Archives: Morning Breakouts

According to a new report, more than 800,000 visits to the ER in 2009 were for avoidable dental ailments.

Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., has refused a request from former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to pull a campaign advertisement rejecting the federal birth control mandate that features Kennedy's father, the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

Meanwhile, on the House side, a top Democrat has said he will support efforts to undo the panel created to curb Medicare spending growth. The American Medical Association also reiterated its support for repeal.

"Urbanization leaves hundreds of millions of children in cities and towns excluded from vital services, UNICEF warns in 'The State of the World's Children 2012: Children in an Urban World,'" released on Tuesday, the agency reports in a press release (2/28). "Children in slums and poor urban communities lack access to clean water, sanitation and education, as services struggle to keep up with fast urban growth, says" the agency's flagship report, according to AlertNet (Caspani, 2/28). The report "calls attention to the lack of data on conditions in slums, particularly as it relates to children, and it calls for a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding poverty and inequality in cities and increased political will to improve the lives of the most marginalized," UNICEF writes in an accompanying article (2/28).

"Tackling land-use conflicts around game parks must form part of the national strategy to stop the spread of [Trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness], warn doctors fighting the disease in Tanzania," IRIN reports. According to the news service, "Tanzania's booming tourism industry has been driven largely by its wildlife parks, which contribute almost $1.8 billion a year to the economy," but "[a] growing number of communities find their villages 'squeezed' between wildlife areas, putting them at risk from tsetse flies that spread ... sleeping sickness, a debilitating and often fatal disease."

In this Open Society Foundations (OSF) blog post, Daniel Wolfe, director of the International Harm Reduction Development Program at OSF, examines "the ways that power structures, rather than individuals, contribute to disease rebound and spread," citing a recent study by MJ Milloy and colleagues, published in the journal JAIDS, "which shows the link between incarceration and the failure of HIV treatment." Wolfe writes, "Milloy's analysis showed that incarceration kick-started viral replication among patients who had previously had their HIV under control. The findings make the study one of a number of must-reads on how prison practices not only impact the health of inmates but communities at large" (2/27).

This report (.pdf), published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) on Monday and titled "Righting the Global Fund," recounts the adversity faced by the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria over the course of 2011 and suggests potential strategies for addressing these challenges going forward (2/27). "Aside from the major challenges of ensuring adequate funding from donors, there are five critical areas where the Global Fund will need to concentrate its repair efforts this year" -- grant oversight, management, governance, program inefficiencies, financial forecasting and donor reliability -- and "five priorities that should guide the U.S. government's approach to the fund" -- fund management, operational integration, diplomacy, consistent messaging to Congress, and the integration of science data and innovation, the authors write in the report (Morrison/Summers, 2/27).