Archives: Morning Breakouts

"Footage of malnourished North Korean orphans and official warnings over failed harvests have given a rare glimpse at the scale of devastating food shortages in the country following a harsh winter and widespread flooding," the Guardian reports. "The World Food Programme (WFP) ... estimated in March that a quarter of the country's 24 million inhabitants needed food aid and that a third of children were chronically malnourished" and "has warned it has only 30 percent of the funding it needs for its relief operation, which targets 3.5 million of North Korea's most vulnerable citizens," the newspaper writes.

UNICEF representative for Indonesia Angela Kearney said at a workshop on household to hospital continuum care on Thursday that although Indonesia's infant mortality rate showed a downward trend in the past few years, it is still high, Xinhua reports. "Based on a UNICEF global child mortality report, over the past 10 years infant mortality rate declined significantly to 35 out of every 1,000 births in 2011 from 97 out of every 1,000 births in 1991, she said," according to the news service.

Inter Press Service examines the issue of gender-based violence (GBV) against women as they make the journey from their homes in Somalia to Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp in search of food aid and refuge, calling it a "hidden side" of the famine crisis in the Horn of Africa. "So far, only 30 cases of rape were reported between January and July 2011 according to the UNHCR at Dadaab," IPS writes, adding, "But medical experts at the camp say that this is a small fraction of a huge problem faced by women" because many do not report instances of rape out of fear they will be blamed by family members and rejected from the community (Esipisu, 10/5).

The Huffington Post profiles Philippe Douste-Blazy, U.N. under-secretary-general of Innovative Financing for Development and chair of UNITAID, a financing mechanism he conceived in 2004 to help provide medicines for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria in developing countries. The article discusses Douste-Blazy's work and background, UNITAID, and other innovative financing schemes (Lines, 10/6).

In a letter to the Guardian in response to the news that the U.K. Department for International Development (DfID) plans to cut bilateral aid for HIV/AIDS by nearly one-third, Nathan Ford, medical coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres, writes that the agency's decision "comes at a critical moment," after "[v]arious studies published in the past year have shown widespread access to treatment and prevention can dramatically cut HIV/AIDS transmission, and allow for consideration of an end to the epidemic."

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has called on the Brazilian government "to ensure its state-owned drug company steps up production of the only drug for Chagas disease, which affects 10 million people in Latin America," Guardian Health Editor Sarah Boseley writes in her "Global Health Blog" (10/6). "Thousands of people with Chagas disease will go untreated in coming months due to a shortage of benznidazole, the first-line drug used in most endemic countries," according to a MSF press release and a related article published by the organization. According to the press release, MSF has stopped diagnosing Chagas in Paraguay and has suspended new projects in endemic areas of Bolivia due to the shortage (10/5).