Archives: Morning Breakouts

In this entry in the Huffington Post's "Impact" blog, Kolleen Bouchane, director of ACTION, an international partnership of advocates working to mobilize resources to treat and prevent the spread of tuberculosis (TB), examines the need for improved TB vaccines and diagnostics in order to curb the spread of multidrug-resistant TB, especially among children, and highlights ACTION's new report (.pdf), "Children and Tuberculosis: Exposing a Hidden Epidemic," which she says "exposes the link between TB and orphaned and vulnerable children, malnourished children or children living with HIV."

Robert Walker, executive vice president of the Population Institute, writes in this Huffington Post opinion piece that despite an increase in government and NGO support for maternal and child health programs, including family planning services, announced last week by the U.N. as part of its Every Woman, Every Child campaign, "the world's largest donor nation, the United States, is retreating on its commitments to international family planning, and other donor nations may follow suit."

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a growing interest in global health throughout the U.S. and how Jaime Sepulveda, who served as head of epidemiology in Mexico in the early 1980s and who took over the Global Health Sciences division at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) earlier this month, "hopes to make the Bay Area a powerhouse in research and development of global health policies worldwide." The newspaper writes, "In the past five years, global health has taken off at the Bay Area's top research institutions," adding, "Both UCSF and Stanford have opened new global health centers, and Kaiser Permanente -- the Bay Area's largest health care provider -- has formalized a program to send its doctors and nurses overseas."

A report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that was commissioned by the G20 chair "proposes raising new funding for poorer countries by taxing financial transactions, tobacco, and shipping and aviation fuels, according to details of a G20 report obtained by Reuters," the news service reports. "The Gates Foundation was tasked by current G20 chair, France, to look at how the governments of its member countries could raise new money for aid to developing nations, including plugging an estimated $80-100 billion funding gap to help the poor adapt to climate change," the news agency writes. The report "suggests even a small tax of 10 basis points on equities and two basis points on bonds would raise about $48 billion among G20 member states, or $9 billion if only adopted by larger European countries," Reuters notes (Wroughton, 9/23). "Longstanding proposals for a tax on currency transactions have often been met by skepticism by governments, which argue it would drive currency trading from one financial center to another," the Financial Times reports (Beattie, 9/23).

The Nation examines how a surge in the outsourcing of clinical trials to contract research organizations (CROs) and a resulting increase in the number of trials being conducted in the developing world, where "regulations aren't as onerous, patient recruitment is easier and informed consent is less clearly defined," has led to a rise in unregulated drug trials in South America, noting that, according to a 2010 report by the inspector general of the HHS, "40 to 65 percent of clinical trials on FDA-regulated products in 2008 took place overseas. Of nearly 6,500 foreign trial sites that year, the FDA inspected only forty-five -- less than one percent."

BBC News reports on a continuing outbreak of dengue fever in Pakistan's Punjab province, where "more than 8,000 cases of dengue fever have been reported ... so far -- 7,000 in Lahore alone -- and the count continues to rise," according to the Punjab health department. According to the news service, "Doctors say more than 30 people have died of the fever so far" in the province, and "[h]ealth officials estimate that more than 7,000 people are being tested daily for the virus -- 300 to 400 test positive each day" (Haq, 9/23).

"The World Bank said on Saturday it was more than tripling funding to $1.88 billion for a worsening drought in Horn of Africa countries affecting more than 13 million people," Reuters reports. "World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the financing would help fill a $1 billion funding gap needed to tackle drought and a food crisis engulfing parts of Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Uganda," the news agency writes, noting the bank initially had pledged $500 million in July. Zoellick said the majority of the funding was to go toward long-term solutions to drought relief, with $288 million reserved for humanitarian aid through June 2012, according to Reuters (9/25).

NPR's Tell Me More on Friday interviewed Sierra Leone First Lady Sia Nyama Koroma about her work aimed at improving maternal health in her country. Koroma was in New York attending the African First Ladies Fellowship Program "that brings together Western European and American first ladies with their African counterparts for an exchange of ideas and best practices," according to the program. Since implementing free health care, "Sierra Leone has seen a 214-percent increase in the number of children under five getting care in health facilities and a 61-percent decrease in mortality rates in difficult pregnancy cases in health clinics," Tell Me More reports, statistics that Koroma said are due to "the participation of all of us" (Martin, 9/23).

As part of its special report "Healing the World," GlobalPost examines country ownership within the Global Health Initiative (GHI). The news service writes that Rwandan Health Minister Agnes Binagwaho told GlobalPost that a GHI focus on gender-based violence in Rwanda was a "curious" decision, which "[s]he said ... wasn't a priority and no one had asked her if that fit in with the national plan." According to GlobalPost, "U.S. health officials in Kigali said they were only following Rwanda's lead in their choice of programs." "'To choose gender equality reflected the fact that they've done phenomenally well in making it a priority,' said Nancy Godfrey, GHI field deputy for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Rwanda. 'Our focal area comes directly from the national gender policy ... Rwanda's national gender policy. So we didn't make it up,'" GlobalPost writes.

In addition to "essential money," "the right policies, government commitment and citizen accountability" are needed to decrease child mortality and improve other global health indicators, "[b]ut the sine qua non for effective health care delivery is health workers. Whether it's prevention, treatment or care, it's all about health workers," Jonathan Glennie, a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, writes in a post on the Guardian's "Poverty Matters Blog."

Gordon Alexander, director of the office of research at UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre, writes in this post on the Guardian's "Poverty Matters Blog" that a series published in Friday's Lancet on early child development (ECD) shows "that the payoff from concerted, integrated action around ECD would be enormous." Additional focus on and investment in ECD, particularly in the areas of nutrition, maternal and family health, and poverty alleviation, would help children reach their full potential in adulthood, which means "investing in ECD now will quite literally yield billions of dollars in later years," he says.

According to this report, some physicians and patients find "time-banking" - a method of bartering - to be an effective means of covering the treatment costs for low-income patients, mainly because it involves no red tape.