Archives: Morning Breakouts

"Working with a local telecommunications company, the World Food Programme (WFP) has developed a program in the Ivory Coast to facilitate cash transfers that can be used by thousands of Ivorians to buy food despite a climate of political violence," according to a Foreign Policy Association blog post. WFP provides a monthly sum of money to Ivorian households, "[h]owever, people have had trouble accessing the money because of unrest plaguing [the] Ivory Coast since the contested 2010 presidential election," the blog states (Lucivero, 10/10). Residents will receive a text message when funds are available, "alerting them to the transaction and allowing them to withdraw money from local cash points," AlertNet reports (Fominyen, 10/4).

"An attenuated, or weakened, strain of Chlamydia trachomatis bacteria can be used as a vaccine to prevent or reduce the severity of trachoma, the world's leading cause of infectious blindness, suggest findings from a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study in monkeys," an NIH press release reports. The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine on Tuesday, used cynomolgus macaque monkeys in the experiment "because their immune responses closely predict those of humans," the press release states. "If this approach demonstrates continued success, the implications could be enormous for the tens of millions of people affected by trachoma, a neglected disease of poverty primarily seen in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH, according to the press release (10/10).

In this post in the Guardian's "Response" column, Jenny Tonge, chair of the U.K. all-party parliamentary group on population, development and reproductive health, responds to a Guardian opinion piece published last month entitled "Welcome baby seven billion: we've room on Earth for you." Tonge writes, "The article seems to miss the point that more than 200 million women who are sexually active and do not want to become pregnant are not using modern contraception," adding, "The human toll of denying women the fundamental right to plan their families is extraordinarily high and also a significant source of population growth. If all women who want to avoid pregnancy were able to use and access family planning, the rate of population growth would slow substantially" (10/10).

Speaking on Monday at a conference on communicable diseases in the eastern Europe and Central Asia region, where AIDS is a growing problem, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made Russia's case for poppy crop eradication by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan asserting that the West "is aggravating the HIV/AIDS problem in Russia and the West by refusing to use its forces to destroy opium crops in Afghanistan," Reuters reports. "Afghanistan is the world's biggest producer of poppies used to make opium, the key ingredient in the production of heroin," the news service writes, adding, "Russia is the largest per capita consumer of the drug and faces an HIV/AIDS epidemic that is spreading from dirty needles." "The United States has phased out crop eradication efforts to focus instead on intercepting drugs and hunting production operations and drug lords," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports, adding that the U.S. "said it made the change because drug crop eradication was putting farmers out of work, sowing resentment against foreign intervention" (10/10).

The U.S. has pledged a record $56 million donation from PEPFAR to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) aimed to "dramatically increase resources for programs in Ethiopia providing vital nutrition assistance to people living with HIV (PLHIV)," according to a WFP press release. With the donation, "WFP will work in Ethiopia's least developed regions ... to improve the nutritional status, treatment success and quality of life of PLHIV," the press release states (10/11).

In this Globalist opinion piece, Ian Dowbiggin, an author and professor of history at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada, examines the issue of "diagnostic inflation" within the psychiatry field in the last half century and how, "[a]s Ethan Watters and others have argued, lately American psychiatry has been exporting its diagnoses and treatments to other cultures, 'homogenizing how the world goes mad.'"

In this Washington Times Communities column, Anwaar Abdalla, a lecturer on Civilization and Cultural Affairs at Egypt's Helwan University, writes, "While breast cancer is a global issue, in Egypt, the figure for people suffering from breast cancer is alarming," adding, "According to official statistics of the National Cancer Institute (Cairo University), breast cancer accounts for 35.1 percent of the cases of cancer in Egypt."

Speaking at a national malaria forum in Nairobi on Monday, Charles Mbogo of the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) presented new evidence showing that malaria-causing mosquitos in Kenya have developed resistance to the most common chemicals derived from pyrethroids and DDT, which "could be a major blow to the country's strategy to eradicate malaria by 2017," Nigeria's the Nation reports. "This new development comes at a time most parts of the country, especially the coastal region, have been recording a significant drop in malaria deaths," the newspaper writes.

A $258 million HIV/AIDS prevention program in six Indian states may have prevented an estimated 100,000 infections from 2003 to 2008, researchers from the Public Health Foundation of India and the University of Washington suggest in a study published in the Lancet on Tuesday, the Associated Press/Washington Post reports (10/10). The analysis "concluded that infections dropped significantly in three populous southern states, a little in Tamil Nadu, and not at all in northern Manipur and Nagaland," the New York Times reports (McNeil, 10/10). "While the initial findings regarding the ... Avahan project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, come with large uncertainty due to data limitations and methodology, the study's authors say ... that investing in prevention can make a dent in one of the world's largest epidemics," AP writes (10/10). Tactics used in the program, which targeted high-risk groups, "included one-on-one safe-sex counseling, free condoms, exchanging used needles for sterilized ones, clinics to treat sexually-transmitted disease and advocacy work within the community," Agence France-Press reports (10/10).

Time examines the issue of maternal mortality in Afghanistan, where the Health Ministry says "about 18,000 Afghan women die during childbirth every year." The magazine writes, "According to a recent report by the NGO Save the Children, Afghanistan ranked as the worst place to give birth, followed by Niger and Chad," Time writes, adding that getting women in rural areas to hospitals, a lack of midwives and a stigma against pregnancy "because it's a public acknowledgement of sex with their spouses" are all challenges to improving maternal health in Afghanistan. The magazine highlights the HHS-funded Afghan Safe Birth Project, which has "has helped reduce deaths during [caesarean] sections at [Kabul's Rabia Balkhi Hospital] by 80 percent" since 2008, according to Faizullah Kakar, an epidemiologist and special adviser on health to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Time reports. "[I]n April, the U.S. government cut the program's $5.8 million annual funding, and Kakar says the Afghan government doesn't have the money to keep it going," the magazine notes (Kakissis, 10/11).

BBC News examines how counterfeit or substandard medicines are threatening India's fast-growing pharmaceutical industry, writing, "Worth over $12 billion, the industry is expected to grow more than four-fold in the coming decade," but fake drugs in the system are risking both the lives of patients and the reputation of drug makers. While the scale of the problem in India is unknown, "[c]ounterfeit drugs are a $200 billion industry worldwide," and "[w]ith manufacturing costs nearly 40 percent cheaper than other countries, the authorities are worried India could become an easy target for counterfeiters," the news service reports. According to BBC, the Indian government "has launched a campaign against counterfeit medicines," and a "committee set up by the Indian Ministry of Health has approved a proposal to put [two-dimensional] barcodes and scratch-off labels on medicines" that will allow users to use mobile technology to quickly confirm whether a medication is real (Kannan, 10/11).

"India's Aurobindo Pharma has become the first major generic drugmaker to join" the Medicines Patent Pool, launched by the UNITAID health financing system and "designed to make HIV/AIDS treatments more widely available to the poor," Reuters reports. "The Medicines Patent Pool said on Tuesday the agreement would allow Aurobindo to make a range of AIDS drugs licensed to the pool by Gilead Sciences, the leading maker of HIV drugs, in July," according to the news service. "Aurobindo has also elected to take advantage of a key provision in the pool's licenses in order to sell one drug, tenofovir, to a wide range of countries without paying royalties," Reuters writes, adding, "These could include several middle-income countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Ukraine and Uruguay" (Hirschler, 10/11).

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded United Therapeutics Corporation a contract for up to $45 million over five years "to help develop a potential oral treatment for viruses like influenza and the mosquito-borne tropical fever dengue," the Associated Press/Washington Post reports (10/10). The funding comes from NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and will be used "for studies directed at the development of a broad-spectrum antiviral drug based on [United Therapeutics'] glycobiology antiviral platform," according to a press release from United Therapeutics, which adds, "Funding will support the development of a candidate compound through preclinical safety and efficacy studies toward potential clinical trials against dengue" (10/10).