Archives: Morning Breakouts

"Reducing the incidence of malaria could also drastically reduce the number of deaths from bacterial infections among children in Africa, a study" published last week in the Lancet found, according to SciDev.Net. "'Children who are protected from malaria are less likely to catch bacterial infections. It therefore means that controlling malaria will give an additional benefit,' Anthony Scott, the lead author and a researcher at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, in Kenya, told SciDev.Net."

"An acute government funding crisis in Swaziland, Africa's last absolute monarchy, is disrupting supplies of HIV/AIDS drugs and hampering the fight against the virus in the country with the world's highest infection rate, Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) said Friday," Reuters reports. "Stocks of testing kits and related chemicals were 'almost dry,' making it next-to-impossible to chart the progress of the 70,000 patients on therapy or more than 130,000 other people carrying the virus, the aid agency said," according to Reuters.

The George W. Bush Institute is forming a public-private partnership to use PEPFAR's existing infrastructure of doctors, nurses and clinics to expand screening and treatment of women for cervical cancer and perform breast cancer education in the developing world, the Wall Street Journal reports. The goal of the partnership, which also includes the State Department, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure and UNAIDS, "is to reduce the number of cervical cancer deaths by 25 percent in five years in countries where it scales up screening and treatment," WSJ writes, adding, "Its initial investment will be $75 million."

"United Nations humanitarian agencies have begun to assist communities in southern Pakistan that have been pummeled by monsoon rains which have claimed the lives of almost 200 people and destroyed or damaged nearly one million homes in an area still recovering from last year's catastrophic floods," the U.N. News Centre reports. The U.N. and the Pakistan government "have begun a rapid needs assessment in Sindh, with shelter, food, water, sanitation, hygiene and health care expected to be the priorities," the news service writes (9/10).

Inter Press Service examines regulations related to human medical research, writing that "experiments carried out by U.S. doctors in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948 using 1,300 human subjects who were infected with sexually transmitted diseases highlighted the inadequacy of controls and safeguards in clinical testing in this Central American country -- still a major problem today, according to experts."

At an event on Thursday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, co-hosted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Brookings Institute, House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) unveiled a discussion draft of the Global Partnerships Act of 2011, aimed at "reshap[ing] foreign assistance, making it more relevant 'by incorporating the best practices and lessons learned over the last half century,'" he said, the Malaria Policy Center's "Malaria Watch" blog reports (Todd, 9/9). Released as a draft instead of a numbered bill in order to spur discussion, the document covers "the full spectrum of foreign aid -- development, democracy promotion, arms transfers and nuclear nonproliferation -- but doesn't include spending levels," according to AEI's "The Enterprise Blog" (Johnson, 9/8).

The GlobalPost's "Global Pulse" blog reports on an event held on Wednesday at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C., entitled "7 Billion: Conversations that Matter," at which Michelle Bachelet, former president of Chile and now the under secretary-general and executive director of UN Women, spoke about the importance of family planning as the global population approaches the seven billion mark.

Stacey McMahan, sustainability advisor and design fellow with Architecture for Humanity, who has resided in Port-au-Prince, Haiti for a year teaching the locals how to build safe structures, writes about the importance of clean drinking water as an integral part of post-earthquake recovery in Haiti, which she writes will be ongoing in Haiti for decades, in this post in Huffington Post's "Impact" blog.

"Cholera in Haiti is the worst epidemic that this hemisphere has seen in decades, yet it has received relatively little attention," Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and president of Just Foreign Policy writes in this Al Jazeera opinion piece, adding, "The international community has failed Haiti in so many ways and for so many years that it is almost unimaginable."

The Guardian's "Poverty Matters Blog" reports on a one-day conference held in London this week that brought together engineers, health workers, donors and charities to look at devices specifically designed for the developing world. The conference, which was organized by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), addressed that fact that, according to WHO estimates, "as much as three-quarters of all medical devices in the developing world do not function" because of such factors as "[p]arts that are expensive and difficult to replace, the need for a constant electricity supply, a lack of trained operators [or] unsuitability to rough terrain," the blog notes.

A team of researchers led by Stephen Hoffman of Sanaria Inc. have created a candidate malaria vaccine against Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly of the malaria parasites, using live but weakened parasites that "represents a potentially encouraging anti-malaria strategy," an NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases press release reports. The findings of the research, which "was conducted by scientists at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, working in concert with a large team of collaborators," were published in Thursday's online issue of Science, the press release states (9/8).

News Corp Australian Papers/Fox News reports that scientists in Australia have created genetically modified rice that "has up to four times more iron than conventional rice and twice as much zinc" in an effort to "provide a solution to the iron and zinc deficiency disorders that affect billions of people throughout the world." "Rice is the main food source for roughly half the world's population, including billions of people in developing countries across Asia, but the polished grain is too low in iron, zinc and Vitamin A to meet dietary needs," the article notes.

"Access to affordable lifesaving medicines will be threatened where they are needed most -- in parts of the developing world -- if the U.S. insists on implementing restrictive intellectual property policies in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement," states a press release from Doctors Without Borders. According to the release, "a leaked draft of the U.S. position indicates that the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is demanding aggressive intellectual property provisions that go beyond what international trade law requires" and that these measures would "delay the introduction of more affordable generic drugs" (9/8).

Usha Kiran Tarigopula, deputy director in global health at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, writes about the Foundation's partnership with the state of Bihar, India through the Ananya Alliance "aimed at reducing maternal, newborn, and child mortality by 40 percent by 2015," in this "Inpatient Optimists" blog post, which is part of a series called "Global Conversations on Newborn Health in India." She writes, "The emphasis is on family planning, pre- and post-delivery care for mothers and their newly born infants, immediate and exclusive breastfeeding, care and nutrition for children up to two years old, and routine immunization. Coverage for treatment of diarrhea and pneumonia, as well as some neglected diseases and sanitation, is also a part of the plan" (9/7).

"Having to contend with U.S. army drones and the crossfire between the Taliban and the Pakistani army, the residents of Pakistan's tribal areas find access to treatment for HIV/AIDS harder than in most other parts of the world," Inter Press Service reports. People with HIV/AIDS living "in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) must cross the porous border into Afghanistan and take a circuitous route to Peshawar, capital of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, to get timely anti-retroviral treatment (ART)," at a family care center established by the Pakistan government and the WHO, the news service writes.