Archives: Morning Breakouts

Reuters examines how budget debates in Congress "could undo" President Barack Obama's "'smart power' approach, which elevates diplomacy and development alongside military power as guarantors of U.S. security in a rapidly changing world." Programs run through the State Department and USAID that provide "[f]ood aid to hungry countries, ... improved medical services for expectant mothers and the U.S. response to natural disasters such as earthquakes and droughts could be hit in a major scale-back of U.S. assistance," the news agency writes.

"Sierra Leone's free health care plan for pregnant women and young children is dysfunctional and hobbled by corruption and a lack of accountability," according to a report (.pdf) released Tuesday by Amnesty International, Agence France-Presse reports. The nation's free health care program for pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under five years old was launched in April 2010 with support from UNICEF, the World Bank, the WHO and the U.K. Department for International Development, AFP notes (9/6).

A survey by Gallup and Healthways finds wide variations in the number of uninsured from state to state.

Nancy Lindborg, USAID's assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, writes in this post in USAID's "IMPACTblog" that the U.S. "continue[s] to call on all parties involved to allow unfettered humanitarian access to Somalis in need." She continues, "The unfortunate reality is that Somalia is the most difficult operating environment for humanitarians in the world today," adding that "unless we -- the international community -- can get access to provide humanitarian assistance to southern Somalia, the already horrific situation will get worse. Without access, the number of people in crisis will increase, and famine will continue to spread in Somalia" (9/6).

"Rwanda's health ministry has launched a campaign encouraging men to undergo vasectomies, in an effort to curb population growth in Africa's most densely populated country," Reuters reports. The government says to compete with Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, the country's economy must continue to grow at an average seven to eight percent per year, and to do so, "the birth rate must be below three children per family," according to the news agency.

"Children who live in households that own at least one insecticide-treated bed net (ITNs) are less likely to be infected with malaria and less likely to die from the disease, according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington," published today in PLoS Medicine, according to an IHME press release (9/6).

"Guyana is battling to prevent the spread of malaria as climate change brings higher temperatures and more rainfall, threatening to push the disease back into densely populated coastal regions," AlertNet reports. The majority of malaria cases occur in the northwest of the small South American country, [b]ut recently, the mosquito-borne disease has also been found in an adjoining coastal region, as well as further inland to the east and south," the news service writes.

The U.N.'s Pan-American Health Organization, the United States and the international community "should be working with the Haitian Health Ministry to wage a more aggressive and effective effort" against the cholera epidemic that hit the country last year, and those efforts "should include not only clean water and sanitation systems but more antibiotics and cholera vaccinations," a New York Times editorial says. "Ramping up manufacturing" of the cholera vaccine -- of which there are less than 400,000 doses worldwide -- "could be readily done and would have global benefits," the editorial states.

A new index (.pdf) released Tuesday by Save the Children measures the nationwide reach of health workers and ranks the best and worst countries for a child to fall sick in, with Chad and Somalia at the bottom and Switzerland and Finland at the top, according to a Save the Children press release (9/6). According to the analysis, "[c]hildren living in the 20 countries at the bottom of the index ... are five times more likely to die than those further up the index, Save the Children said," AlertNet reports (Batha, 9/6). The study also highlights countries such as Ethiopia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, according to Reuters (Kelland, 9/6).

"There is no doubt that" a 10 percent reduction in funding from donor governments for the AIDS response in low- and middle-income countries in 2010 from the previous year's levels "is linked to economic strain felt by countries across the globe," a VOA News editorial says. "UNAIDS estimates that an investment of at least $22 billion will be needed by 2015 in order to avert more than seven million deaths," the editorial states, adding, "It is clear that continued support to HIV prevention and treatment is a necessary investment, even in these difficult times."

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism examines what some experts are calling a serious inequity in public health spending, writing that neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) "together kill more people than maternal mortality and have a higher disease burden than malaria or [tuberculosis (TB)] and nearing that of HIV/AIDS. However, despite the severity of the situation, funding for NTDs is just a fraction of that spent on other diseases."