Archives: Morning Breakouts

In support of the ninth annual International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation, Melanne Verveer, ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, and David Robinson, acting assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, outline several examples of U.S. advocacy and funding related to stopping the practice of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in this post on the State Department's "DipNote" blog. They call on governments and international donors to "overturn deeply entrenched social norms that are not only harmful to women and girls, but to our communities and societies" (2/6). In a post on USAID's "IMPACTblog," Sandra Jordan, communication and outreach adviser for USAID's Bureau for Global Health, writes, "The single most important aspect of ending this practice is involving the community. USAID focuses on enabling and empowering communities to make their own collective choice to abandon FGM/C" (2/6).

Meetings such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) "are highly beneficial for the health sector, since there is a genuine need for reaching out to non-state actors in the midst of the many transformations shaping global and domestic health sector public policy," Sania Nishtar, founder of Heartfile and Heartfile Health Financing, writes in a Huffington Post opinion piece. "But that is not all the World Economic Forum is doing for health. It is also contributing substantively in the normative and advocacy space," according to Nishtar, who uses non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an example. "By identifying NCDs as the top 10 risks to the world in WEF's Global Risk Reports for two consecutive years (2009 and 2010) it helped raise concern, globally, at a time when it mattered the most," especially leading up to last year's U.N. High Level Meeting, she writes.

In this post in the Guardian's "The Observer," Mark Honigsbaum, a research associate at the University of Zurich's Institute for Medical History, interviews Peter Seeberger, the director of the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany, about a recent announcement that Seeberger and colleague Fran

Romney and GOP presidential primary rival Rick Santorum also trade barbs, while the Associated Press takes a look at Newt Gingrich's ties to lobbying.

A U.S. District Court judge says that he can't stop the law from taking effect.

"Sugar poses enough health risks that it should be considered a controlled substance just like alcohol and tobacco, contend a team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)," in an opinion piece called "The Toxic Truth About Sugar," published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, TIME's "Healthland" blog reports (Rochman, 2/2). "While acknowledging that food, unlike alcohol and tobacco, is required for survival, [authors Robert Lustig, Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis] say taxes, zoning ordinances and even age limits for purchasing certain sugar-laden products are all appropriate remedies for what they see as a not-so-sweet problem," the Wall Street Journal's "Health" blog writes (Hobson, 2/2).

"The controversy over research about potentially dangerous H5N1 viruses heated up [Thursday night] in a New York City debate that featured some of the leading voices exchanging blunt comments on the alleged risks and benefits of publishing or withholding the full details of the studies," CIDRAP News reports. "The debate, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, involved two members of the biosecurity advisory board that called for 'redacting' the two studies in question to delete details, along with scientists who want the full studies published and representatives of Science and Nature, the two journals involved," the news service adds (Roos, 2/3).

On Wednesday, several HIV experts spoke at a Capitol Hill briefing "supporting the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program's reliance on scientific evidence to drive its work to end AIDS," the Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog reports. The speakers, including Diane Havlir of the University of California, San Francisco, RJ Simonds of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Renee Ridzon of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Chris Beyrer of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, talked about using antiretroviral treatment as a prevention method, the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission, voluntary medical male circumcision, and preventing HIV among marginalized populations at high risk of infection (Mazzotta, 2/3).