Archives: Morning Breakouts

GlobalPost reports how, spurred by an outbreak of the pneumonic plague in 1994, the Indian city of Surat "successfully went from one of the country's dirtiest cities to one of its cleanest in 18 short months." The news service writes that "after 54 residents died and some 300,000 fled to escape a possible quarantine, the people who stuck around were willing to get with the program -- working to eliminate the tons of garbage and overflowing sewers that had inundated the city with disease-carrying rats."

In this GlobalPost opinion piece, Zulfiqar Bhutta, Husein Laljee Dewraj professor and head of the Division of Maternal and Child Health at the Aga Khan University Medical Center in Karachi, Pakistan, and Ciro de Quadros, executive vice president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and former director of the Division of Vaccines and Immunization at PAHO, examine the need for a dengue fever vaccine as Pakistan struggles to curb an outbreak of the disease that to date has killed 60 people and has infected more than 8,000. "The need for a dengue vaccine is clear," and "[w]ithout a vaccine to prevent dengue, we must redouble our efforts to effectively treat this infectious threat, starting with improving diagnostics," they write.

"The U.N. on Wednesday said food assistance has reached nearly half the Somalis in need, [and] it warned cases of diarrhea and cholera could spike with the seasonal rains expected in October," the Associated Press reports (9/28). "However, the report released Tuesday by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that four million Somalis remain in crisis nationwide, and that 750,000 people risk death in the Horn of Africa nation within the next four months," according to VOA News.

"The Microbicide Trials Network (MTN), which is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, [on Wednesday] announced that it decided to stop one arm of a study involving more than 5,000 women in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Uganda" after "an interim review of the ongoing trial by an independent monitoring board ... found that the drug tenofovir when used as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) had less effect in protecting women than anticipated," Science Magazine's "Science Insider" blog reports. "Although the board did not offer any specifics on how many women became infected on the drug versus placebo, they said continuing with the tenofovir arm was 'futile' as it would not yield meaningful results," the blog writes.

Researchers at the Spanish Superior Scientific Research Council (CSIC) have successfully completed a small Phase I human clinical trial of an HIV vaccine candidate that granted 90 percent of 30 study participants an immunological response against the virus, Gizmag reports. "The MVA-B vaccine draws on the natural capabilities of the human immune system and 'has proven to be as powerful as any other vaccine currently being studied, or even more,' says Mariano Esteban, head researcher from CSIC's National Biotech Centre," the magazine writes (Borgobello, 9/28).

A panel of economists commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Centre who "conducted a first-ever cost-benefit analysis of the top AIDS-fighting approaches by comparing the costs of prevention and treatment options per lives saved ... said Wednesday that adult male circumcision, a global priority for preventing HIV infection, is not nearly as cost-effective as other methods of prevention," USA Today reports. "The World Bank and the U.S. State Department support a major push for adult male circumcision," however the panel said that "more cost-effective ways to prevent the spread of the disease are an HIV vaccine, infant male circumcision, preventing mother-to-child transmission of the disease and making blood transfusions safe," the newspaper writes.