Archives: Morning Breakouts

Fresh from his South Carolina victory, Newt Gingrich appeared on three Sunday morning talk shows. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were also interviewed.

"In recent months, many politicians and presidential hopefuls have called for budget reductions, and many have specifically targeted military spending for cutbacks," Peter Hotez and James Kazura, past president and president, respectively, of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, write in this Atlantic opinion piece. "[P]rograms such as the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) often find themselves low on the priority list despite their crucial role in saving the lives of our troops on the battlefield and here at home," they write, adding, "Today, American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan still face formidable tropical disease threats. ... For over 100 years, WRAIR has been the U.S. military's premier institution for preventing these types of tropical infections."

This post in the Ministerial Leadership Initiative's (MLI) "Leading Global Health" blog is "the third of a series of perspective pieces on country ownership from the 'Advancing Country Ownership for Greater Results' roundtable organized last week by" MLI, a program of Aspen Global Health and Development. "This third of four pieces covers the comments from several participants," including Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and co-moderator of the session; Mark Dybul, former U.S. global AIDS ambassador, and current co-director at Georgetown's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law; Pape Gaye, president and CEO of IntraHealth; Paul O'Brien, vice president for Policy and Campaigns at Oxfam America; Salif Samake, director of Mali's Health, Planning, and Statistics Unit in the ministries of Health, Social Development, and the Promotion of Women, Children and Family; and Francis Omaswa, MLI senior adviser, executive director of the African Centre for Global Health and Social Transformation, and co-moderator of the session (Donnelly, 1/19).

The GOP presidential hopefuls clashed on a range of issues related to the health law, its individual mandate and efforts to repeal it. Candidates' positions on abortion were also flashpoints.

At a presentation hosted by the Global Health Council on Thursday at the University of Washington, Christopher Murray and Michael Hanlon from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation provided an update on global development assistance for health, the Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog reports (Lubinski, 1/19). The data were based on a recently released report, titled "Financing Global Health 2011: Continued Growth as MDG Deadline Approaches," which "offers a comprehensive view of trends in public and private financing of health assistance with preliminary estimates for health financing in the most recent years" and "shows that development assistance for health (DAH) continues to rise, albeit at a slower rate than before the recession," according to an IMHE press release (December 2011).

"In 2012 there will be a major strategic shift in global health, away from development and towards sustainability," a Lancet editorial states. "Since 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), driven by a macroeconomic diagnosis of global poverty, have focused on investment in a small number of diseases as the most effective approach to decrease poverty, ... [b]ut this approach is now delivering diminishing returns," because of emerging challenges such as non-communicable diseases (NCDs), climate change, and financial security, as well as a heightened focus on integration and accountability, the editorial says.

"An international debate over whether to censor new research on bird flu may soon prove academic, as other laboratories close in on similar findings showing how one of the most deadly viruses could mutate to be transmitted from one person to another," Reuters reports. Last year, two teams of researchers reported study results "that showed how the H5N1 [bird flu] virus can be transmitted through airborne droplets between ferrets, a model for studying influenza in humans," and the findings prompted the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) in December to advise "two leading journals, Nature and Science, to withhold details of the research for fear it could be used by bioterrorists," the news service writes.

Texas and Janssen Pharmaceuticals reach a $158 million settlement on a suit claiming that the company lied about the efficacy of the anti-psychotic medicine.

In a January 17 statement, India's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare "dismissed reports that a form of incurable tuberculosis [TB] has arrived in the country," saying "that a team of doctors sent by the ministry found that seven of the patients are responding to treatment" and the cases would be classified and managed as extremely drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), Nature News Blog reports (Jayaraman, 1/19). "Earlier, doctors in Mumbai said 12 patients had a 'totally drug resistant' form of TB, and three had died," according to BBC News. "A WHO official in India told the BBC that there is no recognized case of totally drug resistant TB anywhere in the world," the news service writes (1/20).

Speaking at a media briefing in Geneva on Thursday, Sheila Tlou, UNAIDS director of the regional support team for Eastern and Southern Africa, said the region is making progress in scaling up access to prevention and treatment services, including behavior change and prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) programs, the U.N. News Centre reports. "We have to now focus on making sure that we scale up voluntary medical male circumcision, behavior change, and all those [interventions] to make sure that we reduce infections," she said, adding that improving access to treatment also is critical, according to the news service (1/19). "'There has been quite a lot of progress since 1997 with a 25 percent reduction in new infections in our region,' said Tlou," Agence France-Presse notes (1/19).

The Wall Street Journal reports on how the burden of retiree health-care benefits is among the financial issues driving the company to file for bankruptcy.