Latest KFF Health News Stories
Federal Judge In Texas Halts Enforcement Of Abortion Law
The Texas case involves a new law that requires expectant mothers to see a sonogram of the fetus and hear the heartbeat. Meanwhile, Kansas, Virginia and Mississippi are also dealing with abortion issues.
State Roundup: N.H. State Employees Agree To Health Concessions
News outlets report on a variety of state health policy issues.
Obama Pledges To Protect Health Care, Other Benefits For ‘The 9/11 Generation’ Of Veterans
President Barack Obama pledged to spare veterans’ health care and other programs from the budget-cutting that is currently underway on Capitol Hill.
Medicaid News: Colo. Finds Expansion Too Expensive
Two years ago, Colorado officials opted to expand their Medicaid program to poor adults without children. But the cost has been much higher than expected, and they are now scaling back. In other Medicaid news, Kansas decides on a new high-tech system for residents to use to establish eligibility; California insurers question the state’s plans for adult day care, and Florida faces a suit over treatment of veterans.
Comprehensive Approach To NTDs ‘Fosters Social Equity’
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) “are diseases of socially excluded populations that promote poverty by relatively depriving individuals from basic capabilities and freedoms,” Carlos Franco-Paredes of the Children’s Hospital of Mexico and Jose Santos-Preciado of the Faculty of Medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico write in this PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases editorial. The authors examine “[t]he social pathways of becoming ill with an NTD” which “include socially determined failures including widespread illiteracy, malnutrition, poor living conditions, unemployment and the overall failure of ownership relations in the form of entitlements.”
Rural Areas Bear Higher Burden Of Dengue Fever, Study Shows
“In dengue-endemic areas such as South-East Asia, in contrast to conventional thinking, rural areas rather than cities may bear the highest burden of dengue fever,” according to a study led by Wolf-Peter Schmidt from the Nagasaki Institute of Tropical Medicine in Japan and published in this week’s PLoS Medicine, a PLoS press release states. The authors “analyzed a population in Kanh-Hoa Province in south-central Vietnam (~350,000 people) that was affected by two dengue epidemics between January 2005 and June 2008” and “found that at low human population densities, mostly in rural areas, dengue risk is up to three times higher than in cities, presumably because the number of mosquitoes per individual is higher in low-density areas,” according to the release (8/30).
Women In Haiti Have Limited Access To Maternal Health Care, May Trade Sex For Food, HRW Report Says
“Tens of thousands of women in Haiti have severely limited access to reproductive and maternal healthcare, many are compelled to trade sex for food and most are vulnerable to rape, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Tuesday,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur/M&C reports (8/30). The report said “[d]espite a mammoth humanitarian-care push in the wake of the Jan. 12, 2010 quake that killed as many as 300,000 people, serious gaps exist in the healthcare that women and girls are receiving,” the Los Angeles Times writes.
Mexico To Administer HPV Vaccine To All Girls Beginning In 2012
“Mexico plans to administer the vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cervical cancer, to all girls beginning next year, the country’s health ministry said Tuesday,” Agence France-Presse reports. Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova “said while deaths from cervical cancer had fallen 47 percent in the country over the past two decades, there were still 13.4 cases for every 100,000 women last year,” AFP writes, adding, “Cervical cancer kills about 4,200 women in Mexico each year” (8/30).
Ghanaian Bill Aims To Improve Mental Health Care By Combating Stigma
“A bill before Ghana’s parliament aims to improve mental health care and encourage more health professionals to enter the sector by tackling one of the greatest impediments to both — stigma,” IRIN/Guardian reports. “The draft reforms — developed with support from the World Health Organization — were completed in 2006, but the bill is only now under consideration by parliament,” which “is expected to take it up again when it reconvenes in October,” according to the news service.
UNHCR Head Calls For Additional Aid For Somalia; World Bank To Provide $407M To Help Kenya
“U.N. refugee agency chief Antonio Guterres said Tuesday that relief groups should increase aid to war-battered and drought-hit Somalis to reduce the exodus to neighboring countries,” Agence France-Presse reports. “‘Our objective is to create conditions for Somalis to be able to live in Somalia and for Somali refugees, when they have the opportunity, to go back home safely,’ Guterres added,” the news agency notes. “Tens of thousands of Somalis have in recent months fled to camps in Ethiopia and Kenya due to the drought, the Horn of Africa’s worst in decades,” AFP writes (8/30).
Cell Phones Prove Useful In Tracking Disease Outbreaks
When a cholera outbreak began months after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, health workers used cell phones to help track the movements of people leaving the epicenter, allowing them “to alert medics to go where infected people might carry the disease,” according to a report published on Tuesday in PLoS Medicine, NPR’s health blog “Shots” reports. “The second wave of cases did appear exactly in the areas where most of the population was moving to … out of the cholera zone,” public health specialist Richard Garfield of Columbia University said, the blog notes. Health officials also used the phones to send health advice to Haitians over voice mail or text messaging, according to the blog (Joyce, 8/31).
Researchers Targeting Ancient Algal DNA In Malaria Parasites
NPR’s health blog “Shots” describes how scientists are targeting biological structures called apicoplasts in malaria parasites in developing new medications to fight the infection. Without apicoplasts, which are not common in most species, malaria parasites die, so a drug developed to target them would theoretically kill the parasites, the blog notes.
First Edition: August 31, 2011
Today’s early morning highlights from the major news organizations, including details about the GOP tax expert who has been named to help run the deficit-reduction “super committee” as well as the health policy ideas Republican governors are offering in the context of the nation’s fiscal fix.
Presidential Panel Reveals New Details Of 1940s Syphilis Experiments In Guatemala
“A presidential panel on Monday disclosed shocking new details of U.S. medical experiments done in Guatemala in the 1940s, including a decision to re-infect a dying woman in a syphilis study,” the Associated Press/Seattle Times reports. The final report of the bioethics commission’s review, which was ordered by President Barack Obama, is due next month, the news agency reports.
Cost Of Second-Line ARVs A ‘Huge Barrier To Care’ In Resource-Poor Countries
In this U.N. Dispatch blog post, Mark Leon Goldberg, managing editor of the blog, examines the costs of second-line antiretroviral treatments (ARVs), which “are several orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional, first-line ARV treatments” and are a “huge barrier to providing care” for resource-poor countries. He writes of “a huge gap in the way governments and donors have historically approached people living with HIV,” adding that “as more people access first-line treatment, there will be more opportunities for people to develop resistance to that first line. Donors and governments in the developing world simply can’t afford that kind of outlay.”
Family Planning Can Improve Maternal And Child Health, Survival
Describing a maternal health program that promotes family planning in the rural village of Bweremana in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Michael Gerson writes in his Washington Post column that “[t]he very words ‘family planning’ light up the limbic centers of American politics.” But “in places such as Bweremana, family planning is undeniably pro-life,” Gerson says, noting that “[w]hen contraceptive prevalence is low, about 70 percent of all births involve serious risk. When prevalence is high, the figure is 35 percent.”
Erratic Weather Exacerbates Food Insecurity In Indonesia’s Eastern Province
“Erratic weather has exacerbated food insecurity in one of Indonesia’s driest regions,” including the districts of West Timor (TTS), Nusa Tengarra Timor (NTT), and North Central Timor (TTU), “leaving farmers and families hoping for the best as October’s planting season approaches,” IRIN reports. “The availability of food is a constant issue in … the mostly undeveloped eastern province where an estimated 30 percent live below the poverty line on an average income of US$280 a year” and “[m]ore than half of all children younger than five are underweight and stunted, according to the Nutrition Security and Food Security report [.pdf] on NTT in 2010,” the news service writes.
Scientists Using Molecular Epidemiology To Diagnose And Track Disease Outbreaks
The New York Times examines “[n]ew methods of quickly sequencing entire microbial genomes [that] are revolutionizing the field” of molecularly epidemiology and could help public health officials identify and track disease outbreaks.
Epilepsy ‘Treatment Gap’ In Sierra Leone A Result Of Stigma, Lack Of Resources, Experts Say
In Sierra Leone, “one of Africa’s poorest countries, … scarce health care resources and the stigma surrounding epilepsy add up to a ‘treatment gap’ of more than 90 percent — meaning that fewer than 10 percent of the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Sierra Leoneans with epilepsy are getting the treatment they need,” the New York Times reports. “Epilepsy treatment gaps are driven largely by low income and rural location, making sub-Saharan Africa a treatment-gap hot spot. Treatment in Sierra Leone is not expensive,” but “[t]he costs of untreated epilepsy, on the other hand, are enormous, especially in lost productivity,” the newspaper writes.
Many Women Give Birth In Haiti’s Tent Camps Without Medical Services
In the refugee camps in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince nearly two years after a devastating earthquake, “health and human rights officials warn of another crisis: an explosion of tent babies,” the Miami Herald reports. “Haiti’s tent baby phenomenon comes as the country continues to struggle to rebuild, and as the nearly 600,000 Haitians still living in hundreds of squalid camps in quake-ravaged communities see the avalanche of medical assistance from foreign doctors and nongovernmental organizations disappear,” primarily because of a lack of funding, the newspaper writes.
