Archives: Morning Breakouts

Bloomberg News examines abortion laws in Latin America and writes that the region, "home to the world's strictest abortion laws, may hold lessons for U.S. Republican presidential hopefuls who advocate a ban on the practice" in the U.S. According to Bloomberg, "A consequence of the laws, whatever the moral arguments, is that Latin American women have more 'unsafe' abortions per capita than women in any other region, according to the World Health Organization." The article reports that the U.N. Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on Health Anand Grover recently stated that "[s]trict abortion laws 'consistently generate poor physical health outcomes, resulting in deaths.'"

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan on Tuesday at the opening session of the agency's Executive Board special session on reform in Geneva "stressed that planned reforms are intended to make the agency more efficient as it strives to improve global health amid multiple challenges that have an impact on human well-being," the U.N. News Centre reports (11/1). Chan said "proposed reforms would see the agency become more streamlined and deliver 'measurable results' at country level" and "acknowledged ... that parts of the WHO had become rigid and unresponsive," the Associated Press/CTV News writes. She "urged WHO's 34 board members to safeguard the agency's role as global health guardian despite growing competition and budget constraints," according to the news agency (11/1).

In this Washington Post opinion piece, Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, cites declines in global child mortality rates as an example of how development aid works, and writes, "I am giving a report Thursday to the heads of the Group of 20 (G20) governments, including President Obama, suggesting creative ways for the world to continue investing in development despite fiscal constraints." Gates highlights three key ideas he hopes "become part of congressional deliberations over the coming weeks" -- first, "programs funded by U.S. generosity have been a core component of this 50-year project of raising living standards around the world"; second, "development isn't just good for people in poor countries; it's good for all of us"; and third, "the United States is not doing development alone. We spend about one percent of our total budget on aid, as do dozens of donor countries."

"Millions of children and women of child-bearing age in North Korea face malnutrition which can leave them at higher risk of death or disease, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday," Reuters reports. UNICEF urged donors to fill a funding gap to prevent a "nutrition crisis" in the country, the news agency states (Nebehay, 11/1). According to Agence France-Presse, "UNICEF had asked for $20.4 million for 2011, but has received just $4.6 million" (11/1).

"Nearly half of pregnant women do not get tested for syphilis in poor areas of southern China where the sexually transmitted disease has seen a resurgence, researchers said Wednesday" in a study published in the WHO's November 2011 Bulletin, the Associated Press/Washington Post reports. Pregnant women with syphilis can miscarry, have stillbirths or their infants can have congenital defects, the news service notes. According to the AP, the study "found that more than 40 percent of about 125,000 mothers-to-be in Guangdong province were not tested for syphilis in 2008, mostly due to a lack of health facilities in rural areas." The study noted that "several provincial and national programs to improve testing have been put in place" since the study was conducted, the AP writes (Wong, 11/1).

"Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the biotech start-up Amyris [have] developed a process to manufacture artemisinin, a crucial ingredient in first-line malaria drugs that until now had to be extracted from a natural crop called sweet wormwood," PBS NewsHour reports. "The new semi-synthetic artemisinin ... successfully entered the production phase through a public-private partnership with the drug company Sanofi-Aventis earlier this year" and "will hit the market beginning in 2012," according to NewsHour. Olusoji Adeyi, who runs the affordable malaria medication program at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the new formulation of artemisinin will help make better quality malaria treatments more affordable and increase access, NewsHour reports (Miller, 10/31).

The VOA News audio program "Explorations" on Tuesday discussed international humanitarian aid in the Horn of Africa. The program features interviews with Kurt Tjossem, the International Rescue Committee's regional director for the Horn of Africa and East Africa; Shannon Scribner, Oxfam America's humanitarian policy manager; and Nancy Lindborg, USAID's assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance.

"The world's population is expected to hit seven billion around October 31," CNN's Jaime FlorCruz reports in his column, "Jaime's China." This is a number that would have been reached five years earlier were it not for China's family planning policy, according to Zhai Zhenwu, a professor at Renmin University School of Sociology and Population. FlorCruz writes that experts at the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China say "the policy has prevented more than 400 million births in the country."