization, a network in which the organizations would cooperate to boost quality and restrain cost increases, sharing in any savings. Now, with six months of operating data in hand, they are finding spending reductions that are greater than those for patients outside the network (Hancock, 3/8).

Later this month, just as the Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the 2010 health law, the House is expected to pass a measure that would repeal an advisory board created in the law to curb Medicare spending if it exceeds specific targets. But the debate is not shaping up like the usual House legislative fight over the law. Some key Democrats also want the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) gone (Carey, 3/8).

Inter Press Service has published a two-part series, made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Haiti, examining sanitation services in Haiti since the earthquake in 2010. The first article looks at the installation of mobile toilets in displaced persons camps following the earthquake, and says that as relief organizations pull out of the country, the toilets are being removed or left to overflow (Jerome/Daudier, 3/7).