Archives: Morning Breakouts

"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.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, cited the polarized climate of Congress and Washington as a key reason she will leave the Senate. Her departure renews Democrats' hope of winning this GOP seat.

The St. Louis Beacon offers a Q&A with Jay Angoff, who formerly was with the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight and continues to be a senior adviser to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

The Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC) -- consisting of 40 global health research and advocacy organizations -- on Tuesday held a congressional briefing to launch its third annual policy report, titled "Sustaining Progress: Creating U.S. policies to spur global health innovation," GlobalPost's "Global Pulse" blog reports (Donnelly, 2/28). The group is "warning deep cuts in the U.S. federal budget could reverse progress made on many diseases, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria," VOA News writes (DeCapua, 2/28).

In the Republican campaign for the presidential nomination, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), "the most religiously conservative candidate, surprisingly, is the most fervent advocate for U.S. global health diplomacy," Jack Chow, former U.S. ambassador on global HIV/AIDS and former assistant director-general of WHO on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, writes in a Foreign Policy opinion piece. "Santorum has staked out global health as one of his preferred instruments of asserting American power abroad" and "seems determined to lay the groundwork for a global health agenda that is not only far more extensive than his competitors', but would surpass both [George W.] Bush and Barack Obama in advancing U.S. interests abroad through fighting disease," Chow writes.

"A typhoid outbreak that began in Harare last year is steadily spreading across Zimbabwe with more than 3,000 cases reported although only one death due to the disease has been reported so far, health officials have said," ZimOnline reports (Marimudza, 2/29). "We have reported 203 new typhoid cases this week only ... So we actually have an outbreak that is raging," Ministry of Health Epidemiology and Disease Control Director Portia Manangazira told VOA News, according to the news service (Gonda/Chifera, 2/28). Speaking to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health and Child Welfare on Tuesday, Manangazira "said the ministry did not have adequate supply of drugs for patients," NewsDay notes (Chidavaenzi, 2/29).