Archives: Morning Breakouts

Arjen Dondorp, deputy director of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Research Unit at Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, and colleagues discuss the need to combat antimalarial drug resistance in this New England Journal of Medicine opinion piece, writing, "Researchers, funders, and policy leaders must recognize the urgency of the problem, take action to address simultaneously several important knowledge gaps, and focus immediately on eliminating the threat of artemisinin resistance."

This year's annual World Disasters Report, published by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on Thursday, focuses on hunger and malnutrition, but highlights a growing gap between economic classes, the Australian reports, noting "15 percent of the world's population is going hungry while a record 20 percent now suffer the effects of 'excess nutrition'" (Hodge, 9/23).

"The African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA) has launched a scorecard to improve the fight against malaria on the African continent," IRIN reports. "Updated quarterly, it provides information from each country on policies formulated, preventative measures initiated, money spent, lives saved and lost," and "also tracks tracer indicators for maternal, newborn and child health," the news service writes.

"Gender discrimination lies behind much of the malnutrition found in under-five children in Nepal, say locals and experts," IRIN reports. "Women live hard lives from day one, born with no fanfare, contrasting starkly to the six-day celebration to mark the birth of a boy. Despite the physical demands of a woman's daily life, boys and husbands eat first and are offered the most nutritious food, often leaving girls and women with leftovers," the news service writes.

Two million Pakistanis have become ill from malaria, diarrhea, skin diseases or snake bites "since monsoon rains left the southern region under several feet of water, the country's disaster authority said Thursday," Agence France-Presse reports. "More than 350 people have been killed and over eight million people have been affected this year by floods that officials say are worse in parts of Sindh province than last year," the news agency reports.

Though "[c]holera vaccines are not a magic bullet and are not available in adequate numbers" to vaccinate everyone in Haiti, where at least 10 people die each day in an outbreak that began in October 2010, "there are compelling reasons to add vaccinations to the arsenal of public health weapons that has been deployed against cholera in Haiti," a Washington Post editorial states. Efforts to improve access to clean water, educate the public about cholera transmission and treat those infected are ongoing, "[b]ut those efforts should be supplemented with an ambitious vaccination program starting as soon as practicable," the editorial writes.

"East Africa's worst outbreak in a decade of visceral leishmaniasis, the deadliest parasitic disease after malaria, could ease if donors paid more attention to the illness," which infects approximately 500,000 people and kills up to 60,000 annually in 70 countries, the non-profit group "Leishmaniasis East Africa Platform, or LEAP, said in a statement from Nairobi" on Friday, Bloomberg reports.

In a post in the State Department's "DipNote" blog, Scott Radloff, director of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at USAID, examines how, for the past year, the Alliance for Reproductive, Maternal, and Newborn Health, a partnership between USAID, the U.K. Department for International Development, the Australian Agency for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched at last year's U.N. General Assembly Summit on the Millennium Development Goals, has "accelerate[d] progress in improving maternal and child health" worldwide. Radloff highlights successes in Ethiopia and Pakistan and writes that by 2015, the Alliance aims to contribute to increases in the use of modern contraceptives, the number of women giving birth in the presence of a skilled birth attendant and the number of infants exclusively breastfed through the first six months of life (9/21).

In this opinion piece in The Hill's "Congress Blog," Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif) writes that cutting "funding of vital programs that focus on global food security, health, climate adaptation, and disaster relief, ... which make up less than one percent of the U.S. federal budget, will not get us far in terms of plugging the budget gap but they could literally make the difference between life and death for many of the world's poor." She adds, "As part of a global response, the U.S. is responding, having already provided more than $600 million in assistance. ... To ensure that future droughts don't again devastate poor and vulnerable communities, we must support investments in small scale food producers, especially women, to increase agricultural productivity and build resilience," (9/21).

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday approved a $53 billion FY12 foreign operations appropriations bill, the Associated Press reports. "Reflecting the economic pressure, the bill is $6.2 billion less than President Barack Obama requested," the news agency notes (Cassatta, 9/21).

Encouraged by early results of a study of an experimental malaria vaccine involving 45 children in Burkina Faso, researchers led by Pierre Druilhe at the Pasteur Institute in Paris are set to expand the clinical trial, resulting in a larger study involving 800 children in Mali, BBC News reports. The initial trial aimed "to test the safety of the vaccine but this follow up study found that children who received it had an incidence of the disease three to four times lower than children who did not," BBC writes.