Archives: Morning Breakouts

Recent U.N. statistics showing a drop in child mortality are both good and bad, because the number of child deaths continues to drop, but "progress isn't reaching all families around the world, and it isn't reaching newborn babies as often as older children," Joy Lawn, director of Global Evidence and Policy for Save the Children's Saving Newborn Lives program, writes in a GlobalPost opinion piece. While the knowledge and technology exist to save lives, "too often, there is simply no one equipped to deliver basic lifesaving care to families who need it most. More than anything else, babies and children die for lack of frontline health workers," she writes.

"[F]ar too many children in Kenya and other African countries continue to suffer unnecessarily each year due to the misdiagnosis of fever, which contributes to the deaths of nearly three million children of less than five years of age from malaria and pneumonia," Willis Akhwale, head of Kenya's Department of Disease Prevention and Control in the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation, writes in a Daily Nation opinion piece, saying that health care workers "desperately need a test that can quickly and accurately identify and distinguish between fever-causing diseases."

World leaders attending the first-ever U.N. High-level Meeting on Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs) kicked off the summit on Monday by "unanimously approving a 'political declaration' meant to stem a rising tide of [NCDs], now the world's leading killer," CNN reports (Ariosto, 9/19). The declaration "call[s] for a multi-pronged campaign by governments, industry and civil society to set up by 2013 the plans needed to curb the risk factors behind the four groups of NCDs -- cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes," according to the U.N. News Centre.

A new analysis (.pdf) conducted by the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, the Evidence to Policy Initiative at the University of California-San Francisco, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative "warns that if the countries that have produced impressive reductions in malaria cut or stop control activities, malaria will rapidly resurge and a decade of progress will have been in vain," BMJ News reports.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday is expected "to announce a significant expansion of the organization's ambitious global program to tackle infant and maternal mortality and boost access to reproductive health over coming years," the Financial Times reports. The announcement "will highlight the doubling of commitments from governments, the private sector and non-profit organizations on funding and policy initiatives for the 'Every Woman Every Child' program," the newspaper writes (Raval et al., 9/19). The announcement comes "[a]s the U.N. General Assembly opens a new session" and is "being called on [by the international community] to provide more family planning services to hundreds of millions of women," according to VOA News (DeCapua, 9/19).

Foreign Affairs on Tuesday published an analysis examining the history of negotiations behind the political declaration approved on Monday by leaders attending the U.N. High-level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs).

Alexander Finlayson, Katherine Hudson and Faisal Ali, all affiliates of MedicineAfrica, a social enterprise providing a platform for health care educational and research partnerships between Northern and Southern collaborators, write in a SciDev.Net opinion piece, "Health scientists in developing countries can use social media to tackle research priorities, ... build[ing] networks and shar[ing] the knowledge needed to make strategic progress towards strengthening health systems." They say that mobile technology can enable "direct interaction with patients, helping remote training of health care workers, and supporting the education of scientists," and that the use of social media outlets, such as Twitter, can "facilitate collaboration between scientists in developing countries," preventing duplication of research (9/15).

"A health policy shift that saw the introduction in May of free caesarean section operations in 35 hospitals across the Republic of Congo -- to curb the growing rate of maternal and infant mortality -- seems to have prompted a proliferation of such operations, according to health officials," IRIN reports. "'We are virtually living in the hospital because there are so many consultations,' said Jean-Claude Kala, head of gynecology at Makelekele Hospital, south of Brazzaville," the news service writes.