Archives: Morning Breakouts

Mary Fanning, South Africa's country coordinator for PEPFAR, writes in a New Age guest column, "In the fight against HIV/AIDS, this is a time of hope. It's also a time to celebrate the partnerships that are advancing this work and to recommit to a plan to ensure prevention, treatment and care for those infected and affected is sustainable and locally managed," adding, "Ultimately, whether it's putting more people on treatment, supporting HIV testing campaigns or leveraging mass media to drive the prevention message, the partnership between the U.S. and South African governments saves lives."

On the sidelines of the U.N. High-level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) on Tuesday, "[r]epresentatives of governments, civil society and the private sector joined United Nations agencies ... to emphasize the importance of good nutrition, which is vital not only for human health but also for national economic and social development," the U.N. News Centre reports. The event "took place one year after the launch of the Scale Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, a global initiative that aims to improve maternal and child nutrition," the news service reports (9/20).

PlusNews examines how health officials are addressing non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in sub-Saharan Africa, where "[c]ountries grappling with HIV prevalence are now faced with rising epidemics of chronic diseases."

The PBS NewsHour blog "The Rundown" features an interview with USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, in which he discusses a new website initiative called "FWD," "aimed at giving viewers a better sense of the scope of the famine in the Horn of Africa -- its worst in more than 60 years." The site includes infographics and data maps "intended to contextualize the problem by showing the recent increase in food prices, where internally displaced peoples camps are located, and where various aid groups are operating," according to the blog (Epatko, 9/20).

"Authorities in eastern India will start culling chickens and destroying eggs to contain a new outbreak of H5 bird flu, the government said in a statement on Tuesday, as a mutant strain of the virus is spreading elsewhere in Asia," Reuters reports (Williams, 9/20). "A mutant strain of avian influenza -- for which there is no vaccine -- appeared recently in China and Vietnam. But Indian authorities did not specify which strain of the H5N1 virus had been detected in the West Bengal region, which has been a hot spot for avian flu in the past," the Los Angeles Times' "Booster Shots" blog reports. The blog provides a link to track the movement of bird flu on the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's avian influenza pages and a link for additional information on the virus from the CDC (9/20).

"Polio has broken out in China for the first time since 1999 after being imported from Pakistan, and there is a high risk of the crippling virus spreading further during the annual Haj pilgrimage, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday," Reuters reports (9/20). Nine cases of wild poliovirus type 1 have been recorded in China's western province of Xinjiang, which borders Pakistan, WHO spokesperson Oliver Rosenbauer said, according to Daily News and Analysis, GlobalPost notes (9/21). A genetic link has been confirmed between the virus detected in China and a strain circulating in Pakistan, according to the Associated Press/USA Today (9/20). BBC News reports that "Chinese authorities are now investigating the cases, and a mass vaccination campaign has been launched in the region" (9/20).

World leaders on Tuesday "pledged to take wide-ranging action to prevent millions of deaths from cancer, diabetes, and heart and lung disease by tackling the key causes -- smoking, excessive drinking, lack of exercise and unhealthy diets dominated by fast food," but the "declaration approved at the first-ever General Assembly meeting on chronic diseases which ended Tuesday left unanswered the question of coordinating an international response to what the leaders called "a challenge of epidemic proportions," the Associated Press/CBS News reports.

Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare have agreed to provide their claims data to a new nonprofit research initiative.

Three recent reports -- a one-year assessment released by the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) of the WHO on Tuesday, an analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington published on Tuesday in the Lancet, and a Save the Children report released on Monday entitled "No Child out of Reach" -- examine the progress of the global campaign to save mothers and children under five in developing nations and evaluate whether Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5, reducing child mortality by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015 and maternal deaths by three-quarters over the same period, can be met.

"On top of a raging insurgency and devastating seasonal floods, Pakistan is reeling from a particularly acute outbreak of dengue fever that has left local authorities scrambling to contain the epidemic" and has put a strain on the health care system, the Washington Post reports, adding that the disease "has already infected thousands across the country and killed as many as two dozen people." Local government officials have "reacted frantically to the daily increase of cases with a series of measures including school closures, free treatment for dengue patients and large fumigation drives. But some say the response is inadequate and authorities should have focused more efforts on prevention," the newspaper writes.

Officials in Pakistan on Monday "announced targeted, three-day anti-polio campaigns in affected areas, which include Karachi and districts in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas," the Wall Street Journal's "India Real Time" blog reports. According to the Global Eradication Initiative, led by the WHO, 84 cases of type 1 polio have been reported in Pakistan so far this year, nearly twice as many cases as the country had recorded by this time last year, according to the blog.

The Washington Post reports on an event hosted last week by Washington Post Live, the division of the newspaper that organizes forums and debates, which brought together a number of attendees of the U.N. summit on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) wrapping up today in New York, as well as other key thinkers on global health, to discuss curbing the rise of NCDs. The newspaper includes links to commentary from several attendees at the event, including Julio Frenk, dean of faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health; Nils Daulaire, director of the Office of Global Health Affairs, Department of Health and Human Services ; Ann Keeling, chief executive of the International Diabetes Federation and chair of the NCD Alliance; and Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and director of the CSIS Global Health Policy Center, among others.

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.