Archives: Morning Breakouts

The "improvement and extension of health care in Africa is ... being constrained by gaps in financing," according to a new report (.pdf) by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) based on research commissioned by Janssen Pharmaceutica, a Belgian subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, the Financial Times' "beyondbrics" blog reports (Wheatley, 3/1). The report, titled "The Future of Healthcare in Africa," "discusses the continent's traditional health care issues, such as communicable diseases or financing health care in economically difficult circumstances" and "also addresses less well-known topics, such as the threat of obesity and heart disease, the use of mobile technology, development of more preventive care, and more," according to the Janssen website (3/1). The report "identif[ies] the key trends shaping African health care systems" and uses them "to develop [five] scenarios that depict the possible health landscape on the continent in 2022," a Janssen press release (.pdf) states (3/1).

"HIV organizations, researchers and activists have criticized the WHO and UNAIDS for not clearly communicating [guidelines on HIV and hormonal contraception] to African women, who remain the most affected by the continent's high HIV prevalence rates," PlusNews reports. In February, the WHO confirmed its existing recommendations after a study published last year suggested that using hormonal contraceptive injections might double the risk of women acquiring HIV or transmitting the virus to a male partner, according to the news service. "However, because the U.N. agency was unable to definitively rule out the possibility that progesterone-only birth-control shots like Depo-Provera posed no HIV risk, it is now strongly advising women at risk of or living with HIV to use condoms concurrently to prevent HIV infection or transmission," PlusNews writes.

The new president of the World Bank "should come to office understanding the realities of flooded villages, drought-ridden farms, desperate mothers hovering over comatose, malaria-infected children, and teenage girls unable to pay high school tuition. More than knowing these realities, and caring to end them, the bank president should understand their causes and interconnected solutions," Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, writes in a Washington Post opinion piece. "My good fortune to see the world through the eyes of others, during 30 years working on some of the world's most vexing problems, has helped me understand various regions' challenges and the need for tailored solutions," which is why "I am eager for this challenge" to lead the World Bank, he writes, advocating for his nomination to be considered for the position.

"A constitutional debate is under way in Nigeria over whether the government can prosecute parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated against polio, or if it has the power to force parents to have their children vaccinated against any communicable disease," VOA News reports. "The debate comes on the heels of a resolution by the government of Nigeria's northern Kano state to prosecute any parent who refuses to have their children receive the oral vaccine against the highly contagious disease," the news service notes.

The Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), a regional arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), on Tuesday "unveiled new guidelines to help countries throughout the Americas detect and prevent transmission of the mosquito-borne chikungunya virus -- a disease which has already infected more than two million people around the world," the U.N. News Centre reports. "The guidelines' authors, PAHO adviser on viral diseases Otavio Oliva and PAHO adviser on dengue Jose Luis San Martin, warned that the fact that people in the Americas have not been exposed to chikungunya virus, placed the region at particular risk for the introduction and spread of the virus," the news service adds (2/28).

In this Huffington Post "Black Voices" opinion piece, Vanessa Cullins, vice president for external medical affairs at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, responds to an announcement by the WHO in February that the agency would not revise its contraception guidelines for women living with and at risk of HIV infection based on a "study suggesting that hormonal contraception increases women's risk of [acquiring and] transmitting HIV to their partners." A panel found "there was not enough evidence" to support women abandoning hormonal contraception and concluded there should be "no restrictions on hormonal contraception," Cullins states.

An inexpensive test and single-dose treatment could help save the lives of nearly one million infants annually if pregnant women in low-income countries were offered rapid tests for syphilis, experts from the Global Congenital Syphilis Partnership said on Thursday, Reuters reports. "A team of researchers led by Rosanna Peeling and David Mabey at the [London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)] found in a study due to be published soon that introducing rapid tests to increase access to syphilis screening was both feasible and cost effective," the news agency writes.

The March issue of the WHO Bulletin features an editorial on global shortages of medicines; a public health round-up; an article on breast cancer awareness; a research paper on interventions for the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa; and a paper on the global burden of cholera (March 2012).

As part of its series of interviews with CDC staff working on global HIV and tuberculosis (TB) research and development, the Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog spoke with Jordan Tappero, "who is currently serving as director for the Health Systems Reconstruction Office in the Center for Global Health, an office opened in response to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti." In the interview, "Tappero describes his early research in HIV and TB, thoughts on why Uganda is the only sub-Saharan African country not enjoying a reduction in HIV incidence, and how quickly HIV services were restored to people living in Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake," according to the blog (Mazzotta, 2/29).

With each of the three droughts in the Horn of Africa over the last decade, "the international community agreed that long-term measures were needed to prevent another tragedy. But each time, when the rains finally came, the world's good intentions melted away," Jose Graziano de Silva, director-general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) writes in a Project Syndicate opinion piece. "We must ensure that this does not happen again by joining forces now to banish hunger from the region once and for all," he continues.

The Switzerland-based Millennium Foundation, a Unitaid-funded campaign to solicit donations for health projects from airline travelers, "is being wound down after spending nearly $20 million to generate less than $300,000 over the past four years," the Financial Times reports. "The lack of successful fundraising sparked concerns from health campaigners over the waste of scarce resources at a time when funding is declining and millions of people around the world are dying each year from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria," the news service writes.

"The Kenyan government's recent failure to adequately treat a patient with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) has some civil society organizations questioning whether the country's TB program is equipped to diagnose and treat such patients," PlusNews reports. "The government admits the TB program in Kenya has not been adequately funded despite the country's big TB burden," PlusNews writes, adding, "Kenya ranks 13th on the list of 22 high-burden TB countries in the world and has the fifth-highest burden in Africa."