Archives: Morning Breakouts

Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, on Monday "urged Ukraine to step up its efforts to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic," calling "on the Ukrainian authorities to expand opiate substitution therapy, ensure HIV/AIDS treatment in prison and increase government funding of anti-AIDS programs," the Associated Press reports. "'This is the region of the world -- the only region of the world -- where the AIDS epidemic is still growing,' Kazatchkine told reporters in Kiev, adding that other countries have managed to stabilize their epidemics," the news service writes. "The United Nations says Ukraine has Europe's worst AIDS epidemic, with 1.3 percent of the population above [age] 15 infected with HIV," according to the AP (1/16).

In this post in the Center for Global Development's (CGD) "Global Health Policy" blog, Victoria Fan, a research fellow at CGD, and Rachel Silverman, a research assistant at the center, respond to India's marking of one-year since a case of polio was found in the country, writing, "While we applaud India for its commitment to reaching this milestone, let us not allow this recent success obscure the sorry state of vaccination in India." They provide statistics regarding vaccination coverage in India and conclude, "We wonder whether India's focus on polio may have come at the expense of other diseases," and, "[w]hile India should be applauded for its contribution to global eradication, we urge India to consider the trade-offs in focusing on any one disease at the expense of another and, as much as possible, to try to piggy-back one effort to another effort" (1/14).

Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof continue to answer readers' questions in this third and final installment of the series on Kristof's "On the Ground" blog. Gates and Kristof answer questions about assessing and incorporating the needs of women and children in Bangladesh into development initiatives and discuss the global health activities about which they are most excited and optimistic (1/13).

GlobalPost's "Global Pulse" blog reports on a roundtable held on Thursday and organized by the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health (MLI) -- a "five-year project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation" -- at which "U.S. officials, developing country leaders, and heads of non-governmental organizations that do tens of millions of dollars of work in health around the world" discussed country ownership with respect to development aid. According to the blog, "several senior U.S. officials said they were committed to building up country ownership, along with systems that closely monitor spending" (Donnelly, 1/13).

Bloomberg examines the effects of the global financial crisis and a resulting stall in development aid for global health programs, writing, "Governments struggling to curb deficits from Spain to the U.S. have cut or slowed the growth of their contributions to the World Health Organization and disease-fighting funds that prop up health services in the world's poorest countries, according to a report by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a research unit at the University of Washington in Seattle."

"The World Health Organization says it will take a role in helping sort through an international scientific controversy over two bird flu studies that the U.S. government deemed too dangerous to publish in full," the Canadian Press/Winnipeg Free Press reports. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's assistant director-general for health security and environment, on Sunday in an interview with the Canadian Press "said the agency will pull together international talks aimed at fleshing out the issues that need to be addressed and then work to resolve them." On the advice of the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity (NSABB), the journals Science and Nature "have grudgingly agreed to abbreviate the papers, leaving out the details of how the work was done," according to the news service.

"Countries need to change their current mindset to successfully tackle non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the head of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) said [Monday], adding that governments will need to explore new approaches to prevent and treat these diseases, which have quickly become one of the most pressing issues in public health," the U.N. News Centre reports (1/16). "In an opening speech to the annual WHO Executive Board meeting, Director-General Margaret Chan ... urged the 34-member board to tackle the root causes of non-communicable diseases," VOA News writes (Schlein, 1/16).

Mark Bowden, the U.N.'s official in Somalia, on Sunday said "tens of thousands of people will have died over the last year" in the country's famine, adding that the rates of malnutrition are "amazingly high," BBC News reports. "He said a quarter of a million Somalis were still suffering from the famine," and he "said malnutrition rates have begun to drop but the crisis was likely to continue for the next six or seven months," the news service notes (1/15).

The expected re-appointment of Margaret Chan as the WHO's director-general "comes at a perilous moment for WHO," a Lancet editorial states. Although "WHO is in crisis" and "[r]escue is needed," the situation is not "a fair reflection of the director-general's performance," the editorial adds, noting several successes of her first term, including initiatives on women's and children's health and non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

"Hopes of controlling malaria in Africa could be wrecked by criminals who are circulating counterfeit and substandard drugs, threatening millions of lives, scientists" said in a study published in the Malaria Journal last month, the Guardian reports. "They are calling for public health authorities to take urgent action to preserve the efficacy of the antimalarials now being used in the worst-hit areas of the continent," the newspaper adds (Boseley, 1/16). "The counterfeit medicines could harm patients and promote drug resistance among malaria parasites, warns the study, funded by the Wellcome Trust," BBC News writes (1/16).

Health officials from India and the WHO are scheduled to meet in Mumbai on Tuesday to discuss how to manage the cases of at least 12 patients infected with a highly drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) strain, Bloomberg reports (Narayan, 1/17). "The 'totally drug-resistant' tuberculosis (TDR-TB) reportedly emerging in India is actually an advanced stage of drug-resistant TB, which researchers called totally drug-resistant for lack of a better term," IRIN notes (1/17).

A Congressional delegation traveling in Africa visited Arusha, Tanzania, on Wednesday "to see first-hand the impact of development projects" funded by the U.S., IPP Media reports, noting that the delegation included Senators Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), John Thune (R-S.D.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and Rep. Kay Granger (R-Tex.). The delegation met with farmers who have used drought- and disease-resistant maize varieties, as well as "visited Ngarenaro Health Centre in Arusha, which receives support from private and U.S. government organizations," including USAID, the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), and PEPFAR, the news service writes. According to a press statement, "the delegation also visited Ghana and South Africa, and would meet with the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) officials in Stuttgart, Germany, following their trip to Africa," IPP notes (1/14).