Archives: Morning Breakouts

"Rich countries that provide wasteful, inefficient, and inequitable health services should be more accountable for the money they spend and should adapt cost-effective models of care pioneered in poor countries, delegates agreed at a meeting" on global health held by the Salzburg Global Seminar and the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science last week in Hanover, New Hampshire, BMJ News reports. Speaking at the conference, Al Mulley, director of the Dartmouth center, said, "Poor countries have had to innovate to provide essential services, and there is plenty of scope for 'reverse innovation,'" BMJ writes.

In this Scientist opinion piece, Edward Partridge, president of the American Cancer Society and director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, president of health care and education at the American Diabetes Association, and Ralph Sacco, immediate past president of the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association and professor and chairman of neurology at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, write that while last month's U.N. High-level Meeting to discuss non-communicable diseases (NCDs) helped to raise awareness about the burden of NCDs, several important steps must be taken immediately to prevent and control the diseases.

"A laboratory that will research and monitor emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) such as yellow fever and dengue" was launched in Kenya last month "in an attempt to tackle growing vector-borne health threats in the region," SciDev.Net reports. "The Martin Luscher Laboratory for Emerging Infectious Diseases was launched with support from the German and Swiss governments at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) ... and is expected to add capacity to respond to disease outbreaks," the news service writes.

Investments to keep 3.5 million people living with HIV on antiretroviral drugs provided by programs co-financed through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria through 2020 will cost an estimated $14.2 billion, but "the financial savings would amount to between $12 billion and $34 billion," according to a study published in the journal PLoS One, Sarah Boseley reports in her "Global Health Blog" in the Guardian (10/5).

In a special report, CNBC.com examines "the world of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, from the dangers they pose and where they're made, to what is being done to combat them." The news service notes that "[i]n some countries, counterfeit prescription drugs comprise as much as 70 percent of the drug supply and have been responsible for thousands of deaths in some of the world's most impoverished nations, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)," and adds that counterfeit drugs also affect people in developed nations (Toscano, 10/4).

The use of mobile phones for medical purposes, or mHealth, holds "promising implications," but "there are still some challenges to overcome," PBS NewsHour reports. Additional research is necessary to determine whether people act on health-related text messages and whether the messages have value for a user, to "questions ... around whether applications can be used across all mobile devices, and how to charge cell phones in areas where electricity is spotty or nonexistent," the news service writes. "Despite all of the challenges, there is progress, especially in the area of collecting health information," NewsHour notes (Epatko, 10/5).

Today's early morning highlights from the major news organizations, including reports about the latest from Capitol Hill and the campaign trail, as well as findings from new research related to health care quality issues.

In a KQED interview, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins discussed a range of topics, including the state of medical research funding.