Archives: Morning Breakouts

The GAVI Alliance "has agreed to fund the roll-out of vaccines against cervical cancer in developing countries, offering protection against a disease that kills one woman every two minutes," Reuters reports (Hirschler, 11/17). The group is continuing negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of the vaccine, NPR's health blog "Shots" notes. "By 2015, GAVI expects that two million girls in nine countries will have received the HPV vaccine," but the shot will not be given to boys unless the WHO recommends they also receive the immunization, according to the blog (Husted, 11/17).

Inter Press Service examines how doctors and aid workers in and around Mogadishu, Somalia, "are warning that famine victims in internally displaced camps have become vulnerable to contagious diseases like cholera and measles, as conditions here are ripe for an outbreak." Sanitation and access to food and drinking water are the greatest concerns, IPS reports, adding that "[w]hile international aid continues to be delivered to Somalia, relief efforts at some camps have dwindled or stopped." The news service writes, "The Somali government's Mogadishu spokesman Mohamed Abdullahi Arig told IPS that the government needed help to prevent a possible cholera outbreak and to prevent other communicable diseases from spreading in the camps. 'The government is more vigilant, but our capacity is too little. We need the international community's assistance in this sector,' Arig said" (Abokar, 11/17).

In response to Michael Gerson's November 11 column in which he said the end of AIDS is possible because of combination prevention and treatment innovations, David Bryden, the Stop TB advocacy officer at RESULTS, writes in a Washington Post letter to the editor, "Another benefit of [HIV] treatment is that it sharply reduces deaths from tuberculosis [TB], which is the primary killer of people living with HIV/AIDS." He says that "to fully succeed in Africa, where TB and HIV/AIDS are often two sides of the same coin, we have to quickly identify people who have TB or who are vulnerable to it and get them the services they need," which also means developing an accurate quick test for the disease.

In this Huffington Post opinion piece, Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, reports on a World Bank- and USAID-sponsored debate she moderated last week as part of a series on HIV/AIDS issues, the topic of which was "Countries should spend a majority of what is likely to be a flat or even declining HIV prevention budget on 'treatment as prevention.'" She notes several of her reactions to the debate and asks with regard to global health spending, "What about the pie? Even if it grows, there will be tradeoffs."

Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC: Global Advocacy for HIV Prevention and a founding member of the Global Health Technologies Coalition, writing in The Hill's "Congress Blog," welcomes Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's November 8 announcement of "an additional $60 million for implementation of a combination of prevention strategies in four sub-Saharan African countries and evaluation of their impact," adding that "this funding can only be viewed as a down payment on the work that needs to be done." He says the Obama administration and the governments of other countries "need to add specific commitments, milestones, and strategies to the vision," as well as "commit to the long haul."

As part of its series on the relationships between human, animal and environmental health, titled "The Infection Loop," HuffPost Green examines how changes in climate and landscape, human movement, agricultural practices, and microbe adaptation are affecting the spread of malaria. "Our disease-fighting weaponry has certainly improved in recent years, from the widespread distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets to hopeful progress towards a malaria vaccine," but some "experts suggest that getting ahead of the disease, let alone maintaining a lead, is far easier said than done," according to the article, which includes quotes from malaria researchers working in several academic disciplines (Peeples, 11/16).

AllAfrica.com reports on trachoma -- a chronic bacterial infection spread by direct contact with eye, nose and throat secretions from others who are infected -- in Kenya, profiling Kajiado County where the disease has reached the blinding stage in 3.4 percent of patients, "making it a serious public health problem in that region and many other similarly remote areas with little access to health care and screening." According to the news service, "Officials with the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) estimate that of every 100 people screened for trachoma in Kajiado alone, 17 will have active stage symptoms such as redness and irritation of the eyes."

South African public health experts from Medecins San Frontieres (MSF) South Africa and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) "are calling on governments to use legally available mechanisms to promote the production or import of generic drugs in their countries," Inter Press Service reports. The article examines how countries can alter their patent acts under the Doha Declaration -- a World Trade Organization declaration on the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and Public Health that "exists to ensure that patents do not undermine the ability of countries to achieve the right to health" -- "to access generic versions of otherwise patented medicines in cases where prices are prohibitively expensive, the organizations say."

In advance of a U.N. climate change conference this month in Durban, South Africa, the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, a high-level international panel, on Wednesday announced its recommendations (.pdf) for achieving food security while addressing the effects of climate change, VOA News reports. The panel, which includes scientists from 13 countries who are experts in agriculture, climate, economics, trade, nutrition and ecology, "spent the past year analyzing many climate studies -- a year that included climbing food prices, humanitarian disasters and political unrest -- all of which, it says, threaten food security," VOA writes (DeCapua, 11/16). "The seven high-level recommendations include significantly raising the level of global investment in sustainable agriculture and food systems in the next decade; sustainably intensifying agricultural production on the existing land base while reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and reducing losses and waste in the food system," a commission press release states (11/16).

Multi-drug resistant bacteria "are increasing their grip in Europe with rates of drug resistance in one type of bacteria reaching 50 percent in the worst-hit countries, health officials said Thursday," Reuters reports. "In a report [.pdf] on multi-drug resistant bacteria, ... the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which monitors disease across the European Union, said the need to combat resistance was 'critical,'" the news agency writes, adding, "To a large extent, antibiotic resistance is driven by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which encourages bacteria to develop new ways of overcoming them" (Kelland, 11/17).

IRIN examines the results of a report by the aid watchdog group Publish What You Fund that examines "whether donors publish information about their budgets, their allocation and procurement policies, or audit reports on their own performance" and "finds that most international aid donors are still not open enough about their aid programs, and some offer no information at all." The report, which "ranks 58 aid-giving countries and organizations according to their openness about 37 aspects of their aid programs," was released in anticipation of the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness to be held in Busan, South Korea, at the end of the month, where "transparency will be up for discussion," according to IRIN. Some of the organizations ranked in the report include the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the GAVI Alliance, the World Bank's International Development Association (IDA) and the African Development Bank, according to IRIN (11/16).

"The pollution that has accompanied China's spectacular rate of economic growth will have dire health consequences for its population, the United Nations has warned in a report," the International Business Times reports. "Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), told media that already hundreds of thousands of Chinese people have suffered respiratory illnesses or died prematurely due to the heavy smog that envelops some cities in the country," the news service writes.