Archives: Morning Breakouts

The former Nebraska governor and senator made his announcement Wednesday. Democrats view his candidacy as a hopeful development in their efforts to retake the upper chamber, but some pundits say his policy positions - such as his belief that that health law didn't do enough - might not be popular within his state.

Speaking at the American Society for Microbiology's (ASM) Biodefense and Emerging Diseases Research meeting in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Ron Fouchier, the leader of the team at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands that genetically altered the bird flu virus, making it transmissible between ferrets and "touching off public fears of a pandemic, said ... that the virus he created was neither as contagious nor as dangerous as people had been led to believe ..., prompt[ing] the United States government to ask that the experiments be re-evaluated by a government advisory panel that recommended in December that certain details of the work be kept secret and not published," the New York Times reports (Grady, 2/29).

Only weeks after the U.N. declared an end to the famine in Somalia, regional climate scientists meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, at the 30th Greater Horn of Africa Climate Outlook Forum have said preventive measures should be taken to stem the effects of drought that likely will return to Somalia and other parts of the Horn of Africa over the next three months, IRIN reports. USAID's "FEWS NET said people should expect erratic rain in southern Somalia and southeastern Kenya" and will "be releasing a detailed outlook in the coming weeks," the news service notes. But "[o]ne of the problems highlighted was the lack of linkage between early warning and early action. 'There is no framework that allows the trigger of funds when the early warning bell is sounded,' said one aid worker," IRIN writes (2/29).

Her surprise retirement also underscores what some say is a rift within the GOP between conservatives who demand allegience to bedrock principles and those concerned with courting swing voters.

"For mental health to gain significant attention, and funding from policymakers globally, it is not enough to convince people that it has a high disease burden but also that there are deliverable and cost-effective interventions -- according to South African researchers writing in this week's PLoS Medicine," a PLoS press release reports, adding, "Mark Tomlinson and Crick Lund from the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health based at the University of Cape Town argue that global mental health must demonstrate its social and economic impact." According to the press release, the authors "discuss a framework to help understand why some global health initiatives are more successful in generating funding and political priority than others" (2/28).

In this post in IntraHealth International's "Global Health" blog, Editorial Manager Susanna Smith responds to an editorial published in the Lancet earlier this month that "issued a dire warning to the international medical community" about the use of medicine as a weapon of war in Syria, writing, "It is just the latest in a series of reports from across the Middle East on how medical care and medical professionals and facilities are being used to inflict politically motivated violence." She adds, "The U.N.'s condemnation of this type of violence in Syria specifically is one step in the right direction, but it is high time the international medical community speaks out against the overt violations of medicine's covenant with society, violations that are clearly a strategic weapon on the part of these political regimes" (2/27).

"The International Community of Women Living with HIV (ICW) expressed concern Monday over the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Technical Statement on Hormonal Contraceptives and HIV (.pdf) and its accompanying press release," the Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog reports. "WHO released the statement last week -- concluding that women living with HIV or at high risk of HIV can safely continue to use hormonal contraceptives to prevent pregnancy," the blog writes. According to the blog, "The ICW is pushing for more research on the subject and increased communication to explain the risks involved to potential users of hormonal contraceptives" and "'urgently' demanded that the WHO correct the note for media the WHO released along with the technical statement, calling it inconsistent with the findings of the technical review panel" (Mazzotta, 2/28).

"At present, the prevailing strategy for improving access to medicines for [neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)] is drug donation programs, which, despite providing some of the highest economic returns of public health programs ... have uncertain sustainability," Francesca Holt of St. John's College at the University of Cambridge and colleagues write in this PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases opinion piece. "Countries in demographic and economic transition are uniquely poised to be leaders in a shift towards a more sustainable, affordable means of providing access to medicines for NTDs," they add, citing China, India, and Brazil as examples (2/28).

In an interview with Xinhua on Tuesday, Francis Adatu, head of the national leprosy and tuberculosis (TB) program in Uganda, warned that TB "remains a major public health problem" and that multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) has emerged in the country, the news service writes. "'According to our prevalence survey we found MDR-TB in 1.3 percent among new cases and 12.3 percent among people who have been exposed to drugs or treated over and over again,' Adatu said," Xinhua writes, noting that Adatu said treatment for MDR-TB was much more expensive than for drug-susceptible TB.